It Happens All the Time: A Novel

Heather was in town for two weeks, and despite my parents’ protests, I went out with her almost every night after I got off work, visiting different bars and trying out clubs I’d never been to. I did it for the distraction, for a sense of normalcy. See? I’d think. Everything’s fine. I’m out with a girlfriend. I’m laughing and talking and dancing like any other almost-twenty-four-year-old girl. Going out kept me out of my head; it restricted the amount of time I spent replaying what had happened with Tyler, who seemed to creep in around the edges of my thoughts no matter how hard I tried to push him out. I woke up every morning in a cold sweat, breathing hard, remembering the weight of him on top of me, feeling the stabbing pain as he pushed inside. You asked for it, I told myself. If you hadn’t acted like such a slut, it never would have happened. It didn’t matter that my parents kept telling me that I should report him to the police, because I felt certain that anyone who listened to all the details of what went down would assume that I had wanted to have sex. They’d judge me. They’d tell me to be more careful next time, and that would be that.

When Heather and I went out, I kept myself to a strict one-drink limit, never accepting the ones sent over to us by strange men, and rejecting the invitations to dance with anyone other than my friend.

“Come on,” Heather said the night before she would head back to Berkeley. We were sitting at a table at the Wild Buffalo, where a live band was playing some kind of bluegrass-rock blend, and I’d just refused a stocky, cute guy with bright blue eyes and a well-trimmed, brown beard who had asked me to dance. “You’re killing me, Amber! It’s just a dance!”

I gave her a tight-lipped smile and shook my head, knowing full well that that wasn’t always true.

“Are you still pining for Daniel? Is that it?” Heather asked, but she didn’t wait for me to answer. “Because you know what the best way to get over a guy is, right? Get under a new one!”

I laughed, but my heart skipped a beat at the mention of Daniel’s name. I hated knowing that I’d hurt him, hated thinking that he would spend the rest of his life thinking the worst of me. But I also knew that someone as kind and good as him deserved better than what I was, now. Breaking up with him, giving him his freedom, had been the right thing to do.

I glanced over at the guy with a beard, who, after asking me to dance, had rejoined his group of friends. And then, without warning, a tidal wave of rebellion rose up inside me. “You think I should go for it?” I asked Heather.

“Oh my god, yes!” she said. “You so need this. Go dance. Give him your number. Live a little, girl!”

So it was her encouragement, coupled with an undeniable, swelling sense of reckless abandon, that urged me to stand up and make my way over to this stranger. It felt good to know that he wanted me. I didn’t want to know his name; I didn’t want to make bullshit small talk about our lives. I just grabbed him by the hand and pulled him onto the dance floor, throwing my arms up in the air and swaying my hips to the music. I knew I looked good—I’d had a stylist clean up the hatchet job I’d done to my hair, and that, coupled with my new asymmetrical, sweeping-bangs bob, actually made me appear more sophisticated than I ever had before. I’d put on heavy makeup, as was becoming my habit, even when I went to the gym. I’d worn a light green, flowered sundress that had been a little tight on me a few months ago but now hung loosely on my frame. I closed my eyes, feeling the heat of his body so close to mine, smelling the sour scent of beer on his breath. I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t even care when he put his hand on my back and pulled me against him.

I thought I would instantly rebel at this kind of touch, that I would shove him off of me, but instead, I did nothing. I felt nothing. As we danced, I hovered above my body, watching as I leaned in and whispered in the guy’s ear. “Wanna get out of here?” I asked, and he nodded.

I watched as I led him out to the dark alley on the side of the building. I watched as I pushed him up against the brick wall and kissed him, letting my hands roam down his sides, lifted his T-shirt, and unbuttoned the top of his jeans.

“Damn, you’re hot,” he muttered.

“Shut up,” I heard myself respond, and it was someone else saying the words, someone else unzipping his zipper and rummaging around in his boxers, until she got down on her knees and took him into her mouth.

“Holy shit,” he groaned, and I watched as this other girl—the girl who wasn’t me—switched to stroking him with her hand. A few seconds later, it was over. After he caught his breath, he zipped up and stood there awkwardly for a moment, not really looking at me. “Sooo,” he said, smoothing his hand over his beard. “Can I buy you a drink?”

I didn’t speak. Instead, I simply spun around and headed back into the bar on my own, not caring whether he followed. I saw Heather on the dance floor, where she was gyrating against a broad-shouldered, hipster-looking black guy with round glasses and skinny-legged jeans. I went to join them.

“Hey!” she said. “Where’d you go?”

