Someone Is Watching (3 page)

I moved in last year. My father bought the apartment for me, even as he insisted he would be happy if I lived at home forever. But he agreed that it was probably time for me to be on my own. It had been two years since my mother’s death. I was working. I had a boyfriend. I had my whole life ahead of me.

Of course, that was then.

This is now.

Now I have nothing. My job is on hold; my boyfriend is gone; my father died of a sudden heart attack four months ago, leaving me an orphan. At least I think it’s been four months since my father died. Like I said, I’ve lost track of time. That can happen when you stay in your apartment all day, when you jump every time the phone rings and leave your bed only to shower and go to the toilet, when your sole visitors are the police and the one sibling who isn’t suing you over your father’s estate.

Thank goodness for my brother, Heath, even if he’s not a whole lot of help. He collapsed at the hospital when he first saw me after the attack, actually fainting dead away and almost hitting his head on the side of the gurney. It was almost funny. The doctors and nurses rushed to his side, and I was temporarily forgotten. “He’s so handsome,” I heard one of the nurses whisper. I can’t blame her for being temporarily distracted by Heath’s good looks. My brother, older than me by a scant eleven months, is by far the most beautiful of my father’s children, his dark hair always falling into eyes that are an unnaturally deep shade of green, the eyelashes that frame them obscenely long and girlish. Women are always falling in love with Heath. Men, too. And Heath has always had difficulty saying no. To anyone. To anything.

At the hospital, they examined me thoroughly, then pronounced me lucky. An odd choice of words, and probably my face registered this, because they quickly qualified: By “lucky,” they meant my attacker had used a condom, so he left no semen inside me. As a result, I didn’t have to go on any of those awful anti-AIDS drugs or take the morning-after pill to prevent unwanted pregnancy. He spared me that. Such a considerate rapist. The downside is that he left not a hint of himself behind. There is no DNA to run through sophisticated CSI computers. Unless I can give the police something more to go on, unless I can remember something,
anything
 …

“Think,” I recall the uniformed police officer gently prompting the night of my attack. “Can you remember anything about the man, anything at all?”

I shook my head, felt my brain rattle. It hurt, but trying to talk hurt even more.

“Can we go over everything just one more time, Miss Carpenter?” another voice asked, this one female. “Sometimes the more we go over something, the more we’re able to remember. Something we don’t even realize might be significant.…”

Sure, I remember thinking. Significant. Whatever.

“Your name is Bailey Carpenter, and you live at 1228 Northeast First Avenue. Is that correct?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“That’s downtown. You were found in North Miami.”

“Yes. As I told you, I was staking out an apartment there. I’m an investigator with Holden, Cunningham, and Kravitz.”

“That’s a law firm?”

“Yes. I was looking for a man named Roland Peterson who skipped town about a year ago. We represent his ex-wife, and we’d gotten wind Mr. Peterson had recently slipped back into the city, possibly to visit his old girlfriend.”

“So you were watching the girlfriend’s apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think Roland Peterson is the man who attacked you?”

“I don’t know. Are you going to arrest him?”

“We’ll certainly check him out.”

I suspected that Roland Peterson, whether he was the man who raped me or just a deadbeat dad, was probably halfway out of Florida by now.

“Can you describe the man who attacked you?”

I shook my head again, felt my brain slide toward my left ear.

“Give yourself a few minutes,” the female officer urged. I noticed that she was in plain clothes, which probably made her a detective. Detective Marx, I think the other officer called her. “I know this isn’t easy, but if you could try to put yourself back in those bushes.”

Is Detective Marx really so naïve?
I think now.
Does she not realize I’ll be in those bushes for the rest of my life?

I remember thinking she looked too petite, too insubstantial, to be a police officer, her light gray eyes too soft, too caring. “It’s just that it all happened so fast. I know that’s such a cliché. I know I should have been more alert, more aware of my surroundings.…”

“This wasn’t your fault,” she interrupted.

“But I’ve studied judo and tae kwan do,” I argued. “It’s not as if I don’t know how to defend myself.”

“Anyone can be caught off guard. You heard nothing at all?”

