He Said, She Said

by John Decure

  Dr. Craig didn’t see it that way, though. He wanted what was best for me, didn’t want to see Dr. Don’s lawyers destroy me. But all I had to do was tell the truth, and I prayed to God that if I did, well, He would shine His light on me. In the Last Judgment, with the many mistakes I’ve made, a sinner of my advanced level of achievement, well… one day I know I’ll need God on my side, so just maybe this would be a start.

  All I wanted was to get in there and say my piece, but when we got to court, one look at Ms. Aames and you could tell she’d been fighting herself and… maybe losing the battle.

  She came down the hallway as we approached the courtroom. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw her chatting with someone who wasn’t there.

  “Rehearsing my lines,” she said when Dr. Craig inquired. He didn’t look convinced, to me.

  “Ready to go?” she asked me head-on.

  I was about to say yes, I was about as ready as I’d ever be, though the truth is, I was terrified. But Dr. Craig leaned closer to Ms. Aames with a question.

  “How much sleep did you get last night?”

  “Enough. Trial work is demanding, doc.”

  “Just how is it that Miki Dora figures into your opening statement?”

  “I didn’t… he doesn’t. What I just said… oh, forget it.”

  She lost me on that one. They both looked concerned, and that scared me a little.

  “Who’s Miki Dora? Is he testifying for Dr. Don?”

  Ms. Aames turned and really looked me in the eye for the first time today, and there was kindness in her eyes.

  “No. He’s just a friend of ours,” she said. Dr. Craig nodded like he agreed.

  “Sorry. I’m dangling off a high ledge, trying not to look down.”

  She told me that was normal, and not to worry. She looked great in a gray dress that went past the knee, black stockings and a long black sweater, but to me, her face seemed a tad blotto and her eyes had that little bit of frantic in them. 8:40 in the morning, and you’d think she’d been through a war already.

  Dr. Craig was shaking his head, hands in the pockets. He’d worn a blazer and nice slacks, had that professor look going—which is what I told him when he came to pick me up. A nice look for the ladies, I’d said, and I’m pretty sure, he blushed when I said it. He could try and hide it all he wanted, but there was a spark going back and forth between him and Ms. Aames. That spark was not in evidence at this juncture. In fact, they looked like they wanted to kill each other.

  Not quite out of my earshot, I heard Ms. Aames deny she said the name Miki Dora—whoever that is. Dr. Craig said no, he just heard her. They went back and forth a while, whispering, but not quietly enough so I couldn’t hear them going at it. Dr. Craig’s point was that my welfare should come first, and if Ms. Aames couldn’t protect me sufficiently in court, then this thing was going backward, two wrongs not making a right, and so on. Ms. Aames, she told Dr. Craig she’d been a trial attorney a long time, and testifying’s no picnic for anybody, but she was on top of her gig.

  “So, what if you start having visions?” he asked her. That I heard for sure.

  Good Lord! I said to myself. She’s mentally ill! The eyes; that intensity. Why hadn’t I put it together sooner? I was torn right in half, loyal to her on one hand, but scared stiff on the other.

  She told him she had a system, kept two lists up-to-the-minute. What’s real, versus what isn’t. Easy to tell the difference, she said, she’d had a lifetime of practice.

  “That’s it?” he whispered, but hard.

  “I was talking to my father a little while ago,” she hissed under her breath. “He’s dead, but he was a good trial lawyer. I was trying out a few phrases in my opening statement. The words were real. My father wasn’t. I know the difference. Satisfied?”

  “How can I be?”

  “Craig, back the hell off!”

  That last part was above a whisper.

  They fought one last round after that, neither of them seeming to care when I retreated a few paces and found a window to a dull white room, a little spot designated for witnesses like me. Nice place to stew in your juices, I thought, sitting down at a fake-wood table. Prayer seemed apropos, but before I could compose a new way to beg for God’s mercy, my dueling protectors both came in together, looking pretty winded.

  “Here’s the thing, Rue: it’s up to you,” Dr. Craig told me.

  Ms. Aames kept her arms folded. “Your call, Mrs. Loberg. I won’t make you testify unless you think you can do it.”