“I was living a little!” I said, still overcome by a buzzing, detached sense of power, similar to how I felt when I went to a party and ate nothing while everyone around me gorged. It was a heady rush, and I knew that, once it was gone, I’d want it again.

“Ha!” Heather shouted. “I told you! You feel better, right?”

I nodded, and we continued to dance. Again, I closed my eyes, moving my body to the music, letting the bass and drums and guitar pulse through me until my head throbbed and my mind went blank. This was who I was now, a girl who danced with strangers and unzipped their pants in a filthy alley outside a bar. A girl in charge of every minute of her own life—a girl who would own a situation before it owned her.

I held on to this new mind-set every night for the rest of July, after Heather had left and I started going out to the bars on my own. I visited a few of the ones downtown, but more often I frequented the busy casinos in Ferndale and Lynden, since the influx of out-of-towners there gave me a better chance at the anonymity I craved. I stopped drinking anything except water, because being drunk reminded me too much of that night. I honed in on a different guy each time I went out, never asking for his name or telling him mine, never making more than a few minutes of conversation before dancing with him, and then leading him to a stall in the bathroom or outside in the alley. I never let any of them take the lead—I would pin their hands above their heads, or behind their backs and whisper, “Don’t say a word,” in their ears. That was usually enough to get them to comply, but if they tried to touch me anyway, to slip up my skirt, pull down my panties, or turn me around and bend me over, I shoved them away and took off. I ran to my car and went somewhere else to look for someone new. There was no lack of males willing to let me do this. I doubted they went home and cried about how some girl had taken advantage of them. It was so different for men—the more women they slept with, the more accolades they were given. A man who has sex with a different girl each night is considered a stud, a woman who does the same thing, a whore. I was just living up to what I’d turned myself into the moment Tyler had rubbed his erection against me on the dance floor and I’d done nothing to push him away.

“Honey, please don’t go out tonight,” my mom said one morning in late September, the day after my twenty-fourth birthday, which I’d insisted to my parents that I didn’t want to do anything to celebrate or acknowledge. We were sitting on the couch in the family room, where I had my laptop open, studying, and she was reading a book. “You can’t keep living like this.”

“Like what?” I asked, popping the sugar-free mint gum I had in my mouth between my molars. My breath was terrible lately, and I knew it had to do with how little I was eating. My thigh gap was back, my rib cage showed through my pale skin, and I fit into the jeans I’d worn when I was fifteen. Part of me felt angry with myself for so easily slipping back into the behavior patterns that had almost killed me, but another, darker corner in my mind experienced shimmers of self-satisfaction when my stomach growled or I was dizzied by hunger. Suffering felt familiar—it felt like something I deserved.

“Like Tyler didn’t rape you,” she said, dropping her book on the coffee table in front of us.

“Can we please stop having the same fucking conversation?” I snapped my laptop shut, ready to head upstairs to the solitary comfort of my bedroom, but she grabbed my arm before I could.

“Don’t swear at me.”

“I didn’t. I swore near you.”

We held each other’s gaze, waiting to see who would look away first. When she blinked and released her hold on me, I felt like I’d won, but then, she started to cry.

“I don’t even know who you are anymore,” she said. She wrung her hands together in her lap, and I noticed that her usually lovely, manicured nails were bitten to the quick. “You’re not eating. You barely speak to us. You’re gone all the time. We know you’re hurting, Amber, and if you’d just slow down a minute, you’d see we’d do anything to help.”

Something about seeing her like this poked a tiny hole in the brick wall I’d built around me. I sighed, and then sat down next to her again. “I’m just trying to get past it, Mom. I can’t change it. I can’t let it take over my life. It’s better to keep busy.”

She wiped her cheeks with her fingertips and shook her head. “Keeping busy doesn’t fix anything. It only makes you think you’re not hurting. You’re numbing yourself, just like you did back in high school. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see that you’re doing it again?”

“I guess,” I said with a small shrug. “But it’s my life. What happened, happened to me. I should get to decide how to get through it.”

“Not when how you’re dealing with it is just going to make things worse,” she said. “Your dad and I have been doing some research—”

“On what?” I asked, instantly wary. I knew they had to be talking about me; I saw the way their conversations suddenly ceased whenever I walked in on them. At night, I could hear them whispering fervently to each other through a heat vent between our rooms, after they’d said they were going to sleep.

“The behavior of sexual assault victims,” she said, “and what we might be able to do to help. What you’ve been doing isn’t unique. Lots of girls try to go on like nothing’s happened. But it doesn’t work. Eventually, the trauma works its way to the surface, and it will keep doing that over and over again, making you feel worse and worse, unless you talk to someone.”

