“She was thirteen the first time it happened.”
Tory was shaking so hard she couldn’t stand any longer. Sinking to the floor, she slipped deep inside herself, not sure she was strong enough to listen. Not sure she was strong enough to know.
She was going to sit there for a few minutes, just until her legs quit shaking so much. And then she’d stand up and walk right out of this room. Out of this house.
“I think he killed something inside Christine that day, something that had managed to survive all the beatings. But it couldn’t survive that kind of violence.”
“No!” Tory said, her hands over her ears as, face lowered, she shook her head back and forth. “No, no, no.”
“She couldn’t bear to have you find out. And more, couldn’t bear to let him kill the little bit of innocence, the soul, that was left intact inside you…”
Christine thought she had soul left?
“She tried at first to report him, but you two had already been so humiliated when they hadn’t believed you about the beatings and…and he swore he’d say Christine had seduced him. She was afraid they’d send her away and leave you alone with him. The damage had already been done to her, and at that point, her only goal was to protect you from the same fate. She made sure she kept him…satisfied so he wouldn’t turn to you. She never left you alone in the house with him after that.”
Christine had always been home, but that was because when she went to the university, her classes happened to get out earlier than Tory’s high-school classes did. And she didn’t date because she was studying. How else could she have received her doctorate at such a young age?
How else could she have earned her freedom?
“She told me that her only reason for staying alive was to protect you, to see that you had a decent life, to see you happy.”
“She had lots of things to live for,” Tory said, her hands still over her ears, eyes closed, her head almost in her lap. “She loved her job.”
“She loved you,” Phyllis told her. “And maybe, there at the end, she learned to trust and care about me some, too. Everything else was just a means to an end.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Tory insisted. “She just hadn’t met the right man, one she could trust.” She looked up at Phyllis. “It’s hard to trust a man after you’ve been beaten by the one you lived with as a kid,” she informed her.
Phyllis might have read enough books, worked on enough studies, had enough clinical experience, to be considered an expert, but there were some things nothing could prepare you for.
She held Tory’s gaze steadily.
“Once Chrissie met the right man, she would’ve settled down with him, had a family, been happy,” Tory went on. “Christine was born to be a mother. Look how well she looked after me.”
Phyllis shook her head. “She couldn’t have children.”
Tory didn’t say a word. She felt the blood drain away from her face, from her hands, but she couldn’t move. She was immobile, a deer in front of headlights, waiting to be hit again. She’d been there before. Many times.
“She got pregnant and was terrified what your stepfather would do if he found out,” Phyllis continued, but the words were obviously costing her. Each one came out sounding tearful, choked.
“She went to a clinic where they didn’t require any signatures.”
“Ohhh…” Tory moaned, rocking herself. For someone who was no stranger to pain, she’d never known she could hurt so badly.
“She said the doctor was nice to her, but after several days of bleeding, she knew something was wrong. By the time she went for help, it was too late. They had to do a hysterectomy.”
“Where was I?” Tory asked, looking up, her head feeling as though it was stuffed with cotton.
“If she’d had surgery I would have known about it.” This whole terrible thing was a mistake. They weren’t talking about her Christine. Phyllis had her confused with someone else.
“You remember when she had her appendix out?” Phyllis asked quietly.
Tory closed her eyes again. Oh, God. She opened them. Looked at Phyllis and crumpled. Her shoulders, her ribs, her spine, everything just gave out on her.
It was true. The entire vile story was true.
With superhuman strength, Tory made it to her feet, managed to stumble out the door and to the bathroom in time to lose every bit of her Thanksgiving dinner.
Her poor, beloved, tortured sister.
THE TIMING of Phyllis’s revelation about Christine turned out to be a blessing in that the holiday gave Tory three full days to pull herself together before she had to resume teaching. Before she had to pretend that everything was still the same, that nothing had changed.
“Some people would be able to survive what Christine went through and find some measure of happiness here on earth,” Phyllis had told her over the weekend. “Christine’s spirit was too tender….”
And another time, she’d said, “Christine’s only goal was to find a way for you to be happy. Perhaps she’s done that now….”
Tory wasn’t so sure, but as she prepared for class on Monday morning, Phyllis’s words continued to replay themselves in her mind. And somehow, over the next week, as she adjusted to the horror of Christine’s rape, she also found a slight respite from the horrible guilt that had been crippling her with every breath she took and Christine didn’t.
Are you happier now, Chrissie?
Phyllis thought she was.
Tory didn’t have an answer.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE THURSDAY AFTER Thanksgiving, Ben was enjoying the balmy seventy-degree weather as he walked across Montford’s still-green campus. The combination of grass and cactus was unnatural, in his opinion, and he found the lack of fall trees, plus the abundance of palm trees, saguaro cactus and golf-course-green grass a bit odd so close to Christmas. In Flagstaff and northern California, where he’d spent most of his life, there were four seasons and the usual foliage or lack thereof that accompanied them.