  Glad it was finally settled, I said thanks to them both.

  “Just know, the case is over without your testimony,” Ms. Aames added.

  “Well, no pressure there,” Dr. Craig shot back.

  “I was just—”

  “Get off her back—”

  “Don’t fight,” I told them. “It’s all right. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while now. I’ll be fine.”

  Dr. Craig probably didn’t look too happy, but to be honest, I can barely recall. It was like a white light fell on me, and I was blind with fear, too terrified and nervous to think straight anymore. What I didn’t know was Ms. Aames, whatever her troubles may be, was able to see that I’d been blinded. As she led me down that hallway to the courtroom, she turned to pause, taking a motherly hold of my wrist.

  “Fear not,” she said. “You’ve been through far worse already than anything these clowns can throw at you. You lived through it, body and spirit, once before, and you survived. You were strong enough. Now all you’ve got to do is experience it one more time, but merely in words. Be strong again.”

  “Th-thanks.”

  At the door, she put her jumpy gaze to rest by closing her black eyes. When she opened them she was a foot away, her hand coming up to rest on my shoulder.

  “We can do this.”

  I floated up to that witness stand in a haze of doubt.

  They asked me to state my name, and I smiled because I wanted to make a joke and say Joan of Arc—and which one of you, by the way, remembered to bring the matches? Instead I said my name, took an oath, and was asked to tell the truth. When I said I would, the sound of my words seemed to turn tail the instant they left my lips and tuck back into my mouth. I’d been praying a lot, nonstop for days, and I thought maybe this was a sign. Just the way my whole life has gone, I thought: promise to tell the truth, but no one cares to hear it.

  In that moment of dark revelation, I felt God’s presence—recognized that He had been there, just outside the courtroom, speaking to me through Ms. Aames a minute ago. Encouraging me. Now, on the stand, Jesus whispered to me.

  Say your piece anyway, My sister, say it for all to hear.

  Dr. Don, he was over at the table beside his lawyers, in a dark suit that, to me, made him look like a boy in his father’s Sunday clothes. Of course, I’d seen his penis before, so it was easy to think of him as a kid. Men and their penises—acting like children.

  He was scribbling notes and being careful not to catch my eye. I wanted to say: go ahead, try to act like a man, but you never will be. Never.

  The judge had a nice smile when he welcomed me, but I wished he hadn’t. The thing is, I’m too much of a people-pleaser, it’s one of my many weaknesses, and when someone’s nice, I automatically try too hard to be nice right back. Probably he was just trying to put me at ease, which is fine, I guess. But no, I was not here to satisfy him.

  My hands were sweaty and fidgeting like crazy, and my insides were rolling like snakes were crawling around in them. My blue pantsuit fit me tighter than when I’d bought it for that Harley dealers’ convention in Laughlin me and Andy attended two, three years ago. It made me look like an office temp, but it was my only outfit that would do for court, I figured, so I wore it anyway. Now I could hardly breathe and the bobby pins just behind my ears were pinching my skull every time I moved. I hadn’t even started, but I was doing a fine job showing them all what a loser I am…

  Here’s what I remembe
r saying, not the exact words, but close. Including the highlights—or I guess, the lowlights, depending on how you might judge a person like me.

  I was born and raised in Carson, California, the armpit of the Los Angeles Harbor. (Ooh—no one laughed.) My dad had an auto parts store in Artesia, and in the summer I used to work there, sweeping up and cleaning the glass doors and doing odd jobs for fifty cents an hour. Except Daddy never got around to paying me because what would a foolish girl do with money except spend it on foolish things? he’d say. He was a big-time Holy Advent of Christ follower, he and my mom, but he had no problem stiffing me for my work. That’s a pretty good example of the man’s sense of fairness and right and wrong.

  Mom, she was a happy housewife back when you could find happy housewives all up and down the block. But she wasn’t ever happy about much anything I did. One time I brought home a spelling test with a hundred percent mark and a gold-star sticker from the teacher. All my mom could see was that my handwriting on one word, remonstrate, deviated from the line it was written on. She tore up the test; then she tore up my backside with a switch.

