CHAPTER FOUR
She stared out the small window as the airplane drew her closer and closer to Iowa. As predicted, she had slept very little, always certain she would open her eyes to find...what? An apparition? The man who didn’t exist but had taken her virginity from her?
The very idea was preposterous, yet she found an anger boiling inside that could not be ignored. How could she believe he’d done so when he couldn’t possibly have been there? The evidence had been in favor of the fact that it had, indeed, happened. The doctor had told her it was possible for a girl to be born without a hymen, but that with her that was most definitely not the case. Hers had been torn by penetration, and there was only one explanation: something had entered her.
Now as she looked back on it, she wondered if the doctor had figured her for some kind of weirdo sticking inanimate objects into her body and then lying about it when caught with the evidence staring her…or at least staring him…right in the face. She knew she’d never done anything to herself, having had no idea prior to that night that that particular area of her body was for anything more than peeing. She cringed as the full force of her naivety at that age really hit her and resolved that if she ever had children of her own, she’d be damn sure they didn’t find out about the birds and the bees from a junior health class but were properly educated by her.
She wondered if she had known more at the time, would she have tried to stop it? Would she have fought him? Would she have known that what he was doing was rape? Her face flushed. Had it really been rape? She’d been a willing, if uneducated, participant. She’d even told him it was what she wanted. But she hadn’t known what she’d been saying. What she’d wanted was love. Acceptance. Someone to hold and call her own. She had been so lonely, such an outcast, so ostracized and hated by her own family. By the time she’d said yes to the stranger in her room, he’d already taken the one thing from her that should’ve been her choice to lose.
More and more, Jane started feeling like a complete idiot. First for even contemplating that he had been more than a dream, and second for not understanding what was happening to her back then. That she’d had sex before she even knew what it was now gnawed at her even as her brain told her she was wrong, that there had to be some other logical explanation. But if there was, why would the man who’d come to her throughout her childhood now be returning? She’d last seen him on the cusp of her nineteenth birthday, and then it had only been a brief sighting, once again, from inside her closet when she’d been home from college for Winter Break.
Eighteen years later he was back. And that could only mean that her dark side needed to be let out. She wondered at the intelligence of returning to the place of her childhood now, of all times, with these memories rearing their ugly heads. And yet, what better place for her to deal with the secrets she’d buried than where the events had unfolded? Maybe this was just happening to show her that she did need to make this trip. She did need to confront her past so she could move beyond it to whatever the future held.
She leaned back in her window seat and closed her eyes as the plane began to descend, praying she’d made the right decision. Because whatever was going to happen in Darvon, Iowa, she had an idea it wasn’t going to be easy.
* * *
As the rented car sped along the two-lane road she noted the tractors out in the field, tilling it in preparation for the spring planting. The sweet smell of an early thunderstorm wafted through the windows and she inwardly jumped for joy. Thunderstorms were something from her childhood that she had enjoyed, even going so far as to stand outside in them. Nothing but the grace of the heavens had kept her from getting struck by lightning, but she had been fearless as a child and the crash of thunder and streaks of lightning had made her feel alive.
It was some sort of animalistic response to the power of a storm, she knew. It came from deep inside her, but she had no idea why she was so drawn to the darkened clouds, the large drops of rain, the concert only Nature could put on. Even as a toddler, her grandmother had once told her, she had laughed and giggled where anyone else her age was cowering in fear. She had wanted to be at the window watching instead of hiding under the bed. And she remembered standing or sitting at her bedroom window for hours when the storms would hit. Getting a thrill every time a tornado watch or warning was flashed over the television screen, loving it when the lights went out and left the house silent. For then, all could be heard.
One storm in particular had been extraordinarily exciting. Exciting until it had turned deadly. It had been a whopper. She was seventeen, and had been walking up the stairs to the second floor when she was drawn to the light show out the small window on the landing. She’d gone to stand there, eyes glued to the sky as jagged streaks came one right after another. And that’s when the light had flashed before her eyes, blinding her. A loud crash of thunder accompanied the event and when she opened her eyes she saw spots and the lights in the house had gone out.
* * *
“Dad!” she’d yelled, running down the steps. “I think lightning just hit something!”
Her father had ordered her to stay inside while he went out in the rain to investigate. Soon he’d come rushing back telling her stepmother to call the police, that Fran Carrington’s house had been hit by lightning and he had no idea if she was home. Fran was an elderly woman who lived alone two houses down. Jane wondered at her safety, but was prevented from further thought by a squeal of brakes and the most deafening thud she’d ever heard. The ground beneath their feet shook as her father darted back out the front door and down the walk to the front sidewalk.
“Truck’s down!” he yelled back. “Tell your mother!” And with that, he had disappeared into the darkness.
“No!” she’d cried. “Dad!”
“What’s going on?” her stepmother had asked, rushing in from the kitchen.
“Dad said a truck was down!”
“Oh, no,” Mavis Marsh had breathed. She grabbed the phone where she’d just hung it up and dialed the police again.