With a manila envelope under his arm, both hands in the pockets of his jeans, he turned toward Christine’s office building with more lift in his step than he’d had in a while.
He wasn’t sure she’d be there, though this was part of her scheduled office hours. She’d seemed a bit more distracted than usual this past week; he wondered if maybe she was busy with end-of-term meetings and other administrative stuff.
The thought that she might be rebuilding emotional walls they’d managed to break down on Thanksgiving had crossed his mind. But it didn’t deter him. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Christine desperately needed a friend. And that, for some reason he didn’t understand, he’d been chosen.
He also couldn’t deny that being with her made his burdens a little easier to bear.
If she needed space now and then, that was fine with him. He needed space, too—had goals to meet before he intended to even think about making another emotional investment. Before he even considered the possibility of remarriage.
Ben was a patient man. After years of living with Mary, he knew what mattered in a relationship—friendship—and recognized some of that genuine, honest awareness between him and Christine. Recognized it because he’d lived without it for so long.
And because neither of them particularly wanted it.
Light was shining under her door. Good. She was there.
“Come in,” she called in answer to his knock.
He did, swinging her door almost shut behind him. “You busy?” he asked.
She pushed away a pile of papers and looked up at him, her eyes tired. “Not really.” The smile she gave him wasn’t quite relaxed, but not as nervous as it had been several weeks ago. “Just getting a head start on the weekend—grading essays.”
“You really bleed over them, don’t you,” he said. He’d seen the number of comments—complimentary and constructive—she’d made, not only on his essays but on those of his classmates.
“I guess I do.�
�� She shrugged. “If you guys are going to put in the time and thought and effort to write these papers, you deserve to have time spent on my end, too, don’t you think?”
Ben nodded. Then he slid the envelope he’d been carrying in front of her. “This came yesterday. Open it,” he said, standing back, hands in his pockets once again.
With a curious glance at him, she turned her attention to the envelope, pulled out the single sheet, read it—and grinned up at him. The first honest-to-goodness, genuine, completely unforced expression he’d ever seen on her face.
In that moment, she seemed about twenty, not the thirty he knew her to be.
“Congratulations!” she said, looking at the paper again.
Ben rocked back on his heels. “I came to thank you,” he told her. “If you hadn’t encouraged me to submit the paper to begin with, I’d never have thought of it.”
“And now you’re going to be published!”
“In the December issue.”
“It says here you have to sign a release form.”
“Already done. Mailed it this morning.”
“And you get ten free copies of the publication. I hope you’ll autograph one for me.”
“Sure.” Still too pleased with himself to feel embarrassed, Ben smiled. “You’re a great teacher, Christine.” He wasn’t sure where that had come from, hadn’t planned to sound as though he was buttering up his teacher. But the words were true, and she seemed so hesitant at times. Like just now, when he’d thanked her.
Christine slid the paper back into the envelope, then refastened the clasp and handed it to him. “You’ve already got an A, Sanders. The flattery’s not necessary,” she said.
“Hey!” He grabbed her hand as he took the envelope and waited for her to look at him.
When she did, her eyes were wary. He was also surprised to notice that her hand was shaking.
“You know me better than that,” he said, trying to find the connection they’d shared the week before.
She jerked her hand and he let go. She was, after all, his teacher. And they were in her office.
But it wasn’t always going to be that way.
THE LAST TWO WEEKS of classes were busy ones for Tory as she crammed every moment with preparing for her daily lessons and grading several hundred end-of-term papers, as well as quietly researching previous exams in American Literature 101. And then preparing her own exam. For once, something worked to her advantage, as her eighteen-hour days left little time for introspection. And made her too tired to lie awake at night.
She had no opportunity to fret over her reaction to Ben Sanders those weeks, although he was always there, a constant reminder of a life she could never live. He still walked her to her office after class, and many times those few minutes of conversation were the highlight of her day. Not that she’d admit it to anyone. She even tried to keep that acknowledgment from herself.
Any closeness between them was a mistake. Got them nowhere.
Ben continued to be in contact with Alex’s school, but there was nothing to report. No change in Alex’s withdrawn behavior. But no bruises, either. Tory waited for those reports. And listened to them with a mixture of relief and dread.
She was always shaking when Ben left her after those conversations.
He hadn’t heard from Alex himself since that last terrible conversation almost six weeks before.
Tory wasn’t sure that was good news, although she didn’t mention her suspicions to Ben. She had a feeling he figured the same thing, but he didn’t voice it, either.
Then, suddenly, classes were over. Exams were held and graded, and her first semester as a college professor was successfully completed. She turned in her grades, locked Christine’s office door and left Montford University for the month-long Christmas break.
And everything that had been pushed away for the end-of-school rush came flooding back. It hadn’t disappeared as she’d tried to pretend, but had been right there waiting all along.
Could she do it again? Head into another semester living a lie? Did she have any other choice?
Would she ever get the obscene vision of her stepfather and Christine out of her mind? Or her heart?
