by B S Steele
“Okay, guys, let’s get going,” I yelled down the stairs, knowing full well they’d been waiting on me for over a half hour.
“Ready when you are!” David yelled back.
I was so ready to see all my family, and to share a few intimate dances with David. Romance had been mainly through letters and phone calls for the last four months. I felt truly beautiful and happy in that moment.
Chapter 32: I Do
“Do you, Emma Rose, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
The Preacher asked. Emma paused a moment, soaking in the reverence of the moment, as she looked into her handsome fiancée’s eyes.
He was striking in his Army uniform. His medals and ribbons glinted in the light that shone down on the two of them.
“I do.” She said, smiling widely.
Her white dress graced her thin frame, her dark hair swept up into a romantic up-do that accented her porcelain skin. She looked as beautiful as I’d ever seen her.
“And do you, Bradley, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
Without hesitation, Emma’s fiancée echoed her own promise.
I handed my sister the ring I’d been hiding under my bouquet and took her flowers as she slipped the gold ring onto Bradley’s hand. Her own diamond glinted and glittered as he slid it on her slender finger.
They kissed as the Pastor blessed their marriage with the words as old as time.
“I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
Our whole family clapped and whistled, my heart swelling with pride as I looked tearfully at my Mother in the crowd, and at each of the faces of our family members.
As Emma and Brad hopped off the stage, hand in hand, the wedding party followed, all ready to pile into the limo waiting outside. We toasted to the bride and groom, raising our champagne glasses high, and headed off on the highway towards the promise of awkward toasts and even more embarrassing dance moves in the night ahead.
Chapter 33: Guns and Roses
The scissors made the only sounds in the house as Michael slept soundly upstairs. David had flown back to Texas to finish tech school. We’d decided to downsize to a small two-bedroom townhouse while he was away, saving money for our pending duty station in Florida.
I traced the Air Force symbol onto navy blue cardstock, and sprinkled silver glitter on top watching the way the sparkles caught the light as it clung to the star shapes I’d cut out. My heart skipped a beat at the thought of how David would be so surprised when I led him through the doors of the local VFW hall, to his very own welcome home party.
David was an emotional man. He’d even tear up over sad animal movies. I adored that quality about him. He’d grown up rough, and I’d made it my mission to show him that he could always count on me. I wanted him to know that there was a secure anchor for his heart that would never fail him.
My entire family would all be in on the surprise, and since the death of my Dad, it would be a special tribute, because it would be the first time the family would come together after his funeral and Emma’s wedding.
We all needed the distraction and if my family had anything to do with it, there would be no lack of helping hands to decorate or cook. Invitations with a photo I’d snapped of David at his boot camp graduation were stacked to my left, and a display board celebrating his achievements was decorated with flags and candid pictures of him marching with his flight.
The phone rang, disturbing the silence in the house. I jumped up, feeling excited. David often called late, after his long days in class at the Air Force Academy. I couldn’t be prouder of him, or more excited for the future that lay ahead of us. After all we’d been through, things were finally starting to come together.
“Hello?” I said, smiling mischievously into the receiver.
I was horrible at keeping secrets.
“Hey,” a tearful female voice echoed back.
“Emma?” My sister rarely called me this late. “What’s wrong?”
My gut lurched, and my thoughts raced, thinking the worst.
“I-I have a gun,” she whispered.
“What?! Why?! Jesus, what is going on?!” I exclaimed.
“I can’t live with myself anymore.” She said, her voice breaking. “I’m a bad person.”
My sister had just gotten married to a man she was certainly in love with, and while I knew that she was still grieving over the loss of our Dad, this was extreme for her. I couldn’t imagine how she could have gotten so depressed so close to something so beautiful. As far as I knew, things were going well for her. My first reaction was to jump in my car and drive to her.
“Emma, just do me a favor and put the gun down. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is worth giving up your life,” I said as my panic rose.
“That’s because you don’t know what I’ve done,” she said darkly.
“Whatever it is, I’m sure it can be forgiven. Just tell me what is going on.” I said cautiously.
“It has to do with David,” she said quietly.
My heart sank. After all I’d been through, I wasn’t sure I could handle more.
“Tell me. I deserve to know,” I said, my voice carrying an edge.
Silence.
“Did you guys have sex?” I asked pointedly.
I wasn’t known for sugar coating things.
“Sort of,” she sniffled.
“What do you mean, sort of?” I asked in disbelief.
The blood drained from my face, the scissors slipping from my hand as I rose to my feet.
“Well, it didn’t last long. It just happened so fast,” she admitted.
I crumpled to the floor, the room spinning. All the oxygen knocked from my lungs.
Why, why, why??? My thoughts raced.
She rambled on, telling me how they had been in the basement of the house we had shared together, while I was away at my college class. She’d been washing laundry and hanging out on the basement couch with him, while he played video games.
My mind repeated my Mother’s words, a flashback from that time:
“There’s something not right with Emma and David. . . You know I caught her wearing his shirt? That’s just not something you do with another woman’s husband. . .”