  My mother beat me even harder the year I grew breasts, because a girl my age, to grow breasts already, must’ve had impure thoughts and then, you see, the Devil read them and brought on this unnatural change. Yeah, a whole lot of what I went through growing up had that kind of loose connection to God and the Devil, though I was always one step behind, getting smacked.

  About that time my dad got lucky with his business. There was a new freeway coming through, and his store was sitting right in the way. Normally the state would’ve taken the land and paid him what they wanted to pay, and he’d have been stuck with the deal, but there was an old oil well out back, and it caused a lot of complications because those drilling rights were written into the deed. There were supposed to be geological studies to sort out how the well was going to be capped, and how much my dad could’ve expected in projected revenues from the well that he’d never see, now that the state was buying him out. If Dad wanted to fight it, he could tie up that whole freeway project for years to come, so they settled by overpaying him six ways to Sunday, as he put it, and he quitclaimed them back.

  Suddenly we were rich by normal-people standards. I figured we’d move to a bigger house, in a nicer neighborhood, my mom would buy some jewelry, my dad, a fancy car. But they didn’t change, not at all. My dad no longer had to work, so he started hanging around the local Holy Advent church in our area, doing charitable stuff like paper drives and collecting canned goods for the poor. That first summer after he sold his business, I couldn’t work in the store anymore so I helped around the church. Right after Fourth of July, Dad paired me up with the new minister, Pastor Jim. He and Dad were both in the Army when they were younger, and they liked each other. Late afternoons, I’d see them sitting in Pastor Jim’s office, their hands down at their sides, so they could hide the whiskey they drank in little white paper cups. Telling stories and laughing, always quieting down when I walked by, then laughing and giggling like schoolgirls as I went away.

  But like I said, I got paired up with Pastor Jim, helping him set up the hall for bingo night. Thirty folding tables that bit like snapping turtles when you tried to open them, and five times as many chairs that had to be spread all around them. The first time I did the job, Pastor Jim bought me a soda. The second time, he gave me a gold locket, but made me promise to keep it a secret. By August he was stroking my hair down to the tips, right above my nipples. It was always late afternoon, and by then, Dad was drunk and sleeping on a couch in the rec room. The first time Pastor Jim made a move on me, he came up behind me in the storage room, clicked off the light, kissed me on the neck, and tore my panties right off. Said if I told anyone, he’d kill me, and my soul would rot in hell. I’d been asking him to do this, inviting him, by letting him touch me those times before. I was evil, did bad things. Not him, he was just a man, he was just responding. He was a minister, I thought, so he must have that kind of power.

  That went on till the next summer, when my dad woke up from one of his naps and stumbled over to Pastor Jim’s office, looking for that hidden bottle of booze, I guess. What he saw was his daughter bent over the table and Pastor Jim saying something from the Book of Revelation that he liked to say whenever he reached, you know, that… point of no return.

  I guess I was getting silent and crying, because Ms. Aames asked the judge if she could approach, and when she did, she offered me a tissue. I blew my nose with an embarrassing honk, then told her and the judge I was fine.

  “Pastor Jim,” Bradlee Aames asked me.

  “Oh, right.”

  That day with my dad, it’s like, I can still see it as if it was yesterday. He was hurting me with his… well, he was being very rough. What he said, every word of it I recall: And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.

  “What did your father do?” the judge asked me.

  My dad, he looked like he’d been hit across the face with a baseball bat. He jumped at Pastor Jim, got on him and they started to tussle, but Dad was the smaller man, and he was still pretty lit up, and then Pastor Jim started getting the better of him and just laughing, uncontrollably laughing, his pants still around his ankles. It was a horrible sight. My dad, he was in tears and could barely breathe, I think from getting choked. Didn’t say a word, but you could tell something inside him had died like a part of him was snapped off now, broken. He gave up with the fight and leaned on the floor against the wall. Then he threw up into a fake potted plant. Pastor Jim came over to offer him water in one of those little white paper cups they were so fond of using. That’s when it got really ugly.

