Their eyes met for a moment, and neither of them spoke. Then finally, Chris knew he had to deal with her. Nancy had been avoiding him for months. She had refused to meet with him before she filed for divorce. He knew he deserved it, but it hurt anyway. She was a hard woman with a soft side he had always loved, but she wouldn’t let him see that side of her anymore. All that was left between them was the pain he had caused her, and their wonderful daughter. He would always be grateful to her for that.
“How is she?” He had caught the first plane out of Los Angeles that morning, rented a car at the Boston airport, and driven two hours to the hospital.
Nancy pointed to the door and he followed her into the hall. They could talk more freely there.
“About the same. She’s very shaken up, understandably. She won’t talk about it, even to me. She says all she remembers is a guy on top of her she’d never seen before, and then she passed out. I think she’s ashamed of having put herself in that situation, by drinking and getting so drunk. She could have died if someone hadn’t called the campus police. Her friends just left her there, unconscious. The psychological damage from all this will be huge,” she said sadly. It was every parent’s worst nightmare for their daughter, and Chris started to cry again.
She let him sit alone for a few minutes and came back with a cup of coffee from the machine and handed it to him, with just the right amount of cream and sugar. He was startled by the kind gesture, but she felt sorry for him. He adored his daughter, and had always been a wonderful father to her. She knew how upset he’d been when she took Vivienne to New York and sent her away to school. But she didn’t want Vivienne in L.A., spending time with the twenty-five-year-old he was living with now, and had been sleeping with for two years before Nancy discovered it. She had walked in on them, in their home, in her bed, when she had come home early from a business trip, and Vivienne had been away for spring vacation with friends. It was obvious that Kimberly, the twenty-five-year-old, had been there before and was very much at home in their house.
Nancy had flown to New York a week later, found a job at a law firm, quit her job in L.A., applied for certification, took the Uniform Bar Exam to allow her to practice in New York, and filed for divorce. Two months later, as soon as school ended in June, they had moved. She had since received her certification to practice law in New York. Chris had moved Kimberly in as soon as they left. Nancy was currently demanding that he sell the house and pay her her half of it. She didn’t want Kimberly living in the home she had loved and made into a wonderful place for the three of them. If she had to start over, so did he. He was fifty years old and she was forty-two, old enough to be his girlfriend’s mother, which made it sting even more.
He had begged Nancy to stay in L.A., or leave Vivienne there with him for her last year of high school, which was what Vivienne wanted too, but Nancy wouldn’t allow it. He had finally conceded. She’d enrolled her in Saint Ambrose, which seemed even more cruel to him. She had deprived him of his daughter, and wasn’t even with her herself, and now this had happened. He wanted to take her back to L.A. when she got out of the hospital. He was even prepared to ask Kimberly to move out and get her an apartment until Vivienne started college. He wouldn’t do it for Nancy, but he would for his daughter. He wanted to do all he could to help her get past what had just happened to her.
“Do they have any idea who did it?” he asked Nancy as they sat in the hallway side by side, waiting for Vivienne to wake up. Nancy shook her head in answer.
“She says she got drunk with a bunch of girls and then passed out. She remembers a man on top of her. The other girls left her there. She’s not even sure if the other girls were still around when it happened. She thinks they might have left before. She doesn’t know.”
“That doesn’t sound like her. I thought they had strict alcohol policies at the school.”
“They do, but kids get by with things even in the best of schools. The police think she’s lying to them.” She hesitated for a minute. “I think so too. They think she’s protecting the boy who did it and she knows who he is.”
“Why would she do that? That makes no sense.”
“Maybe they were friends, and she got drunk with him and his friends and things got out of hand. So far, they have no clue who the kids are, girls or boys. Viv says she can’t remember the girls she got drunk with and doesn’t know their names. None of it holds together, and I think the police are stumped. There’s a team from the rape detail coming in from Boston sometime today. They’re used to working with juveniles, and the school is doing everything they can to cooperate with the police. The police told me this afternoon, they’re going to fingerprint every student in the school tomorrow, male and female. They have prints on the tequila bottle they found at the scene. Viv’s prints are on it too. They took hers last night.”
“Will they send the boy to prison if they figure out who did it? They usually don’t in these kinds of schools. They’re a bunch of spoiled rich boys and their parents get them off.” He looked angry as he said it.
“There are a lot of rich kids at the school,” she conceded, “but they’ve had scandals like this at other important prep schools, and the press have crucified them. I don’t think Saint Ambrose wants that, particularly in the first year of going co-ed. No one would ever send their daughter there again.”
“Why did it have to happen to our daughter?” he said, his eyes bright with tears. He had cried the whole way east on the plane. He was terrified she’d never recover, and be emotionally scarred for life, which was a possibility. Nancy had been talking about it with Vivienne all afternoon, telling her that she couldn’t let this stop her or make her frightened and bitter. She had to get past it, whatever it took. Taylor Houghton had already called Nancy and told her that the school would pay for all of Vivienne’s medical expenses, and whatever psychiatric counseling she needed later. It was the first thing Chris had heard about the school that he liked. Chris had grown up poor and was a self-made man, and had a visceral dislike for the kind of spoiled, entitled snobs that he felt came out of schools like Saint Ambrose. Nancy had tried to assure him that there was a decent mix of people at the school, not all of them had been born with a silver spoon in their mouth with fathers who had gone to Princeton and Yale, although many had. He’d had a chip on his shoulder about that all his life. He had worked his way through college at night, and made a great deal of money by his wits and business sense, without the benefit of Harvard Business School.
They saw the light go on over Vivienne’s door then, she had rung for the nurse. She was awake. Nancy let Chris go in first. She knew how happy Vivienne would be to see her father. They both burst into tears when they saw each other, and he held her in his arms, and gently stroked her long golden hair, just as he had when she was a little girl. It made Vivienne cry harder when he did it. She felt as though she had let him down by getting drunk the night before, and everything that had come after. She knew better than to get drunk with a bunch of boys, even though her father didn’t know she’d done that.