“I don’t know,” I told her, trying to remember and not remember at the same time. “I
felt
something. A slight shift in the air. No, wait. I
did
hear something, maybe a footstep, maybe a twig breaking. I started to turn around, and then …” A tissue suddenly appeared in the officer’s outstretched hand. I grabbed it, tearing it into pieces before it reached my eyes. “He started hitting me. He was punching me in the stomach and face. I couldn’t get my bearings. He put a pillowcase over my head. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. I was so scared.”

“Before he hit you, were you able to make out anything? A shape? A size?”

I tried to picture the man. I really did. But all I saw was the darkness of the night, followed by the suffocating whiteness of the pillowcase.

“Could you see what he was wearing?”

Yet another shake of my head. “He must have been wearing black. And jeans. He was wearing jeans.” I heard the man’s zipper and wanted to scream to block out the sound.

“Good. That’s very good, Bailey. You
did
see things. You
can
remember.”

I felt foolishly proud of myself and realized how eager I was to please this woman whose eyes were so soft and gray.

“Could you tell what color the man was, if he was black or white or Hispanic?”

“White,” I said. “Maybe Hispanic. I think he had brown hair.”

“What else?”

“He had big hands. He was wearing leather gloves.” Once again I tasted the stale leather and swallowed the urge to gag.

“Can you estimate how tall he was?”

“I think he was average.”

“Could you tell if he was overweight, skinny, muscular …?”

“Average,” I said again. Could I be any less informative? I’ve been trained to notice the smallest of details. Yet all my training evaporated with that first punch. “He was very strong.”

“You struggled with him.”

“Yes. But he kept hitting me, so I never got close enough to make any real contact. I never got a look at his face. It was all one big blur. And then he pulled that pillowcase over my head.…”

“Did you notice his shoes?”

“No. Yes!” I corrected myself, my mind flashing on the iconic Nike swoosh in the canvas of the man’s sneakers. “He was wearing black Nike sneakers.”

“Can you estimate what size?”

“No, damn it. I’m useless. Absolutely useless. I don’t know anything.”

“You
do
know,” the officer said. “You remembered the sneakers.”

“Half the population of Miami owns sneakers like those.”

“Did he say anything?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“He didn’t say anything.”

Which is when I felt the man’s lips moving toward my ear, his voice penetrating the pillowcase with the same sickening force he was penetrating me.
Tell me you love me.

My entire body started trembling. How could I forget this? How could my mind have blanked out something so obviously, terribly important?

“He told you to tell him you loved him?” Detective Marx repeated, unable to disguise her surprise or her revulsion.

“Yes. He repeated it twice.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Tell him you loved him?”

“No. I called him a bastard.”

“Good for you,” she said, and again I felt a surge of pride.

“Okay, Bailey. This is very important. Can you tell me what he sounded like?” She was already elaborating before I could formulate a response. “Was he American? Did he have an accent? Was his voice deep or high-pitched? Did he speak with a lisp? Did he sound young or old?”

“Young,” I said. “Or at least, not old. But not a teenager,” I qualified, trying to remember what teenagers sound like. “He was whispering—actually, it was more of a growl. I didn’t hear an accent or a lisp.”

“Good. That’s very good, Bailey. You’re doing great. Do you think you’d recognize him if you heard that voice again?”

Oh, God, I thought, panic making me dizzy. Please don’t let me hear that voice again. “I don’t know. Maybe. Like I said, he was whispering.” Another surge of panic. Another onslaught of tears. Another tissue. “Please, I just want to go home.”

“Just a few more questions.”

“No. No more questions. I’ve told you everything.”

What I’d told her was that the man who raped me was most likely a white male of average height and weight, between the ages
of twenty and forty, with brown hair and a fondness for black Nike sneakers. In other words, I’d told her nothing.

“Okay,” she agreed, although I heard the reluctance in her voice. “Is it all right if we stop by your apartment tomorrow?”

“What for?”

“In case you remember anything else. Sometimes a good night’s sleep …”

“You think I’ll sleep?”

“I think the doctors will prescribe something to help you.”

“You think anything will help?”

