Baird asked if we wanted to speak with a psychiatrist to better understand the treatment and what life might be like for her without it. He said every minute that passed reduced the effectiveness.
Charlotte’s eyes got so wide. “Yes!” she said without even looking at me. “Do it! What are you waiting for?” She stood up and pointed to the door like they should both rush out to follow her orders. But I grabbed her arm. I may not be the smartest man, but this didn’t sound right to me. If she couldn’t remember, how could she help them find this creature? How could she help put him behind bars, where he would get what he deserved? Detective Parsons nodded and looked at the floor like he knew exactly what I was saying. He finally confessed that it would be very difficult. That even if the drug didn’t work completely, anything she did remember would be ripped apart in court as unreliable. Of course it would, right? I mean, come on. Game over. Look—I’m not saying I wanted this guy caught and punished more than I wanted my daughter to recover. But where her mother saw her recovery in forgetting and pretending this never happened, I saw it coming more by way of facing the devil, you know? Looking him square in the eye and taking back a piece of what he had stolen. And I was right, wasn’t I? Jesus Christ, I wish I wasn’t, but I was.
I asked him the next logical question. “If you felt so strongly, why did you agree?”
He thought about this for several seconds. I think he had asked himself this same question a million times, but he had never had to say the answer out loud. When he did, he looked at me with a blank face, as though it should have been obvious to me. Tom had not yet come to see that the dynamics at play in his marriage were anything but obvious—or normal, for that matter.
Because if I was wrong, if Jenny didn’t get past it, I would be blamed. So why did I agree? Because I was a coward.
What I haven’t mentioned yet is the carving on Jenny’s back. It didn’t really become important to the story until now, and I should explain it before I go on. Everything happened so quickly the night of Jenny’s rape. She was at the hospital within an hour of being found. She was then sedated. Her parents arrived within a half hour of that, immediately bombarded with the decision regarding the treatment. It had to be administered by the psychiatrist through the IV that the nurse inserted into the back of Jenny’s hand. There were waivers and forms to review and sign, guarantees for payment. The treatment was not covered by insurance. And, finally, she was prepped for surgery to repair the damage from the rape, and for the thorough forensic examination.
Tom stayed with her until she was rolled away to an operating room. He said it was like watching his daughter in a manufacturing plant. He had visited one in Detroit years before, when he sold Fords. Metal parts, nuts and bolts, plastic and wires and computer chips, thousands of workers with busy hands and machines with moving parts putting things together. As he watched Jenny’s limp body handled by five people, each with a job to do on her body, each concerned only with her body as her mind was manipulated with chemicals and forced to stay asleep, that was the image Tom recalled, and he was deeply disturbed by it, and by his own deferential behavior. He had wanted to lift her from the gurney, raise his fist in the air, and tell everyone to leave her the hell alone. But, of course, he did nothing of the sort.
Not to belabor their differences, but Charlotte had wanted to join her daughter in her sedation, fall asleep, and forget this ever happened. She did not watch the professionals do their work. Instead, she went home and relieved the babysitter, took a sleeping pill, tucked Lucas’s blankets tighter around his body, and then curled up in the spare bed a few feet away. She listened to him breathe until she fell asleep herself. I would come to learn that she did this often to avoid being in the same bed with Tom.
When they were finished repairing the tears to Jenny’s genitals and bowels, she was admitted to the ICU. Dr. Baird stopped up to see how Tom was doing. He was joined by Detective Parsons shortly after. It was then that Tom first learned about the carving on her back. Parsons explained it this way:
We had the preliminary report from the forensic examination. They had some samples of fluids and hairs that needed to be tested, but as we now know, nothing would ever be found. During the examination, they found the carving. It was more of a cut, really, in terms of how deep it was. It was only an inch long, but it required seventeen stitches. No one noticed it at first because she was so dirty and there were so many other superficial scratches that they didn’t think much of it until they’d washed her. This one cut kept bleeding. The team that examined the woods where Jenny was attacked found a stick. It was sharpened at one end with some kind of knife like a small spear. The stick was only about a foot long. There was no skin on it except for Jenny’s, but they did find some fibers that would turn out to be neoprene. That’s the material used for sports gloves. They think he used the spear like a carving tool, slowly whittling away at the layers of skin.
Detective Parsons is a young man of thirty-one years, which explains the liberty he took when informing the Kramers about Jenny the night of the rape. With youth comes the inability to know what’s going to happen as a decision is played out. It is one of the greatest shames of the human experience that by the time we know how to conduct ourselves in an appropriate manner, there’s little conducting left to do.
Fairview doesn’t have much use for detectives. The job here is either a stepping-stone up to a more “active” situation elsewhere, perhaps in neighboring Cranston, or a step down toward retirement. Parsons is not a bad detective. But with his relative inexperience came an awkwardness when he recounted the more “intimate” details of the rape. His eagerness to appear disinterested and professional actually served to reveal just how interested he actually was. It was unsettling. But as I’ve said, the gravitation toward the prurient does not make us evil. We still do everything we can to try to conceal it. And so Detective Parsons did just that as he continued.
When we consulted the rape specialists from Cranston, they had all questioned the time frame. An hour is highly unusual for a rape in a public setting. It would have been difficult to see them in the woods that night. There was little moon and significant cloud cover. But she was within hearing range of anyone out on the street coming or going from the party, and certainly of anyone coming into the yard like the two individuals who did eventually hear her and come to her aid. But they could not argue with the medical facts. Then when they learned about the stick and the scratch, they said it made more sense. They think he stopped and started his various (there was an oddly long pause here) penetrations to whittle her. The carving was low on her back. It’s the place where girls like to get tattoos. They think he was marking her, or maybe just enjoying the cycles of relief and renewed fear from the starting and stopping, and then the winces from the pain of the sharp blade in her skin (another long pause, this time reflective). They think he may have gone through his own cycles of arousal, perhaps needing to refuel his excitement with the carving activity. This added a whole new direction to our thinking. This perpetrator was more sociopathic than we had originally assumed. And we were already thinking pretty far down that road.
Jenny’s physical recovery was not without its hardships. The areas that were sewn are not easily “shut down” and so there was regular pain, daily pain. Jenny tried to stop eating to reduce the amount of eliminating she would have to do. She lost over ten pounds in the two weeks her body was healing, and that time was spent mostly in bed or on the sofa loaded up with painkillers. There was some discord over the decision to send her back to school. There were only three weeks remaining when she was well enough, and the school, including all her teachers, had generously offered to provide her with materials and allow her to take her final exams over the summer.
I was curious to learn how the Kramers came out on this issue. Interestingly, it was Charlotte who wanted to keep Jenny home and under wraps, and Tom who wanted her to “get back on the horse.” I wondered if Charlotte’s real motivation had to do with the fact that Jenny did not look well at this point. In addition to the weight loss, she was pale, almost gray in color. She had dark circles under her eyes that can come from painkillers.