Jane Doe January (4 page)

The undergraduates at the college—even the organ scholars, who have so much authority in the choir—look impossibly young to me. When I think about 1992, the males in my college class are “men” because I was their peer and we all felt grown-up at the time. But these undergraduates here in Cambridge, born so long after me, are kids. That's how young I used to be.
I was your age when it happened,
I think. Or maybe a little older, because I took a gap year before that was fashionable to do.

I realize, suddenly, that most of them weren't even born when it happened. In three months, it will be twenty-two years since that night. I was twenty-two then. It will be exactly double my life.

I've been assuming that the evidence will work. I've felt impatient, having to delay celebrating an official DNA match, but my anxiety has been only over waiting, not over the possible outcome.

Suddenly, at twelve days since the lab got my exemplar, I wobble. That the old evidence may be useless seems not just possible, but almost certain. I imagine that the police just don't want to tell me. The machine will drop me and move on. Legally, I'll be separated from the case, from the “real” victims. It's been years since the fast
breathing, the sudden tears, and oppressive dread. These symptoms feel strange, old-fashioned, and self-indulgent. Who has a panic attack over something that
might
happen?

I shift my fantasy of good news to a fantasy of bad news. It's still a fantasy, a wished-for thing, because any news is better than limbo. Once I know, I'll be allowed to react and to tell. If the evidence fails, people will comfort me. While I wait, I'm just alone.

John's office in the college is like roof guttering for my feelings; it's where I can route my upset to do the least damage. It's a large but cozy-feeling room, full of well-worn furniture and books, with tea-making things and a large grandfather clock that I use to pace myself, to be sure that I've finished putting myself back together when it's time to go pick up my boys from rehearsal. I'm allowed to take off my shoes and curl my feet under me on the couch. He has only toilet paper for tears, no tissues. I tell him that that's okay; it's the same in our house; it's the kind of thing we always forget to buy. This is the first time I've cried in front of him. I didn't even cry when I told him exactly what had happened back then. I don't know what's come over me; I don't know why this reaction took five weeks to coalesce. I tug against the little dashed lines in the paper, separating the roll into streamers that I then fold and dab against my face.

Another day, after rehearsal, I'm supposed to walk my sons to a friend's book-launch party. I think that I've pulled myself together, but a comment sets me off. I'm able to hide it: I'm the last parent at pickup; it's dark; I cry silently. I ask the boys to just play on the grass for about ten minutes while I sit on the steps; I promise that I'll get it together and we'll go to the party then.

Our twelve-year-old, S., goes back into the rehearsal room instead, I assume for a cup of water. But he asks the organ scholar, Ben, if he can use his phone, and calls Gavin. “Dad?” S. says, right
in front of Ben. “Can you pick us up and take us home? Mom's crying.”

I don't mind that he phoned Gavin or that we're going to miss my friend's party. I do mind that he said, in front of Ben, that I'm in tears. I'd worked hard to hide it. He's blown my cover.

It's because of that that I have to explain. I've already told some people at the college, just a few, like the choir secretary and John. John has asked me over and over, “Let me tell Mark, please,” meaning the Director of Music. “Let me tell the organ scholars,” I suppose in order to make sense of the simmering and probably odd-seeming distress that I'm failing to keep completely hidden. I always said no.

After the crying incident, I agree at last that he can tell, but insist that he has to be precise. If he says that I'm going through vague “difficult, personal things,” they'll think that Gavin and I are getting divorced. If he says that I'm going to court, they'll think that we're being sued. I instruct him, “If you're going to tell them anything, you have to tell them that it's rape. You have to use that word. You have to explain that it was more than twenty years ago and that the police have caught him now.”

So the adults have to be spoon-fed specifications, while with my boys I dance around details. They're already used to a certain amount of inappropriate crime-talk around the house, because of the detective novels I write. The boys even came along once on a jaunty family outing to help me choose exactly where a fictional corpse would be dumped out in the fens. So long as I frame things from the police or courtroom point of view, they handle it. There's a big difference between a protagonist being hurt and a protagonist who is trying to fix things. I'm genuinely both, both victim then and now potentially avenger, so all I have to do is choose carefully how I say things in front of them.

Not much later, I get the chance to carefully say a little more.

It's a rare moment to be shepherding just one child on the bus; usually I have both. But W., our eight-year-old, is at kung fu with his dad, so S. and I have the journey to ourselves. We wait for the big, red, double-decker behemoth that still delights me eight years after moving to England.

