As for Danny, he didn’t look happy, or like a man in love. He looked awful, Hal thought. Haunted. Miserable.
“Do people know?” he asked. “Your folks?”
“Not yet,” Danny said shortly. “And that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about what happened with that girl, that summer.”
Hal’s brain felt very foggy, like every thought required extra amounts of effort. “Okay.”
“Hal…” Danny rubbed the side of his face. “I think you raped her.”
Hal stared, trying to make sense of the words, trying to fit them into his memories of the night, before shaking his head. “Nah.”
“She was passed out! And Bubs was…” He lowered his voice, looking over his shoulder to make sure that Brad wasn’t listening. “Bubs was holding her down.”
“Nah,” Hal said again, even as he wondered if that was right, and exactly what had happened. The night in question, and the girl in question, had been many nights and many girls ago. “She was drunk. We all were drunk. But I didn’t force her to do anything. She didn’t tell me to stop.”
“I don’t think she could have told you anything,” Danny said, his voice cold. “I don’t think she could talk.”
Hal shook his head, trying to clear it. “Okay,” he said. “Say you’re right. Say I raped her. What’m I supposed to do about it now?”
“I don’t know!” Danny sounded anguished. “Do you know her name? Do you know how we can find her?”
Hal felt a trill of alarm at Danny’s “we.” Did Danny think they were in this together? Was Danny proposing some kind of joint confession? “I’m not sure I knew her name.” Except, just then, it popped up into his mind. Not Dana. Not Delores. Diana. But he was absolutely not sharing that particular factoid with Danny. “I know she worked as a mother’s helper…” Hal could picture the girl, though: her hair, long and brown, the silly sundress she’d worn. He felt another unfamiliar jolt of fear as he considered whether Danny was contemplating anything as stupid as going to the authorities.
“So what’re you going to do?” Hal asked.
“I don’t know,” said Danny, sounding hopeless. “I don’t know if there’s anything we can do. We’ve just got to live with it, I guess.”
Hal shrugged. If Dan wanted to eat himself up with guilt over something that had happened a decade ago, Hal wasn’t going to stop him. He supposed it explained Dan’s life. Working in that shitty public school in Trenton, taking in foster kids and stray puppies, all of it made sense. Dan’s entire life had been atonement, one long act of contrition. The same way, maybe, that Brad Burlingham, now coming off his second stint in rehab, at present trying to drown himself in whiskey, had turned his whole life into an attempt at escape. Which begged the question: What was Hal’s life going to be?
Hal clapped Danny on the shoulder and used the other man’s body to lever himself upright. “You know what we can do? We can clean up our acts. Go forth and sin no more,” he said, his voice loud and confident. As he spoke, he heard an echo of the man he’d met at his fifth reunion. It catches up with you. You need things to keep you on the straight and narrow. A wife, a family. Anchors. It’s time, Hal decided. Time to go forth and sin no more. Time to find some anchors and get his house in order, and claim the glorious future that he deserved.
2019
Hal had been expecting the call ever since Saturday night, and when, at ten in the morning the Monday after the party, his administrative assistant （you couldn’t call them secretaries anymore） said, “I have your brother-in-law on the line,” Hal sighed, mentally spat on his fists, and said, “Put him through.”
Danny sounded just as hysterical as Hal had imagined he would; just as panicked and dismayed. “What are we going to do?”
“About what?” Hal asked.
“About Diana!” Danny shouted. “About the fact that she thinks you raped her, and that I watched, and she’s found us!”
“True. But what can she do?” Hal asked. “Even if she’s got a case about being assaulted—which, legally speaking, is dubious—the statute of limitations in Massachusetts expired years ago. It would be her word against ours.”
“Have you not been reading the news for the last year and a half?” Danny’s voice was shrill. He sounded, Hal thought, like his sister at her most infuriated, and he could feel a headache forming, like a cap tightening around his skull. “People believe women. They believe them more than men.”