“I know it doesn’t feel that way right now,” she said, placing a gentle hand on my arm. I forced myself not to recoil at her touch. “But eventually you
will
get over this. Your world
will
return to normal.”

I marveled at her certainty, even as I marveled at her naïveté. When has my world ever been normal?

A brief family history. My father, Eugene Carpenter, was married three times and spawned seven children: a girl and a boy with his first wife, three boys with his second, and Heath and me with his third. A successful entrepreneur and investor who amassed his great wealth in the stock market, regularly buying low and selling high, my father was brought to the attention of state investigators on more than one occasion because of his suspiciously good fortune. But despite their best efforts, they were never able to prove anything even approaching misconduct or malfeasance, a source of deep pride to my father and equally deep frustration to his eldest son, the assistant state’s attorney who initiated the original investigation. My father subsequently cut off all contact with his namesake, then cut him out of his will altogether. Hence the lawsuit over his estate, of which Heath and I are the chief beneficiaries. The rest of our half-siblings have joined the suit to claim what they insist is rightfully theirs.

I can’t say I blame them. My father was, at best, a lousy husband to their mothers and an indifferent parent to all of them. What’s more, he had a warped, even cruel sense of humor. He
named the three sons he had with his second wife Thomas, Richard, and Harrison (Tom, Dick, and Harry), and although he always insisted this was unintentional, at least until Harry came along, one thing was indisputable: He constantly played the brothers against one another, the result being that, were it not for the lawsuit, I doubt any of them would be on speaking terms today.

Amazingly, this was not the father that either Heath or I knew. Our childhood was idyllic, our father as loving and attentive as any child could possibly wish for. I credit my mother for this. Younger than my father by eighteen years, he often proclaimed that she was the first woman he’d ever really loved, the woman who taught him how to be a man. And I guess that because he loved her, he loved us, too. The father I remember was generous and tender, soft-hearted and fiercely protective. When my mother died three years ago of ovarian cancer at the tragically young age of fifty-five, he was beside himself with grief. Still, he never deserted us, never sought escape in the man he used to be, was never the man my half-siblings all remember.

He was always there for me.

And then, suddenly, he wasn’t.

The man I’d considered invincible died of a massive heart attack at the age of seventy-six.

That was four months ago.

Since he died, I’ve broken up with my boyfriend, Travis, and embarked on what most people would consider an ill-advised affair with a married man. Not that one thing has anything to do with the other. My relationship with Travis had been deteriorating for some time. I was reeling from my father’s unexpected loss, experiencing a renewal of the daily anxiety attacks that had plagued me after my mother died, times when I couldn’t move my legs, when I couldn’t draw sufficient air into my lungs to breathe. I tried to hide these attacks from everyone, and I was largely successful, but there was one man who wasn’t so easily fooled. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” he’d ask. “What’s
really
going on?” And so I did, reluctantly at first, then compulsively, as if once that particular tap had been turned on, it was impossible to shut
off again. He quickly became my closest ally, my confidant, eventually, perhaps inevitably, my lover.

I knew right from the start that he would never leave his wife. She was the mother of his children, and he couldn’t imagine being just a part-time dad, no matter how unhappy his marriage. He said that while he and his wife rarely argued, this was because they lived largely separate lives, and that although they were regularly seen together in public, they retreated to opposite ends of their house when they were alone. They hadn’t made love in years.

Do I believe that? Am I really so gullible? I don’t know. I only know that when I’m with him and that when we’re together, I’m both where and who I want to be. It’s as simple—as complicated, as complex, as awful—as that.

When I think now of the times we made love, the gentle way his fingers explored my body, the soft probing of his tongue, the expert way he brought me to orgasm, it seems impossible that an act so full of tenderness and love can, in other circumstances, be so overflowing with rage and hate, that what produces so much pleasure can inflict so much pain. I wonder if I will ever again experience the joy of a man’s touch, or if every time a man enters my body, I will feel a rapist ripping into my flesh, if each time a man’s lips move toward my breasts, I will convulse in horror and disgust. I wonder if I will ever be able to enjoy sex again, or if this is something else that has been forever taken from me.