“Talking won’t do me any good,” I said, fighting the wave of revulsion in my belly that rose up when I thought about telling anyone else what Tyler did to me. I was fine. I didn’t need some person I didn’t know to talk with about my feelings. What would I say, anyway? That I’d seduced my best friend and then changed my mind at the very last minute, and now I was out there almost every night, shoving my hands into strange men’s jeans? That doing this felt how I imagined heroin addicts did when they stuck needles in their veins—it only seemed terrible if you didn’t know the pure and merciful blast of relief that followed.

“But what if it did?” my mom asked. “Can you at least please try, if not for me, for your dad? He can barely make it through the workday, Amber. He’s so upset. He keeps replaying what Tyler did, and it’s having a terrible effect on him.” She paused, and then lowered her voice, even though there wasn’t anyone around besides me to hear her speak. “He didn’t want me to tell you this, so you have to promise you won’t say anything, but it’s been so bad, he actually went to the doctor and got on antidepressants.”

“Oh,” I said, shocked to hear this. My dad was the sort who would avoid his yearly physical like he was being asked to enter a torture chamber; the fact that he had chosen to see his physician on his own accord said a lot about the state he was in. “When?”

“In August,” she said. “About a month after he hit Tyler in the front yard. The meds are just starting to help.” She gave me a hopeful look. “I found the name of a local counselor who specializes in situations like this. Would you consider talking with her? Please?”

“Fine,” I said, letting loose a long sigh. I already knew what to expect; I’d spent enough hours with Greta at the hospital and in the support group after I was released to know that therapists were pretty much paid to listen to you and then repeat back your feelings in a way that might help you understand yourself better. I’d go see this woman my mother had found, but that didn’t mean it would change anything—I understood myself perfectly well. I’d show up, go through the motions of a good client, and then I’d get back to doing what had been working for me so far. I’d stay busy, keeping my eyes on my future, so I didn’t waste another moment wishing I could find a way to change the past.

•  •  •

I stayed home that night, as my mother had requested, figuring it was the least I could do to help show her I was fine. After our talk, she had immediately called the counselor she’d mentioned, and set up an appointment for the next day.

“She can’t be any good if she doesn’t have a waiting list,” I remarked as my mom hung up.

“She happened to have a cancellation, so she’s fitting you in,” my mom said, defensively. “Don’t be so quick to judge.”

I’d gone up to my bedroom then, and locked the door, something I’d started doing since the morning after the party, when Tyler showed up at my house. I’d never had a reason to do it before.

“Fuck him,” I muttered, as I dropped down on my bed and opened my laptop. I thought about studying, but for some reason, instead, I opened a search engine and typed in the words “unreported rape.” My parents weren’t the only ones who could do research.

A list of over two hundred thousand links popped up, and I found myself clicking on one after the other, reading estimates that only thirty-two out of a hundred rapes that occur are reported; out of those, only seven might lead to an arrest, and out of these, only two might lead to a conviction. I read that it’s almost impossible to discern whether or not rape rates are increasing or declining due to the fact that rape is one of the most underreported crimes in the world. I read how the results of a forensic exam performed right after an assault are almost the only things presented at trial that can lead to a guilty verdict and result in the rapist spending time in prison. How a victim isn’t supposed to be put on trial for her sexual past or proclivities, but most of the time, she is. No wonder it’s so underreported, I thought. My instincts told me the police wouldn’t help, and it looks like I was right.

Armed with this information, I drove to Fairhaven the next day after work, parking near Village Books and walking down Harris Avenue to find the counselor’s office in a brick building near the bottom of the hill. VANESSA DOUGLAS, MSW, RM. 203, the sign on the directory informed me. I didn’t want to be there, but I’d promised my parents. I needed to do something to assuage their concern, something to help my dad’s tenuous emotional state, and if it took talking to a stranger for an hour, then so be it.

I made my way up a steep set of stairs, and then sat in the waiting room, alone. A few minutes later, I heard a door open down the hall, and the click-clack of heels coming toward me on the hardwood floor. I steeled myself as a tall, slender black woman appeared in the doorway and smiled. Her hair was short, maybe two inches sticking up all around her skull, and her eyes were almond-shaped, dark pools.

“Amber?” Vanessa asked, and I nodded, gripping the edges of my purse. I didn’t know why I was nervous. I was only there to tell this woman that I was fine, that I’d already figured out a way to move past what Tyler had done. That even FBI statistics confirmed my belief that reporting him to the police would be a futile act.