S.'s eyes roam the Park-and-Ride waiting room, reading everything, including a newspaper headline about a local “home invasion.” I quickly scan the text, enough to glean that it's about a robbery without murder or torture; scary but not extreme. I grab my chance: “Hey, did you know that something like that once happened to me?”

Something like that
means something frightening, something criminal, something that didn't, though, kill me.

He looks more closely at the article, reading all of the words.

I clarify, “Not exactly like that, but close. It was a long, long time ago, when I was in college. You know the police I've been talking to? Well, they found the man who did it and I get to help put him in prison. It's really good news.”

He nods. He already knows that something is going on, so I hope that this explanation answers a question rather than raising more.

“Like in Phoenix Wright,” he says, meaning the courtroom video game he plays.

“Exactly. I might get to go to court, if the evidence comes through. The lab is working on it.”

“What's the evidence?”

Semen. The evidence is semen.

“I'm not going to tell you.”

He shrugs. “Okay.”

My friends with daughters tell me that it's only sons who let things go that easily, who take huge news at face value and move on.

“Don't tell your brother,” I add. “He's too young.” W. only gets to
know that I might get to help put away a bad guy, like superheroes do. That's the kind of story that makes them happy.

I keep Valenta updated. I tell him about Fryar fighting extradition. He replies, “Arthur has come to the realization that he will likely be spending the rest of his life in a prison in Pennsylvania, so I am not surprised to hear that he is doing everything that he can to delay the process.”

Valenta's confidence in the coming punishment comforts me. His use of Fryar's first name, however, jars me. That “the bad man” is now “Arthur Fryar,” no longer some nameless villain, is strange enough. Hearing the first name alone is actually shocking, as if he's a normal person, a person who might be greeted or phoned or e-mailed, a person with peers and school friends and coworkers. “Hey, Arthur!” someone might say, in a casual, happy way. It doesn't fit.

I think about Valenta's assessment, that “Arthur,” who had previously been compliant to Detective Campbell's demands in interrogation, is now fighting, and so ridiculously, because he's scared.
Good,
I think. Honestly, he reminds me of me.

When he'd first gotten me down on the floor, I'd been afraid for my life. Placating him had been my priority, and I'd obeyed, even tried to please. But when it got to the worse part, I'd screamed anyway, even at the cost of being smothered for it. It wasn't rational. It wasn't worth my life to struggle so futilely, but I'd done it anyway; I'd had to.

This sudden reversal of his, this about-face from admission and remorse to futile denial of even his own identity? That's him screaming.

The phrase “going through the motions” is usually derisive, but I'm coming to appreciate having motions to go through, via the legal and religious systems around me.

If the lab takes too many more weeks with my evidence, even if there is a match, the legal processes will begin without me. I'll become an afterthought. Though we were equally harmed in 1992, the November victim will become the real invitee; I, Jane Doe January, will be merely the tagalong “+1.” I don't think the police or the district attorney understand that. They must think: So long as the charges are added eventually, so long as Fryar is sentenced for me in the end, what does it matter if I'm not included in the original charges and preliminary hearing? But it matters a lot. Justice, for me, is about more than the sentencing. There's a process here, a ritual, and I want my place in all of it.

As for religious ritual, the brief, ceremonial evensongs on Thurs
days and Saturdays in the college chapel are more comforting to me now than our casual Sunday-morning church in town, which has been leaning more toward glib American-style instruction lately, with less humility, less awe, more how-to-live-your-life formula. I'm far too old to put up with being told what to do.

In contrast, the chapel's formal recitations and extravagant music console me. The services are Church-of-England Protestant—the equivalent of American Episcopal—but as elaborate as Catholic mass. Their tight structure holds me up from the outside, and asks in return only for some standing, then sitting, now stand again and say together a few scripted words. There's no sermon; I appreciate the break from being hectored. There's just assurance, order, beauty.

Some chapel services are crowded, but a lot of them are attended by only a handful of chorister parents. We all know each other and each other's kids. The room is arranged with stalls along the two long sides, so that the two halves of the choir face each other. The parents are split in half, too, each of us sitting to face our own children. I've grown used to the way each parent across from me looks when they're listening: rapt, amazed, grateful, humble; and the way that some boys glance around, as they file in, to look for their parents' faces, and how those boys shine when they find them.

Membership in the choir has no expectation of belief; some families are devout, some nominal, and some explicitly nonreligious. I think I would have disparaged such an arrangement when I was younger, but my ideals have slackened. I'm coming to see the tenets of my faith as aspirational rather than foundational. We try; we listen; we consider; we reach. We're going through the motions. I mean that in a lovely way. The motions are literally lovely.

