There was a video file attached. The first minutes were dark and indistinct, and then suddenly it became clear. I felt like someone had just kicked me in the stomach.
I called Sylvia on her cell phone and told her we had to talk immediately. She had left her office early and was already at her house in North Oakland. I said I would be there within the hour. She was surprised by my vehemence, asking me if it could wait until the next morning when she could squeeze me in for an appointment at her office. I told her no—it had to be right now.
I raced down to Market Street and jumped on a BART train heading to the East Bay, squeezing myself in with the last wave of commuters heading home. At the Rockridge Station, I headed south down College Avenue a couple of blocks, then up Lawton Avenue to the craftsman house that Sylvia and Margo were restoring. Normally, I’d spend a few moments chatting about the latest renovations they’d made, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk about that at the moment. Margo met me at the door and was only slightly frosty about the fact that I was delaying their dinner. Sylvia ushered me into the small study that she’d been fixing up for herself. Even before I sat down, she wanted to know what this was all about.
“Look at this video,” I said, “and then we can talk.”
Sylvia was shocked by what she saw—I knew she would be. After she stopped the video, I could see the wheels clicking in her head, as she began thinking of ways we could act. She told me she’d contact the US attorney first thing in the morning and try to find the right agency to take action. She rattled off a list of alternatives, weighing them and comparing them, trying to settle on a course of action. I wanted her to take all of the legal steps she could, and I knew she would do everything possible. But that wasn’t enough.
“I’ll move as fast as I can on this,” she said. “But it’s going to take time.”
I knew she’d say that.
“Please try to step back from this and let me handle it.”
I knew she’d say that, too.
But I already had my boarding pass printed, and it was sitting right there in my purse.
Alexi
It was hard to breathe.
The room felt thick and heavy. It was always like that when he forced her to sit and listen to him. Something got inside her senses and curled them into a knot. The only window in the room was closed and covered with a blackout curtain. The ceiling fixture was on, but that light was so dim that it made the room seem more eerie than it already was. The walls had closed in, and even the chair—the one he insisted she sit in—felt cramped. The ceiling seemed lower each time she looked up. There was a door behind her, but she feared that if she turned around she might find that it was blocked—or gone entirely.
“When I think of the power to God’s mercy, I am humbled.”
The Reverend Wilder paused for a second before going on any further. He’d begun by talking to her, but he must have known she wasn’t listening. Still, he kept talking. He was in some sort of conversation with himself, maybe trying to rehear his own words.
“You have to think about that awesome power, Alexi. Remember that God could destroy us—both of us, all of us—in an instant. He could consign us to eternal damnation just like that.” He snapped his fingers, and the sound hovered in the air.
The only real light in the room came from a small desk lamp, which was aimed at the pages of the Bible on his desk. He’d read from it minutes earlier, and his voice was heavy in the gloominess of the room. He said he wanted her to know what he would be saying in his Sunday sermon the next morning. But she’d given up trying to make sense of anything he said. Months ago—before he had browbeaten her into submission—she’d argued with him and called him a hypocrite. She yelled at him for the nerve of talking about God or sin or salvation. She kept protesting that night, only to let up when she saw the violence in his eyes. Right now she was just as angry, but she knew it was useless to argue. Her fury had been reduced to a lump in the pit of her stomach.
He kept talking, telling about the times in his life he’d sinned and how the Lord had taken him back. She’d heard that story over and over, but he made her sit in the darkness and listen to it again. She didn’t know how much of it he really believed. It was a conversation without listeners—something he might have recited even if he had been sitting there alone. He talked about his transgressions and his blasphemous acts, and he’d go on about his lustfulness and the sins of Sodom. He spoke in a twisted Biblical language that made it hard follow what he was saying. At times he’d turn and look at her with moisture in his eyes, choking slightly on his words. These are my sins, Alexi. I’ve had to ask God’s forgiveness for all of them. At that moment it was hard not to be moved by the tears streaming down his face.
And then the illusion would be shattered. It might be an offhand remark. Or maybe he would change the tone of his voice to prettify his sins and make them ready for the Lord’s forgiveness. At that point she’d feel a growing disgust. He was trying to draw her in with the shock of his revelations, making her feel part of everything he had done. He said that no one knew about these things but her. He hadn’t told anyone—least of all her mother. The message was clear: You’re in on this with me. Now that you know all this, you’re no better than I am.
He got out of his chair and walked over to where she was seated.
“Alexi, it’s a wonderful thing, God’s mercy. You have to keep that thought close to your heart, because the Lord always allows us to cleanse ourselves. We can be restored to his grace.”
He put his hand on her shoulder.
“Get your hands off of me!” She leapt from her chair and screamed.
She shuddered at his words. It was the same every time. No matter where he started, he eventually got down to that one word: “we.” He’d start talking about his own sinfulness, and within moments he had dragged her into it. It wasn’t “him,” it was “we.” It was we who have sinned, and it was we who need to ask for God’s forgiveness.