I squeezed my eyes shut. I hated that she’d been right and loved her for trying to protect me all at the same time.
“I’ve hated myself ever since. I’ve wanted to tell you so many times, but I didn’t want to ruin your marriage. You know how much I love Michael. I didn’t want to tear everything apart over something so stupid. That’s why in those last few months I lived with you guys, David and I were always fighting. We hated each other for what we’d done.”
I let her continue, feeling like I was going to be sick.
How could he do this to me? With my own sister of all people?! Was it because she was more beautiful than me? Younger? Because she’d never had a baby? Maybe he was disgusted by my ruined stomach and stretch marks. . .
“It started way before that, though. The night that we had that bonfire when you guys lived next to Mom and our stepdad is where it all began,” she said quietly.
“What?! You were sixteen! And I was seven months pregnant!” I yelled.
“I know, and I didn’t mean for it to ever go that way. I was young and I just liked the attention. He was older, and he seemed so cool. When we kissed by the fire it was all so exciting. Until he came into my room later than night.”
“WHAT?!” I said, my voice cracking.
“He came in Mom and dad’s house, after everyone was asleep. He climbed up the stairs, past dad into my room. I was lying in bed, and he came over and started fondling my body under the covers. I got scared and told him no. Dad was asleep in the next room, and it felt so wrong, but he didn’t listen. He just kept grabbing at me, and the next thing I know, he was. . . you know, touching himself. He came right on the floor, right on the carpet, and then just left.”
That sick fucking bastard! That’s statutory rape.
. . I ought to have him beaten! To creep into my parent’s house in the middle of the night, right past my sleeping stepdad! Would to God he’d have woken up and shot him then and there!
“After that night, I avoided him. Nothing ever happened again, until I was eighteen when I lived with you guys. At first it was just harmless flirting, and sometimes we’d talk about how you made us mad. Then one night we kissed again, and I walked away telling him it was wrong. Firstly, Michael was sleeping upstairs, and secondly, you’re my sister. I went to finish the laundry, and he just came up behind me. Thirty seconds later, it was over.”
I put the phone down in my lap, gulping in air. The decorations in front of me seemed to be taunting me, garish and gaudy in the dim light. David’s smiling photograph seemed to be mocking me. Instead of handsome, he seemed ugly and monstrous, staring up at me from his photo on the floor.
“Anna? Please say something. I feel like the world’s worst person.”
I can’t believe they both let me stand up in her wedding next to him, both knowing they fucked while my son slept in his room! While I sat in class, trying to better our lives. I’m such a fool! How will I ever heal from this? How can I look him in the eyes? How will I face my family? How will my son cope with a father who tore apart his family at its very foundation?
I lifted the phone back to my ear, my heart filled with questions and grief. It wasn’t fair that my sister had the perfect husband and that I seemed to be cursed with a messed-up life that never seemed to get quite on the right track.
What had I done to deserve this?
“Emma, I love you. I am so hurt right now; I’m going to need some time. But you need to know that I forgive you. I forgave you the moment you told me. You’ve tortured yourself enough for the both of us, and me hating you won’t make this easier.”
I could hear her sobbing in relief and remorse.
“I love you too,” she said in a tearful voice. I’m sorry that I was so spiteful and jealous. I’ll never understand that part of myself.”
The phone beeped. Another call was coming in. It was David.
“Hold on Emma, I really need to talk to David. He’s calling in. Please just put the gun away, and seriously, it will be okay.”
She sniffed, sounding more confident.
“Okay. I won’t do anything stupid. . . and Anna?” her voice wavered, “I love you.”
“I love you too, and I’m sorry David treated you like that. It was his marriage to protect, and it was his failure. I still need time, because as my sister, you had a responsibility too, but we will be okay.”
I switched over the lines and heard David’s bright and cheerful voice. “Hey Honey! How are things going?”
“Well, other than my sister calling me threatening to shoot herself, great.” I said, my voice low and acidic.
“Huh? Why? What’s wrong with her?” He asked, sounding concerned.
“She told me David. She told me everything.”
I paused, listening to the deafening silence.
“I know all about you two, and I’m just going to ask you once. . . why?”
A long pause, followed by, “Hold on, I’ll call you right back.”
I stared at the phone in disbelief. He’d hung up on me. Probably to call my sister and find out exactly what she’d told me.
The dead phone line said it all. Right now, I really, really needed my Mom and Dad.
Chapter 34: Deeper Down We Go
In the following weeks I had to really consider what my marriage meant to me, and if my relationship with David had any chance of surviving. I drug myself through the days, taking care of Michael. I poured myself into him, taking every moment to soak in the joy that only a small child can give.
I had flashbacks of every struggle, every highlight I could imagine. I thought about how David had looked at me the first moment he saw me after eight weeks of grueling boot camp. I’d stood there in the blazing Texas sun, wearing a yellow tank top and twenty pounds lighter than he’d last seen me.