But Jane didn’t hear the conversation. She had to see for herself what was happening. She ran through the front door and out onto the sidewalk, looking down toward the right of their picture-perfect Midwestern small town street. The scene fascinated her. An electrical wire had come down from a telephone pole and was dancing and sparking all over the small two-lane road that ran right in front of her house. In the midst of its smoke she saw her father running toward a large object in the middle of the road. She jogged closer until she realized what it was.
A tanker truck had overturned in the road and blocked the entire thing. “Get back!” she heard someone yell. “It’s leaking gas!” The electrical wire continued its snakelike dance on the pavement, bouncing closer to the truck and then backwards. “Get back!” the man yelled again. She couldn’t tell who it was.
That was when she caught sight of her father again. He was scrambling up over the hood of the gigantic semi cab, feet slipping against its slick surface. At last he made it up so he was standing atop the driver’s door. “Dad!” she yelled, starting to run toward him. She suddenly felt hands on her, however, and turned to find her next-door neighbor, Brent, holding her back. “I have to help my dad!” she yelled, fighting against his hold.
“No, Jane,” Brent said, grip tightening. “It’s too dangerous.”
“But he’s my father!” she had cried. Brent held her fast.
She watched, fear clutching her heart, as her father pulled the truck driver out. He seemed to be okay, she thought, as her father helped lower him to outstretched arms below. Come on, Dad, get down. Get out of there. Mesmerized, she saw the dancing electrical wire off to the side but only had eyes for her father’s soaking wet form. He moved to slide down the hood of the truck to the ground, but in a flash, he disappeared from sight. In a flash he, and the truck, were gone.
Later she found out that the wire had ignited leaking gas, and it had been a matter of seconds before the flames traveled to
the tanker, which had been filled with fuel. It had exploded. Right there in front of her, her father had died. All she remembered of the next few months was hysterical crying, constantly asking why her father had been taken from her. Swearing that no God would ever have taken someone dedicated to spreading Christianity. That no God would leave her alone with a stepmother who hated her and stepbrothers who knew it.
Her father, though weak in his ability to counter his second wife, had been all she had. Moments of tenderness here and there had served to give her what little love she could get from the relationship, but regardless, she had loved him deeply. He was touted as a hero, giving his life for someone he didn’t know. The papers ran stories about it for three weeks until, like all hot flashes in the pan, he’d been relegated further and further into small print on the back pages until at last all talk of the Man of God’s heroism disappeared.
Clucking tongues and shaking heads greeted them wherever they’d gone, and it had been right before her senior year ended that her stepmother had moved the family to Ohio to be closer to her own mother. Jane hadn’t wanted to go, for their home, the town she lived in, everything there in Iowa was her father. It was where she had feared and hated him, but also the only place she’d ever known him. She didn’t want to leave that behind. She didn’t want to switch schools for the last four months of high school, but she had had no choice in the matter. Amid few farewells and more regrets than anyone could list, Jane had left Iowa behind. She had not been back since.
* * *
Jane came out of the awful past to find that tears were running down her cheeks as quickly as water ran down her windshield. When had it begun to rain? She hadn’t even noticed. Where was she? She saw farm lights in the distance and then finally a green sign telling her it was ten more miles to Darvon.
“Dad,” she whispered, grabbing a tissue from her purse and wiping her face. “How could I have forgotten?”
For Jane realized she had. Not that her father had been killed, of course, but the details – that’s what she’d been missing. Her heart ached for the man who had been a hero. A man she’d always thought of as spineless, who’d turned out to be nothing of the sort. And that, she suddenly knew, was why the Tanners in her books were so heroic in the face of danger. She was recreating her father not only in John Tanner, but in his sons as well. Recreating the father she’d known far too little time with. The father who had lost his wife – her mother – and then later, his own life. She had been orphaned that day.
And as her thoughts filled with him, she knew the first place she was going when she hit Darvon. The only place her father had ever truly seemed at home: his church.
CHAPTER FIVE
Built in the 1800s, the First Baptist Church of Darvon was considered a historical landmark in the state of Iowa. The doors were never locked. Nothing bad ever happened in this tiny town. They certainly didn’t need to worry about vandals or homeless people using it for their own purposes. At least, they hadn’t back when Jane had lived here. As she parked the rented Taurus on the street, she wondered if that were still the case. She got out of the car, pausing to look across the street at the large, three-story white house that had been her childhood home. The window on the far corner of the second floor had been her bedroom. How many times had she looked out of it upon the church and thought how she hated it? Hated what it represented? Hated the hypocrisy she’d found so rampant inside and outside its walls?
The religious would come to church every Sunday, to Bible Study every Wednesday, to potlucks once a month. They would read their bibles, piously say their prayers and take communion the first Sunday of every month. They sang in the choir, they talked of miracles and God and Jesus. Of how much they loved Him and followed His path. They were baptized and taught Sunday School and Vacation Bible School. All the right things were said and done whenever they were in the building. But these very same men and women who denounced Satan once or twice a week were then out at bars getting drunk and screwing each others’ wives the next night. Talking trash, using curse words…something Jane had been taught was wrong for a Christian.
