27 Revelations

by Harlow Hayes

Chapter 13

  A couple of weeks had passed and July was in full swing. I loved July, but it, like everything since the attack, felt tainted. My days were teetering between good and bad, and when I was alone with no external distractions, the bad seemed to be all that there was. The moments that were the darkest were the moments when I wished I no longer existed. When I wished I could just fall asleep one night and drift away into death. My psyche, however, wouldn’t allow myself to wallow in that idea for too long because something would always pull me back. I don’t know whether it was an evolutionary survival instinct for the mind to try to think positively when thoughts of death arrived, but I was always pulled away from its grips.

  Still, I saw, all around me, people living their happy lives—or at least what appeared to be a happy life—and I was the person in the glass box standing in the middle of all this happiness, unable to touch, hear, feel it, or get even a taste. Each moment of laughter was snatched away from me in an instant, which only aided in proving how cruel life was to offer me only a drop of water when I was dying of thirst. Jennifer shared the same sentiment. Life had been cruel to her as well, but unlike myself, she was fortunate enough to receive more than a water droplet.

  “Tell me about your husband, Jennifer. What kind of man is he?” I asked, my big chair conforming to my body.

  “He’s my best friend, and I can say that with confidence. He is my greatest gift because he lets me be me,” she said.

  “Really? What does he do, specifically?”

  “Stew has never tried to change me, never, not in all these years of marriage. I rarely cook, I’m a horrible housekeeper, but he lets me be that. He wants me to be me, and at the end of the day he’s the guy I want to sit on the patio with and I’m the girl he wants to sit next to.”

  “It seems that you are a lucky lady, then,” I said.

  “Well, I didn’t think I would get him, that’s for sure. When I met him I didn’t even like him that much. As a young girl, I was too busy having fun. You know, you’re a young girl yourself. I just gave too much of my time to the wrong guys, so I was older when I met Stew, like twenty-nine. I know that’s still young for you, but back then if you weren’t married by then you were an old maid.”

  I chuckled a bit.

  “If I told you the truth, it would be that I settled for Stew, but it was the best decision I ever made.”

  “Why do you say you settled?”

  “I guess at the time he didn’t meet my definition of high profile, and I wanted high profile. You know, the good job, the good looks, the good sex, the ‘bad boy that turned good because I loved him’ kind of crap. You know, a good challenge. I guess that’s how I got my kicks back then.” She reached for her cup of tea that sat on the cocktail table.

  “Don’t we all love a challenge,” I said, gazing at her face. “What about some of your other relationships? What about your relationship with your parents? Are they still living?”

  “Yeah, they are still down in Texas. My dad has Alzheimer’s and my mom does her best to take care of him, but they had to recently hire some extra help.”

  “What is your relationship with them?”

  “Well, my mother and I talk pretty regularly, but my dad and I have never really gotten along. He was very controlling and domineering while I was growing up, and to be honest I don’t know how my mother stayed married to the bastard for so long.” She leaned back into the sofa.

  “What did he do that was controlling to you?” I asked.

  “Well, I remember a time when I was about ten and my mother had ‘found’ religion and wanted to take us to church, and that pissed him off, so he went on a rampage through the house, throwing everything that was light enough to lift in his drunkenness.”

  “Was your father an alcoholic?” I asked.

  “If you ask him, no, but he never could own up to anything, even when his wrongs were obvious.” Her eyes darkened. “I remember one day I caught him kissing Mrs. Blackwell in the alleyway next to our house, and he tried every lie he could to convince me I didn’t see what I saw and threatened to whip me good if I told my mother.”

  “Who was Mrs. Blackwell?”

  “Sorry, she was our very married slut of a neighbor. She had about a gazillion kids and I don’t think any of them were her husband’s, but she and her husband would come over on Sundays and play bridge with my parents, and the whole time she was screwing my dad and smiling in my mother’s face. Then when my mom got hip to it, she had a little liaison of her own with Mr. Blackwell and all hell broke loose. When it was all said and done, we had to move because my dad created such as scene. He was such a hypocrite.”

  When time started to wind down, Jennifer and I wrapped things up, and once she was gone I laid across the loveseat, reeling from our conversation. It amazed me how much of myself I saw in her. A woman that was twice my age. I wished at times I was born knowing better or that I was special and didn’t have to live and learn but already had all the knowledge I needed about life from birth, but I wasn’t that girl. Each day was something else and whether that something else was good or bad didn’t make a difference because I still had a life to live, and whether it was painful or not, I had to live through it. Jennifer’s pain might have happened at a different time, in a different place, but the story was the same, and it connected us.

  * * *

  “What were you thinking? Could you please tell me that?” my father demanded.

  I leaned against the car window while my dad drove.

  “Did you not think about us at all? You mother and I? Your family? What an embarrassment.” I could feel the anger radiating off of his skin.

  “Dad, I’m hundreds of miles away, no one is going to see your pregnant daughter, plus I’m not even showing yet,” I said.

  “Yeah, not yet.” He focused his eyes on the road.

  “Look, I came home for Christmas… I don’t want to be arguing about this,” I said.

