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Authors: Jessica Treadway
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attack.
But what if he had only committed the burglary, driven Dawn home, then gone to his own apartment for the rest of the night, as he’d always claimed? I could barely bring myself to consider that this might be true, because I’d spent three years thinking it was all behind me. Three years hating him and what he’d done to my family. But I couldn’t help what came back to me. Somebody else—memory experts, the jury—could decide if it was real.
Not wanting to lose my nerve, I found Gail Nazarian’s card and dialed her office. Since it was a Saturday, I’d expected to get voice mail, but she picked up in person. Recovering from this surprise, I stammered that I just wanted her to know I was on board; I would do everything I could to be able to testify. “My daughter Iris knows someone who could hypnotize me,” I told her, thinking it might be a way to find out the truth about that night. I wasn’t ready yet to let on that I might be starting to doubt Rud Petty’s guilt; my experience in the bedroom was too fresh, too unsettling to trust.
I thought the prosecutor would be impressed by my resourcefulness, but instead she shouted, “No!” into the phone before making an obvious effort to dial down the volume of her voice. “No hypnosis. It can get very dicey in court, and they may or may not allow it. We can’t take that chance. Promise, Hanna?”
She had never called me by my first name before, so I knew she was pulling it out now to show how serious she was. I said yes and told her I had to go, though there was really nothing else waiting for me except the question of how to make myself remember—in enough detail that it would hold up in court, and clear my daughter’s name for good—the worst night of my life.
Psychological Impact
I didn’t tell anyone at work that Dawn was returning, even though I had friends there who would have been interested—who would have cared. As it was, Francine startled me when I arrived on Monday and she said, “Hanna, you okay? I heard,” and at first I thought she meant she’d heard about Dawn’s phone call, but then I realized she was talking about Rud Petty’s appeal.
When I was in the rehab hospital, I never thought about going back to work when I recovered. But after I’d been home for two weeks, and realized how shaky I felt with all that unstructured time, I called Bob Toussaint, who’d been my boss for almost fifteen years. He understood that I didn’t need the salary as much as I needed the work itself again. Joe had seen to it, with his usual conscientiousness, that I’d be taken care of if something happened to him, even with the economy as uncertain as it was; I would still be okay, according to Joe’s friend and colleague Tom Whitty, who’d taken over the accounts.
What I craved was the contact with patients and the camaraderie our office had always shared. I didn’t want to put Bob in the awkward position of having to turn me down about actual nursing, because there was no question that the skills I’d once prided myself on had been diminished by my injuries in the attack. It wasn’t hard to convince him, though, that I could make myself useful, especially with the walk-in patients at our clinic—instructing people how to fill out forms, helping elderly patients in and out of their paper gowns, preparing children for their shots. It made me feel good to soothe patients who were worried about a medical visit, and it made the doctors’ jobs easier. Once he saw that I had made a niche for myself, Bob was more than happy to keep me on. Though my job title was appointment liaison, everyone in the office referred to me as the concierge.
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Francine or the other people I worked with. But I knew what their reaction would be if I told them Dawn was coming back to live with me, and I wasn’t sure how I’d deal with it. Start crying? Get defensive and snap at them? I didn’t feel up to any of those things.
I
But what if he had only committed the burglary, driven Dawn home, then gone to his own apartment for the rest of the night, as he’d always claimed? I could barely bring myself to consider that this might be true, because I’d spent three years thinking it was all behind me. Three years hating him and what he’d done to my family. But I couldn’t help what came back to me. Somebody else—memory experts, the jury—could decide if it was real.
Not wanting to lose my nerve, I found Gail Nazarian’s card and dialed her office. Since it was a Saturday, I’d expected to get voice mail, but she picked up in person. Recovering from this surprise, I stammered that I just wanted her to know I was on board; I would do everything I could to be able to testify. “My daughter Iris knows someone who could hypnotize me,” I told her, thinking it might be a way to find out the truth about that night. I wasn’t ready yet to let on that I might be starting to doubt Rud Petty’s guilt; my experience in the bedroom was too fresh, too unsettling to trust.
I thought the prosecutor would be impressed by my resourcefulness, but instead she shouted, “No!” into the phone before making an obvious effort to dial down the volume of her voice. “No hypnosis. It can get very dicey in court, and they may or may not allow it. We can’t take that chance. Promise, Hanna?”
She had never called me by my first name before, so I knew she was pulling it out now to show how serious she was. I said yes and told her I had to go, though there was really nothing else waiting for me except the question of how to make myself remember—in enough detail that it would hold up in court, and clear my daughter’s name for good—the worst night of my life.
Psychological Impact
I didn’t tell anyone at work that Dawn was returning, even though I had friends there who would have been interested—who would have cared. As it was, Francine startled me when I arrived on Monday and she said, “Hanna, you okay? I heard,” and at first I thought she meant she’d heard about Dawn’s phone call, but then I realized she was talking about Rud Petty’s appeal.
When I was in the rehab hospital, I never thought about going back to work when I recovered. But after I’d been home for two weeks, and realized how shaky I felt with all that unstructured time, I called Bob Toussaint, who’d been my boss for almost fifteen years. He understood that I didn’t need the salary as much as I needed the work itself again. Joe had seen to it, with his usual conscientiousness, that I’d be taken care of if something happened to him, even with the economy as uncertain as it was; I would still be okay, according to Joe’s friend and colleague Tom Whitty, who’d taken over the accounts.
What I craved was the contact with patients and the camaraderie our office had always shared. I didn’t want to put Bob in the awkward position of having to turn me down about actual nursing, because there was no question that the skills I’d once prided myself on had been diminished by my injuries in the attack. It wasn’t hard to convince him, though, that I could make myself useful, especially with the walk-in patients at our clinic—instructing people how to fill out forms, helping elderly patients in and out of their paper gowns, preparing children for their shots. It made me feel good to soothe patients who were worried about a medical visit, and it made the doctors’ jobs easier. Once he saw that I had made a niche for myself, Bob was more than happy to keep me on. Though my job title was appointment liaison, everyone in the office referred to me as the concierge.
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Francine or the other people I worked with. But I knew what their reaction would be if I told them Dawn was coming back to live with me, and I wasn’t sure how I’d deal with it. Start crying? Get defensive and snap at them? I didn’t feel up to any of those things.
I
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