3
It was as if the world stopped turning that day in September 1999. My sister lied about what happened. I knew it. She swore Milo had raped her, but he wouldn’t. I knew him better than anyone. He was gentle. He was already locked up by the time I got home that night, and it would be many years before I saw him again. I attacked my sister when she came home from the police station late that night, first verbally and then, when she insisted it was true, I attacked her physically, and Mom and Dad had to separate us. Her story didn’t even make sense. Milo would never tickle a sixteen-year-old girl, especially Ruby.
Milo was prone sometimes to dark moods. I was aware of it, that there were days when he wouldn’t want to talk or hang out, not just with me but with anyone. His best friend in school was a guy called Ben Roche, who advised leaving him alone when he got like that. It only happened three times in the year or so that I knew him. And then he would emerge again, apologetic, unable to explain what had come over him. It was ‘a dose of the blues’ he said. But that didn’t mean he could ever be violent with anyone. He didn’t even get in any schoolyard fights when he was a kid, as far as I knew.
Dad decided that I should go and stay with Aunt Rachel a few days later. She was my dad’s younger sister, living in Worcester, fifty miles west of Boston. Milo was locked up while the investigation was ongoing. I was not allowed to go and see Milo’s mother or sister, or to call them. I only had a rough idea where they lived.I never went to Milo’s house and Dorchester was a big area. Mom told me that they kept calling our house, but she hung up every time. I was angry to be banished from my home like that. I hadn’t done anything wrong. My sister had told a vicious lie and soon the police would find out, and Milo would be freed. I decided that when that happened, Milo and I would run away together, to New York, and start over. I couldn’t bear being separated from him. Aunt Rachel tried to reason with me: ‘Girls don’t make up stories like that, Erin, and your sister is a particularly innocent child. She and her friends are proud virgins, aren’t they?’ I was a virgin too, though I didn’t shout about it like Ruby and her friends. If Milo had wanted to have sex badly, I would have given in. I told Aunt Rachel this. She was five years younger than Dad and way cooler. ‘But, Erin, rape isn’t about sex, it’s about control. Now why would your sister lie about something like that? Has she lied before?’
I had to think about that. Ruby was not a habitual liar. She had told childish lies, denying stealing chunks from Mom’s birthday cake when the evidence was in the crumbs on her face, but we didn’t tell lies in our family. She was an excellent actress and could impersonate every teacher in Altman, but I was never aware of her lying before. This made it more difficult for anyone to believe Milo. It turned out that he had been charged with a misdemeanour by the police two years ago for trespassing in a derelict house. He had never told me about that, but then why would he? I never told him that I had successfully shoplifted a pair of jeans from Old Navy until Mom discovered the labels in the trash can in my room and marched me back to the store to pay for them. It had been a dare among a group of us at the mall. They didn’t even fit me. It was a stupid prank. She docked my allowance for ten weeks – four weeks to pay for the jeans and six weeks to make sure I’d learned my lesson. She never told Dad or Ruby, though. Maybe Ruby had done things Mom hadn’t told us about?
I was supposed to keep it all a secret, but I had to tell Ginnieand Saima. I did not go back to school that year, and they had been calling the house. I called them from Worcester. Ginnie said that everyone in school already knew and that most people believed Ruby. Saima said she believed me, but she asked me why Ruby would make up such a monstrous lie and I couldn’t answer that.
Three weeks later, DNA test results came in. There was no doubt. Milo had raped my sister. Dad drove up to Worcester to tell me. ‘You have to accept it, honey. That man is an evil son of a bitch, and he defiled your sister.’ I had never heard Dad use such language before. I was shaking with shock. I thought of all the ways his DNA could have got on to my sister. A shared towel perhaps? Dad had to make it clear. ‘Erin,’ he said sternly, ‘the DNA came from semen that wasinsideRuby, do you understand what I’m telling you?’ I understood the words he said to me, but it took a while for them to truly sink in. How could I believe that snow was white if the guy I loved with all my heart had raped my sister? But he had, and I was wrong. Aunt Rachel tried her best to comfort me, but I was angry, first at myself and then at Milo. I was horrified that I had called my sister a liar.
