Guilt

'That was the theory,' Sam said.

Diane sat back in the chair, put her head all the way back and closed her eyes briefly. Opening them, she abruptly reached for her mug of coffee. Something to do that wasn't this recitation of history. She forgot to drink from it. 'Even now,' she said, 'even now I wonder how much of it was my fault.'

'Diane, if he forced you…'

'He said he'd kill me.'

'Well, then, you-'

But she was shaking her head. 'No, not just that. Not just the rape itself. Everything after that. My whole life.' Another silence, another shake of the head. 'No, not my whole life, that's an exaggeration. Only most of a decade. Only.' Suddenly, she slapped the arm of the chair. 'God, I hate this victim thing! I'm not a victim. I don't want to be a victim.'

Sam waited.

'Before, I was going to be a doctor.' The brittle laugh shook her. 'It wasn't ridiculous – you don't get into Stanford if you're dumb, and I'd never gotten a "B" in my life. I was fun, smart, pretty. And now I tell myself – have for years – I've had to tell myself that it was this… this thing that made it all change. That it wasn't my fault.'

'That wouldn't be so unusual, Diane. In fact, it would be more normal if it was.'

'I know that. I'm still not stupid. But don't you see, it makes me sick, that victim excuse. I should have just risen above it, put it behind me. Instead, it just ate me up, and I let it. I just let it.' Her fists were clenched on the chair's arms, and one of her eyes overflowed. 'I'm sorry.' She reached into her purse, pulled out a handkerchief, dabbed. 'There's no reason to cry about it. This is stupid.'

'No, it isn't.'

She managed a condescending smile. 'Well, of course you're trained to say that.'

Sam wasn't going to fight her about it. Yes, she was trained to say that, and that was because it was the truth. It wasn't stupid to cry about it. Almost everyone did. 'So what happened, Diane? What do you blame yourself for?'

'Everything! Don't you understand? I'm mad that it happened! I'm mad that I do blame myself, I don't care what the proper modern response is supposed to be. I could have been… I don't know, more somehow. Who I was really meant to be. And instead,' she visibly deflated, 'instead I'm who I am.'

'And is that so bad?'

'I don't know. That's what I'm trying to figure out, I suppose. That's why I'm here. I can't believe… it seems so small a thing, somehow.'

'The rape – a small thing?'

She nodded. 'I know that sounds crazy, but it's what I tell myself when I'm just so full of loathing. It was one small thing, and I let it change the whole direction of my life. I mean, one day I'm in pre-med pulling "A"s, I go to football games, I'm kind of ra-ra and carefree, and the next day, the next time I turn around, I'm a mess. I'm taking every drug in America. And this was the sixties, remember, there were a lot to choose from. I survive another year or so before dropping out of school. And sleeping with anybody, not caring. Losing touch with my mom and dad and family and not caring at all.'

'So what happened finally?'

She brought the handkerchief back to her eyes, left it there a minute, pressing. 'Finally, I woke up. I don't know how else to put it. I just woke up. I guess I didn't want to die. And I never thought about that until my mother did. That's the thing I regret the most, I think. I mean, if she could see me now, it'd be all right. But I was still that other way, that other person, when she died. So she never knew.'

Sam nodded. There was nothing to say. Sometimes, she knew, closing that circle could be the toughest pull of a person's life, and it seemed to her that Diane Price was well on her way to doing it.

Diane was going on. 'And by now it seems behind me. I married Don, went back to school and at least got my degree. I've got two great teenagers, and I'm actually working in a lab where my brains count. And I got there – I got all of that – by finally not being a victim anymore, just pulling myself up by the bootstraps and deciding, that was it, deciding I wasn't going to have this cancer in my life. I wasn't going to talk about it, think about it, refer to it. It was the past, over, done.'

'But you're here?'

'I'm here.'

Sam hesitated. 'Did something else happen?'

Diane shook her head. 'Not to me, thank God. But then, suddenly, last week, I was reading the paper and I started shaking at the breakfast table. I couldn' t stop shaking.'

'What was it?'

'The story about this woman who'd been murdered, Sheila Dooher her name was.'

Sam felt the hair begin to stand up on her arms.

'So the name caught my attention, and I looked down the article, and then opened to the inside page and there was the picture of her and her husband at some charity thing last year. Her husband Mark.'

Sam knew what was coming.

'The man who raped me.'

Father Gorman knew why he'd been summoned to the Archbishop's office. Not only had he been absent at the rosary when Sheila's body had been laid out, he'd not attended the wake afterward, then begged off officiating even peripherally at the funeral Mass. He hadn't gone to the gathering at Dooher's home afterwards.

Now they'd kept him waiting nearly twenty-five minutes at the end of the day. Not a good sign. He was more exhausted than he'd ever been in his life. For weeks, he'd slept no more than four hours a night, plagued by nightmares about his own long-gone parents, of all things. And then, finally, he was inside the austere office. James Flaherty stood up behind his desk, but didn't come around it, didn't offer the kiss of peace as he sometimes did. Instead, his lips moved into a perfunctory smile, but his eyes did not change in any way at all, and he sat back down immediately.

'Gene, I'll get right to it,' he said. 'Mark Dooher is one of my most trusted advisers. He is also, not incidentally, a substantial contributor to the Church and to your parish. He's been President of your Holy Name Society, President of your Parish Council, President…'

Gorman didn't need the glowing litany. 'Yes, Your Excellency. I know who he is.'

Not used to being interrupted, the Archbishop's eyes flared briefly. After a long silence, Flaherty continued. 'He has also lost his wife to murder, as you well know. The police have been hounding him on another matter because of some kind of political vendetta. This is not a time to abandon those people who need us most. The man is going through some kind of hell right now, and I found it incredibly un-Christian, not to say callous as a human response, that you didn't see fit to assist at his wife's funeral or visit with us afterward.' He changed the tone of his voice, making it more personal. 'Mark was incredibly hurt by it, Gene. Incredibly.'

'I'm sorry,' Gorman said. 'I…' He didn't know what else he could say, and left the sentence unfinished, hanging in the room.

Flaherty waited for more, but it didn't come. 'You're sorry?'

'Yes.'

'Sorry doesn't seem like quite enough, Gene.'

'I'm sorry about that, too, Your Excellency.'

Flaherty cocked his head. 'What's going on here? You two have a disagreement, a fight?'

'No.'

'Do you want to talk to me about anything else? I checked your most recent reports, and things at the parish seem to be going along smoothly. Am I wrong about that?'

'No, Your Excellency.'

Flaherty tapped the table. 'Let's drop the Excellency. I'm Jim Flaherty. We've known each other a long time. Is there something going on in your parish?'

Gorman knew what he was asking – was he having an affair, was there a scandal brewing? He shifted his burning eyes to the ceiling, to the sides of the room. 'I do feel like I'm under a lot of stress lately. I'm not getting much sleep. I…'