Funeral for a Friend

28

Serena found Alice Frye where she always was, in the garden behind her house on Morgan Street in the flat lands above the city. Birches and maples made a ring around the yard, creating a private nook where Alice tended to her herbs and flowers. She had a small cottage behind her house, where Serena had seen her every other month for the last few years.

Alice was a therapist, well into her seventies. She was a pixie-sized widow with short dark hair and an endless supply of adrenaline. She had a deep reservoir of sexual anecdotes that always sounded shocking coming out of her sweet elderly mouth. Serena had heard more slang words for male genitalia in Alice’s cottage than on the streets of Las Vegas. For all that, Alice was also smart, sensitive, and not shy about pointing out uncomfortable truths. Serena liked her.

She had tried therapy several times in her past, mostly with bad results. She didn’t like to trust anyone with her secrets. However, after she and Jonny had broken up in the wake of his affair with Maggie, she’d tried again, at the suggestion of a woman she was living with in Grand Rapids at the time. The woman had recommended Alice, and Alice had kicked off their first session in the little cottage by asking flatly, “Okay, my dear, who put whose cock where?”

Right then, Serena knew the two of them were going to get along.

She’d told Jonny very little about her time in therapy. She’d never suggested that he join her. The sessions were for her and her alone. She’d talked a lot about him in the early days, but very quickly, she’d gone on to other parts of her life. Alice had taken her through her teenage years in Phoenix. They’d talked about Maggie. They’d talked about Cat and Serena’s new role as a mother. With Alice, Serena had found a way to confront many of her demons. Even though she felt more in control of her problems, she still liked the validation of coming to Alice’s place every other month, even if all they did was share stories about their sex lives.

Alice looked up with surprise as Serena came around the back of the house. She was on her knees in her flower garden, talking to the purple hydrangeas that had won ribbons at the state fair.

“Serena,” Alice said, looking apologetic. “Did we have an appointment? I don’t have anything on my calendar.”

Serena smiled and shook her head. “No, I just stopped by.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes, things are fine. I was hoping to get your opinion about something. It’s related to a case I’m working on.”

The therapist put down her gardening tools, stripped off her gloves, and rubbed her hands together. “Oh, I get to play Dr. Watson today. How exciting. Well, come on, come on, let’s get to it.”

Alice sprang to her feet with an agility that belied her age. She wiped the dirt from her knee pads and practically bounded in her muddy boots toward the little cottage near the trees. She unlocked the door and let the two of them inside, threw open all of the windows, and plopped into a wheely chair at her desk. By habit, Serena took her usual place on the sofa. The cottage was small, barely twelve square feet, decorated more like a children’s playhouse than a therapist’s office.

“Your husband has been in the news lately,” Alice said, putting half-glasses on her face and fiddling with a shiny gray stone on her desk. She had a collection of polished rocks that she gave to patients to hold during their sessions, all inscribed with different words of encouragement. Determination. Grace. Love. God. Memory.

“Yes, he’s in a difficult situation,” Serena admitted.

“So I gather. Is he talking to you about it?”

“What do you think?”

“Stride? I imagine he’s closed up like an oyster working on his pearl. Which means you’re going to have to go in and pull him out.”

“I know.”

“When did the two of you last have sex?”

“A couple of weeks ago.”

“Well, that’s not acceptable,” Alice snapped. “Who was on top?”

Serena chuckled. She was accustomed to Alice’s explicit interrogations about the details of her lovemaking. “I think it was me.”

“You need to be willing to use that lovely back of yours sometimes.”

“I do, Alice. I promise.”

“You don’t always have to control everything, you know.”

“I know. This isn’t actually what I wanted to talk to you about. I’m not here about myself.”

Alice delivered a pointed stare above the rims of her glasses. “You came to talk to me, Serena, not anybody else. So let’s not pretend you have nothing to say about your own life. You’re concerned about Stride, which means you’re concerned about you and Stride.”

Serena shrugged. “Okay, you’re right. I’m worried about old habits. The easy thing for Jonny is not to talk, and I’m the same way. Sometimes I think he talks to Cat more readily than to me. Actually, it makes me a little jealous. I had a conversation with Maggie yesterday, too, and she told me Stride was burned out and not happy with himself. I told her she was wrong, but you know what? She’s right. And it really pisses me off that she noticed it before I did.”

Alice handed her the stone that she’d been rolling around between her thin fingers. The word inscribed on it was Honesty.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Alice said.

“I suppose I’ll get a bill for this visit.”

“No charge if you tell me more about the sex,” she said with a wink.

