LUCKY - Alice Sebold by Lucky

Author:Lucky
Language: eng
Format: epub

NINE

On the morning of November 4, a county car met me at Haven Hall. I watched for it through the glass walls of the dorm's entranceway. Students had already attended breakfast in the cafeteria upstairs and gathered their books to leave for classes.

I had been up since five. I tried to linger over the rituals of hygiene. I took a long shower in the bathroom down the hall. I moisturized my face as Mary Alice had taught me to do the year before. I selected and pressed my clothes. My body alternated between stony chills and hot flashes of nerves centered near my chest. I was aware that this might be the kind of panic that ruled my mother. I swore I would not allow it to rule me.

I left the glass-walled foyer and met the detective as he was coming in. I engaged his eyes. I shook his hand.

"I'm Alice Sebold," I said.

"Right on time."

"It's hard to oversleep on a day like this," I said. I was sunny, cheery, reliable. I wore an oxford-cloth shirt and a skirt. On my feet I wore my Pappagallo pumps. I had fretted that morning because I could not find nude hose. I had black and I had red, neither of which was an appropriate choice for the virgin coed the grand jury would expect. I borrowed a pair from my resident advisor.

In the county car, marked with the seal of Onondaga on the front doors, I rode in the front beside the detective. We made small talk about the university. He talked sports teams, which I knew nothing about, and projected that the Carrier Dome, little over a year old, would bring a lot of revenue to the area. I nodded my head and tried to contribute but I was obsessively worried about the way I looked. The way I spoke. The way I moved.

Tricia, from the Rape Crisis Center, would be my company that day. We had about an hour of waiting before the lineup to be held at the Public Safety Building jail. This time the elevator of the Public Safety Building did not stop at the floor I was familiar with, where the reassuring sight of a security door and policemen with coffee mugs met you once you stepped off. The hallways the detective, Tricia, and I walked down were full of people. Police and victims, lawyers and criminals. A policeman led a man in handcuffs down the hall past us, while he barked an amiable joke about some recent party to another policeman on the hall. There was a Latina, sitting in a plastic chair in the hallway. She stared at the floor, clutching her purse and a crumpled Kleenex in her hand.

The detective brought us into a large room in which makeshift dividers no more than four feet tall separated desks from one another. There were men—policemen—sitting at most of them. Their postures were tense and temporary; they came there to fill out reports or quickly interview a witness, or make a call before going back out on patrol or, perhaps, finally going home.

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