Ingrid
1998
Prologue

Feeling returned in stages. And all of it Ingrid was asked to describe to the nurses, the doctors, the female officer from the special victims unit. The searing between her legs. The ache in her back and neck. The pulsing throb of her nose and the acid sting in her throat. It hurt to warm up. As cold as she was, the air felt like knives as she thawed in the hospital bed. They finally gave her a sedative.

“You might’ve died out there,” said the nurse as she tapped the needle. “Can’t believe it’s Halloween. Feels more like Christmas! If that boy hadn’t have… Well.”

The nurse did not say any more about it. She left that conversation to the cop. And converse they did. Like everything Ingrid was asked to talk about, she was asked to talk about it more than once. It was thoughtful to give her a woman detective. Ingrid didn’t know if it was policy or happenstance, but it definitely made sense. It would soften the shame she might feel in recounting the events of the evening. If she could remember the events of the evening.

But nothing came.

Ingrid’s memories stopped about an hour after she’d left her friend Emilia’s house—dressed up as Posh Spice with Em tricked out as Sporty—and before she came to on the cold hard ground.

She remembered walking through the streets, the leaves mostly gone from the trees, big piles of them at the curb.

“Take that!” Em had laughed as she kicked with her fake Doc Martens, sending arcs of leaves flying, unleashing their powdery smell of decay.

Ingrid might have joined her, too, if she hadn’t been wearing sandals that laced all the way up to her knees. She didn’t want to get leaves stuck between her toes, freshly polished as they were in a burgundy shade that was almost black. Chanel’s Vamp was what she’d wanted. Instead she’d made do with Wine Not, Sally Hansen’s knockoff version. Either way, she wasn’t about to ruin the pedicure that had taken her two hours to apply.

She remembered arriving at Kelly Roush’s house where all the lights were blazing, making it look like a stage set in the middle of a dark theater. Like The Streets of Old Detroit, the place she’d always loved at the Detroit Historical Museum. The place that had drawn her in when she was little and made her feel safe. The place that had inspired her to start making shadow boxes when she was nine years old.

She remembered flagging at that moment. Kelly Roush’s house did not make her feel safe. Kelly Roush was popular. She was part of a crowd that Ingrid and Em were not.

“Hey,” Em had said, grabbing her arm and propelling her forward. "Boldness be my friend".

“Shakespeare?”

“Who else to face the Kelly Roushes of the world! And Ing,” Em had paused and turned to her. “How many fucking Halloween parties have we been to in our lives? It’s no big deal.”

She remembered Em had laughed. And she’d laughed too.

Then they had plunged into the foyer, with its blast of heat and smell of sweat and beer. Kids stood everywhere, in the entry hall, in doorways, on the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. The entire school—it felt like the entire town—was there. Ingrid remembered finding it odd that there were so many people she did not know. Or maybe she just hadn’t recognized them, costumed as they were.

Ingrid had paused to observe them. Talking and laughing with each other, looming at her like reflections in a funhouse mirror. Leering versions of sexy nurses and naughty nuns. Ridiculous versions of Elvis in the white jumpsuit and Prince from Purple Rain.

She remembered a guy handing her a drink, the red Solo cup sticky and wet. And maybe she remembered drinking it. But the block of hours after—hours in which she’d remained at the party and then somehow left it to make her way to the high school parking lot—she struggled to retrieve.

And it was those hours in question—four and a quarter of them to be precise—that would be debated by the citizens of her town as they aligned themselves on one side or the other. Those who were inclined to sympathize and those who chose to cast stones.

That night—really it was early morning—in the hospital, Ingrid was asked to describe over and over again what had happened. The detective tried different phrasing. She offered coffee, water, tea. But Ingrid could not imagine drinking anything with the ice pack attached to her nose and the agony in her throat. And none of it helped her remember. She could have saved her the trouble—had she had the courage—and told her this had happened before. These voids in her mental landscape. Not often but enough to scare her. From the ocular migraines she got which began with a blurred-out field in the center of her vision, before moving on to prisms of colored lights that shimmered at its periphery, signaling the onset of the migraine itself. Sometimes—not always—Ingrid would pass out and be left with blanks. Windows of time in which she’d suffered excruciating pain that she simply could not recall.

