Someone Is Watching Page 4

  I am just stepping out of the shower when I hear voices, followed by the sound of footsteps, of people moving around my apartment. I grab my oversized white terry cloth housecoat from its hook beside the shower and wrap it around me, raising the scissors in my hand to my chest as I enter the bedroom, all the while assuring myself that I’m imagining things. It’s impossible that anyone could have gotten inside my apartment. There is nobody walking down my hallway. No one is whispering outside my bedroom door.

  Except there is.

  A voice stabs at the air: “Bailey? Bailey, are you here?”

  Followed by another voice, a man’s: “Miss Carpenter? Is everything all right?”

  My knees go weak. My mouth goes dry. The room spins around me.

  A woman suddenly appears in the doorway, a young man’s head bobbing up over her left shoulder. The woman is about five feet, four inches tall, with short blond hair and wide-set brown eyes. Her stomach is distended, heavy with the baby she is carrying.

  “Sally?” I mutter, struggling to find my voice as I lower the scissors to my side.

  “Is everything all right?” the young man behind her asks. Only now do his features fall into place and I recognize Finn, one of the valets who regularly works the front desk. “We tried calling and calling.”

  “I was in the shower,” I say, trying to keep from screaming. “How did you get in here?”

  “It’s my fault,” Sally quickly explains. “I just got so scared when you didn’t answer your phone. I was afraid something might have happened to you, that maybe you’d done something.…” There’s no need for her to finish the sentence. We both know what she was about to say.

  “I’m really sorry, Miss Carpenter,” Finn says, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “We didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  “Don’t be mad,” Sally says. “I forced him.”

  I nod. The condo rules state that the building has extra keys to all units in case of emergency. Clearly, Sally felt that this was such an emergency. “What are you doing here?”

  “Don’t you remember? Last night on the phone, I told you I was going to stop by this morning on my way to work.”

  “It slipped my mind.” In truth, I have no recollection of last night’s phone call at all.

  “Are those scissors?” Sally asks, her wide eyes widening further.

  I slip the scissors into one of the side pockets of my robe.

  “Sorry again about barging into your apartment,” Finn says, backing down the hall toward the door, closing it softly after him.

  “That was some long shower,” Sally says.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. I’m the one who went all crazy and broke into your apartment. Have you had breakfast yet? I brought muffins.” She holds up a brown paper bag.

  I make tea and we sit at my dining room table and eat our muffins and try to pretend that this is a normal day and that we are normal people having a normal conversation.

  “Have you decided what you’re going to name the baby?” I ask. Sally has been here for about twenty minutes, and I don’t think we’ve talked about this yet, although I’m not sure. I’ve been listening with only one ear.

  “Not yet. But I think we’re making progress.” She continues when I fail to ask any follow-up questions. “I suggested the name Avery, and Bobby didn’t immediately go all ape-shit. You know how my dear husband always goes for more traditional names, like with Michael.” Michael is their three-year-old. Sally wanted to name him Rafael, after the tennis player Rafael Nadal, or Stellan, after some Swedish actor she’s always admired, but her husband was insistent on something more traditional. He argued in favor of Richard or Steve. They settled on Michael just as the baby’s head was crowning, and Sally still isn’t convinced they made the right choice. “My legs were wide open, this doctor had his hand halfway to my throat,” she once told me. “I was screaming my head off. You gotta admit the man had me at a slight disadvantage.”

  I wince at the image.

  “You don’t like the name?” Sally asks.

  “What?”

  “I was also thinking of Nicola or Kendall.”

  “I like Avery,” I tell her. The image fades but lingers at the periphery of my mind’s eye, joining a gallery of similar images.

  “You do? I’m so glad. Avery’s my favorite. What’s the matter—you don’t like your muffin? They said it was full of cranberries, like all the way through it, not just on the top where you can see them.”

  The cranberries taste like sour rubber balls. “It’s delicious,” I lie. The berries stick to the roof of my mouth, as if they have been glued there, and even the persistent prodding of my tongue fails to dislodge them.

  “I just hate when you think you’re going to get this muffin that’s loaded with berries, and it turns out there are only a few on the top,” Sally is saying. “It’s such a cheat.” She smiles. “You seem much better today. Did you sleep well?”

  “Much better,” I say, using her words.

  She reaches across the table to pat my hand. “Everybody at work keeps asking about you.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “They said to say hello.”

  “Hello back.”

  Silence. She gulps down the rest of her tea, pats up the few crumbs she’s left on the table with the tip of her finger, puts them in her mouth. “Well, I guess I should go.”

  I’m on my feet immediately. “Thanks for stopping by.”

  “Yeah, and scaring you half to death.”

  “I’m fine now.”

  “You look good,” she says, the forced enthusiasm in her voice underlining her lie. “The bruises are pretty much gone.”

  Only the ones you can see, I think but don’t say.

  “So,” she says, leaning forward to give me a tentative hug. Luckily, her growing stomach prevents her from getting too close. “I’ll see you again soon.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Any plans for the rest of the day?” she broaches as I open the door.

  “Nothing definite.”