How was she going to make it through Christmas without Christine? Or the rest of her life, for that matter.
Were the holidays going to bring more trouble for little Alex? Tory had never understood it, but abuse always seemed to get worse around the jolliest time of the year. She lay awake in bed more than one night thinking of Ben’s little girl, sending silent prayers to a God she no longer believed in. She hoped with everything in her that the child would be all right.
And she tried desperately not to relive her own hellish holidays of the past. Not to see those years with a new vile slant. Not to know that Christine had suffered even more than she had.
During the days, Tory kept busy. She helped Phyllis decorate for Christmas, ran errands for her friend, washed all the curtains and bedspreads and offered to wrap gifts for the needy-family Christmas drive Becca Parsons had organized.
Phyllis had told her that Becca was on the Shelter Valley Town Council but that she wasn’t returning to work until January because she wanted to be home with her baby. That didn’t mean Becca wasn’t working, though. She still worked with Save the Youth and with a number of committees, and she ran the Christmas-gift campaign, which was particularly close to her heart. If the number of presents Tory had to wrap were any indication, Becca’s fund-raising was as skillful as Phyllis had said. And her generosity as limitless.
Despite her full schedule, Tory often thought about her visits with Ben. She tried not to, but she did. Class was over. She’d known she wouldn’t be seeing him again after finals week. Was actually glad of that.
And yet, dammit, she missed him. Missed their conversations. Missed being close to him even if she had had to keep the entire sidewalk between them. He made her nervous as hell—and she missed him.
On Friday morning, the second week in December, Tory stacked the wrapped toys and clothes in the trunk of her Mustang, on the backseat and on the passenger seat. They’d taken up less room when she’d brought them all home in bags.
She wrote a note for Phyllis, who was over at Martha Moore’s house helping Martha put up a Christmas tree—and probably bolstering her new friend, as well, since this was Martha’s first Christmas without her husband. Todd Moore had left his wife and children for one of his students the previous spring; there’d been a certain amount of gossip and speculation about it among faculty; even Tory, who kept to herself, had heard it.
She set out for the town’s police station. Becca had asked her to bring the packages there for the officers to deliver to the families on her list.
Amazing how much work the woman got done while sitting home nursing a baby, Tory mused, trying to see around the packages and out her back window as she changed lanes. A blue Jeep Cherokee was a couple of car lengths back, and in spite of the slow speed Tory was maintaining in an effort to prevent the packages from sliding, the Jeep didn’t gain on her.
Tory switched lanes again. The Jeep followed her. She slowed some more.
The Jeep did, too.
Heart pounding, Tory took a deep breath and turned onto Main Street. The police station was left at the next intersection.
“Don’t panic now,” she warned herself. A lot of people in Shelter Valley drove slowly. The pace of life here was slow. She was just being paranoid.
Turning at the intersection, she refused to look in the rearview mirror. She was not going to give in to the panic. She was not going to do anything crazy.
She slowed as she signaled her turn into the parking lot of the police station, and pulled in carefully. With her eye on a parking spot, she concentrated on getting the Mustang into it. That was all. Parking her car.
Yet, somehow, in her peripheral vision, she caught sight of the blue Jeep as it drove by the parking lot, turned around and drove by again.
If those were Bru
ce’s hired spies, they were getting bolder.
Tory stayed locked in her car for a full thirty minutes after the Jeep had left. It took her that long to stop shaking. And to convince herself the Jeep wasn’t coming back.
This was the third time she’d thought she was being followed. If it didn’t stop, she’d have to leave Shelter Valley. She knew the score.
Once she’d delivered the gifts, she didn’t want to go home alone—to be home alone, a possible sitting duck. She drove back to Main Street, pulling into an empty spot outside Weber’s department store. Big red plastic bows and glittering Santas adorned the street lamps along both sides of Main. Mostly, Tory ignored them. Holidays weren’t for people like her.
But this year, the brightness of the decorations cheered her just a bit, left her feeling almost comforted.
She wandered down the street, looking in shop windows, but had nothing to buy. She’d already picked up several gifts for Phyllis and had no one else to buy for. She wasn’t hungry, so the diner was out. At the end of Main stood the library, one of Shelter Valley’s oldest buildings. With nowhere else to go, she ducked inside for a look around. Phyllis wasn’t due home for another couple of hours. Tory could always lose herself in a book until then.
The interior of the library lived up to the building’s promise. It was late-nineteenth-century, spacious, with marble floors, a display of framed historical photographs and solid wooden tables and chairs. Despite the appeal of its hushed and luxurious atmosphere, it was almost deserted; everyone was too busy being part of the Christmas hustle and bustle to have time for reading. Tory lost herself between ceiling-high rows of books, the solitude and quiet a welcome escape from her life.
She rambled through the stacks for more than twenty minutes, trying to choose a book to occupy these unexpected hours. It should probably be a critical study of American literature, something to help her prepare for the semester ahead.
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