She yelled at him to let loose of her as she pushed her way past him to the door, busting out of the room and racing down the long hallway to the exit. She leaned on the crash doors, forcing her way out, and started running across the parking lot.
What was she going to do? Every direction she might have turned seemed blocked. A few weeks earlier, when she’d sat in that same dark room having that same dismal conversation with him, she decided she had to do something. She’d leaned across the desk, poking her finger in his direction.
“I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to tell Mother everything that’s been going on.”
His blue eyes were icy cold as he stared back at her.
“What makes you think she’ll believe you?”
That caught her for a second. The stare continued.
“And if she does believe you, who do you think she’ll blame?”
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“Alexi, what would you like for dinner?”
Her mother was rustling in the kitchen, using her most soothing voice.
“Your father’s meeting with the foundation people, so it’s just the two of us. Think of something you’d like. Afterward, we can make some cookies.”
Those words deepened her sadness. She hated the meanness of the thought, but she wondered if there was there was anything her mother didn’t think could be solved by a plate of cookies. The thing she was doing right now was so well-meaning—and so clueless—that it almost made her cry.
Things hadn’t gone well between them since the Sunday services that morning. But it wasn’t much worse than it had been for a long time. Her mother tried to do everything right, but it was still all wrong. Their chances to talk would stretch out for hours, but the gap was never bridged. Why was it like that? Her mother had a teacher’s degree from Purdue, and her former students loved her. When she worked with young school kids around the church going over their lessons, she got the same hap
py response. She led groups of volunteers to retirement homes, bringing snacks and gifts, and she would sit there and listen to the bedridden patients. They’d grab her hand and refuse to let go. Many of them said she was the only one who had listened to them in years.
But where was that woman around here? Her mother blamed all their problems on the decision to tell her she was adopted. She was angry at herself afterward for doing so, saying she should have followed her husband’s advice. Her mother was right about one thing: that information had burst open a well of anger that had been building up for years. From then on he became just her mother’s husband, and she would only call him “the reverend”—never her father. Her mother was upset with her for doing that, but would it open her eyes? It hadn’t so far. Maybe she was secretly worried that Alexi would do the same thing to her—start calling her by a different name. But as angry as she was, she could never do that.
When she thought about the ugly thing that had taken over her life, she couldn’t even put it into words. Giving it a name would make it worse. She couldn’t tell anyone—not even her friends. When she got close to saying anything, she would shy away, hinting only that she was unhappy. She had a friend, Laura, who knew she was miserable, but she only knew that she was having a problem with her parents. The secret was too scummy and dirty to talk about. She was sure she’d be ostracized if anyone knew.
Maybe we can make some cookies.
Her mother always wanted to calm things down at home and push aside anything unpleasant. Keeping the family together was her biggest goal, but why couldn’t she see the terrible things going on in her own house—things happening right in front of her? Did it have to be forced upon her? Did someone have to sit her down and tell her all the things that had been happening until the ugliness of it finally got through to her? She knew she couldn’t do it. She hoped and prayed that her mother would find out about it some other way and put a stop to it, but she couldn’t tell her. The horror on her mother’s face if she tried to describe the sordid story would have been more than she could bear.
But her mother lived in the same house. She had eyes. Some hint of it had to be somewhere in a part of her brain. On those nights when her mother was lying there by herself, didn’t the thought ever spring loose and race around the room?
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She half-sat, half-sprawled on the living room couch, where she’d been sitting most of the afternoon, surrounded by a comforter that she’d dragged from her bedroom. She tucked the blanket around her legs, as she felt suddenly chilled. Her phone was in the folds of the blanket, and she picked it up and fiddled with it, experimenting with the video camera just to take her mind off of things. Her journal was next to her. There were things she needed to write, but that could wait until her mother had gone to bed. She’d already filled a couple journals and stuffed them into the side pocket of the guitar case in her closet. She had to do something with them eventually, but right now she just needed to keep writing.
She’d slept on the couch the night before, but she didn’t know if her mother knew that. She’d snuck out of her bedroom just after her mother had turned out the lights and found a place to curl up. The couch, which was a gift from one of their congregants, wasn’t very comfortable, but she decided to sleep on it again because it felt safer. The middle of their wide-open living room seemed more secure to her than her own corner of the house. She’d hinted about that, but her mother hadn’t picked up on the fact that she’d become terrified of her own bedroom.
The living room was quiet after her mother went to bed. The only light was a low glow from the lamp behind the couch. Around midnight, she heard the door open from the garage into the kitchen, and that was followed by someone opening and closing the refrigerator. The reverend was home. He paced around the kitchen for a few minutes, and then she heard him walking down the hall toward the bedrooms. She heard the door to the master bedroom being opened and then gently closed again. After that, she heard him walking farther to the back of the house where she had her own bedroom. There was another faint sound of a door being opened and then closed. A few seconds later, she heard him doubling back down the darkened hallway. Then the footsteps stopped. He must have been standing in the dark at the end of the hall, hidden in the shadows, looking into the living room where she was huddled on the couch. She didn’t dare look up. It stayed that way for several moments as the room started to feel smaller and smaller.
