Alice Sebold - Lucky

Then Lila was coming out of the room. She was shaken. Her hair was disheveled but I saw no marks on her face. A short, dark-haired woman in uniform trailed her.

She was wearing my robe, but it was belted with another tie. Her eyes were bottomless-lost. I couldn't have reached her then no matter how hard I tried.

"I'm so sorry," I said. "You'll be okay. You'll make it. I did," I said.

We stood there looking at each other, both of us crying.

"Now we really are clones," I said.

The female detective moved us along.

"Lila says you have another roommate."

"Oh my God, Pat," I said. I had forgotten him until that moment.

"Do you know where he is?"

"The library."

"Can someone get to him?"

"I want to go with Lila."

"Then leave him some kind of note; we don't want him touching things. And he should stay somewhere else tonight until we can secure that back window."

"At first, I thought it was Pat playing a prank on me," Lila said. "I came back from the bathroom and the door to my bedroom was farther out from the wall than usual, like someone was standing behind it. So I pushed it in and he pushed it out and back and forth until I got tired of it and said, 'Come on, Pat,' and walked into the room. He threw me on the bed."

"We've got an exact time," the female detective said. "She looked up at her digital clock. It was eight fifty-six P.M."

"When I felt sick," I said.

"What?" The female detective looked mystified.

I didn't know where to stand. I was not the victim. I was the victim's friend. The detective took Lila out to the car, and I hurriedly went into Pat's room.

I did something nasty. I used the speculum to weigh down the note. I left it on his pillow because the rest of the room was a mess. I could be certain he'd see it there: "Pat, Lila was raped. She is physically okay. Call Marc. You need to find somewhere else to stay tonight. I'm sorry to have to tell you this way."

I left the light on in his room and looked at it. I decided not to care about Pat-I couldn't. He would be okay, bounce back. It was Lila now.

We drove to the hospital in silence. I sat in the back with Lila and we held hands.

"It's horrible," she said at one point. "I feel filthy. All I want to do is shower."

I squeezed her hand.

"I know," I said.

We had to wait what seemed an interminable time in the emergency room. It was crowded and because, I've always assumed, she had not struggled and had no open wounds, could sit upright and talk coherently, she was made to wait. Repeatedly, I went up to the woman in admissions and asked her why we had to wait. I sat with Lila and helped her fill out the insurance form. There had been none of this for me. I had been wheeled directly in, from ambulance gurney to examination room.

Finally they called her. We walked down the hall and found the room. The examination was long and plodding, and several times we had to wait while the man examining her was called into various other rooms. I held her hand as Mary Alice had held mine. Tears rolled down my face. Toward the end Lila said, "I want you to leave." She asked for the female detective. I went and got her and sat in the waiting room, shaking.

My nightmares had never let Lila be raped. She and Mary Alice were safe. Lila was my clone, my friend, my sister. She had heard every part of my story and still loved me. She was the rest of the world-the pure half-but now she was with me. While I waited, I became convinced that I could have prevented Lila's rape. By coming home faster, by knowing instinctively that something was wrong, by never having asked her to be my friend in the first place. It didn't take me long before I thought, and then said, "It should have been me." I began to worry for Mary Alice.

I shook, and I wrapped my arms around my shoulders and rocked back and forth in my seat. I felt nauseous. My whole world was turning over; whatever else I'd had or known became eclipsed. There was no chance to escape, I realized; from now on this would be it. My life and the lives of those around me. Rape.

The female detective came out for me.

"Alice," she said, "Lila is going with Detective Clapper down to the police station. She asked me to go home with you and get some clothes for her."

I didn't know how to act. Even then I was beginning to realize that Lila didn't know what to do with me around. There was Alice her friend, and Alice the successful rape victim. She needed one without the other, but that was impossible.

The detective drove me home and I unlocked the door. Pat still had yet to come home. The light I had left on had been turned off by someone else. I plunged in. I remembered how Tree and Diane had brought me bad clothes-patched jeans and no underwear. I wanted Lila to have comfort. I pulled down a large duffel from her closet and opened her drawers. I packed all her underwear, all her flannel gowns, slippers, socks, sweatpants, and loose shirts. I threw in a book and from her bed a stuffed animal and a pillow.

I needed things too. I knew already that Lila and I would never sleep in that house again. I walked to the back, where my room was. The door was closed. I asked the detective if I could go in.

I said a little prayer to no one and turned the knob. The room was cold because of the open window through which he'd climbed. I switched on the light near the door.

My bed was stripped. I walked toward it. In the center was a small fresh bloodstain. Nearby were other, smaller ones, like tears.

She had come out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, gone to her bedroom, and played the door game, thinking it was Pat. Then the rapist had shoved her onto the bed on her stomach. She saw the clock. In the darkness, she saw him only for a few seconds. He blindfolded her with the tie from my robe, and then, turning her around on the bed, made her hold her hands in front of her chest in the prayer position while he tied her wrists with bungee cords and a cat leash we kept in the front closet. This meant he had gone through the house while she was in the shower. He knew no one else was home. He made her get to her feet and walk back to my bedroom, where he made her lie down on my bed.

That was where he'd raped her. He asked her where I was during the attack. Somehow knew my name. Somehow knew Pat would not be back until much later. At one point, he asked about the tip money I had on my dresser and took that. She did not struggle. She did as he said.

He had her put on my robe and left her there, blindfolded.

She started screaming, but the boys in the apartment above us were playing loud music. No one heard her or did anything if they had. She had to go through the front of the apartment, outside, and up the stairs, banging on their door until they answered. They held beers in their hands. They were smiling, expecting more friends. She asked them to untie her. They did. And to call the police.

Lila would tell me all of this in the coming weeks. Now I tried hard not to look at the blood, at my bed, at the possessions he had gone through. My clothes in the closet spilled onto the floor. Photos on my desk. My poems. I grabbed a flannel gown to match Lila's, and some clothes off the floor. I wanted to take my old Royal typewriter, but this would seem silly and selfish to everyone but me. I looked at it and looked at the bed.

As I was turning to leave, a gust of wind from the window slammed the door shut. All the hope I had had of living a normal life had gone out of me.

The detective and I drove to the Public Safety Building. We took the elevator up to the third floor and exited into the familiar hallway outside the bulletproof glass that looked onto the police dispatcher's station. The dispatcher pressed the button for the security door and we entered.

"Through there," a policeman said to the detective.