by Joy, E. n.
And right now she stood staring into the hospital room and praying that it had all been a mistake. Alexis was laying with her back to the door. Even though Porsche couldn't see the girl's face, she could see the bandages that covered half her head.
"Alexis," Porsche whispered, scared to step into the room. She didn't know if the girl was gonna start wilding, curse her out, call security, or what.
Alexis winced as she tried to look toward the door. She moved stiffly as she attempted to turn herself over, moaning in pain.
"Sorry," Porsche said, rushing to her bedside. "Don't move if it hurts. I'll come around on the other side."
A fist struck the pit of Porsche's stomach as she looked down on the girl. Both of her eyes were purple-black and her swollen nose covered almost half her face.
"Oh my God," was all Porsche could whisper as the tears came to her eyes. This chick had taken a true beat down. Blood was crusted in her nostrils and caked dry on her busted bottom lip. Porsche didn't know if the girl had been raped or not, but somebody's fists had certainly dented her head and smashed in her grill.
"What happened?" Porsche asked her.
Porsche gripped the bedrail and listened as the girl struggled to speak. Her lips were swollen and she couldn't even breathe through her broken nose. She told her story in a pained whisper. Porsche cried as Alexis relived her brutal attack at the hands of some of the men that Porsche respected and loved.
"They did you like this and you're not pressing charges?" Porsche asked in disbelief when the girl was finally finished talking. This was just wrong, and she didn't care who was involved. Whether it was Vince, or anybody else, this kind of crime against a woman had to come out of a twisted, uncontrollable soul, and there was no way Porsche could deny that. "Why would you let them get away with something like this?"
"Because I can't win," the girl said miserably.
"Girl, look at you. You look like a garbage truck backed over your behind. Ain't a judge in the world gonna say you haven't been through it."
The girl shook her head.
Porsche thought back to the horrible day when she was nine-years old, and struggling underneath a grown man, on a Harlem rooftop. "The doctors used a rape kit on you, right?" Porsche asked.
"No. I said I got robbed and beat up. I never told them I was raped."
"You didn't tell the doctors you were raped but you told Nailah?"
"What good would it have done to tell them? I was in the back of the club partying with those guys the whole night. I gave lap dances and got up on a table and stripped. How was I supposed to know one of them was gonna call an on-side kick? Even if the police do believe me, they'll still make it seem like I asked for it. So whether I tell on them or not, I'm still gonna lose."
"Nah." Porsche shook her head. She was pissed off, on fire. "You ain't losing nothing, baby. You gotta tell the truth so this don't happen to nobody else. Don't no man have the right to screw you and put his hands on you like that." Porsche was completely enraged as she spoke. A fire had just boiled up inside of her out of nowhere.
She turned to look at Alexis lying there in the bed and she no longer saw Alexis, but she saw herself as a nine-year old girl laid out on that roof top. The police had never been called on the man who had raped her either. She imagined how many other little girls had probably experienced the same thing at the hands of that man all because she never told the truth about what had happened to her. She couldn't let Alexis make the same mistake.
"Do you know Coach Beeker?" the girl asked quietly, interrupting Porsche's thoughts.
"Yeah," Porsche nodded. "I know him."
"So you know his wife owns a lot of businesses around here too. Well, my father works for her. If I tell on the coaches' players, it'll mess things up for my family."
Porsche thought back to the kind of deep love her father had had for her and she rolled her eyes at the nonsense coming out of Alexis's mouth.
"Girl, your family is gonna be way more concerned about you than they are about a doggone job. Your father can always get another job. You're his daughter. He can never get another you."
"You say all that like it's easy, but it's not. The only reason I'm even in school is because Coach Beeker got me a scholarship. His wife pays for my books, my dorm room, and my meal plan. If my father gets fired, then I'm out the door. Besidesmy mother is real sick. She's got cancer, but she's getting good treatment. My father gets all her health insurance through the Beekers, and if I make him lose his job, who's gonna pay for my mother's hospital care?"
Porsche stayed quiet because she didn't have an answer. She didn't know who should pay for Alexis' mother's medical care, but she did know who should pay for what had been done to Alexis.
Tears rolled down Alexis' face. Porsche could tell she was carrying a much heavier burden than just what had happened to her, but the burden of what would happen to her family.
Porsche didn't know what else to tell the poor girl. She didn't have all the answers, but she knew who might.
Chapter Five
This was one of the few times Porsche felt comfort- able going to Sharita with a problem. She knew how much her mother liked Vince and counted on him, but she also knew her mother was the type of sister who didn't play that put-your-hands-on-a-woman bull neither. Sharita always bragged that no man had ever laid his fists on her and walked away from it without some permanent scars and bruises of his own. Porsche knew her mother would support her and understand that no matter what it cost, she had to do what was right by this girl.
"What?" Sharita exploded as soon as Porsche finished explaining that she'd spoken to Alexis.
Porsche felt that if Alexis wasn't willing to press charges, then she herself should go down to the police station and report the truth about what had happened, and who had done it. She told Sharita everything. It just came pouring out. She couldn't see letting any of them slide. And if her husband did have any involvement in it, not even him.
