That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (read more books .txt) 📕

“I don’t want to tell you what to do,” he began.

“I think you do,” she said, her voice sharp.

Michael shook his head. “Look, all I’m saying…” He’d stopped talking, then nodded at the newspaper. “This is a moment. It’s a chance.”

“For what?” she’d asked. Not justice. She’d given up on justice a long time ago.

“You don’t have to go to the police and demand a trial. I’m not saying you call WGBH, or call the guy’s boss.”

“I don’t think he has a boss,” said Diana.

Michael had continued doggedly. “I’m just saying that this is maybe a chance to get some closure. To find this guy and tell him that he hurt a real person.”

“Because that went so well the last time,” Diana said bitterly.

“What happened the last time was not your fault,” Michael said, the way he’d said the same words to her a thousand times already. Diana didn’t answer. For a moment, they sat in silence. Then Michael said, “What if he did it to other women? Did you ever think about that?”

Diana buried her face in her hands, because, as Michael undoubtedly suspected, the answer was all the time. It was her biggest fear—that her rapist hadn’t stopped with her, that, to the contrary, she’d been the first, in a line, maybe a long one. She’d spent many of her recent sleepless nights wondering what her obligation was to that possibility, what she owed those girls and women.

Michael touched her back, then the nape of her neck, until he was cupping her head in his big, warm hand.

“I was reading an essay online. It said this was a whaddayacallit. An inflection point. Things are changing.” After all their years together, she could hear what he wasn’t saying. Things are changing if there are people brave enough to come forward, to stand up and say enough is enough.

“I tried,” she said, her voice quavering. “I tried to do the right thing, and look how that turned out!”

“Okay, okay,” said Michael, holding up his hands. “It’s up to you. Completely up to you. It’s just—I know you aren’t sleeping. I feel like you’re suffering. I just want you to be able to find some peace. And I wonder—I wonder if maybe…”

Diana shook her head. Her mind had been made up, and she’d been firm in her convictions. Leave it alone, she told herself. Live your happy life, run your restaurant, be with the people you love, and leave it alone. But Hal’s existence nagged at her, tugged at her, like a hangnail or a loose thread. What if he did it to other women? This is a reckoning, she’d think. And if I sit here and do nothing, I’m just as bad, just as complicit, as he is.

She would spend hours convincing herself to live her life, her happy, peaceful life, and do nothing. Then, at night, awake in the dark, she’d remember what had happened with the judge, a man about her age with an Ivy League education and impeccable credentials, who’d been on the fast track for confirmation to the Supreme Court, when a woman came forward and said that he’d assaulted her at a party when they’d both been teenagers.

The man had denied everything, had called the woman a liar, part of a political plot to take him down. The woman had testified, telling her story in a calm, clear voice, telling the world what the boys had done. Indelible upon the hippocampus is the laughter, she’d said. She’d gone on to become a professor of neuroscience, an expert in how the brain processes trauma, a fact that only amplified Diana’s shame at her own life having been so thoroughly derailed.

Diana had watched every second of the hearings. She’d sat, riveted, holding out hope that the judge, who’d seemed so mild-mannered, would confess to his actions and apologize. Maybe he would say that he was drunk and immature and stupid and that he was sorry, that he’d never treated another woman like that since and certainly never would again; that he loved his daughters and did not want them living in a world where men could harm them without consequences. Instead, the judge, red-faced and furious, spewing indignation and spittle, had denied everything. He’d insisted—before anyone had asked—that he’d earned all of his achievements by working his tail off, that he had no connections or extra help (“I guess parents who paid for prep school and a grandfather who went to Yale don’t count,” Michael said). He bullied the female senators who asked about his drinking. “I like beer. Do you like beer?” he’d asked one of them, the daughter of an alcoholic, who’d gently asked about the possibility of blackouts. “What do you like to drink? Do you have a drinking problem?” Diana kept watching, paralyzed and wordless in her fury, powerless to look away as the judge blustered and brayed, red-faced and wet-eyed with rage, convinced that he was the real victim.

The man became a Supreme Court justice. The woman went into hiding. And every day, every night, Diana Carmody, who’d once been a fifteen-year-old girl, running over the sand on the beach on a warm summer night, would think about him, and about Hal Shoemaker, about all the men who’d harmed women and who’d sailed on with lives continued, unimpaired. She would think about her nieces, and all the girls and young women she knew, growing up in a world where every day was dangerous, and she knew she couldn’t give herself the luxury of inaction.

This time, she decided, she would do it differently. This time, instead of going straight for the men, she’d approach the problem sideways and come at the women. Or, really, just one woman: Daisy Shoemaker, wife of her rapist, sister of the boy who’d watched. She would be much more careful, making sure that her actions did not cause children to suffer, or that at least she did whatever she could to minimize their