I apologize for talking about it, but talk about it anyway. There never seems to be a right time, a private time. I told friends while at a cocktail party. All of our kids were in the same room with us,
far enough away so that they wouldn't hear, but right there. There wasn't any other chance. Everyone I know I see only in the context of other things, either important things that we're supposed to be focusing on, or kid things that we're supposed to keep happy and light. I feel guilty for being more than just the one facet of myself that I'm there for.

Sometimes it's overwhelming to look at the world and notice that everyone in it is a whole person, the center of their own universe of experiences and concerns. Just to be able to function, we have to reduce people to their roles in our lives, even ourselves to our role of any given moment. The occasional glimpse of the complicated wholeness behind each role is humbling.

Stephen Hawking has suggested that the Big Bang could have been caused by the intersection of two universes, a bump that set off the explosion of a new universe. Sometimes I feel like human interactions and relationships are bumps like that, that we're all so enormous with pasts and desires and faults and ambitions that our little meetings have larger, occasionally explosive, effects.

I teach W. that when he asks his brother for help, with his schoolwork or with a video game or with music, he isn't getting a help robot; he's getting his brother, a whole person, who may not give exactly or only what's being asked for, but that what he gives is a gift to be appreciated as it is. Just saying that out loud rattles me, reminds me of how guilty I sometimes feel for being a whole person, for being complicated and chatty and inquisitive and emotional and brash. I'm never just a writer, or just a mother, or just a child-delivery system bringing my sons to their various activities, though I feel sometimes that I should be and apologize for being more.

I'm never as productive as I want to be, or as good at anything as I want to be, and now, so distracted by this case, I'm only worse. I suppose I should be as gentle with myself as I ask my children to be with each other. I suppose that being a universe of a person is what
makes me however good a writer or mother or wife or friend that I manage to be, even if that full universe distracts me and others, and slows things down.

I tell myself:
Efficiency isn't the highest good
. I blink at the words. I know that they're true, but they honestly surprise me.

It's mid-November, two months since the arrest, and the date of the second extradition hearing passes. All I can find online is that, just like last time, there's a new New York court date set for a month away, at which time Pennsylvania can try again. Even though in the meantime Fryar stays in jail, the delay is maddening. It's also ultimately good for my case. The lab, it turns out, is going to take months, not weeks, despite my evidence being bumped ahead of everything except murder.

All I want is to catch up to the other case, to charge him together with the other known victim once he's extradited. I would hate for her to get to put him in prison and all I later get to do is add years to the sentence, years that, depending on the lengths assigned, he may never even live to serve. If we charge together, I can be part of putting him away. I can metaphorically shut the cell door on his pleading face. All his delay is accomplishing is creation of that chance.

His fighting of the extradition also means that, despite his smug and faux-remorseful admissions when he thought that the statute of limitations protected him, he's probably going to fight the charges when he does at last get to Pennsylvania court, which could get ugly. Part of me dreads the potential cross-examination. Part of me thinks,
Bring it on.

Most of the people around me are careful not to ask how the case is going, which I know is meant to be polite but makes me feel instead like they're ashamed of me.

The American detectives look after me. They communicate ef
fusively. Detective Campbell sends me an e-mail with the words “I PROMISE” in all caps. Valenta sends me an e-mail asking “Any updates???” with three question marks. It's as if we're teenagers, an age when every emotion is huge and requires punctuation to reflect that. I feel allowed to feel big things with them. It's as if they feel big things, too. It's as if it didn't happen to just me; it was an offense against all of us. We all want that chance to shut Fryar's cell door. We all want our hands pushing on it when it clicks.

Thanksgiving Day at home in the States is just an ordinary Thursday here. Gavin has just come back from business in California, and we're in a café, getting coffee into him, while our boys are off rehearsing. He asks me, shyly, about the rape: “Have you been reliving it, since the arrest?”

I hesitate. I've been thinking about it; not sure if that's “reliving” it. I worry that maybe he's sensed something off about me, something not present, maybe something in sex or parenting that I've been doing badly. I answer cautiously: “Kind of.”

He says, quickly, relieved to blurt it out: “I have.” He didn't know me then, but before we got married he read the poems I'd written then and we talked about it. I wonder what pictures those words add up to in his mind, how he imagines my apartment, how he imagines younger me. He probably doesn't know that my hair was bobbed that year, not long like it is now. I'd forgotten that myself until just recently.

He looks worried, and sad.

“Why don't you talk to John?” I suggest. “He's really nice.” John is friends with both of us, both me and Gavin, though he knows me better because I'm more often at choir.

