Free A Summons to New Orleans by Barbara Hall Page B

this happened to Simone of all people, who had never put a foot wrong, had never had anything bad happen to her, could negotiate her way out of the tightest spot. Being raped was more like something that would happen to her, Nora. She wasn’t sure whyshe felt that way. Perhaps because she was nearly raped once, in college. She had been so grateful to be in the company of a football player, she actually believed he wanted to leave the party so he could see her apartment. (He said he was looking for a place in that complex.) So she took him there, and the next thing she knew, her hands were being held down, and she was on the bed, and he was on top of her and shushing her. She could not move at all. He could have killed her if he had wanted to, snapped her neck at will. Somehow she thought to bite him, on the cheek. He screamed and jumped up, concerned, no doubt, about his perfect countenance. She ran out and he left. That was all. She never told anyone. Why would she? It had been humiliating, and it had been mostly her fault.
    A distant sense of anger stirred in her, and for the first time she realized that, no, of course it had not been her fault. She took a man to her room, that was all. The rest of it was his crime. And certainly Simone was not to blame for what happened to her. It was horrible, that was all.
    With a jolt, she thought about her encounter with the two men the night before. What if they weren’t going to mug her at all? What if they had had something else in mind? Now she was scared, and she pictured Leo Girardi’s round, reassuring face, and she felt immensely grateful and affectionate toward him. She wanted to track him down and give him a bigger tip.
    A knock on the door made her sit up, her heart hammering. But it was only Poppy, of course, coming to see how she was doing.
    “I’m all right. It’s Simone we should be worried about,” Nora said.
    “She’s taking a nap, but I couldn’t sleep.”
    “Me either.”
    Poppy moved into the room and began pacing. Her usually neat hair was disheveled and it swung around her face, obscuring her expression. She fingered her silver cross and stared at the carpet as she walked.
    “What are we going to do?” she asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “We have to do something about this,” Poppy said.
    “Well, we’re going to the trial, I guess.”
    “Yes, but we have to take care of her. We have to make sure she’s okay.”
    “I don’t know how to do that.”
    “Me either,” Poppy said. “I’ve been praying for her, ever since we got back from lunch. But that is so . . . nothing. Prayer is not really a useful exercise. God is going to do what He wants, and all we can do is ask for the strength and wisdom to understand it.”
    Nora said, “I don’t really believe in God.”
    “I know, but that doesn’t matter to Him.”
    “It doesn’t?”
    Poppy shook her head. “His grace is there, whether we believe in it or not.”
    “I think Simone will be okay,” Nora said, eager to get off this subject. “She seems pretty together. She’s had some counseling.”
    “You don’t understand, Nora. You really don’t. When something like this happens, it gets inside you and it festers. You start to nurture it, the bad feeling, because you’re so afraid if you let it go, it will come back and kill you.”
    “How do you know? Has anything like this ever happened to you?”
    Poppy stopped pacing and looked at her with an expression of mild surprise. Nora rummaged through her brain, trying to recall some dark part of her history Poppy might have onceshared in college. Some awful fact revealed over too many beers at a party or in a bar. God knows what Poppy had once told her that she had forgotten, or had never absorbed in the first place. Nora had been so preoccupied in college, so intent on getting good grades and graduating and marrying Cliff. It was completely possible that all manner of important information about her friends had skimmed the surface of