Jane Doe January (23 page)

While Jessie washes our pizza plates, I confide in Evan that Georgia's reaction is stressing me out.

She's handling the case derailment very differently from me, and her upset rattles me. She's angry; she regrets testifying; she feels betrayed. Her e-mails make me realize how precarious my seemingly stable emotions actually are. Sure, I can watch football and tell jokes, but just inches away on either side is a long, long psychological drop. I need her to not jostle me. She's still considering, with rising panic, whether to join me in Pittsburgh.

The Steelers win at eleven thirty. Evan and Jessie drop me off at my hotel at midnight. Staying up late has done wonders for getting me adjusted to the time zone, but more importantly it's assured me of their care. You don't have someone to your home that you don't like. You don't keep friends over till midnight unless you're having a good time. I trust Evan. I believe him that he would have gotten distant during trial, but we never got that far. He's felt close.

Tuesday morning, I sleep in past five. This is a biological victory; the week I was here for the hearing, I never managed to sleep later than four.

In this morning's paper, the headline on the local section's front page is
SUSPECT IN TWO SHADYSIDE RAPES IN 1992 RELEASED ON A TECHNICALITY
. A law professor quoted in the article says that “It may be fair in the sense that this is what the law says, but it's definitely not just.”

I wash my hair, and primp, and indulge in many cups of coffee; I'm sensitive to even the decaf that I've ordered and can't drink this much at home, but when I'm jet-lagged I know I'll sleep anyway. Bill's meeting me at ten, after he teaches an early class at the university.

I'm between him and Evan in life stage. Evan is just thirty, about to be married, looking to transition from renting to homeownership. Bill, in contrast, is past me, with a daughter in college and an empty nest looming when her brother catches up. He carries himself with effortless authority, smoothly holding every door open. He takes me to the Frick historic house and art collection, near his home. I see his old “commander” badge in his wallet when he opens it to pay for our tickets.

We meander in the greenhouse while waiting for the house-tour start time. I admit that I've now explicitly asked Georgia not to come, not this week. Late last night, in the face of her distraught vacillation over it, I'd rescinded my invite, backpedaling that she doesn't need to, that she shouldn't stress herself. She can come later to tell Aprill how much she hurts and beg Evan to fix things, which is what I think she most needs to do. That's not what I need. We can take our turns here in Pittsburgh.

Today would have been the start of trial. Evan would have been choosing a jury, using one of the questionnaires that he showed me. Bill and I would have been waiting in the witness room, or hanging out in that no-phones-allowed busy hallway.

Instead, we tour a pretty, pretty house, decorated not just in the latest fashions of its time but with things made from the latest technologies, such as ceiling and wall friezes made of molded paper and aluminum. The tour patter is well written and well delivered, but Bill is quick to point out that it glosses over Frick's robber-baron brutality. He buys me a favorite book of his as a souvenir, the story of Frick and Carnegie's contentious relationship and the bloody Homestead Steel Strike, to balance out the tour's rosy picture.

Besides having to take time off work right in the middle of the semester to be with me today, Bill has another significant thing that he's set aside for me. I knew that his nephew had been killed by a drunk driver earlier in the year. I didn't realize that that driver's trial
is this week. I apologize profusely, but Bill tactfully insists that I'm a good excuse for him to take a breather. He smiles. We have lunch in the café. We visit the art collection. We walk in the nearby park, under autumnal trees, past lawn-bowling courts. Everyone has their own reasons to be sad, I realize, though I already knew it. It's just that sometimes I forget.

Bill points out his happy-looking yellow house, then drives me back to the hotel.

It's less than an hour before Dan's picking me up.

I check my e-mail, and Google around. The Associated Press story on the dropped charges against Fryar is appearing in newspapers all over the country, at least on their websites. One site even recycles that unflattering video still of my lower body exiting municipal court. Seeing the story fill the search-engine results feels big, but I remind myself that it isn't the same as its being in printed newspapers. In other cities, the story is filler, tucked away in back pages if it makes the hard-copy papers at all. Only in Pittsburgh is it an actual, if brief, story, credited to named staff writers.

