Rape by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page B

Not Grandma! She’s convinced that all of Niagara Falls is on her side, wanting those animals to be put away for a long time.
    In the elevator the panic hits you, each night. Leaving your mother’s room. The safety of that room. The vigil. Staring at the lighted numerals above the door moving swiftly from right to left flashing the floors as you descend to the ground floor. That sick-collapsing sensation in your stomach as the elevator door glides soundlessly open.
    â€œGrandma. I’m so scared.”
    Grandma doesn’t hear you. Lost in her own thoughts.
    The enemy. Waiting for you. When you leave the hospital, when you return to the house on Baltic Avenue. For of course they know where you live. They know where your mother Teena Maguire lives: the rented duplex on Ninth.
    They know all about Teena Maguire. The Picks, the Haabers, the DeLuccas, the Rickerts. These are East Side families, with numerous relatives. There are more of them than there are Keveckis and Maguires. Many more.
    The Family Services woman says please don’t worry.
    The detectives say trust us. Don’t worry.
    There is a hearing scheduled for next month. (Though it will be postponed. You will come to learn that anything connected with the court, the law, legal issues, lawyers will be postponed. And postponed.) A hearing is not a trial but the preparation for a trial. You will be required to answer questions in court though you have already answered these questionsmany times. You have told, retold, and retold all that you can remember until you are sick with the telling as you are sick with the memory of what you must tell and retell to strangers who seem always to be doubting you, frowning and staring at you, assessing the validity of Bethel Maguire’s testimony.
    If Teena Maguire is well enough, she will be required to answer questions at the hearing. Your mother’s testimony is more crucial than yours, the detectives have told you. Without her testimony, the case against the suspects will be circumstantial, weak.
    You don’t know why. You don’t understand why this is so. They hurt your mother so badly, beat her and tore her insides and left her to bleed to death on the boathouse floor.
    Yes but this has to be proven. In a court of law.
    Not enough that it happened. That Teena Maguire almost died. It has to be proven, too.
    â€œGrandma, I’m scared. . . .”
    â€œOf what, honey? The parking garage? My car is parked right where we can see it. We got here so early.”
    Grandma loves you, but Grandma can’t protect you. For how can Grandma protect you? She lives alone, an aging woman not in the very best of health herself, in her red-brick house on Baltic Avenue, a five-minute drive from the Twelfth Street/Huron Avenue neighborhood where the suspects and their families live. The “suspects”—as they are called—have been warned by police not to approach either your grandmother’s house or your mother’s house and not to approach anyone in your family at any time nor to attempt to contact anyone in your family and yet: they are theenemy, they are free on bail, they would wish to silence you. You know what they are. You remember them from the attack. Rushing at you, jeering and laughing. A wild-dog pack. Glistening eyes, teeth. Fuck we should’ve killed them both, those cunts. When we had the fucking chance .
    The plan is that, when your mother is discharged from St. Mary’s, she will come to live with Grandma, where you are living now. She will hire a nurse’s aide to help with Momma for as long as necessary. And a physical therapist will come to the house several times a week, to help Momma walk again. Grandma has been a widow for twelve years and she has learned to cope with what she calls the inescapable facts of life and so she does not foresee trouble: those animals are guilty, justice will be done , they will tried, convicted, sentenced to prison for