Chapter 2: Wet Dreams

Eric went through the weekend and the next week without hearing anything about Candy, however second-hand or however negative. Wednesday, he took out Candy’s phone number. He had not one God-damned excuse for calling, but he stared at the phone for an hour before putting the number away. That night, he saw the rape in vivid detail in a dream. It was a wet dream, and he awoke covered with sweat as well as other fluids.

Sunday, though, she was in church. Carolyn hadn’t been in choir, and Gladys had said that she had a guest in church. From the choir loft, he saw her and Bill with several women, and one of them looked like Candy from that distance. After the service, he stopped on his way to the choir room to see if he were dreaming, and he wasn’t.

“Uncle Eric, Uncle Eric,” the boys said. Paul held out his hand to be swung around.

“Now, you’re in your church clothes, and so am I. Church after service is not the time nor the place.”

“I owe you an explanation,” he said to Candy. “Let me get this robe back to the choir room, and I’ll drive you home. I can explain on the way.”

“We’re taking her to lunch,” a girl said. She was Claire something, a grad student whom he’d seen at coffee hour.

“Well, I can do that.” Indeed, he would be happy to take Candy to lunch. But Candy turned to Claire.

“You are?” she asked.

“The three of us.” There were two other girls with Carolyn and Bill. One of them was Jane, another grad student. He didn’t know the other.

“Thanks,” Candy said to Claire. “Sorry,” she said to him. She didn’t sound particularly sorry. He watched the group leave and went to trade his robe for his parka. Well, he’d blown that one. On second thought, it wasn’t too awful. He had established that he expected to give her an explanation.

Maybe he could call her. If he did, though, she would want the explanation over the phone. If he called her to set up a time to give her the explanation in person, she would suspect that he wanted the meeting more than he wanted to give the explanation.

The next Sunday, Candy was back in church. He hadn’t seen her from the choir loft, and he almost missed her. Normally, he went out the outside entrance from the basement with others who didn’t have family waiting upstairs. Today, that entrance opened onto a mushy puddle, and he went up the inside stairs. There she was, waiting for him at the top. Actually, she looked vaguely startled when he greeted her. She had probably been waiting for Carolyn, but Carolyn had three family members to greet, and he could deal with Candy.

“Miss Wharton.” He finished climbing the stairs and walked closer. “I still owe you an explanation. Do you have something else scheduled for this afternoon?” Was Joan going to invite her to lunch again? The girls looked at each other.

“Well, if you have something to tell me...” Candy said. That was the acceptance, now for the practics.

“Wait here. My car’s two blocks away, and the weather’s miserable.” He got the car and turned on the heat before driving to the spot in front of the church. The loading zone was always busy on Sunday noon, and he had to wait for Charlie while his family piled into the sedan. Then he pulled into the spot and went for Candy. As she was already out the door and coming towards him, he merely opened the door for her. He pulled out, marshaling his thoughts.

“Just a second,” he said. Traffic was tricky, if slow, and he was heading north. He got them in the right direction and stopped for a traffic light.

“The short answer, he began, “is that the office has decided not to prosecute.”

“She didn’t believe me?” Her voice sounded ashamed, and she was taking this as further punishment -- punishment from his side, too.

“Miss Murphy believed you 100%. ‘What,’ she asked me, ‘is there to disbelieve?’ What she doesn’t believe is that she could convince a jury. And, to be fair to the jury, they’re supposed to require evidence beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt. You say one thing; the perp says something else, and unless all 12 are convinced beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt, the perp walks.”

“Perp?” she asked. He’d been using the office term.

“Sorry. Professional jargon. Perpetrator, the guy who did it. Anyway, do you eat Chinese?” If Claire could take her to lunch, so could he. She was thinking, not rejecting it, but not accepting it yet. He doubted that she would have accepted faster if he’d said Italian. “I gave you the short answer. There is a longer one, and you deserve it.”

“Well...” Another long pause. “Thank you.” So he got them to the restaurant. She was out of the car before he came around, but she let him seat her at the restaurant. The order was a more comfortable topic for both of them, but his excuse for the time with her was his report.

“Okay.” he resumed when they had ordered. “The perp said it was consensual. Do we believe it? Does Miss Murphy believe it? Not by a long shot, but what lawyers believe and what they can prove are two very different things.”

“What should I have done differently?” She was still feeling guilty. Murphy was probably right. She was feeling guiltier than the mother fucker was.

“Aside from not going on a date with the guy in the first place? You should have definitely acted on legal advice.” He was trying to show her how ridiculous her guilt was. “If you’d had a lawyer with you on the date, he would have told you that when you said ‘no,’ you should have screamed it. At least the second time you said ‘no’ should have been a scream. When you got up and got dressed you should have knocked on all the doors of other apartments and asked them to call the police. You knock on a stranger’s door late at night, and they’re reluctant to let you in. They’ll usually call the police.

“I’ll be blunt,” he continued. It wasn’t Candy’s fault. It was the mother fucker’s fault, and it was a little the police’s fault, too. “You’re robbed and you report it the next morning, they’ll investigate. You’re raped and you report it later, the police are more reluctant to act. In that, for all you waited too long, for all that I’m a weird guy to talk to, you finally got to Miss Murphy. An ASA asks the cops to investigate, and they investigate. And, from her standpoint of course, there’s always the chance that the perp will break down. ‘I didn’t mean to do it. I don’t know what came over me. I’m terribly sorry.’ The weird thing is that the guys with consciences are serving time while your sort of perp is walking.”