Karin Slaughter - Skin Privilege

Cathy was right. Sara needed to do something. She picked up the Comet and the odd-smelling sponge she'd bought at the convenience store and headed toward the bathroom. For some reason, the sink was outside the door, a long counter that was burned at the edges where people had rested their cigarettes while they – what? – brushed their teeth?

It didn't bear thinking about.

Sara sprinkled some Comet into the sink and started scrubbing, trying not to take any more chrome off the plastic drain in the process. She put some muscle into it, cutting through years of grime as if her life depended on it.

Pride before the fall, she thought. All those years of being the teacher's pet – the best student in the class, the highest grades, the best accolades, and the brightest future – for what? Emory University had accepted her before she graduated from high school. The medical college had practically rolled out the red carpet, offering enough financial aid for her father to easily make up the difference. Thousands of people a year applied for the limited number of residencies at Grady Hospital. Sara hadn't even had a fallback. She knew she was going to get into the program. She was so damn sure of her own abilities, her own intelligence, that she had never in her life thought she would not succeed at anything she set her mind to.

Except for stopping a one-hundred-ten-pound college dropout from escaping the Elawah County Medical Center.

'Stupid,' Sara repeated. She gave up on the sink and went into the bathroom. She started on the toilet, using the scrub brush mounted on the wall to clean the bowl, trying not to wonder what had turned the bristles dark gray. As she got down on her knees beside the bathtub, Sara remembered her mother showing her years ago how to clean a bathroom – how much cleaner to use, how to gently scrub the porcelain with a sponge.

Sara sat back on her heels, thinking that one day, maybe soon, she would show her own child how to clean the tub or vacuum the living room. Jeffrey would have to explain how to sort laundry because Sara was forever pulling pink-streaked, formerly white socks out of the dryer. She could take the kid to the grocery store, at least. Jeffrey thought a frozen dinner was a well-balanced meal, which might explain why his blood pressure had to be controlled with medication.

A thought came to Sara like a knife in her chest. What if she ran into Beckey Powell at the grocery store? What if Sara was standing in the meat section, holding her child's hand, and Beckey walked up? How would Sara explain to her new son or daughter why Beckey Powell hated her? How would she explain why the whole town believed that her incompetence had led to the death of a child?

Sara wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, eyes watering from the overwhelming stench of bleach in the tiny bathroom. She wished that Jeffrey was there to keep her mind from going to such dark places. Since filing the adoption papers, they'd started playing what-if games. 'What if we get a boy who hates football?' 'What if we have a girl who loves pink and wants her hair braided?'

Sara imagined games were the last thing on her husband's mind at the moment. A dead person had been in that SUV and Lena was somehow entangled in that death. After meeting Jake Valentine, Jeffrey did not trust the local force to solve this crime without leaping to the easiest conclusion and pinning it all on Lena. He had left early this morning to plot strategy with Nick Shelton, a friend of his who worked for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Sara had not been invited to tag along.

She leaned back over the tub, rinsing the Comet, then sprinkling more powder to start the process again. The sponge was just about to give up the ghost, but Sara would not stop until the job was done. She folded the sponge in two and used the edge to attack the black ring around the periphery that probably dated back to the seventies.

Sara muttered a curse under her breath, wishing again that she was back home. At least in Grant County, she could stay out of Jeffrey's way and let him do his job. Here, all she could do was make sure he had a clean place to put his toothbrush. Overnight, she had turned into a glorified housewife, and for what? So that Lena could laugh her way out of town?

Sara knew that Jeffrey bent the rules sometimes. If he had been by himself last night, Jeffrey would have taken the empty nurses' station as an invitation to find Lena on his own. If he had walked into that hospital room alone, Lena might have opened up to him. She might have told him why she needed to get out of there instead of breaking out. She sure as hell wouldn't have tried to use Jeffrey in order to make her escape; she respected him too much.

Unlike Sara.

Cathy had said that women were their own worst enemies. Was Sara Lena's enemy? She didn't think so. It was true that Sara had never understood the bond between her husband and the thirty-five-year-old detective, but Sara wasn't stupid enough to be jealous. Barring the fact that Lena was as far from Jeffrey's type as you could get without going outside the species, their relationship was too much like that of an older brother and errant young sister to cause Sara concern.

Maybe the dislike came from Lena making such bad choices for herself. After her sister, Sibyl, had died, Lena had fallen into a deep depression. She even managed to get herself temporarily suspended from the force. That was when she'd started seeing Ethan Green. That was when Lena had lost all of Sara's sympathy.

As a doctor, Sara should have understood the process. Grief can lead to depression, depression can lead to chemical changes in the body that make it impossible to crawl out of the spiral without some help, be it pharmacological or therapeutic or both. God knew that over the last few months, Sara was more than intimate with the dangers of depression. Still, her personal experience did not help her understand why Lena had turned to Ethan.

Sara had read the women's journals, knew the statistics, studied the causal relationships. Depression can lead to vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities attract predators. It was like a shark sensing blood in the water. Just because a woman gave the outward appearance of being strong, that did not preclude her from becoming a victim of domestic violence. In some cases, it made her more likely to fall victim; you could only keep up that tough act for so many hours before it all fell apart.

Sara knew this in her brain. She accepted that some women – smart women – got mixed up with the wrong person, ended up making compromise after compromise until there was nothing left but to sit there and take it. But, still, the fact that Lena 's twenty-four-year-old boyfriend had abused her -not just abused her, but beaten her to a bloody pulp – was something that Sara could not get past.

It was as if Lena had been obsessed with the man, like she could not get him out of her system. Maybe if Ethan had been a drug, Sara would have better understood the addiction. Heroin, meth, opium… that would explain Lena 's devotion, her inability to get through the day without a hit. The brainwashing would have made more sense if she had been in a cult, but there was nothing for Lena to fall back on but her own damaged personality. She had a good job, her own money, her own support structure. She had a gun and a badge, for chrissakes. Ethan was a paroled violent offender. Lena could have arrested him at any time. As a police officer, she was bound by law to report any case of domestic violence, even if she herself was the victim.

And yet she had left it up to Jeffrey. Lena was the one who had tipped him off that Ethan was carrying a gun in his backpack. Jeffrey refused to discuss it with Sara anymore, but she was certain that Lena had planted the gun, that the only way she had been able to get rid of her abuser was this coward's way. Ethan had ten years' hard time hanging over his head. Lena had hidden the gun, then called in Jeffrey to do her dirty work.