  “Yeah, the only reason you came home was because your sad-ass excuse of a boyfriend doesn’t want anything to do with you now. You let that white boy experiment with you, knock you up, and look at where you are and where he’s at. You are nothing more than the black slut he brags to his friends about. You’re alone, Mara, and he’s out living his life carefree.”

  I could feel my face getting hot. I was tired of his comments, but I thought about my mother in my anger and decided to take the high road.

  “Let’s not talk about this,” I said. “Just get me home.”

  “Well, I’m going to tell you this now, if I see his ass I’m going to break his neck.”

  I shook my head and sat in silence.

  We rode on for several more minutes and I dozed off, tired from my flight in. When the car came to a stop I opened my eyes, but we weren’t home.

  “Let’s go,” he said. He opened the driver’s side door.

  “Let’s go? Where are we going?” I asked, irritated that we still weren’t home.

  “You have an appointment,” he said as he unbuckled his seatbelt.

  I looked out my window. We were sitting in front of the abortion clinic.

  “Get out of the car, Mara,” he ordered.

  “Have you lost your goddamn mind? I am not getting out of this car!” I yelled back.

  “Watch your mouth and get your narrow ass out of this car right now before I drag you out.”

  “I told you I was keeping it. I’m keeping my baby, you bastard.”

  He looked at me like he wanted to break my neck.

  “You’re nineteen, you don’t know anything. Keeping that baby will destroy you—”

  “Oh, please. You don’t give a shit about me or my baby, you just care about you and what everybody else might think about your pregnant fuckup of a daughter!” I shouted.

  “Get out of the car!” he ordered again.

  I opened the car door and stepped out. I opened the door to the back seat and grabbed my stuff.

  “I’m out, you happy
? Tell Mom I’m sorry.”

  “Mara,” he said, staring at me from the driver’s seat with his hand resting on the wheel.

  “Fuck you. I’ll catch a cab back to the airport.” I walked away and didn’t look back.

  Then two weeks later, I miscarried.

  * * *

  I laid in bed that night feeling the softness and warmth of my sheets. I thought about what I had said to him and I couldn’t get to sleep. His voice and my voice echoed through my mind. I had meant those words with everything that I had in me. The man that raised me was only that, a man. I couldn’t see myself calling him father anymore. Thoughts continued to stir in my mind and I needed them to be gone so I wrote again, hoping to get lost in the words.

  July 9

  FAMILY

  I have no family. Not in my eyes. My mother, my brothers, and my father are not my family. I love them and want nothing bad to come to them, but I feel as though they don’t belong to me or I to them. I am a strange creature in that group, an outcast, and looked upon as something foreign. Even Johnathan, with all his faults, didn’t love me without trying to change me. I guess they had good intentions in their eyes but their “good” intentions hurt me. I thought I was once understood by my mother, but the truth is she wants me to be something that isn’t me. Something gentle and docile. Something not free-thinking. The only difference between her and my father is that she isn’t as aggressive. Family is a group of people that loves you as you are. Where you can just be and grow into you. The unique you that makes you so special to this world. People claim to love you, but do they, really? When they place demands on you to be something other than who you are. Why does family do that? Why do they stifle you? Try to morph you into some carbon copy of them or someone else. I only ever wanted to be me, to live a life that I had made for myself like any other human being, but me being me made me a sinner, something evil. According to my father, I got what I deserved for not following the Lord’s plan for my life. I was on a path straight to Hell. Well, Hell is here. It is my every day. “But you do have free will,” my father and mother say, but what free will do I have if there is already a plan? Because that is what you also said. My thoughts are changing and I really don’t know what to believe under all of the confusion. Repent, pray, but I have done that to no avail. I once believed, though not as intensely as my father; I did, once. I guess I’m still waiting for an answer but I haven’t gotten it, not even a whisper.

  Who is my family? I don’t know. I guess I’m still searching for one.

  Chapter 14

  “It’s all right, Carla. Start from the beginning,” Dr. Moore said.

  We sat in our circle, looking at Carla. She was always commenting about something, always giving her two cents, but she couldn’t form the words when it was her turn. She looked like she would vomit, but thankfully when she opened her mouth, the words came out instead.

  “You all know that I grew up in a really strict household. My dad, again, was a religious nut, that old time religion.” She paused. “I was fourteen the first time I had sex. It happened on my way home from Sunday school. His name was William Shots and he was the best-looking thing this side of the Mississippi. He was seventeen at the time and I thought I was hot shit. I had finally had sex and it felt good to break the rules and defy my faith and my father, but I think from there it got out of hand.”

  She sipped on her coffee. “By the time I was sixteen I had had sex with twenty different boys, and I had gotten out of control. I started using drugs and went days on end without talking or even seeing my parents. I believe that my father thought that he could beat the rebellion out of me, but it only made me wilder, angrier. So I went where I wanted to, had sex with who I wanted, and didn’t care. I didn’t want to be alive and so I did almost everything that I could that was dangerous because I couldn’t kill myself outright, too much of a coward, I guess.

