Read Her Story Online

Authors: Christina Casinelli

Her Story (3 page)

BOOK: Her Story
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She closed her eyes again. This time when she opened them she was by herself. There were all sorts of conversations and movement and beeps and buzzing outside of the curtains. She was no longer strapped down. She slowly turned her head from side to side. She felt sore all over. She looked down at her hands, expecting to see the mangled mess they had been before, but instead saw clean, neatly wrapped, bandaged hands. All of a sudden the curtain was ripped back by a phantom hand.

 

“There you are! I’ve been looking for you all over! They wouldn’t tell me anything!”

 

“Rebecca? What the… What’s going on?” she stammered. Her head started swimming again as she struggled to take everything in.

“I found you passed out in the shower! There was blood everywhere – I had no idea what to do so I called 911!”

 

“Oh good – you’re awake!” said an uninvited nurse as she entered through the gaping hole Rebecca had left in her blue curtained fortress. “Now, we just have a few more tests to run and a few questions to ask you.” The next thing she knew this unwelcome woman was bombarding her with questions. All the questions Rebecca must have been unable to answer; things about her medical history, what medications she was on, and the most important question of all – what had happened to her tonight – were thrown at her at rapid fire speed, while Rebecca just stood by and watched on, likely curious about the answers to some of those same questions herself.

 

“I think you should call the police,” was all she said.

 

Chapter 5

 

It felt like it took them forever to arrive. The whole time she was waiting Rebecca just kept standing there, staring at her. Rebecca had wanted to call her parents, but she had somehow managed to talk her out of it.

 

Two male uniformed cops eventually showed up. And by the time they had she almost wished she hadn’t asked to see them. Rather than letting her tell her story, they simply shot rapid fire questions at her. Did she know her attacker? Why was she walking home by herself so late? What had she been wearing? What were her exact movements that night? Had she had anything to drink? What exactly did she remember?

 

He had beaten her pretty severely. As she had suspected, her cheekbone was broken, as were two of her fingers. She had suffered a concussion and had needed some stitches in her scalp where he had slammed her head against a tree when she had ceased to fight back. It had seemed almost as if that was something he hadn’t expected to happen.

 

“Always be a ‘bad’ victim,” her mother had repeatedly told her. “Make it as difficult as possible for them to get what they want from you. You know what they want from you…”

 

And that’s exactly what she had tried to be – a bad victim – yelling and screaming and clawing and fighting and eventually causing her attacker enough trouble that she had had the opportunity to run, and luckily he had declined to follow.

 

No, she did not know who had attacked her. He had come up on her from behind and it was too dark during their scuffle for her to get a good look at his face.

 

She was walking home so late because she didn’t have a car, and when her bus had never shown up, she gave up waiting at the bus stop near her classmate’s apartment and decided to walk home. Even though it was dark out, the weather was still relatively pleasant for a New England fall, given that the rain from earlier in the day had stopped.

 

She had been wearing a zip-up hoodie over a t-shirt, jeans, and canvas sneakers. The only reason she volunteered this information was because her attacker had grabbed the hood of her sweatshirt when she had been walking by. Had that not been the case, she couldn’t understand why that question of what she had been wearing would even be relevant.

 

She had been at her classmate’s apartment studying. Her study group had a rotating schedule for who hosted their Sunday night study sessions. This had been Julie’s week. Mike had offered to give her a ride home so that she wouldn’t have to wait for the bus, but she had declined – primarily because something about Mike had always seemed a little bit off. When she had hosted study group a few weeks prior, Mike had excused himself to use the restroom and instead “accidentally” wandered into Rebecca’s room, where she had found him. There were currently no words to describe how much she had wished she had taken Mike up on his offer.

 

Of course she hadn’t had anything to drink. She was a first year law student at Brown – since this semester had started she couldn’t remember the last time she had touched alcohol. And yes, the others in her study group could indeed verify that she was not drinking. And no, she wasn’t using any other “substances” either. She was beginning to become impatient. What did any of these questions have to do with finding her attacker?

 

Finally the officers asked her to walk them through her night. She had left her apartment a little before 4 p.m. to catch the bus. She arrived at Julie’s apartment in Elmhurst right around 4:30. She was one of the first to arrive and the rest of the study group slowly began to trickle in. They hunkered down around 5, dividing up who would outline each chapter, each case, quizzing each other on facts related to the cases that would be covered during the upcoming week. Julie had laid out a spread of various snacks and finger foods in the kitchen, and the group floated between the kitchen and her living room – shouting back and forth between the rooms. The group dispersed around 10 p.m., each member heading off to spend the rest of the night reviewing the notes they had taken throughout the night, the over-achievers of the group off to start outlining.

 

Mike offered to give her a ride, which she declined, and headed toward the bus stop she had gotten off at earlier. She waited at the bus stop. And waited. And waited. Being much colder than it had been when she had left that afternoon, she pulled her favorite zip-up hooded sweat shirt from her messenger bag, and rather than fusing with the cross-body strap, just threw it on, zipping it up over the strap. It wasn’t unusual for the buses to run late. RIPTA wasn’t exactly the most reliable form of transportation, but it was the cheapest. Well, other than walking, which is what she eventually decided to do.

 

She had made the cross-town walk before, several times before actually. The most direct route didn’t take her through the greatest neighborhood, but she had never had a problem, and she knew which streets and corners to avoid. If she just kept her head down and kept moving forward she couldn’t imagine she’d run into any problems. Oh, how wrong she had been.