I got a summons to appear as a witness for the defence. Mom and Dad were outraged but I was over eighteen by then and there was nothing they or I could do to stop it. I worried myself sick in the weeks leading up to the trial. I had constant nausea. I did not know what I was going to be asked. Would Milo have told them about how intimate we had been? It turned out that he had. In a full courtroom in front of my parents, Aunt Rachel, their friends, Mrs Kelly, Margie, Milo’s friend Ben Roche, Mr Bermingham the school principal, the judge, jury and a whole load of strangers, I had to reveal the private details of my life. I could not look at Milo. I could not look at anyone.
Then it was the prosecutor’s turn. He asked me who suggestedthat Milo sneak into my room against my parents’ rules in the middle of the night. I had to admit that it was me. I had been the one who wanted to get closer to him. I think he had expected a different answer. He asked me how hard I had to persuade him, and I told the court that Milo didn’t argue at all. I watched my mother leave the courtroom in tears. The prosecutor talked about how this was a sign of Milo’s deceptive behaviour, how he had manipulated his way into my bedroom, against the rules of my parents, who had been so good to him. He also asked me about his moodiness. Where did I think he went during those times when he refused to talk to anyone? I didn’t understand what he meant. He went to school and to work and home, like normal. He asked if I had proof that he went to work and home during his ‘thunderous moods’. Milo’s lawyer objected to his words and the judge asked me if his moods were thunderous. I said no. She asked me to describe them. I said that it just seemed like depression to me. The prosecutor resumed his questions, asking again if I knew for sure that Milo went home and to work during these moods. I had no proof. He asked if I knew anything about Milo’s previous girlfriends. I did not, except that they were older than him. I don’t know what the relevance of these questions was, but Milo’s defence let them go unchallenged. There were unsaid implications, though, and they were not good for Milo.
Milo’s defending attorney used my information to demonstrate how gentle Milo had been with me and how he had never pressured me into oral or full penetrative sex. I wept through this testimony. I glanced quickly at Milo. He lifted his head from his hands and mouthed the word ‘sorry’ at me. I hated him by then. I was angry with him for putting me through this.
Months later, right on the day of Milo’s sentencing, Mom said we’d have to go to Ireland for Ruby’s sake. ‘How is Ruby ever going to recover when there are reminders everywhere?’ I thoughtit was an unnecessarily drastic step but Mom was adamant. We had to move to Dublin. Mom and Dad argued about it, and this time the arguments were loud and serious. Doors slammed and voices were raised. We hid in our rooms. Ruby’s friends visited, but they never stayed long.
I couldn’t talk to her. I don’t think she could talk to me either. Milo would never have been in our house if it hadn’t been for me.
4
Ruby
The DNA results proved that what I said was true. The investigation and the court case and the verdict took seven months and then there was the sentencing weeks after that. The court case was gruelling and way more traumatic than the incident itself. It was a jury trial. It went on and on and on. Milo had to admit that I’d said no three times. He admitted that he’d told me, ‘This never happened, nobody has to know,’ but he didn’t admit the incident. He didn’t try to say it was consensual. He said that I had tried to seduce him. I was quizzed many times by his attorney about what I was wearing. He’d said I was wearing shorts, but I told them I was wearing jeans. And the prosecutor insisted that it didn’t matter. I was a sixteen-year-old innocent, and he was a nineteen-year-old working man. But the DNA was the biggest, most undeniable factor.
Neither Erin nor I went to school that academic year. Erin came back from Aunt Rachel’s to appear as a witness in the trial. She was a different person. She grabbed me and hugged me and sobbed how sorry she was, but then she went to her room and rarely came out. We stayed home for months, unable to offer comfort to each other. Dad tried to persuade me to come back to church, but I was ashamed. I was no longer pure in the eyes of God.
After the sentencing, Mom’s solution was to take us out ofBoston and back to her home in Ireland. ‘It’s for a few weeks,’ said Mom. ‘Your grandma will be pleased to see you and Erin.’
I nodded along when the trip was suggested. Mom had been asking Dad for years about moving back to Ireland. Now Dad and Mom fought about it. ‘Movethere?’ said Dad, incredulous, then he saw me in the doorway and his voice softened. ‘Hey, Ruby, how are you today?’ he said, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes, and I knew how he wanted me to respond, to run into his arms for comfort so he could kiss the top of my head, like he used to. But I turned away and went back up to my room and shut the door behind me. The trial had been awful.
Erin did not want to go to Ireland. She was broken-hearted and broken.
‘You girls need to stick together,’ said Mom. Erin looked at me and I saw her shame and anger.
