Lucky (28 page)

It was like a relay race, I realized. The leg I'd run had been arduous and long, but there were still others—more questions and answers—more key witnesses, many more hours to Gail's day.

"If I learn anything I'll contact the detective," she said, turning to me. She extended her hand to my father. "Nice to meet you, Bud. You can be proud."

"I hope the next time we meet it's under more pleasant circumstances," he said. It had just hit him. We were leaving.

Gail hugged me. I had never hugged a pregnant woman before, found it awkward, almost genteel, the way both she and I had to lean only the upper halves of our bodies in.

"You're incredible, kiddo," she said quietly to me.

Murphy drove us back to Hotel Syracuse, where we packed. I may have slept. My father called my mother. I don't remember those hours. My attention had been so focused that now I let go. I was aware that my case was still continuing as we folded clothes and waited for Murphy to pick us up later that afternoon. My father and I sat on the edges of the twin beds. Putting distance between us and the city of Syracuse was our unspoken goal. We knew the plane would do it. We waited.

Murphy came early to meet us. He brought news.

"Gail wanted to be the one to tell you," he said, "but she couldn't get away."

My father and I were in the carpeted lobby, our red American Tourister luggage waiting nearby.

"They got him," he said joyfully. "Guilty on six counts. He was remanded to jail!"

I went blank. My legs felt weak beneath me.

"Thank God," my father said. He said this quietly, acknowledging an answered prayer.

We were in the car. Murphy was chattering. He was high off it. I sat in the back of the car while my father and Murphy sat in the front. My hands were cold and limp. I remember feeling them distinctly resting on either side of me, useless.

At the airport, while my father and Murphy sat off at a distance in an airport lounge, I called my mother from a pay phone. Murphy offered to buy my father a drink.

I pushed in my home phone number and waited.

"Hello," my mother said.

"Mom, it's Alice. I have news."

I faced the wall and cupped the mouthpiece in both hands. "We did it, Mom," I said. "All six counts except the weapons one. He was remanded to jail."

I didn't know what
remanded
meant yet but I used the word.

My mother was ecstatic. She shouted up and down the house in Paoli, "She did it! She did it! She did it!" over and over again. She could not contain her joy.

I
had
done it.

Murphy and my father exited the bar. Our flight was boarding soon. I found out what
remanded
meant. It meant Madison would not be released between conviction and sentencing. They had handcuffed him inside the courtroom as the charges were read. This made Murphy gleeful.

"I wish I could have been there to see his face."

It had been a long, good day for John Murphy, and, as my father confided on the airplane, Murphy could really pack the drinks away. But who could blame him? He was heady, celebratory, off to see his Alice.

I was drained. Though it took me a while to realize it, I, too, had been remanded. I would be held over for a long time.

On June 2, I received a letter from the probation department of the County of Onondaga.

They wrote to inform me that they were conducting "a pre-sentence investigation of a young man who was recently found guilty after trial of Rape First Degree, Sodomy First Degree and other related charges. These charges," the letter stated, "stem from an incident in which you were the victim." They wrote to inquire if I had any input on the sentencing recommendation.

I wrote back. I recommended the maximum sentence allowable under the law, and quoted Madison calling me "the worst bitch." I knew Syracuse had been voted the seventh-best city to live in that year, and I pointedly stated that having men like Madison on the streets wouldn't bolster this reputation. I knew my best hope to be heard was by making the point that a maximum sentence would make the men who sentenced him look good. That way they wouldn't be doing it for me, but for the people who elected them and paid their salaries. I knew this. Whatever skills I had, I used.

I closed my letter by signing it over my title: victim.

On July 13, 1982, in a court where Gorman presided, and Mastine, Paquette, and Madison were in attendance, Gregory Madison was sentenced. It was the maximum for rape and sodomy: eight and a third to twenty-five years. The larger sentences, along with lesser ones given for the four remaining charges, would run concurrently. Mastine called to tell me. He also informed me that Gail had given birth. My mother and I went shopping for a gift. When I saw Gail fifteen years later, she brought the gift along to show me she remembered.