Dan is less confident than Bill and Evan. He cautiously parks elsewhere and walks to meet me in front of the hotel, instead of swooping his car in front of the taxi stand to scoop me up. It turns out that he lives right near Bill, right near that park and the Frick house, just over the border in Squirrel Hill, one of the college neighborhoods I once lived in. We drive there to pick up his wife, Christine. I'd specifically asked for her to join us, because she'd come to the hearing. She'd acted as interpreter of Dan's aloof manner; if it weren't for her, I wouldn't have known how much Dan cares.

It turns out that all of them—Dan, Evan, Bill, Aprill, and their assorted partners—are local; well, I'm not sure about Aprill's husband, but the rest for sure. Dan and Christine even went to the same high
school as Evan and Jessie, albeit two decades apart. I hear the accent in Dan when he pronounces “steel mill” as “still mill.”

Christine is effusive, emotional, and has a lot to say. She's desperate over the withdrawal of the case, and delighted to see me, flitting between outrage and good cheer. Above all, she and her itty-bitty Yorkie are friendly hosts. She's tidied the house and shows off Dan's sports-themed “man cave” in the basement. They've been married just six years, which is shorter than I'd thought given Dan's age, near Bill's. She's just grown her hair back from grueling breast cancer treatments, which she was going through last fall while I'd been badgering Dan for DNA results and extradition news.

We get in the car together, Christine and I both insisting that the other take the front passenger seat. I win this round, and get in the back next to the doggie car seat (empty; the pup is staying home).

They give me a driving tour, first to East Liberty, which is the most changed neighborhood since I lived here, now significantly developed and becoming fashionable. That leads us into always fashionable Shadyside, which is where I'd lived in 1992. I tense up. I'm not sure if we're coming here on purpose. I decide to just go with it, and ask Dan to drive straight down the main street. Most of the shops have changed, but they still have the same tone: currently popular brands appealing to young professionals and to college students with parental money to spend.

We get to the end of the shops. Dan has to understand where we are, but he shows no reaction. Again, I make it specific: turn left.

My apartment building looks exactly the same. It's lit inside. I see the door that Fryar caught behind me as I entered. The address number is clearly visible: 911.

Dan doesn't stop. That's probably for the best.

He drives through Carnegie Mellon's campus. I hardly recognize it. A frenzy of building has taken place over twenty years, in
overwhelmingly matchy-matchy ivory-colored brick. Then I see it: Margaret Morrison, the building where I'd taken more than half of my classes for four years, with its distinctive rotunda. Its familiarity hits me and I say, “Oh!”

We drive through Oakland, University of Pittsburgh territory. I recognize nothing. My life at Carnegie Mellon had been insular, not just within the university, but specifically within the drama department. We didn't get out much.

We cross a bridge to the South Side, seedy with bars and tattoo parlors. Dan and Christine have stories. We cross again, to the North Side. Dan parks the car at police headquarters.

Sex Assault moved into this renovation of a carpet warehouse just over ten years ago, along with Homicide, Burglary, Robbery, and Narcotics, long after 1992. Still, I want to see.

It tickles Dan that their office is bigger than Evan's. It's a huge, wide-open space, with, to be fair, a lot more than five desks. You can tell Dan's by the Steelers bumper sticker, and Aprill's by the flower trellis, put up for either decoration or privacy (besides her local caseload, she's part of an FBI child pornography task force). I can also tell it's hers by her leather jacket on the chair, just like in Evan's office. She's here.

Depressingly, there's a play area for children, and car seats of various sizes, ready for emergency call-outs. There's an evidence room, full of bags and boxes. There's an interview room. I step inside.

The walls have a strange kind of insulation that I suppose might be to muffle sound. There's no two-way mirror, like on TV. I hope that there's some kind of recording system, but I don't notice any evidence of one. It could just be that I'm not looking around enough. I'm staring at just one thing: the leg iron permanently bolted to the floor.