Gavin shakes his head. “I can't do that and look after your feelings at the same time.” I think he's worried that starting is easy and stopping may be hard.

We compromise. He agrees to see John when I finally go away for the hearing. I've decided that I'm going to go, whether my evidence is ready or not, whether or not I get to testify. We still don't know if it's imminent or weeks away, but, whenever it will be, Gavin will get to stay behind and take over being the sad one, the one who needs listening to.

It's like when S. goes away, even just for a day, and W. gets to be the “big kid” of the house. W.'s personality shifts; he takes on a temporary confidence and sense of responsibility that then evaporate away when the usual order resumes. When I go to Pittsburgh, Gavin will get to have feelings about this, briefly. It will get to be his pain, his worry, his turn.

December. Arthur Fryar's still in Rikers Island, New York City's infamous jail, waiting on a midmonth hearing. I'm told that if he continues to fight the extradition, he'll get six more weeks there, at least. I look up how the jail celebrates Christmas. An old news article describes a program that provides the inmates with gift-wrapped socks, and a more recent article gives the recipe for the jail's special holiday carrot cake, featuring ingredients such as “3 gallons vegetable oil” and “25 pounds flour,” noting that each batch “makes 25 loaves.”

Cambridge does the season prettily. S. sings treble in a sold-out
Messiah,
and plays timpani in a paid, black-tie gig of Rutter's
Gloria
. W. sings the college Christmas services and squeaks “Away in a Manger” on his cello at home. Because the university term ends very early and most of the students will go home, all of these concerts and services glut the beginning of the month. By the time the holiday actually arrives, we'll be sick of carols.

It's during this run of getting our sons to and from rehearsals and performances that my evidence, after more than twenty years in a freezer, manages to produce a DNA profile that's then
matched with Arthur Fryar in the FBI database. I get the news while walking home one evening under twinkly white lights; Detective Honan had called our home phone, and Gavin phones me. That week's music seems to punctuate the breakthrough:
Hallelujah. Gloria.

It was Detective Honan who had called, not Detective Campbell, because she's attached to the other victim. She's kept me abreast of developments in her case; now that I have a case of my own, I'll deal more with Honan, the detective I'd randomly been matched with more than a year ago, when I'd tried to get this started.

The match starts my clock ticking: the police have an exception to the statute of limitations of exactly one year, starting now, to “commence” the prosecution. I'm not sure whether charging Fryar counts as “commencing,” or if we have to actually get into court within that year. Assuming that my case will be linked with the other, which matched back in August, we'll be “commenced” by summer at the latest, whatever the definition is. All his delaying has been an attempt to run out the clock, but the measures available to him simply won't stretch far enough.

I casually e-mail Detective Honan that it would be nice if Fryar's officially charged for me in time for my birthday. Honan replies that they still have to wait for the complete lab report, so it won't be that fast. I double-take, surprised that he knows when my birthday is. Gavin laughs and says, “Of course he does. It must be at the top of some page in your file.”

I wonder how the current detectives picture me, having just the old case notes, and recent phone calls and e-mails. They know such personal things, yet hardly anything else. Does my file have a photo from back then? Do they know what I look like now? Have they seen my website or looked at the picture above the bio in one of my books? They probably don't even know that I write. Valenta does, but I don't think the new ones do. What do they see in their
minds when they think of me? Is their imagined me a twenty-two-year-old student or an almost forty-four-year-old mother? To be honest, in my own mind I'm both.

I'm sick of waiting, and I piss Detective Campbell off. I can tell that she's annoyed with my repeated requests for an explanation of the rescheduled hearings. I am demanding, but only of information that already exists. I can be patient for information that's still being created, but, once something is known, I want to know it, too. It's maddening that New York won't be more open about what's going on with the extradition hearings, and maddening that Campbell won't dog them.

New York is far away from me now, but still feels like a kind of home. It was “the city” when I grew up nearby, close enough to take the train to after school (or instead of school); it's where I interned as a grad student and worked on my thesis; it's where I got my first magazine work. My sister lives there, my college and camp friends, too, and my agent, and editor. It's my editor, Randall, who helps me. He agrees to attend this third extradition hearing and tell me what happens. He asks me what I want to know.

Everything,
I think.
What
's it like to be in the same room with him?
Is he awful? Or does he seem normal? From his manner do you think he's ashamed, or cocky, or resentful? Do you think he fully appreciates that this is about what he did then, or is he only able to chafe at what's happening to him now? What's his lawyer like? He knows Fryar's guilty, right? And the judge? Why is she putting up with his ridiculous claims? Is the girlfriend there? Tell me the story.