Chapter 8 #3
I ended up going higher than the captain, to the colonel, and reporting my experiences, too.
“You’re poison now,” one of the other officers informed me. I knew he was speaking for many others. “No one’s gonna want to partner with you.”
Lilly and I were told we had come down with #MeToo fever, even though that trend had already come and gone, at least in our world.
Someone—I never found out who—put a bloated dead mouse in my locker, turning it putrid.
I found my car keyed one evening after a shift, walked out to slashed tires a few days later after dinner at a local restaurant with Wallace, and answered a call from an anonymous source threatening to burn my house down.
The backlash made me furious. The counterattack ended up shaking me more than the actual incidents, more even than the feel of Hartley’s slobbery tongue on my cheek.
To learn that calling out harassment in a job that’s supposed to be about law, order, and justice would trigger these attempts at retribution?
I felt like one of those high-alpine tamaracks, trying to survive on a steep, otherwise bare mountain slope, crushed into splinters by an avalanche.
I also felt a strange guilt. After all, I hadn’t endured the kind of violence Sophie had encountered on that camping trip years before.
I wasn’t dealing with the kind of emotional and physical trauma that Jess went through when she woke in the middle of the night with her jeans pulled down and Mark on top of her, his broad, heavy frame crushing her.
Sadly, the things that happened to me didn’t warrant public notoriety and universal scorn.
These were muddled, everyday encounters.
As much as it sucks to acknowledge it, they were commonplace.
But surely they warranted some form of condemnation so they didn’t create the kind of entitlement that leads to sexual harassment and rape culture in the first place.
What happened to Jess, though, just one month after all the nasty Hartley entanglements, slithered into my life like a black snake right when she was at the top of her world.
This poisonous thing had staying power. It curled around my torso and squeezed if I went more than a few hours without reminding myself of the world in which I worked.
No matter what I do or how I proceed, what happened to Jess with Coleman and what followed with me and Coleman will never stop replaying in my head.
But there’s no way to go back, to find some wrinkle in time where I can alter anyone’s actions, or even alleviate my own if I’d only’s.
Luckily, I tell myself now, I’m a trained officer. If it’s me, this guy has picked the wrong woman. But something dark and uncertain has sunk its teeth into me—the same feeling I had when I found out my own sister had been raped ten years after Sophie was also raped.
The same sinking sensation I had when I walked away from being a cop: that I couldn’t cut it. The same inadequacy that swept over me after our mom’s death my senior year of college, when Jess dropped into a black hole of depression, like Sophie had, and I couldn’t pull her out.
Thankfully, with time, Jess snapped out of it. This time, I’m not so sure.
“Hey.”
I look up, confused. The guy who sat across from me—Climber Guy—has lifted his hand. He’s palming his phone with the screen facing me. “You see this?”
What am I supposed to say?
“Shit,” he says, still studying me. “That’s wild.”
“Yeah,” I agree. Usually wild seems like an overstatement. Not today.
“But”—he gives a one-shoulder shrug—“could be a lot of people.”
“Exssssackly,” I say.
“You’ve been worried?”
“Ugh, I mean, getting texts from friends pointing out the resemblance isn’t comforting. And you. Seriously, did you just look at the sketch, notice me, and”—I snap my fingers—“bingo?”
“Kinda.” He squints, like it hurts him to admit it. “But that doesn’t mean anything. I saw you sitting here, and I’m a little bored and looking at the news and, well, you’re the only woman in my immediate view. It’s not all that surprising that my eye should fall on you.”
“Ouch.”
“Oh no, I mean, even if you were in a crowd and not off to the side like this, I’d notice you. You’d be hard not to notice.”
I want to roll my eyes at the cheesiness of the statement, but I can’t help but crack a small smile.
“Plus”—he checks the photo on his screen again and glances back at me with his own coy smile—“she kind of looks like that actress who married Ben Affleck. What’s her name?”
I shift in my seat. Is he trying to make me feel better, or is he still simply digging out from the only-woman-in-his-immediate-view remark? Whichever, I’ll take it.
“Garner,” he says. “Jennifer, right?”
I nod enthusiastically. Yes. Yes. Someone else, someone everyone can recognize. But it’s an odd thought. Even though I don’t want this to be me, I don’t wish it on others, either.
“Well, good bet she’s already ponied up for an extra bodyguard.”
I have plenty enough going on without worrying about Jennifer Garner’s security arrangements. “You here for CrimeCon?”
“That. And the bar.”
“I’m sure there are better bars than in this place.”
“I have hopes for this one. I’m a journalist. Doing a piece on how crime media is shifting toward advocacy, CrimeCon being a good place to start. And bars are always great for getting good stories out of people.”
If things were normal, I’d want to pick his brain for examples of how the event was promoting such causes. Before Jess quit podcasting, she’d begun urging listeners to donate to a nonprofit demanding timely testing of rape kits by law enforcement and the enactment of more victim-notification laws.
But things haven’t been normal all year, and they’re as far from ordinary as you can get right this moment. And my right foot must know it since it’s madly tapping the floor. I force myself to still it.
I want to discuss the sketch again, wrap my head around it, but chatting about it with a stranger doesn’t make sense.
What if he is the Confession Artist, for God’s sake?
He comes off like some mountain-man creative type.
With his well-muscled arms, I could see him making custom canoes or specialty furniture or having a studio somewhere in the boonies where he carves wooden sculptures of grizzly bears. Maybe he sketches, too.
He takes a sip of his drink, winces, and puts it down. “It’s a little early for drinking, isn’t it? But damn, these mega hotels. It’s like being in an airport. You can grab one any time of the day.”
“True.” I stand up. “It was nice chatting with you.”
“You too.” He looks at me awkwardly, like he wants to add something, maybe a condolence, like Try not to worry.
But I walk away before he gets anything else out and call Jess to tell her I’ll meet her back at the room instead.
The truth is, I have no idea whether to give the sketch another minute of thought. But I also know there’s no switch I can flip to make the dark thoughts go away.