“This caller doesn’t seem to have a question,” Matt Hallinan was saying. “Let’s move on to someone who does.”
“Matthew Hallinan raped me that summer,” Eleanor said. “When it turned out I was pregnant, he took me to have an illegal abortion.”
The host of the show had stepped in now. “These are serious charges you’re making here...”—she must have consulted her notes—“... Eleanor. Do you have anything to say in response, Senator Hallinan?”
“This caller is obviously a nutcase,” Matt Hallinan said.
The line went dead, but Eleanor had said what she had wanted.Long ago, she and Darla had made a pledge. Darla would leave Bobby. Eleanor would settle her score with the man who’d raped her in the front seat of his parents’ car. She had just done that.
Within ten minutes of Eleanor’s call toTalk of the Nation,her phone rang. It was a producer on the program, calling to say a reporter from CNN had heard Eleanor’s call and wanted to speak with her. They weren’t giving her number out without her authorization.
The reporter called five minutes later. “I need to know, before anything else, if you are prepared to go on the record with your allegation concerning Matthew Hallinan,” she asked Eleanor.
No doubt most people would have told her to consult an attorney first. (She was the daughter of one. All these years after his death, she knew what he would have told her.)
Eleanor recounted her story for the reporter. The summer in Rhode Island. The rape. The abortion.
“And you were how old at the time?” the reporter asked.
Sixteen.
Within a week of the CNN story, four other women had made statements concerning experiences of sexual assault at the hands of Senator Matthew Hallinan. Eleanor was asked to appear on theTodayprogram. Though he declined an invitation to address the allegations himself, a spokesperson from his office appeared to say that the charges were baseless.
The next week, theNew York Timesran a picture of Matt Hallinan at a fraternity party, in his law school days, hoisting a flag made from women’s underpants and carrying a sign that said, “No Means Yes.” Shortly after, Senator Hallinan announced that out of a desire to spend more time back home with his family in Rhode Island, he would not be running for a second term in the Senate.
A letter arrived from Patty. “Good job ruining my brother’s life,” she’d written.
Eleanor didn’t write back.
96.
Crash
Cam called—an event so rare Eleanor didn’t recognize the number when it showed up on her phone.
“Elijah’s with you, right?” he asked.
“He’s at a gig,” she told him. “A new band wanted to try him out. He’s so excited.”
She was so startled to hear Cam’s voice that it took her a moment to realize the rest. She could make out the word “accident.” The word “truck.” Ambulance. Emergency room.
“It’s Coco,” Cam said. Except for the day of Toby’s accident, she had never heard him sounding this shaken. “She was on the back of some guy’s bike and a truck hit them.”
Her first thought was of Elijah. Eleanor was not his mother, but the news of injury to the woman who was struck her like a physical blow. She pictured this boy she’d come to love, hearing the news. His mother, injured on a highway, airlifted to Boston, awaiting surgery.
“They called me from the hospital,” Cam said. He was actually crying. “Even though we aren’t married anymore, my name was still the one on the card in her wallet.”
Coco was alive. Concussion and a fractured jaw. Massive internal injuries. Also a broken pelvis. One of her legs was pretty mangled. The doctors weren’t sure they could save it.
For a moment all Eleanor could hear on the other end of the line was the sound of the man she used to be married to, crying about the woman he used to be married to. All Eleanor could do was listen.
“I was so mad at her for what she did,” he said. “But I didn’t want her to die. If things had just stayed how they were, none of this would have happened.” That was always the truth, wasn’t it? If things had just stayed how they were.
The truck driver was drunk, he told her. The motorcycle they were riding ended up on the whole other side of the highway.
Somewhere in there Eleanor thought to ask, “What about the guy driving the motorcycle?” Coco’s boyfriend, the man for whom she’d left Cam.
DOA.