But never had those blanks lasted hours.

Until tonight. Until sometime after she and Em walked in the door of that party. Until waking up in the parking lot of their school.

At last the hospital drugs kicked in and Ingrid found relief—temporary though it was—from torments both physical and mental. The physical subsided in time. The mental was only just starting.

The breaking of Ingrid’s nose, in the end, was not the worst thing that could have happened. Her nose, which had been crooked since birth in a way her mother found endearing but other kids made fun of, had made her recognizable in a quirky—imperfect—way. But everything changed that night. All it took was a rhinoplasty specialist to break it again and set it straight. And that forced introduction to plastic surgery—violent though it was—was a key that would unlock a series of useful doors.

From the pain of what happened that night—she knew what it was even if she could not remember it—Ingrid gained her eventual status as a great beauty, which became one of her calling cards. That combined with her voice which, like her nose, would be forever altered in a way that would play a part in her destiny.

In the aftermath of Halloween 1998, some argued that sixteen-year-old Ingrid Lind—already in her senior year of high school and young for her grade—had been raped, beaten, and strangled by a sexual predator. Others demurred. They believed she had engaged in a consensual act of erotic asphyxiation. Her assailant—or partner, depending on which side you fell—had used the long pleather straps of her Posh Spice gladiator sandals, which she’d bought at Party City earlier that day, that much she remembered, to tighten around her throat.

The broken nose—for which he’d used his fist according to forensics which found traces of foreign human tissue mixed in with a little make-up— was harder for them to justify. Either way, the first irony was that whatever occurred that night—willing or unwilling—had left Ingrid with damaged vocal chords. Her voice would be forever husky, unable to achieve any volume. It made her sound vulnerable. It made men crazy with desire and aroused in them a longing to protect her. Which brought it to the next level of irony—the fact that Ingrid elicited this protection response from men after what had occurred in an utterly unprotected moment at the hands of a man. But it was her voice, combined with her beauty, that would make her a star.

But all that would come later.

Ingrid never went back to high school. She stayed home with her mother, who abandoned her career in the same way her daughter abandoned her studies. Her father went one step better and, in fairly short order, abandoned the two of them.

Ingrid submitted to one round of surgery to fix her nose and a second to improve a few other flaws in her face. Dr. Wolensky had liked her.

“Ingrid,” he said, peering closely at her nose with the aid of a small ruler. “You could be a beauty. You are very close, really, to having a classically perfect face.”

“That’s funny,” Ingrid said and she would have laughed if she could have. “The kids at school call me Woodstock. Like the bird in Snoopy.”

“I’m quite serious. And I would,” he said, turning to Mrs. Lind, “be honored to perform another surgery or two on your daughter. There’s not much that needs to be done. A few tweaks, if you will. And the results, I think, will surprise you.”

Ingrid looked to her mother but her mom just smiled distractedly.

“There will be no charge,” he added.

That was enough for Ingrid. What did she have to lose? Her mother couldn’t say no, not after everything her daughter had been through.

Luckily, it turned out he knew what he was doing. Ingrid soon became unrecognizable as the girl she once had been. Both inside and—thanks to Dr. Wolensky—out.

Not that anyone saw her. Other than her medical appointments and sitting for the GED, she did not venture beyond the four walls of her house. But when it was over, when she turned eighteen, when she felt like she could leave without leaving a trace, she got out of that nowhere town taking her newly perfect face and her newly imperfect voice along with her. She headed west and changed her name and erased her history, in that age-old American tradition. All she’d had to endure was a little pain and humiliation along the way. She’d dealt with worse. And she would have to deal with it again.

But that would be foreshadowing.