 

She had been walking along a row of trees that lined the park when she felt a hard, strong tug on the hood of her sweatshirt that not only made her lose her balance, but almost brought her to the ground. After that, everything seemed to happen in a blur. Her assailant was dragging her behind the tree line and into the park, both hands now firmly grasping the hood of her sweatshirt. At first she struggled to break free of his grip. Unable to do so, she unzipped the hoodie and began to run as hard and as fast as she could. There were no lights on in the park. The only thing illuminating the landscape was the glow of the streetlights on the road that she was quickly leaving behind her. She started to lose her footing on the mud and loose rocks of the open field she was making her way across. She was breathing so hard, she didn’t even hear him rapidly approaching behind her. He tackled her, wrapping his arms completely around her, pinning her arms to her body, leaving her with nothing to break her fall as he used all of his weight to bring her down to the ground. Her knees met the ground first, followed quickly by her forehead.

 

He rolled her over onto her back. She closed her eyes and started screaming as loud as she could. This was when she felt the back of his hand across her face. “Shut up!” he growled, pinning her hands above her head, squeezing them tight, while lowered his body on top of hers, using all of his body weight against her. She kicked and bucked and squirmed. Eventually she was able to free one of her hands, which she started swinging wildly toward his face. She felt her fingernails dig into his flesh and he shifted his weight as he recoiled just enough to allow her to free herself. She crawled to her feet and took off. Now completely disoriented, her only goal was to put as much distance as possible between herself and this mystery man. Her cheek throbbed. Her hands ached from her wrists through the tips of her fingers. Her legs just kept pumping, but she could hear his heavy breathing closing in behind her. The next thing she knew he had latched onto her arm – but she kept pulling away, fighting to get away. She heard herself screaming out for help, but they had moved so far away from the road she knew her screams were all but useless.

 

‘Be a bad victim. Be a bad victim.’ Her mother’s words echoed in her head. “Shut up!” he said. He had her by the shoulders now. She continued to try to pull away, but the mud caused her to struggle with her footing. “Shut up – shut up – shut up!” he said as he shoved her backward, slamming her head against the trunk of a tree. Her mouth slammed shut. She literally saw stars. Her footing slipped on the roots of the tree. She felt her legs giving way, slowly slumping her toward the ground. That was exactly where he wanted her, and she knew that was absolutely the worst place she could be.

 

Steadying herself against the base of the tree, she propelled herself forward, landing the top of her head squarely in his gut. There was an audible ‘whoosh’ of the air that exploded from his lungs. As he stumbled back, she grabbed the sides of her messenger bag, and using all of her remaining strength, cracked the bag, weighed down by all her books and legal pads, across his face. And with that, she was off again - running toward anywhere that would get her out of that park and away from that man.

 

Chapter 6

 

When she opened her eyes, she had no idea where she was. She quickly realized, however, that her right wrist was handcuffed to the railing that ran along the side of her bed. Before her brain even had time to process the peeling wallpaper and generic framed pictures of fruit that hung on the wall, or the green curtain to her left that separated the beeping of her monitoring devices from those of the patient in the next bed over, a nurse ran in and immediately started fiddling with her monitor. “Oh good, you’re awake. Do you know where you are, hun?” she asked, with that soft calming voice she could only assume they taught all nurses before they unleashed them in hospitals across the country.

 

“What happened?” she managed, slowly becoming conscious of how sore her entire body felt and how much discomfort murmuring even just those two words caused her.

 

“Well dear, it appears you caused a bit of an accident,” the nurse explained. “You hit another car head-on, and…well, there are a few officers here that need to speak with you.” She nodded to her cuffed wrist as she said this. “I’ll give you a few minutes to get your bearings and I’ll send them in. You suffered a nasty concussion when the airbag deployed, but the good news is nothing is broken. Your nose is just a bit swollen and you’ll probably be sore for a few days. The doctors may want to keep you overnight though, for observation.”

 

Before she could get any other words past her swollen lips, the nurse vanished as quickly as she materialized.

 

The police were here… the police. And they wanted to ask her questions about what had happened… What had happened? She closed her eyes and before them flashed the image of that young girl caught in her headlights. Who just runs out in front of traffic like that? And then there were more headlights – this time they were barreling toward her… And then she had woken up here. Her head was pounding and her eyelids felt heavy. She wiggled her fingers and toes – just to be sure. The nurse had said nothing was broken – but who knew? Her toes rippled in waves under the blanket. She rotated both of her wrists slowly, an act slightly inhibited by the handcuffs. All she wanted was a cigarette.

 

She heard the officers before she saw them. The heavy boots, the intermittent squawk of their radios, the low rumbles of voices she could only assume they thought made them more intimidating.

 

“Ma’am – we just have a few questions to ask you.”

 

“Well I have a question for you – why the fuck am I handcuffed to this bed?”

 

“Well ma’am, the woman that was driving the car you hit died while in surgery. Now – we have a few questions to ask y-“

 

“WHAT?!” She bolted straight up despite her body’s protest. “I-I-I wasn’t even going that fast. I didn’t even… that girl just came out of nowhere. I…what…” she was beginning to lose control of her voice. The monitors attached to her by a tangle of wires started beeping and shrieking, reflecting the swirl of blood and emotions pumping through her veins. Before she knew what was happening, the soft-voiced nurse was barreling into the room.

 

“You need to leave,” she said, glaring at them, defending her patient.

 

BOOK: Her Story
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ads

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