  “It’s beautiful out,” she says, as if this is unusual. Miami is full of beautiful days. “Maybe you should get out, go for a walk.”

  “Maybe.”

  She motions toward my wet hair. “Better dry it before you catch a cold.” What’s the point in drying it when I’m only going to shower again in a few hours?

  I close the door after her, watching through the peephole as she waddles down the corridor toward the elevators. Then I run to the powder room and throw up the tea and cranberry muffin.

  — FOUR —

  I remember the first time a boy touched my breast. His name was Brian, and he was seventeen and a senior at a nearby high school. I was fifteen and excited that he’d even noticed me, let alone asked me out. We were going to a party, and I’d decided to wear the pretty wine-colored dress my mother had recently bought me. The dress was sleeveless, with a white lace collar and large pearl buttons up the center of the bodice. I loved it because I thought it made my still-small breasts look bigger. Was that why Brian felt he could touch them? Had the dress signaled that his touch would be welcome? Was that why he’d been so angry when I slapped his hand away? Was that why he promptly took me home, depositing me, humiliated yet defiant, on my doorstep, calling me a tease, among other choice epithets?

  This memory leads to another earlier one. I am twelve, maybe thirteen. School is over for the day, and I’m about to board a bus to meet my mother downtown. I’m wearing my school uniform—a green sweater over a crisp white shirt, matching green skirt and knee socks, and black Oxfords completing the less-than-fetching ensemble—and as I lift my leg to climb onto the bus, I feel something brush across my buttocks. The touch lingers, refuses to let go, as I spin around and dig my nails into the unwanted hand. A man, short, middle-aged and balding, rubs his hand and grins, sheepishly at first, then more boldly, before backing away and disappearing into the throng still waiting to boar
d the bus. I lurch toward the back of the bus, feeling sick to my stomach. It is years before I am able to disregard that man and his unwelcome caress, his even more unwelcome smile, a smile that said, “Don’t look so shocked, little girl. You know you liked it.”

  Did he really believe that? I wonder now, standing by my bedroom window and staring through my binoculars at the street below. Could a grown man really think a child would welcome the unsolicited caress of a stranger? Did I do something to encourage him to grope me as I boarded the bus? Had I smiled at him provocatively? Had I lifted my leg too high, exposed too much girlish thigh? Had I sent him any sort of message to make him think he had the right to put his hands on me?

  These thoughts fill my head as I train my binoculars on two young women darting between moving cars, trying to cross the street against the lights. It’s about five o’clock and still light out, although not as light as it was even last week at this time. It’s mid-October, and soon it will be time to change the clocks for winter. “Fall back,” I hear my mother say. “Spring forward.” I used to get a kick out of that. Now I think, What difference does it make? One hour is pretty much the same as the next.

  I try to recall how I spent my day. Sally dropped by this morning, I think, then remember no, that was yesterday. Today has been relatively quiet. No visitors. No phone calls. In fact, I actually called the police this morning and not the other way around. A changing of the guard, so to speak, although the contents of the call are always the same. The police have eliminated the man I’d been watching as a suspect in my rape. It turns out it wasn’t Roland Peterson after all, and Peterson’s girlfriend—ex-girlfriend, she insisted—swore her new boyfriend, the man I saw in the window, had been with her all evening. So he has an alibi, as does Todd Elder, and we’re back at square one. I ask if there are any new leads, if they are any closer to finding the man who raped me, and they ask if I’ve remembered anything to aid them in their search. The answer is the same in both cases: no.

  The police promise to stay in touch, and I hang up the phone. I don’t want to be touched.

  Something is happening on the street. An altercation between two young men. I point my binoculars at them, watch as a fistfight erupts and the people around them scatter. No one interferes, which is probably smart. How many times have I read of good Samaritans being killed while trying to break up a fight?

  Was someone watching the night I was attacked? I wonder, not for the first time. Did anyone see what was happening and choose not to intervene out of fear for their own safety? Was there someone who saw or heard something that could be helpful in identifying the man who raped me, someone who knows something but isn’t telling?

  According to the police, who claim to have questioned everyone who lives in the vicinity of where the attack took place, the answer is no. Of course, I know from professional experience that the police aren’t always as thorough as they claim and that witnesses to crimes aren’t necessarily as truthful or forthcoming as they should be. Not because they’re bad people. Not because they don’t care. They just don’t want their own lives disrupted. If they can maintain a safe distance, they will choose to stay safe.

  I don’t judge them. Nor do I blame them. There is safety in distance, I have come to believe.

  The phone rings, and I jump. Seems I spoke too soon about it being a quiet day. I move to it quickly, not wanting to risk a repeat of what happened yesterday. “Hello, Miss Carpenter. It’s Finn at the concierge desk.”

  My heart starts pounding at the sound of the disembodied male voice speaking in my ear. I feel my rapist leaning toward me. Tell me you love me, he says. I calm myself by remembering that Finn always identifies himself in this manner—It’s Finn, at the concierge desk—as if I know a plethora of Finns, and that I used to find it amusing. “Your brother is here to see you,” he says.

  I wonder why he is telling me this. Everyone who works here knows Heath. They know to just send him up.