  Turns out, I was the whore. Though I didn’t even know what the word “seduced” meant, I had caused all this when I seduced Pastor Jim. My soul had been commandeered by Satan. You get the picture. Next thing I got sent to the church over in Bellflower for counseling from a supervising minister named Pastor Molek. Same result.

  “You were raped again?”

  I nodded and tried to say yes, but no sound came out. Everybody just sat there quietly until I got myself together again.

  Anyway, the rest of that summer I stayed home, in my room, grounded. My father acted like he didn’t know me. My mom wouldn’t speak to me, but she found lots of stuff I did wrong, lots of reasons to hit me. Again and again.

  My body kept changing, getting curvier. Boys kept noticing. I didn’t know how to deal with the attention. I was a whore with a ruined soul. My junior year in high school, my drama teacher, Mr. Chambliss? He got in my pants twice in his car when he offered me rides home in the rain—my parents not caring to pick me up, of course. Another time I got caught shoplifting a two-dollar bottle of nail polish at Woolworths, which honestly, I forgot I even had in my hand. I was carrying it around the store for so long, just feeling low. The manager, he put me in a back room for questioning, and he kept me there all afternoon. I had to, you know, put my hand on his thing, or he wouldn’t have let me out of there.

  Dr. Don? Oh, he started out nice enough, but he had this way of looking at me that I knew meant trouble ahead. You know, complimenting me on my dress, my hair, letting his eyeballs roam. We came in, Andy and I, on account of our two teenagers, Mindy and, well, my son’s got nothing to do with this, so I’m not going to mention him. They were seeing Dr. Don for some fairly serious problems. What kind? Well, drug use, ditching school, running away from home. Andy and I were supposed to do conjoint therapy, and we did that now and then; you know, come in and talk about the kids’ problems with them.

  Mostly though, those sessions, we all just sat around and listened to what Dr. Don had to say. He was kind of long-winded. After about six months, he started telling me I needed individual therapy, because of some of the, uh, skeletons in my closet that kept popping out during sessions. I knew he had a point. I mean, Andy, my ex-husband? He knows
about the problems I had with my stepfather, but I don’t think he even knows about the Pastor Jim stuff.

  Stepfather problems? Yeah. I know I call him “Dad,” but he’s not my real father. Yeah, it took years to face the facts, I’d pushed them down so far for so long, but he did things to me too. Man-woman things to a young girl who didn’t understand what was happening to her. Maybe Pastor Jim was wise to that somehow. I don’t know. I don’t want to even think about it.

  Anyway, I saw Dr. Don alone for several sessions, and he heard my whole history. A diagnosis? Yes, he made one. Borderline personality disorder. Not that I think he’s wrong. I know I’ve got a lot of problems. It’s just, he was creeping me out in our sessions. Asking these really personal questions about my marriage. You know, how often my husband and I had sex. Did I think about it a lot? What did I like? What made me have… you know, an orgasm. I just thought it was weird, like, I couldn’t see how this was supposed to help me. It seemed more like he was helping himself. My husband and I, we were having our troubles, just not getting along, and in bed, as well. I couldn’t talk to my own kids. Was drinking too much, which seemed the only way to hold back the pain I was suffering day and night. So I quit seeing him, until about six months later, when he offered to see me in his office at no charge. Made a pitch that he’d been studying my problem and had a new therapy he thought could help me.

  What he did, though, was help himself. Called the new treatment, um, touch therapy. I know… I’m embarrassed to even say it. Said it had to do with building up trust, enough to supposedly free me from my repressions about the past. Good touches, safe touches, then next thing I know, he’s giving me the horny touch. I didn’t know what to do. My life was such a mess. I was overwhelmed. The first time he took my dress off, we were on his office couch, this brown sectional. I was in shock, like I was watching a movie and starring in it at the same time. Dr. Don told me I’d been teasing him, egging him on with my bad behavior. Now, I was going to reap what I’d sown. Had me by the wrists, pushed me down. It was the same old script, even when he put his hand over my mouth and threatened to stop me for all time, as how he put it, because… yeah, I was a bad seed.