Watching these people as she had grown up had made her question that which was drilled into her head from the time she could understand the spoken word. And questioning the validity of her father’s teachings had in turn led to her questioning his character. Many hours she had contemplated a man who claimed to be a man of God, and how it was that such a man could counsel couples in trouble, minister to parents on the treatment of their children and tend to the sick and needy in hospitals and on their death beds, when inside his own home there were far worse things taking place than anyone knew.
She’d once had a teacher suspect some sort of abuse, but Jane had been taught that she was treated the way she was because she was second-class. She wasn’t her stepmother’s child and she was therefore not worthy of her love. It didn’t occur to Jane until she was in college that perhaps people weren’t supposed to speak to their children the way she’d been spoken to. That maybe chipping away at a child’s ego until they had no self-esteem whatsoever was not normal. That being whipped with a belt for hugging your maternal grandmother too long was extreme and illogical. And that with two half-brothers in the very next room, having your door taken clean off its hinges at age thirteen simply because you’d locked yourself inside to avoid a beating was unconscionable.
So when Mrs. Koch had asked if she were being abused at home, Jane had replied, honestly, no. After all, she didn’t know that she was. Mrs. K. had always kept trying, and had always been kind, which was why Jane knew she’d liked her so much, aside from the encouragement about her writing. When she was about twenty, her maternal grandmother had even told her she and her grandfather had contemplated trying to take her away from her father and stepmother numerous times because they knew she was being abused. But the lawyers they’d seen had advised against it. In the absence of huge bruises and a history of broken bones or fractures, there was every chance that a judge would rule against them, and even more of a chance that Jane’s parents would get an order forbidding her grandparents to see her at all. And so they had decided that to see her once a year was better than never seeing her again. A painful decision, her grandmother had said, but the best hope they had.
Jane remembered as she stood in front of the church, rain soaking her hair and clothing, the story her grandmother told her once about how she’d been in her arms getting hugs and kisses when her stepmother had come into the room and raised holy hell about it. She’d sent Jane to her room and an hour later, when her grandmother had snuck upstairs to check on her, she’d found her curled into the fetal position in the middle of her bed, asleep. It had been the saddest sight she’d ever seen, her grandmother told her. Sad because she knew that day by day the little girl was being beaten down, maybe not always at the end of a belt or a hand, but emotionally and psychologically.
Remarkable, she thought as she touched the handle of one of the front double glass doors, that she’d made it into any type of normal adulthood, considering. The door opened easily beneath her hand. No, they still didn’t lock it.
She walked into the foyer and noted the same musty smell as when she was younger. It seemed nothing had changed. She walked completely into the foyer and further up the medium-sized flight of stairs that led to the sanctuary. Lined with light gray carpet, the walkway stood in contrast to the old, but well-polished hardwood floor beneath the four sections of ornately carved wooden pews. Red carpeting, looking somewhat newer than the gray one in the foyer, lined the aisles and in the back of the church flashes of lightning briefly lit a large stained glass window of Christ walking through the woods holding a lantern. God, she remembered it so well. How she had stood there as a little girl looking at the colored bits of glass and wondering at the work it had taken to put them all up for such a detailed picture.
The place still felt like her father. In the months following his death, before they’d taken off for northern Ohio, she’d spe
nt most of her waking and sometimes a lot of her sleeping hours in this sanctuary. She could see her father at the front atop the raised dais, standing behind the pulpit during one of his sermons. She remembered sometimes coming upon him on Saturdays as he practiced for the next morning. To the left, behind the pulpit, was where the choir sat. Between the choir box and the pulpit was the small piano. God, it seemed nothing had changed. How could that old thing even work anymore?
To the right of the dais was the old Wurlitzer organ. In the center of it all was the wooden altar upon which was inscribed This is my body broken for you. There were lilies all over the dais and on the altar. It was only then that Jane remembered Easter had been just last Sunday. How things had changed in her life. Easter had always been a big event with a sunrise service out in the park just beyond the edge of town, followed by a potluck breakfast and then the Sunday service proper back here. To the right was a smaller room filled with folding chairs, used for overflow. In her life, she could only remember having seen it used once. Its accordion doors were open, and frosted glass made it impossible to see out its windows.
Behind the altar, the same brass organ pipes still clung to the wall. She walked up the aisle about halfway and turned around in a circle, unable to believe it all still looked like this. It was as though she’d never left. Continuing forward, she moved through a door to the left of the dais. There were three pictures lining the hall she entered. The very first was a somewhat faded painting of a small girl walking alone on a path through a forest whose trees had lost all their leaves. Faintly painted in behind her was what she knew was supposed to be a guardian angel. The angel’s hand was on the girl’s head, and all around forest animals had gathered to watch the girl and her angel pass. On the wooden frame beneath the painting was a small brass plate with engraved letters. It was a bit dusty, so she rubbed it with her arm and leaned in for a closer look. It said: IN MEMORY OF KATHERINE MARSH.
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