Porsche still slept in the bed with Vince, spite her gut feeling of his true involvement, but as soon as he went to sleep, she got up and climbed into the bathtub with a bunch of pillows and a blanket. She couldn't stand to look at him, and she definitely didn't want him to touch her.
"You taking your tail down to the police station to tell them honkies, what?"
Porsche flinched as her mother narrowed her eyes and snapped a finger in the air. "First of all," she rolled her head around on her neck," I done told you all about those white girls! When I tried to tell you how that one ruined your father's career and his whole life, you just couldn't believe it, remember? So now you sitting up here telling me you can believe something even worse than that about your own husband? About your baby's daddy? Porsche, please! You all booty and no brain! Girl, you ten times stupider than you look!"
Porsche was stunned. She'd spent years listening to her mother run her mouth about her father and the white chick who ruined their lives, and Sharita was right. Porsche didn't believe it because her father had told her the real story and she trusted him. But Vince was her husband and she had trusted him too. He was the father of her baby girl, and if she let herself believe that he had been down with this in any way, then it meant everything she had ever thought or loved about him had been a lie.
"Listen here, Porsche," Sharita said. Her eyes were wide and her lips were twisted. Porsche had never seen her mother look so mad or so scared. "You just keep your stupid mouth closed, you hear me? For once, in your miserable little life, do something smart. Be quiet. Remember, you the one who let them lawyers talk you into signing that stupid prenup. If you leave Vince, the only thing you'll get is whatever little bit he feels like tossing your way. Just be quiet and let this drama blow over and pass all of us by."
"But, Ma," Porsche pleaded. "They tore that girl up. You shoulda seen what they did to her. It's crazy. They was like wild dogs on her. They stuck all kinds of stuff up inside of her-"
"She's a liar!" Sharita shouted. "She's just tr
ying to ruin them! You don't even know this tramp and you taking her word over theirs!"
"Ma, I seen her with my own eyes."
"You don't know who beat her up. It could have been anybody. Probably her boyfriend, or maybe even her daddy. You know how white people do. You don't even know what you saw."
But I know what I heard, Porsche thought sadly. On- side kick! That was Vince's favorite play, and she'd heard it before too. From that other girl who had accused him and his college football team of pulling a train on her back when he was still in college.
Sharita could tell from the look in her daughter's eyes that she was about to lose everything. "Okay, Porsche. L-l-let's say something did happen. Maybe they were out drinking, right? Partying a little bit. It's been a sorry season so far, so it's natural that they would be stressing a little bit. But why was that young college chick shaking her butt around a bunch of grown married men anyway? Who knows what kinda scheme she had on her mind or what tricks she was holding up her sleeve? So maybe one or two of them banged her. Maybe they did. But how you know she didn't ask for it? How you know she wasn't down with it from the jump?"
The look on Porsche's face said it all. Wasn't no way anybody could be down with getting knocked around like that.
Sharita was getting desperate and she tried even harder to convince her daughter to keep quiet. Vince was their money cow. Without him, they'd be back in the hood...broke. Sharita couldn't see that happening.
"So you gonna ruin everybody's life over one stupid girl? You mean to tell me this stunt means more to you than your own family and friends? Mica just had her third baby last month, Porsche. And Jarrie has twins. I won't even mention Telisha's little boy who can't hold that water-head of his up off his shoulders for two seconds straight. He's gonna need a home attendant for the rest of his life. You go running your mouth to the cops and get all them boys arrested and lose their contracts and then who's gonna take care of all them daddy-less babies? Who's gonna take care of your sister, huh? You know Mercedes can't even tie her shoes by herself. And what about Joy, huh? You go down there and tell them cops that your husband beat and raped some young, white college student and who's gonna take care of you and your little baby? Better yet, who's gonna take care of me?"
"I can't live with-"
"Look at what your father did to you, Porsche!"
Sharita grabbed her daughter by her shoulders. "He lost everything and left us to fend for ourselves! You want your daughter to grow up the way you did? Trapped in the hood with no heat and hot water? Slapping at roaches and running from rats her whole life? Just watch. Joy is real pretty. She's gonna have a shape on her, too. All the girls in our family do. You wanna raise her on 118th Street between a crack house and a strip club so she can end up getting snatched by some grown man on the corner who wouldn't mind taking a big-booty nine-year- old up on the roof and screwing her? You tryna tell me you can live with something like that?"
***
Porsche laid in bed crying for hours, her mother's words and her own conscience fighting each other.
She wasn't the one who had started this war, but she was deep in the middle of a battle anyway. She'd heard all of what Sharita had said, especially that last part. She hated Harlem. There was no way she wanted to go back there and live. It almost killed her to imagine Joy experiencing the same kind of pain and fear that she had suffered there. She didn't want to have to worry about some nasty predator snatching her baby and pinning her down on a rooftop for sex. She wanted to protect her daughter from all that, and she knew Vince did too.
But was Joy any safer in their mansion than she would be in the hood? If Vince could attack a girl like Alexis, was he the kind of man she could trust in her daughter's life? And if Jerrard was involved too, what about having someone like him around her daughter?