  “But there were nights when I found myself in random beds, nights when I woke up in the hospital from being too drunk or too drugged. I was living with this drug dealer, Lonnie Thatcher, at the time, but so much of that is a haze. Sex and drugs was all that our lives consisted of. The only thing I wanted was the next high, the next fuck. But one night I decided that I didn’t want to be there anymore, so I tried to sneak out while he slept and I took the heroin and his money, but he caught me before I reached the door and he beat me senseless. I woke up in the hospital all banged up, and there my parents were. My mother was still herself, but something in my father had broken and he wept. I had never seen my father cry in my life and he cried at the sight of me. It broke my heart to watch because I was so ashamed of what I had done and who I had become. I was seventeen and had lived so rough, so hard. To make the story short, my parents let me come back home, but after a couple of weeks being back I found out that I was pregnant. I was happy to be home but I still couldn’t tell my mother and father the truth, so I told them I was raped.”

  When I looked around, the shock on our collective faces registered fast.

  “I carried the child and put it up for adoption, but my father pressed charges against Lonnie and he went to jail for a rape that never happened. I didn’t feel bad at first, but as I got older, I regretted what I had done. Sexual crimes are nothing to be taken lightly, and I felt that he deserved to be in prison; he was a woman beater and a drug dealer, but I was pretty much a prostitute, trading my body for a little food or a hit of something.”

  “What did you do? Did you ever say anything?” Roe asked.

  “When I turned twenty, I left my parents’ house for good, and it was then that I finally told the truth, and it was then that I found out what was wrong with me.”

  “What do you mean, what was wrong with you?” I asked.

  “I found out that I was bipolar and a slew of other things that came with it.”

  Now I understood, but it was painful to listen to all the same.

  “So I found out and got some help. I went back to get my GED, then my associates, then after that, a decent job. I got married and had a couple of kids and life was good up, until five years ago. When John died.”

  I remembered now that her husband had passed away and my heart ached for her.

  “I was depressed for the longest time, and after about two years I finally decided to try dating again, and I met someone, Charles. We started dating casually and I didn’t think that I would ever feel that way about someone again. John had been so kind and understanding about my past, about my disorder, but I fell in the hope trap. And one night, after a date, Charles raped me. I didn’t know it was happening until it was happening. It had started out as just some flirting and kissing. I was attracted to him, but I knew that I wasn’t ready to go to the next level. It happened at my home on my couch.”

  Carla’s eyes began to swell with tears. “How could I have been so stupid? Every time I talk about it my blood boils.”

  “Carla, what is it beyond the rape that makes you so upset?” Dr. Moore asked.

  “My own mind. I had this idea that after all I had been through that there would be some fairy tale ending in it for me. Then I feel bad because I feel that my chickens have come home to roost, so to speak, and maybe it’s what I deserve for crying wolf so many years ago.” She threw up her hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know how I am even dealing with all of this.”

  “I think you’re doing well,” Zoey said.

  Everyone stared at her, unsure of what she was saying. Carla looked at her, confused.

  “Zoey, can you elaborate a bit?” Dr. Moore asked. “What are you thinking?”

  Zoey spoke. “You have had a hard life, but look at what you have overcome. You found love, and you have a family. I know the loss of your husband was hard on you but you didn’t fall back into what you once were. Even now, with the assault, you are here, clean and sober, with children, a job, and people here that are supporting you. What I’m saying is, you didn’t take the easy way out. You didn’t light yourself up with drugs, sex,
and booze. It may not be what you thought it would be, but you’re tough, and you have to recognize it yourself because if you don’t feel that way at the end of the day, what we have to say doesn’t matter.”

  The fresh air on my face after group was exactly what I needed. Group was overwhelming and the stories were becoming more traumatic, more shocking, and honestly painful. I sat down on the bench right next to the bed of flowers outside of the counseling center. I closed my eyes and the breeze tickled my skin. The sun’s warmth consumed me and in that brief moment I felt peace. I took a deep breath, but in moments my peace was interrupted when Sophie came out and sat next to me. I had been with clients all that morning, then group that afternoon, and I didn’t want to be bothered. Sophie was more sullen than usual. Her eyes were bloodshot and her face looked as if all the happiness had been sucked out of her. She sat there breathing heavily before she finally spoke.

  “I’m sorry, Mara,” she said.

  I was confused. “Sorry about what?”

  “I’m sorry about being a bitch that one day when you were just trying to be nice. But I need to talk to somebody that isn’t my parents or a group; someone objective, I guess.” Tears began to stream down her cheeks.

  I rolled my eyes, but she didn’t catch it. I didn’t want to be dealing with her, but I allowed her to dump on me anyway. “No, no, it’s fine,” I said. “I don’t mind. This is what I do, keep talking.”

  “I don’t have many friends here,” she said. “I haven’t had any friends to talk to in a long time, my ex-husband made sure of that, so it’s just a little strange.”

  You could hear the buildup of emotion in her throat, so much that I thought that she might choke on it.

  “They granted sole physical custody to him, to my ex… I don’t… I don’t understand…”

  She buried her face in her hands and her body shook with each breath. She had been quiet during group that day but I’d had no idea that this was on her mind.

  “Oh, Sophie… I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I said. I put my hand on her back to try to comfort her. My professional self was telling me not to, but she needed that kindness.