It was agreed that Mom and I would go on our own four days after she suggested it. Erin refused to come. She went to some prayer retreat instead. Nobody talked about what would happen after the summer.
I said goodbye to Laquanda and Tasha and Janet, who promised they’d write. I was glad to be getting away. Milo had his supporters who apparently called me horrible names. My name was graffitied all over walls in South Boston. I had been out of school for eight months and I was desperate to get away. Grandma’s little house had always felt safe to me. And I needed to feel safe.
Leaving was horrible. We all cried, Erin and I clinging on to each other, telepathically saying all the things that had gone unsaid. Mom and I had one-way tickets. I didn’t know if we were going to come back. Dad’s eyes were red-rimmed, and my mother sobbed as they parted at the airport. Once again, I felt guilt for breaking our family in two, but this was only four days after the thirteen-year sentence had been handed down. I had hardly processed what had happened yet.
5
Erin
Milo and I had our first kiss in a deserted gym in high school. We were both nervous, but once we’d kissed, it kind of sealed the deal. Mom and Dad liked him and his mom. Milo was not allowed into my bedroom under any circumstances. We respected their rules for a long time. Being with Milo was exciting and interesting and we laughed a lot. We loved the same books; we watched the same movies over and over.Good Will Huntingwas our favourite. He was Matt Damon and I was Minnie Driver and we made up the happiest endings for ourselves. Milo couldn’t afford to take me out for meals or buy me jewellery, but I didn’t need those things.
Milo was not a virgin. He had slept with a few girls. I wasn’t entirely surprised by this. I think I was one of the last virgins in my class, but I was struggling with it. My body yearned for him, as if it was a different entity to my mind. I knew that God was testing me, but Milo said he would wait. We didn’t go the whole way, though we came close. We had worked out which steps on the back stairs of the house squeaked and I had oiled the handle of my bedroom door. On the occasional nights when Milo stayed over in the spare room downstairs, he could creep up and quietly enter my bedroom at the top of the back stairs without anyone hearing, where we would make out and fool around. We would whisper to each other about what felt good and what didn’t, manoeuvringeach other’s hands and bodies until we were both satisfied. We stifled our moans. Nobody knew. Ruby’s bedroom was between mine and my parents’ room. She had famously slept through a storm that had taken the roof off the shack directly behind our bedrooms a couple of years earlier. Nothing would wake her.
I think at the time I trusted Milo more than anyone I knew. He told me he’d wait until I was ready, but I was God-fearing in those days. We knew that we were going to get married as soon as I graduated high school. I knew Dad would go crazy, but as they had got married when Mom was twenty-one years old and he was twenty-two, he couldn’t say too much. We planned to have three children after he qualified as a doctor. We were stuck about where we were going to live. Milo wanted to support me, but it was going to be a long time until he would be able to do that. Besides, I wanted to go to Harvard. I reckoned that Dad could probably buy us an apartment as a wedding present, but Milo was uncomfortable with that. He had got into Boston College on a scholarship that didn’t cover everything. He had student loans too. The principal at Altman had helped him with his applications. Principal Bermingham always took a special interest in Milo. He mentored him and said he could see Milo’s potential. So could I.
I used to write short stories for my own amusement. They were usually stories about wacky characters. They were all different. One was about demon children who were born to this loving couple but who grew up to be psychopaths and murdered their parents. Another was about a single mother who refused to feed her children; they were taken from her and put into foster care, but they were traumatized. They refused to eat until they were put back into their mother’s care and then they ate her. These stories were often disturbing. I was afraid to show them to anyone but Milo and he suggested I show them to my teacher. I don’t know where these ideas came from, but Milo loved them – he said I should send them in to competitions. Even thoughI was top of the class in English at school, my English teacher didn’t like them. She found them distasteful and encouraged me to write about the real world. I didn’t think Dad would have approved, especially if my teacher didn’t, and Mom wasn’t much of a reader. I loved books and reading, though. Ruby once said that prettiness was wasted on me because I was such a geek. She was funny.
Milo thought I should be a writer, and I thought that was something I could maybe try in my spare time, but I wanted to read books rather than write them. It was a huge surprise to discover that Milo had entered one of my stories into a competition in a literary journal and they had agreed to publish it. Dad demanded to read the story and, to my surprise, he liked it. I don’t think Mom understood it, but she was super proud and took me to New York on the train for the day to seeThe Lion Kingon Broadway. We wouldn’t be home until late. That was the day Milo raped Ruby.