  “Not Heath,” Finn says, as if I have voiced this thought out loud.

  Another man interjects. “Let me have that. Bailey,” he says in his best assistant state’s attorney’s voice. “It’s Gene. Tell this clown to let me up.”

  Oh, God, I think, as my head falls toward my chest. I haven’t seen Gene—more formally, Eugene, my father’s first-born son and namesake—since our dad’s funeral. I haven’t talked to him since the launch of his lawsuit. I don’t have the strength for his bluster and bullshit now.

  “I’m kind of tired,” I say.

  “Don’t make me have to call in the troops.”

  While I’m not sure exactly what troops he means, I know he won’t leave until I’ve agreed to see him. “Send him up,” I tell Finn. I return the phone to its charger, lay my binoculars down on the nightstand beside it and head for the door. Gene is already waiting on the other side by the time I get there.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were raped?” he demands even before I’ve fully opened the door.

  I stand back to let him enter, then immediately close the door and double-lock it.

  “It’s not something I choose to broadcast,” I hear myself say, hating the quiver in my voice.

  “I’m your brother.”

  “You’re suing me,” I remind him.

  “One thing has nothing to do with the other.”

  I find myself marveling at his ability to compartmentalize. Was this how he was able to investigate his own father for fraud? “Would you like something to drink?” I ask, not sure what else to say, not sure whether I have anything to offer him.

  “I had to hear about it from the police, weeks after the fact.”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I should have.…”

  “Yes, you should have. I’m an assistant state’s attorney, for God’s sake. And no, I don’t want anything to drink. How are you doing?” His voice softens, his dark eyes narrowing with what I like to think of as concern but is more likely suspicion. He’s not sure he believes my story, I understand in that moment, ushering him into the living room.

  “Not great,” I say.

  “Maybe it would help if you got dressed.”

  I look down at my blue flannel pajamas, trying to remember the last time I changed them. Maybe yesterday, maybe the day before.

  “You look like hell,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  “Sorry. I’m just upset. This is very upsetting.”

  No kidding, I think but don’t say.

  “Look, I didn’t come here to argue.” Gene walks toward the living room window, and for the first time, I notice a slight limp. He is a big man, tall, with a linebacker’s girth, which I guess isn’t surprising, considering that he played football in college and was, by all accounts, headed for a pro career before being sidelined with torn ligaments in his right knee. Or maybe it was his left knee, I think, as he comes to a stop and turns around to face me. He might be more handsome if he were less severe. But he wears his thinning brown hair in an unflattering crew cut, and his lips always turn down, even when he smiles, which isn’t often, at least in my presence. He unbuttons the jacket of his navy blue cotton suit to reveal a noticeable paunch pressing against the lighter blue shirt beneath. He fidgets with his too-wide, blue-striped tie. I can’t remember ever seeing Gene without a tie. “Nice apartment,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  “You have good taste.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What the hell happened?” So much for small talk.

  “You know what happened. You said you spoke to the police.”

  “I want to hear it from you.”

  I can’t do this. I can’t keep reliving my attack for the edification of others. “Is this visit personal or professional?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m asking.”

  “I’m your brother.”

  “Who’s suing me,” I remind him again.

  “What happened, Bailey?” His tone indicates that he will keep as
king until he gets an answer.

  I provide him with the bare essentials of the assault. The words stick to my teeth like toffee, and I have to pry them loose with my tongue. I watch Gene’s eyes as they alternately widen and narrow. I note the creases in his forehead as his brow furrows in obvious dismay. I watch his lips turn down. “You look more like your mother than our father,” I remark at the end of my story.

  He looks startled. “How do you know what my mother looks like?”

  “I saw a picture of her once, in one of Daddy’s scrapbooks.”

  “I didn’t realize he kept a scrapbook.”

  “Yes. Quite a few, actually.”

  “I’d like to see them sometime.”

  If I don’t oblige, I wonder, will he sue me for them? “How’s your mother doing?” I ask. I don’t know Gene’s mother. We’ve never met. But I always thought she had a kind face. Maybe that’s just the way she photographs.

  “She’s doing well. Enjoying her retirement and her grandchildren.”

  Gene has two sons, ages seven and nine. I can’t remember their names or the last time I saw them, probably when the youngest was a baby. “How are your boys?”

  “They’re great. But we’re talking about you now,” he says, as if suddenly remembering why he is here.

  “There’s nothing more to talk about.” I used to be someone who had lots to say. I had opinions and interests. I was complicated, multifaceted. Then I was raped.

  “I just don’t understand,” he says.

  “What don’t you understand?”

  “How it could have happened.”

  I explain the situation again, how I was hiding in the bushes, how the man snuck up behind me, how he overpowered me. Was Gene not listening the first time?

  “What the hell were you doing hiding in a bunch of bushes at that hour of the night?” he demands angrily. “You had to know how dangerous it would be.”

  “Are you implying that it was my fault?”

  “No, of course I’m not implying that. I’m just saying that maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing in the world for you to be doing.”

  “It’s my job, Gene.”

  “Then maybe you should find another line of work.”