Yellow was his favorite color on me, and I’d worn a short skirt paired with matching sandals. The moment he saw me, he just stopped, his eyes full of love and awe. He’d looked at me many times that way, and it always filled me with a warmth that nothing else did.
In my heart of hearts, I felt that he loved me. He’d always struggled within himself, to love unselfishly. I thought about how we had stood in the hotel room, alone for the first time in weeks. How I’d pressed my bare breasts against his back and felt him shiver in pleasure. We made love, the purity of our unwritten and bright future ahead of us. David and I were connected in a way that most couples never were.
We understood the self-loathing that came from a strained and abusive childhood. His father was a hard man, and hated David from the moment he was born. David’s twin brother had died before birth, leaving his father to blame him for simply surviving. Many times, his father had beat him until his back was bruised and welted. He was forced to live in a home where his father’s affection for his older sister crossed boundaries no child should ever be forced to understand.
Like me, David had escaped his family and lived as a teenager in the care of a loving Christian family. He’d been left with deep wounds that took years of healing. When we found each other, it was like meeting the other half of ourselves. There were times when it was like we could read each other’s minds, and we’d laugh out of the blue, knowing what the other was thinking.
We worked like a machine, always knowing what the other needed, without saying a word. We were crazy, sexual, and deeply connected by a spiritual thread that seemed unbreakable.
Despite all of this, I knew that this wasn’t okay. I couldn’t go on like he hadn’t killed every ounce of trust I had. I thought about the times David had left me when I needed him the most. How he’d been so excited to become a father, but then told me I was on my own.
I could never understand the highs and lows. One moment so bright, the next being consumed by a darkness so thick, hope was the only candle to light our way. He was a rollercoaster of indecision and pulling me down into an abyss of uncertainty and pain.
I’d tried my best to move past the heartaches. Like the time he tore apart our whole house, dragging my wedding gown into the yard to burn it. I was a fighter, and I’d always stood up to his tantrums, just like I’d stood up to my Mother as a child. I was determined to show him that love was unconditional, and to give him the strength to be the man I knew he could be.
I constantly questioned my sanity. Or if I was simply repeating the cycle of abuse in some twisted attempt to atone for my own lack of self-love.
We’d lived in nearly empty apartments. Slept on a mattress in a rundown trailer, lived on cheap bread and even cheaper TV dinners. We’d went from the poorest of poor, to living in a quarter million-dollar house. We’d taken on the responsibility of our younger sisters, acting as parents to them when we ourselves were struggling to grow up.
We’d take each other to the top, just to drag each other to the precipice of disaster. When Michael was about eight months old, I remember my cousin coming to my house. She told me that while I’d been in the hospital in preterm labor, he’d come to her house drunk, and tried to sleep with her. She’d only been fifteen years old, and I didn’t want to believe her. What a fool I’d been.
Friends came out of the woodwork, telling me that he had been inappropriate with them, flirting while I was getting steroid shots, pills, and no sleep in the long and cold midnight hours of the hospital.
It broke my heart, but I pushed on, listening to him tell me that he would change. When the day came that I had a chance to cheat on him, I sat there, the handsome Army Reserve man looking at me with his dark eyes, and I couldn’t. I just didn’t have it in me. I recalled all the violence between myself and David, holed up into the late hours of the night.
My son didn’t see it, but I knew it affected him. I chose over and over to stay, and my family did their best to support me. Da
vid begged me to give him yet another chance. He told me that boot camp had changed him, and that he’d seen for the first time, what he really had. Being away from me for so long had shown him how much he loved me, and how much he needed his family. He told me that I deserved this new adventure with him. A new house, a new life away from all the horrible memories.
Two weeks later, we packed up our car, and left Michigan behind us forever. We left on a cold night in October, the snow lightly falling for the first time that year. As I held Michael bundled up in his winter coat, I looked up at the dark sky, the streetlamps catching the sparkling snowflakes.
“Say bye-bye to the snow, Michael. There is no snow in Florida.” I said to him, his large green and blue eyes looking at me curiously.
“Bye, bye snow,” he echoed.
My Mother came to see us off and met us at a gas station just minutes from our house. She stood by the gas pump smiling sadly, yet excited for my new life. I’d been itching to leave this town since I’d come back to it.
“Here, I bought you guys some coffee and donuts.” She said, handing me the treats. “Don’t worry about the gas. I’ll pay for your first fill up.”
“Aw, thanks Mom,” I said, crushing her in a hug.
“I’ll call you when we get there. There is a point of contact that is supposed to meet us, and show us where to go, Sergeant Little Bear or something,” I said, smiling.
“Okay, well, just make sure to let everyone know, and send us pictures!” She said, returning my squeeze.
The trip was long, and by the time we reached the Sunshine State, David and I were bleary-eyed and more than ready to see our new home. We’d done everything online and were riding on the suggestions of his new First-Shirt who would be our go-to lady for all our needs while we were at our new Duty Station.
David would be working in Technician Department, and we’d chosen to live outside of the Air Force base in a large, beautiful apartment complex with a pool and a clubhouse.