Later, after I endured his attempt at chitchat, he walked me to my car. He was sozzled. I couldn’t let him drive drunk, so I asked him how he got to the pub.
“Walked,” he said. “I live a few blocks from here.” He pointed west. “You could walk me home.” He gave me a drunk, lopsided smile that pulled his face into a rough, sloppy sketch drawn on for the evening.
I said no thanks and told him I’d see him at work the next day.
He spread his arms wide—a come-to-papa gesture—and pulled me toward him. I reciprocated stiffly, bending at the hips to give him a rigid, arms-only hug. As I pulled away, he jerked me in tighter and smashed his lips onto mine.
I snapped my head to the side and pushed him away, but not before he dragged his tongue across my cheek, like a wet, squishy slug. His hand grabbed my left breast hard and pinched. He looked calculating, as if his drunkenness had only been an act. As I drove home, I had to grip the steering wheel hard to prevent my hands from shaking.
There was no sense in reporting the grope to Captain Mercer. He and Lieutenant Hartley were tight. I was supposed to be tough, a pro at slapping down boundaries. Acop, for God’s sake. I’d entered this profession knowing full well it wasJohnnyLaw, not Jenny Law. What did I expect?
I had a friend in college who wrote a thesis on workplace harassment, and she told me, after learning that I intended to enter law enforcement after everything happened with Sophie, that the field ranked among the worst when it came to every kind of workplace and sexual harassment.
Plus, I had not been raped. What had happened to Sophie years earlier had been so much worse.
The atmosphere at the station might have been loaded with suppressed aggression, and a few of us women constantly breathed its fumes, but as far as I knew, actual sexual assault was kept in check. They knew better, and I knew the responsibility fell on my shoulders to guard myself.
Even with everything I’d been through with Sophie, I still considered it my fault for saying yes to Hartley and meeting him for drinks in the first place. That’s how deeply ingrained this shit can be. And, of course, he wasdrunk. Everyone liked him. He was fun, he was jolly, and told ribald tales that kept the other officers in stitches.
That night I decided this was something I needed to carry around with me—annoying, bothersome, but not the heaviest of my burdens. I still believed in the system, that this was a glitch—an endless wringing out of an old grease-stained towel that hadn’t been tossed away yet, but eventually would be discarded.
Turned out, though, that the next day Hartley informed me there’d been complaints aboutme. Myproductivity.
When I asked who had lodged them and what exactly they were, he wouldn’t say, only that I needed to watch my performance.
I continued to stuff it all down, but I was like a pot beginning to simmer. Images of Sophie and me in the cold woods kept resurfacing. I worked twice as hard as other officers, took extra shifts and never slacked, until one day another coworker, a younger female officer named Lilly with even less seniority than me, told me about her very similar experiences with Hartley.
Prodding for drinks. Following her to her car. Insisting on hugs. And she said she was groped, too.
Thatset me in motion. I was legally bound and morally obligated to do something, to get her to the proper channels for filing a complaint. And if she didn’t, I would need to report that I’d witnessed a grievance, even if relayed to me in private.
I ended up going higher than the captain, to the colonel, and reporting my experiences, too.
“You’re poison now,” one of the other officers informed me. I knew he was speaking for many others. “No one’s gonna want to partner with you.”
Lilly and I were told we had come down with #MeToo fever, even though that trend had already come and gone, at least in our world.
Someone—I never found out who—put a bloated dead mouse in my locker, turning it putrid. I found my car keyed one evening after a shift, walked out to slashed tires a few days later after dinner at a localrestaurant with Wallace, and answered a call from an anonymous source threatening to burn my house down.
The backlash made me furious. The counterattack ended up shaking me more than the actual incidents, more even than the feel of Hartley’s slobbery tongue on my cheek. To learn that calling out harassment in a job that’ssupposedto be about law, order, and justice would trigger these attempts at retribution? I felt like one of those high-alpine tamaracks, trying to survive on a steep, otherwise bare mountain slope, crushed into splinters by an avalanche.
I also felt a strange guilt. After all, I hadn’t endured the kind of violence Sophie had encountered on that camping trip years before. I wasn’t dealing with the kind of emotional and physical trauma that Jess went through when she woke in the middle of the night with her jeans pulled down and Mark on top of her, his broad, heavy frame crushing her.
Sadly, the things that happened to me didn’t warrant public notoriety and universal scorn. These were muddled, everyday encounters. As much as it sucks to acknowledge it, they were commonplace. But surely they warranted some form of condemnation so they didn’t create the kind of entitlement that leads to sexual harassment and rape culture in the first place.
What happened to Jess, though, just one month after all the nasty Hartley entanglements, slithered into my life like a black snake right when she was at the top of her world.
This poisonous thing had staying power. It curled around my torso and squeezed if I went more than a few hours without reminding myself of the world in which I worked. No matter what I do or how I proceed, what happened to Jess with Coleman and what followed with me and Coleman will never stop replaying in my head. But there’s no way to go back, to find some wrinkle in time where I can alter anyone’s actions, or even alleviate my ownif I’d only’s.
Luckily, I tell myself now,I’m a trained officer.If it’s me, this guy has picked the wrong woman. But something dark and uncertain has sunkits teeth into me—the same feeling I had when I found out my own sister had been raped ten years after Sophie was also raped.
The same sinking sensation I had when I walked away from being a cop: that I couldn’t cut it. The same inadequacy that swept over me after our mom’s death my senior year of college, when Jess dropped into a black hole of depression, like Sophie had, and I couldn’t pull her out.
Thankfully, with time, Jess snapped out of it. This time, I’m not so sure.
“Hey.”
I look up, confused. The guy who sat across from me—Climber Guy—has lifted his hand. He’s palming his phone with the screen facing me. “You see this?”