We bump into Aprill on our way out. We chat just enough for her to say that she has to cancel meeting with me the next day; the
case she was in court for on Monday has unexpectedly dragged on. I'm sure that that's true, but I wonder if it's also a relief to her, to be able to avoid me.

Dan drops Christine and me off at a restaurant to get a table while he finds parking. While we wait to be seated, I show her photos of Gavin and the kids on my iPad. She oohs at my wedding pictures, and tells me about her and Dan's city-hall elopement. We're shouting over the vigorous thrum of conversation in this clearly popular spot, full up on a Tuesday night.

We get a table, and great meatballs, and mostly talk about how Christine and Dan met. When Dan gets uncomfortable with that, we talk about the case. Christine reminisces about how badly Dan had wanted to go with Aprill to New York to interview Fryar, to try to prove the initial link between the two cases. But he hadn't been able to be away from Christine, because of her cancer treatments. I wish I'd known then that he'd wished he could go.

Christine is distraught over the end of the case. She wants to change the law. She wants to go to the press. She wants to fix it. I tell her what I've told everyone back home: the new law does fix it. The problem is that the Supreme Court says that we aren't allowed to apply the new law backward in time. Things are fixed going forward. They're just not fixed for me.

So we joke about revenge instead, about how wouldn't it be nice, when we're all of us together at dinner tomorrow, well alibied, if Fryar were hit by a car. I don't mean it, not really. Violence is ugly and death is terrible, no matter who it happens to. But we're angry and sad and still adjusting to the bad news, so we all three high-five over it.

Again, I bring up the hospital in 1992, and the sad-but-blushing nurses. They seem important, and somehow very relevant to this week. I was chipper with them to try to make them feel better,
like I'm chipper now, but not because I was kind; it's because I was desperate. I think I perceived that we were connected: them, and my friends in the waiting room, and my college, and the police, and that any rising above that was going to happen was going to happen together. That's certainly what's going on now. That's why I can't be angry at Evan or Aprill or Dan. We're the good guys, together. It would be like being angry at myself.

The cyanide case is still in the headlines the next morning, with news of jury selection. Our case is not, and won't be, I suppose, ever again.

I e-mail everyone back home, to let them know that I'm safely here, that I've seen Evan and Bill and Dan and Christine, that there's a permanent leg iron in the Sex Assault interview room and that I watched the Steelers game Monday night. Rambling, mostly. I read replies all day, giggling at “Off to buy an Arthur Fryar doll and pins” and, from a Presbyterian minister, a desire to say something that “doesn't sound like pietistic bullshit.” Two very different friends both call me admirably stoic, which confounds me. I'm actually outrageously emotional.
Aren't I?
It certainly feels that way from inside myself. Perhaps I misunderstand stoicism, which I think of as suppressing one's feelings. But one friend defines it as “accepting our fate, being thankful for what we have and for those around us, and, I think most importantly, focusing on what we can control.” I suppose that is what I'm trying to do. I joke to the other friend that I prefer to be thought of as a “tough broad.”

Kevin e-mails, offering to save me a seat for tomorrow's “exciting” opening statements in the cyanide trial. I can't accept because of my flight, but I'm delighted by the invitation.

Bill picks me up for our group dinner. He's made a reservation for all of us, which turned out to be surprisingly difficult for a Wednesday. The Penguins have a hockey game tonight. Pittsburgh is
apparently utterly at the mercy of their teams' home games in terms of traffic, parking, and restaurant tables.

He has the car valet parked, and we wait at the bar for the others: Evan and Jessie, Dan and Christine. And Aprill, I hope. I don't want to miss her completely.

I ask Bill to order a martini for me. He tells me the good news of his latest promotion. It's not public yet, but I tell everyone about it as they arrive. None of them work at the university, so the announcement is safe with all of us. We're friends, right? It feels like we're friends.

At the table, I make sure to sit next to Aprill. Her case, which was over the molestation of a twelve-year-old, finished today. The prosecution lost. She's disappointed and frustrated, and now she has to deal with me.