That summer I began my makeover. I had been raped but I had also been raised on
Seventeen
and
Glamour
and
Vogue.
The possibilities of the before-and-after that I had been presented with all my life took hold. Besides, those around me—namely my mother now, with my sister working in Washington before leaving for Syria, and my father off in Spain—encouraged me to move on with my life. "You don't want to become defined by the rape," she said, and I agreed.

I got a job in an ill-fated T-shirt shop where I was the only employee. I stamped badges in an unventilated attic and did sloppy silk-screening for local softball teams. My boss, who was twenty-three, was out hustling up business around town. Sometimes he was drunk and showed up with his buddies to watch TV I was wearing huge clothes at the time, ones I made myself, what even my mother called tent dresses. And I wore a lot of them in the June and July heat of 1982. One day when my boss and his friends taunted me to show a little flesh, I turned around and walked out. I drove home in my father's car, covered in inks.

It was just me and my mother again, like the summer when I turned fifteen. I kept looking for another job—my journal is full of shoe-store interviews and office-supply-store applications—but like in any suburb during the summer, jobs were scarce once midsummer hit. Mom was trying to lose weight. I decided to join her. We watched
Richard Simmons
and bought an exercise bike. I have a memory of the Scarsdale diet, small, measured steak and chicken bits that we could barely get down. "This diet is costing a fortune," my mother said as we ate more meat that summer than I have since.

But I began to take off pounds. I would sit in front of the television in the morning and watch obese women cry with Simmons, setting off a sort of round-robin of tears among the guest, Simmons, and the studio audience. Sometimes I cried too. Not because I thought I was as fat as the women on the screen but because I thought I knew exactly how ugly they felt. I might have been able to get down the street without being called names and I could see my shoelaces over my belt, but I identified with Simmons's guests as I did with no one else. They were the walking, talking ostracized who had done nothing wrong.

So I cried. And I got on that bike. And I hated my body. I used that hate to shed fifteen pounds.

In late summer, after my father had returned from Spain, the three of us were out in the yard doing yard work. I was supposed to ride the ride-on mower. A typical Sebold fight erupted. I didn't want to, etc. Why did Mary get to go live in D.C. and then go to Syria?

My father called me ungrateful. It escalated. Suddenly, just as it was traveling down the familiar path to all-out shouting, I burst into tears. I started crying but couldn't stop. I ran inside up to my room. Trying to sop up the tears was futile. I cried until I was spent, dehydrated, my eyes and the flesh around them a site map of broken capillaries.

Later, I didn't want to talk about it; I was putting the rape and the trial behind me.

Lila and I wrote back and forth to each other all summer. She was dieting too. Our letters to one another read like journal entries, long, pondering pieces written to have company during the writing as much as to really share any information bulletins about ourselves.

We were hot and bored, nineteen and stuck at home with our parents. We told each other our life stories in those rambling letters. How we felt about everything from our individual family members to boys we knew at school. I don't remember writing her about the trial in detail. If I did, her letters don't reflect it. I got one postcard in the early summer congratulating me. That's it. It disappeared from our landscape after that.

As it did from almost everyone's. The trial seemed to have provided a very solid and heavy back door to the whole thing. Anyone who had actually entered that house with me, looked or walked into the rooms there, was very happy to finally leave the place. The door was shut. I remember agreeing with my mother that I had gone through a death-and-rebirth phenomenon in the span of one year. Rape to trial. Now the land was new and I could make of it anything I wished.

Lila, Sue, and I planned, via our letters, for the coming year. Lila was bringing a kitten down from a litter at home. I had made a pact with my mother: If I jumped up and down enough on a couch that she hated, we might convince my father when he returned from Spain that I should take it to school. I rented a truck with Sue, who lived nearby. My mother was cheery and sent me off with new clothes that fit my new figure. This was going to be the turnaround year. I was going to do what I called "live normal" now.