“Send me a bill,” Serena replied with a chuckle.

“All right, all right, I’ll stop prying. So what’s the issue today? What do you need my professional opinion on?”

“This is delicate,” Serena replied.

“Ah, so we’re back to sex.”

“Sort of. There’s a woman who has made an accusation of rape. It’s an incident that occurred almost thirty years ago when she was a teenager.”

“I assume we’re talking about the Devin Card story,” Alice replied.

“I can’t say yes or no, but draw your own conclusions.”

“Okay. As we talk about this hypothetical situation, would it be safe for me to rely on the details of that accusation as they’ve appeared in the media?”

“Yes.”

“And you want to know whether this accusation can be considered credible despite how long ago this was,” she said.

“You are too damn smart for your own good, Alice.”

The therapist winked and picked up another rock from her desk, with the word Intelligence etched into the stone. “Tell me what you know. Have you talked to this woman?”

“Yes. She acknowledges that she was drunk the night of the assault. She says she threw up and may have passed out. We’ve been able to identify the likely time and place where it happened, but she can’t verify those details herself. However, she is absolutely certain that she did not consent, that she was raped, and that she knows the identity of the man who did it.”

“And you want to know whether this is a plausible set of circumstances?” Alice asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I think it’s very plausible,” Serena said.

“You would be correct. It’s perfectly reasonable that a victim would have no clue about the time or place of an assault, or even that she would get many of the accompanying details wrong, particularly if alcohol or drugs are involved. But she could easily still remember being raped and who did it. In fact, I’d be surprised if she didn’t.”

Serena nodded. “Now comes the tough part.”

“Namely?”

“Is it also plausible that she could have made a mistake?”

Alice drummed two of her fingers against her chin. “About which part?”

“Any of it.”

“Well, about whether she was raped at all? That’s extremely unlikely. Some women do manufacture stories of assault, but that’s an entirely different set of circumstances and a very different pathology. If you believe she’s sincere about her memories, then I would conclude that yes, she almost certainly was raped. As to whether she denied consent? That’s much harder to know without context, and both the man and the woman might remember it very differently. On the other hand, if she specifically remembers using words like No and Stop, then I suspect it’s likely that she did so, even if the man didn’t hear it that way.”

“And what about the identity of the man who did it?” Serena said.

Alice’s face twisted into an expression of reluctant discomfort. “Oh, Serena. This is very difficult ground.”

“I know.”

“The overwhelming majority of victims don’t make mistakes about who assaulted them. It’s not a function of how much time has passed. The idea that a victim could be certain about the identity of her attacker decades later — while blocking out many of the other details — doesn’t strike me as unusual in the least.”

“But it does happen.”

“Yes. It does happen. There have been instances where a victim was absolutely certain of her assailant’s identity, and eventually, it turned out that she was mistaken. DNA proved it. In fact, certainty can be your worst enemy. It can feed on itself, making you squash out your doubts because you want to believe in the truth of your memories. On the other hand, that’s far more likely to happen with a stranger, not someone the victim knows. In other words, if this woman actually knew Devin Card and specifically remembered going upstairs with him, I find it extremely unlikely that she made a mistake about that.”

“Thank you, Alice,” Serena said. “That’s very helpful.”

The therapist scooted her chair forward and leaned her elbows on her knees. “And yet you still think she made a mistake, don’t you?”

“I really don’t know. We’ve uncovered some evidence that someone else at the same party may have had a motive to assault her. It could have been an act of revenge against a girl who dumped him that night. And yet the victim knew this person, too, and his name never came up from her. She never mentioned him, never talked about seeing him there. If it was him, I can’t believe she wouldn’t have remembered. I don’t see how she could have substituted someone else in her memory. It’s hard for me to imagine a woman being wrong about that.”

“Then what’s your hesitation? I hope it’s not that you think a man like Devin Card is incapable of behaving like that. Because we both know that isn’t true. No man is truly the master of his dick, Serena. And it’s not that I’m ganging up on Devin. In fairness, I believed the accusations against him seven years ago, but I voted for him anyway.”

“Really?” Serena asked.

“Really. I had a client a few years ago who asked me if I thought it was possible to forgive every sin. I said not only was it possible, it was a human necessity. It doesn’t mean we don’t punish people for what they do, but we also have to accept that people grow and change. And that God’s plan is infinitely more complex than we can understand.”

“Forgive every sin,” Serena said.

“Exactly.”

“That’s hard to do when it comes to rape.”

Alice nodded. “Indeed. In fact, my client said the very same thing.”