When she'd told her mother that she couldn't live with this, Porsche had meant it. She couldn't live with it. Not for Sharita, and not for Mercedes, neither. Not for Seville, or Mica, or Jarrie, or Telisha, and certainly not for Nailah. Porsche could never live with a man who had enough ugliness in him to beat and rape a woman. Not even for her daughter, Joy. Especially not for Joy.
Porsche realized that through all of this, she hadn't been any better to Vince than her mother had been to her father. At least Sharita had listened to what her father had to say about the girl in the car the night of the accident, even if she didn't believe the story he told. She needed to hear Vince's side of the story. He had been good to her and her family, and at the very least she owed him the benefit of the doubt and the opportunity to tell her the truth.
She had finally confronted Vince. He'd come home bruised and tired from a day on the field, and Porsche knew all he wanted to do was pop a painkiller and get some sleep. She was prepared to let him do that too; just as soon as he told her the truth.
"I know what happened," she said quietly. She watched as he stripped out of his clothes. His body was a thick piece of magnificent chocolate. Chiseled and in perfect proportion.
"Oh, yeah?" Vince sounded tired. Bored.
"Yeah. I know about that girl back when you were in college, and about the girl from last week. The one who scratched up your back the night you stayed out and turned off your phone."
Vince didn't answer her. He strode over to their huge walk-in closet. He took down a fresh wife-beater and a pair of thigh-length cotton Jockeys.
"Why, Vince?" Porsche asked, fighting tears. "How could you do that?"
Her husband turned around slowly. He looked exhausted and hugged his left shoulder like he was in intense pain. "She was just a skank, Porsche. Both of 'em were skanks. They knew the drill and they got exactly what they wanted. Why do you think they were there in the first place?"
Porsche almost screamed in anguish. He wasn't even denying it! "But what about me? About our marriage? What about Joy?"
Vince sighed, and Porsche saw something in her man's eyes that she had never seen before... cold indifference.
"Get used to it, baby. You wanna be with me? Then learn to take the bad with the good. That's life. Besides, look around you. Harlem is way behind us and Big Vince is taking good care of everybody. I'm handling mine. You got everything you need. Joy got everything she needs too. And she always will. You can believe that.
Porsche couldn't stop her tears. "But I can't believe you, Vince. How am I supposed to live like this knowing that you."
"She was just a groupie, Porsche! A stankin' white girl. Get over it."
"They were women, Vince. Just like me. Just like your daughter."
"Forget about 'em, baby. They mean nothing. Nothing at all."
Porsche wiped away her tears. They do mean some- thing, Vince, she thought in her head. They mean something to me.
Chapter Six
The walk down the winding staircase was the shortest it had ever been. She'd moved into the nursery with Joy, and for the past three nights she had stayed up praying for answers. Porsche had called on God more than ever before. And even though she had been lax in her faith at times, Porsche assured God that if He gave her the strength to make it through this situation, she would try to holla at Him on the regular.
Vince had left for practice an hour earlier and the house was still pretty quiet. Porsche carried Joy in her arms and had two bags slung over her shoulder. She was leaving with only the necessities, but she hoped Vince would allow her to come back and get some of their daughter's things as soon as she got settled into her new place.
Just a week ago she had found a small apartment in Harlem. Fortunately, it was in an area that had just been remodeled. The rent was higher than she'd wanted, but whatever Vince gave her for Joy's child support she hoped would cover it. She'd have to figure out the rest.
After walking through the two bedroom unit, Porsche had stood on the stoop with the landlord. He reassured her that there were no rats in the building and no roaches, either. Porsche had gazed up at the Harlem rooftops and shivered in fear. There were no reass
urances for that, though. And she didn't expect any. There were all kinds of people in the world. Nobody could control that. The only person you could control was your- self.
"You're leaving?" Sharita shrieked as Porsche stuck a few baby bottles into Joy's diaper bag. She'd come downstairs as Porsche was fixing a batch of Similac for Joy and now she was wildin' out. "You're really gonna go down there and tell them white folks your husband raped some girl? "Do you know what could happen to Vince behind this?"
To Porsche, Vince was unimportant. This was not about him. This was about doing the right thing; some- thing her father had taught her.
"You gonna jeopardize everything for some girl you don't even know?"
No, Ma. I'm gonna jeopardize everything for the truth.
Sweat was dotting Sharita's face and she was shaking like a leaf. "Porsche, please. You can't leave Vince and you can't tell on him, either. If you do, we all go down. Without you here, he's gonna send all our tails packing and we don't have nowhere else to go. Is that what you want? You gonna leave your whole family hanging out there to fend for ourselves?
"Sorry, Ma," Porsche finally spoke as she walked toward the door.
She was leaving all the finery that money could buy completely behind her. Porsche had enjoyed all the blessings that came along with being the wife of an NFL star, but there was more to life than money and material things, and unlike her mother, she wasn't willing to sell her soul for designer bags and luxury cars. She was leaving the high life behind, but at least her soul would be intact.
A taxi was waiting in the driveway to take Porsche first to the police station to make her statement, and then back to the same Harlem ghetto where she'd come from.