That fall, Mary Alice was in London in an exchange program. So were other friends. Tess was on leave. I missed them only vaguely. Lila was my living, breathing soul mate. We went everywhere together and cooked up crazy schemes. We both wanted boyfriends. I played the role of the experienced one to Lila's innocent. Over the summer I had made us matching skirts. We wore these and anything black whenever we went out.

Ken Childs was at a loss without Casey, who was also in London, and we began to pal around. I thought he was cute and, the most important fact, he already knew about me.

The three of us went dancing together at on-campus clubs and art-student parties. I wanted to be a lawyer now. People liked hearing this ambition so I said it a lot. Because of Tess, I wanted to go to Ireland; I told people that too. I went to poetry and fiction readings and indulged in the wine and cheese. I took an independent study in poetry with Hayden Carruth and an independent with Raymond Carver, whom I've always thought Tess had assigned to baby-sit me.

One day I ran into Maria Flores on the street. I had written her a triumphant letter early in the summer about the trial. I told her that I had felt her there with me in the courtroom and that I hoped she could take some solace in this. Her letter back was, to be honest, too real for me. "I have a brace on my leg. My ankle is healed and I walk with a cane due to nerve damage. My suicidal tendencies have lessened though frankly, they aren't all gone."

She worried about her cane inhibiting her from meeting new people and felt ashamed that she had not completed her job as a resident advisor. She ended the letter with a quote from Kahlil Gibran:

"We are all prisoners but some of us are in cells with windows and some without."

I couldn't see it for years but if one of us had a window, it was Maria who was looking out.

"I got off scot-free," I remember saying to Lila. "She'll wear the rape eternally."

I was dancing and falling in love. This time, a boy in Lila's math class: Steve Sherman. I told him about the rape after we had gone to see a movie and had a few drinks. I remember that he was wonderful with it, that he was shocked and horrified but comforting. He knew what to say. Told me I was beautiful, walked me home and kissed me on the cheek. I think he also liked taking care of me. By that Christmas, he became a fixture at our house.

At home my mother was on an upswing too. She was trying new drugs, Elavil and Xanax, and even biorhythm therapies, things she had never considered before. Group therapy was on the horizon. My mother trusting someone other than herself. "You inspire me, kiddo!" she wrote. "If you can go through what you did and go back out, I figure this old gal can too."

I had reached some positive ground zero; the world was new and open to me.

I worked on the literary magazine,
The Review,
and was chosen to be editor when I became a senior. The English department asked me to represent them in the Glascock Poetry Competition, which was held annually at Mount Holyoke College.

Years before, my mother had fled Mount Holyoke, leaving behind a fellowship for graduate school. She recalls that it felt like a death sentence to her. All her friends were getting married and she, the egghead, was going off to a place full of "nuns and lesbians."

So I went back to reclaim something for my mother and to take the stage for rape. I didn't win. I came in second. I read "Conviction." Reading it aloud had made me shake with it, the truth of my hate. One of the judges, Diane Wakoski, took me aside and told me that subjects like rape had a place in poetry but that I would never win the prizes or cultivate an audience at large that way.

Lila and I thrilled at stupid movies and we saw one the day I got back from Massachusetts, Sylvester Stallone in
First Blood.
It played at the fifty-cent movie theater near our house. We laughed hysterically at the cartoonish action on the screen in front of us, guffawing so hard we were crying and could barely see or breathe. We would have been kicked out if anyone else had been in the theater to complain but we were alone in the old run-down movie house.

"Me Rambo, you Jane," Lila said, and beat her chest.

"Me good muscle, you girl muscle."

"Grrr."

"Tee-hee."

Near the end of the film someone cleared his throat quite audibly. Lila and I froze but kept staring at the screen. "I thought we were alone," she whispered.

"So did I," I said.

We kept it down and attempted a respectful silence during the final raging shoot-out scenes. We did this by digging our nails into each other's arms and biting our lips. We giggled but we did not erupt fully.