She finally sensed that he was gone. She wrapped the comforter around herself tightly, reaching around for whatever she could find. She was scared to be alone at the moment. She found her phone and started scrolling through it aimlessly. There was an email message she’d missed earlier. It was from a woman she didn’t know—or, at least, she didn’t think she knew. She read it quickly, but her nerves were so frazzled she found it hard to focus. The woman said she’d seen her at the morning church services. That set off alarm bells in her head. She remembered how angry she had been at the moment the woman described. This woman had apparently seen her in all her anguish, and everyone else had probably seen her, too.
She put down the phone and stared into the darkness. She wanted her nightmare to be over, but it seemed now like it could be getting worse. What if the whole world found out? She had screamed out in anger whenever the reverend said that she—like him—needed to ask forgiveness for her sins, implying that the stain of everything had rubbed off on her. He’d even put himself on a higher plane by saying he had asked forgiveness for his sins while she was still wallowing in the evil of hers. He warned her of that. He said people would say she was the sinful one because she hadn’t confessed. She knew he had to be wrong, but would people believe her? Or would they just point their fingers at her and say she brought this all on herself? Was this email just the first step in an endless trail of humiliation?
She sat there for a few minutes, trying to fight her depression. She picked up her cell phone and read the message again, but this time she saw some things that she’d missed when she raced through it the first time. What was this woman really saying? She mentioned something about knowing her in the past. When was that? She had assumed the worst when she first read the message, but now she realized the woman was being much more sympathetic. She stared at the words at the end of the message: “I’m here, if you ever need my help.”
She felt a whisper of hope. “Help”—she hadn’t dared think of that word.
The words had come from a complete stranger, but still she could feel the power of them flowing through her. She had a dizzy, momentary feeling that things might get better. She didn’t know if this woman could really do anything to help her, but for the moment her doubts were pushed aside, as the thought of being done with all this raced through her mind. Suddenly, she could visualize herself on the other side of her pain, looking back as her shame and degradation receded into the background.
She hit the reply menu, but she found herself just staring at the screen, too scared to go any further. What would she say? How could she explain what was going on without making herself sound terrible or pathetic? And maybe none of this was real—maybe this woman didn’t mean what she said. Her reply could go nowhere, bringing her newfound hope to an end. She typed a few words, but her hands were shaking too much. She finally cancelled the reply page and sat back to think about what she should do.
And then suddenly it was morning, and the light was coming through the living room window. She’d fallen asleep on the couch with her cell phone still in her hand. Last night she had thought about staying home on Monday and skipping school, but that was before she got the email message. Now, she was energized. She read the message one more time, hoping that it wasn’t just a dream. It was still there. She thought all day about how to reply to the woman’s email. She had to do it right. The safest way was to move slowly, starting with an exchange between them that she could build on when she was sure she trusted her. Between classes, she hinted about the messa
ge to her friend, Laura, but she knew it had to be her secret.
When she got home from school, her mother was in the kitchen, cooking something for dinner. She took a step into the living room but then stopped in her tracks. The pit of her stomach started to drop, and she was afraid she’d fall down. She must have let out a gasp.
“What’s the matter, honey?”
Her mother hurried in from the kitchen.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I should have warned you that the couch is gone. Your father called the people at the furniture store this morning, and he talked to that nice Mr. Lewis—you know, the man from the congregation that sent us the couch in the first place? Well, he’s arranged for an even better one to be delivered to us from the factory early next week.”
She just stared.
Her mother seemed surprised.
“I didn’t think you even liked that old couch. I’ve seen pictures of the new one. It’s so much nicer. It’s a beautiful, soft gold—you’re going to love it. Your father said they needed to pick up the old one this morning, but I said that’s okay. This way we’ll have a few days to clean the room and get everything ready.
“Are you okay?” her mother asked.
She wasn’t okay—she didn’t know if she ever would be okay.
The reverend was everywhere in that empty room. He was sending her a message, displaying his power in a way she wouldn’t be able to miss. He’d hollowed out that room in the same way he had hollowed out her soul. He’d keep doing that, she knew, because no one could stop him. The plan she’d worked on all day now seemed hopelessly inadequate. It was replaced in her head by a sense of desperation.
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When did it begin?
She tried to remember the first time she knew something was wrong. She couldn’t pinpoint it exactly. She was around twelve when she finally realized it was something bad, but the things that led up to it started earlier. Nothing happened quickly—one thing just led to the next thing. At first, it was just the tickling—a small thing. Please stop! She remembered laughing about it when she was younger, telling him to stop even while she was thinking that it was enjoyable. Please stop! In those early days she didn’t really want him to stop even when she told him so.
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