“Follow me,” she said. Once we were inside her small office, I let my eyes wander around the room, taking in the one red-brick wall, accented by three others painted a rich cream, and high, rounded-arched windows overlooking Bellingham Bay. It was a crisp and sunny autumn day, and the water and the sky were an equally eye-squinting blue.

“Nice view,” I said, still standing by the door, which I’d shut behind me.

“Isn’t it?” she said as she lowered herself into a bomber-jacket brown leather chair. “Please, have a seat.”

I glanced over to the couch, which matched her chair and was littered with several large, fluffy, red and cream pillows. I sat in the corner farthest away from her and hugged one of the pillows to my chest.

“So,” she said. “Can you tell me a little about why you’re here?”

“My mother made the appointment. I’m sure she already told you.”

“Yes,” Vanessa said, “but I’d like to hear it in your own words. And rest assured, anything you say to me in this room is confidential.”

“I don’t really want to be here,” I said, gazing out the window. It was too hard to look at her. It reminded me too much of my time with Greta in the hospital all those years ago. I couldn’t believe I was back in this same place—I liked to think that I was tougher than I used to be. I thought I was smarter. But what happened with Tyler took that away from me. He took away everything.

“That’s not uncommon,” Vanessa said, setting her elbows on the arms of her chair and crossing her long legs under her sleeveless and fitted linen dress, the hem of which hit just below her knees. “Therapy is usually the last resort for people. Not exactly on anyone’s bucket list.” I looked back to her, and she smiled again, waiting for me to speak. When I didn’t, she tried another approach. “Why don’t you just tell me a little about yourself? Did you grow up in Bellingham?” I nodded. “Any brothers or sisters?”

“No,” I said, and then launched into the “how I was a miracle who came into the world nine weeks early” story, taking my time, trying to burn through the hour I was supposed to spend in that room.

“Did you have a lot of friends growing up?” she asked, and the question sucked the air from my lungs. Only one that really mattered, I thought. And he’s the one who landed me on this couch.

“Some,” I said, when I felt like I could breathe again.

“Do they still live here?” Vanessa pressed, tilting her head to one side.

“One of them does.” The truth was, from the moment Heather left my freshman year and my illness started to get worse, it had always just been Tyler and me. He was the only person who stayed by my side, who didn’t seem to condemn me for what I’d gone through. Even Daniel hadn’t understood me the way my best friend did. And now I’d lost them both.

Vanessa didn’t say anything, making me realize that my mother must have already told her some of my history. About Tyler. I shook my head, feeling a scratching sensation in my throat. I coughed to clear it, and a few tears escaped. Damn it. I might as well stop with the bullshit small talk. I reached for the tissue box on the burled wood table between us and wiped the corners of my eyes.

“I didn’t go to the police,” I said, tucking my legs up under me as I tore off bits of the tissue I held and let them land on the pillow in my lap. I kept my head down. “I didn’t go to the hospital and have an exam. There’s no way I could prove what he did.”

“What did he do, Amber?”

I shook my head again. My mom kept using the word “rape” to describe what Tyler did to me, but I still couldn’t quite label it that way myself. The circumstances that led up to that moment in the bedroom at the party were too muddy—I was too complicit in what had occurred.

“Did you want to have sex with him?” Vanessa asked. Her voice was low, a therapist’s well-practiced, soothing serenade.

“I thought I did. We’d been flirting a lot since I got home from school, but I was engaged to Daniel, and even though I was having second thoughts about getting married, I never should have gotten so drunk. I shouldn’t have kissed Tyler or danced with him the way I did.” I’d had these same thoughts so many times over the last couple of months, I didn’t know how I could believe anything else could be true.

“Amber. Our society always seems to blame the victim, not the perpetrator, for a sexual crime. It says a woman shouldn’t dress provocatively or drink alcohol or have any kind of flirtation or interaction with a man because that means she is asking for him to do whatever he wants to do to her, even after she tells him no. Just because you were kissing him doesn’t mean you were asking for more.”

“But I followed him upstairs. I let him put me on the bed and push his hips against me. I could feel what he wanted to do.” I shuddered briefly, repulsed by the memory of that moment, repulsed by myself, for being stupid enough to let it happen.

“Nothing you did makes what Tyler did to you okay. If you told him to stop at any point that night, and he went ahead and had sex with you anyway, then what he did was rape. If you had oral sex, and after that, he forced his fingers inside you or had intercourse with you when you didn’t want it to go that far, then it was rape. If you two had been sleeping together for years, and this one time, you told him no, and he went ahead despite that, it was rape. Tyler raped you, Amber.”

I shook my head, still struggling with the guilt I felt that I’d led him on.

“You’re not responsible for this,” Vanessa continued, looking at me intently. “Yes, you were drunk. You might have kissed him. Everything about your behavior and your words might have said yes, but the moment you changed your mind, the moment you withdrew your consent either by physically struggling to get away or by telling him no, he was committing a crime. But the fact that you were drunk means that you were incapable of giving consent, so even if you hadn’t struggled or said no and he had sex with you, it was still rape.”

Her words struck a chord deep inside me. I’d never thought about the fact that being drunk had taken away my ability to give consent. Tyler should have known that. He should have realized that the state I was in made what he was doing to me wrong. Instead, he took advantage of how weak I was. He ignored my pleas for him to stop what he was doing—he let me struggle and cry and then he had sex with me anyway. Hearing Vanessa describe this as rape sounded different to me, somehow, than when my mom said it. Maybe both of them were right.

“Whether or not you decide to go to the police,” Vanessa said, “you are entitled to be furious about what Tyler did to you. To be full of fear and pain and have moments where you wish he was dead. And I am here, if you want to work through all of those complicated feelings. You just have to give me a chance.”

My eyes welled up again as she spoke, and this time, I couldn’t hold back the tears. “It doesn’t matter,” I said, my voice crackling. “No one would believe me. He’s, like, the nicest guy around. He’s a paramedic. He saves people for a living. He’s never hurt anyone.”

“That you know of,” Vanessa said. “And, Amber, he hurt you. The world is full of seemingly nice guys who assault women. Guys who don’t have healthy attitudes about women and sex in general, who see sex as something they’re entitled to, who hurt women and don’t even know they’re doing it because we don’t educate our young men on how not to become rapists.”

I thought about Tyler’s parents then, about the parade of women Jason had plowed his way through over the years—the crude and sexist comments he always made around his son, and the way he constantly made Tyler feel like he would never measure up. I thought about Liz, that however nice she might be, she was also way more concerned with getting her own needs met than with meeting Tyler’s, or teaching him anything about what a healthy relationship should look like. I was certain that neither of them had ever had a conversation with Tyler about how not to rape a woman—if they had, he definitely would have told me about it. I doubted that there were many parents out there who had this kind of conversation with their sons, the same way girls are talked to about not walking alone to their cars at night, or how to not dress “suggestively” when they go out so men won’t get the “wrong idea.”

“A man doesn’t have to be evil in order to sexually assault women,” Vanessa said. “Most rapists don’t look like what we’re programmed to believe they should—they’re not greasy-haired monsters who jump out from behind the bushes and tie up their victims in their basements. More often, they’re someone’s typical father, husband, brother, or son—but what they do to women is monstrous. Just because Tyler is ‘nice’ ”—here, she made air quotation marks with her fingers—“doesn’t mean he’s not capable of rape. Clearly, he is, or you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

“But what’s the point of going to the police if he won’t go to jail?” I asked. My thoughts were scrambled, pulled in a hundred different directions.

“I’m not saying you have to,” she said. “I’m happy to just help you here, in this room. But I will tell you that I’ve worked with many women who’ve been through exactly what you’re dealing with now, some of whom ultimately decided to file a report with the authorities, despite knowing the odds of getting a conviction were low.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Don’t most women just end up getting retraumatized by the judicial system, having to relive what happened to them over and over again? Their sexual histories questioned and their reputations torn apart? What’s the point of going through all of that if the guy gets away with it anyway?” My body ached, the same way it had the moment Tyler rolled off of me. I felt the stabbing sensation between my legs the same way an amputee might feel ghostly pain in a missing limb. Every time I allowed myself to think about that night, it all came rushing back—I was in that strange house, stumbling down the stairs, desperate to find a way to get home. I didn’t want to do this. I thought I was fine. But now, I found myself hoping that Vanessa would tell me there was another way, that she had a magic formula to piece my shattered insides back together. I wanted her to make me feel whole.

“The point is, that for some women, going through the process of telling their story to the authorities is cathartic. It gives them a chance to release some of the blame they point at themselves and pin it on the person who actually deserves it. And, most importantly, it creates a record, so that if their attacker ever does the same thing to another woman, there’s a better chance she’ll be taken seriously and he’ll be indicted.”

I’d never thought about the fact that Tyler might have already done this kind of thing to other girls. I hadn’t considered that he might do it again, in the future, to someone else. The full weight of these possibilities crashed down upon me, and I knew I had to do something. I knew going to the police would hurt me more than it would hurt him. There has to be something else. Some way to make him pay. And if I was sure of anything, it was that sitting in a therapist’s office, dwelling on what he did to me and whining about my feelings, wasn’t going to be it.