One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  The Sentient Bean was a cavernous place with a counter too small for it. People shopping at the Brighter Day health food place next door dropped in for coffee, but the hang-out clientele seemed to be mostly men who had nothing to do but play backgammon and tell lies. The group next to me was a case in point.

  One guy, who sounded like he was probably from Philadelphia, was dropping a name a minute while he watched two others play. In the time I sat there waiting for Randi, he claimed that he knew everyone in the film industry from Daniel Day-Lewis to “Bob” De Niro. Not only that but his mother hung out with Eleanor Roosevelt and his uncle was Eleanor’s plumber at Hyde Park. It made me wonder if anybody was real.

  I shook my head at my own self. Of course there were real people. Good people. Honest people. Like my Watch, who I wished were going to join me instead of the straight-haired woman in too-expensive sunglasses and teetery ankle boots who approached me from the door.

  “Thanks for coming,” Randi said. “Can we move to a table further back?”

  Only because Mr. Name Dropper was launching into how he was going to revamp the entire film arts program at SCAD did I agree.

  “Do you want coffee?” Randi said when she’d selected the table in the most remote corner of the place.

  “No,” I said.

  “I do,” she said, “but it can wait.” She tossed back her hair. Thin as it was, it fell right back against her face. “Paul wasn’t sure you needed to know this, but I think legally it’s best.”

  I felt my own face drain of color.

  “Seth is not as financially stable as he led us to believe. He left me in charge of paying his bills while he’s gone, and I don’t know how he thought I wasn’t going to discover this but he has spent thousands, and I do mean thousands, of dollars on”—she forced her voice down to a hoarse whisper—“pornography, including paying for the ultrahigh-speed Internet he needed for those big sites.”

  Randi was rattling off the information as if she were talking about one of her clients. I expected her to whip out a file any minute and check to see if she had the name right.

  “The upshot is: He has missed his last two mortgage payments on the townhouse. I’ve paid them so he’s now current, but that can’t continue. Contrary to popular belief, we are not made of money.”

  That was entirely untrue. I had never seen a woman more made of money in my life, and I’d known some very rich people.

  “So why tell me?” I said.

  “Because Seth still believes you’re going to marry him when he gets past this, and I think you should have all the information before you make that commitment.”

  Suspicion nearly made my hair stand up on end. She was suddenly concerned about my welfare? Even as I watched her turn her gaze from me in a rare moment of self-consciousness, I knew. She wasn’t.

  “No,” I said. “You’re telling me because you want me to have every reason not to marry Seth.”

  Randi’s head came up. “Why on earth would I do that? I want my son happy.”

  “You want your son protected—no, your family. Your name. And as long as I know, the threat of other people finding out will always be there. If I am the one who decides not to be his wife, why would I ever out him? Only a woman scorned would do that.”

  “You always were a dreamer,” she said.

  “For once, Randi,” I said, “I’m not dreaming. But from now on, if there is anything I need to know about Seth, let Seth tell me.”

  I ran all the way to the other end of the park before I stopped to breathe and massage the stitch digging into my side. Was there ever going to be a bottom to the layers that had to be ripped off? Was there always going to be one more thing that had to be exposed?

  As I limped across Gaston to the house, I knew one thing for sure: this didn’t feel like healing.

  The postal guy was at our box as I approached the wrought-iron fence. I wasn’t usually the one who brought in the mail, but I retrieved it and took it inside. Daddy would want to see it and I needed to see him. We’d barely spent ten minutes together since Mama left for Virginia.

  I was surprised to find him in the kitchen, whisking eggs in a bowl.

  “Look at you,” I said.

  “Fixing myself an omelet,” he said. “You want one?”

  “No, thanks.” The thought made me turn green from the inside out.

  “It has feta cheese in it.”

  “Really, Daddy—I’m good.”

  “You don’t look good.” He tapped the whisk on the edge of the bowl and frowned at me. “Do you need to see the doctor?”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll have an omelet. Just no garlic.”

  “What? That’s the best part.”

  “I brought the mail in,” I said.

  “Give me the bad news. Where does your mother keep the garlic anyway?”

  “I’m not telling.” I hiked myself up onto one of the stools and flipped through the stack. “Okay, Bell South . . . American Express, that one’s kind of thick . . . AARP—”

  “Pitch that one. It makes me feel old. Ah, garlic salt. That’ll work.”

  “Business Weekly and . . .” I stopped because I was staring at a vanilla-colored envelope with a Denver postmark. The return address said, simply, Seth Grissom.

  “You okay, sugar?” Daddy said.

  “Y’know what?” I said. “I’m going to pass on the omelet after all. Maybe tomorrow?”

  He just looked at me—sadly—and nodded. I retreated to the fourth floor with the letter pressed against my chest.

  But when I hit the window seat, I couldn’t open it. What had Seth said on the phone? Maybe talking about it isn’t the best way. Maybe I need to get my thoughts down on paper.

  Was that what this was? More thoughts? More layers? One more thing to rip off the places that were just beginning to scab over?

  I closed my eyes against the sun slanting in through the slats of the shutters and striping the room in light. This was difficult enough when I knew almost nothing about porn and addiction and Seth’s raw past. Seeing it was too much. It was too hard.

  The sun lightened the space behind my eyelids anyway. I opened my eyes and watched the dust dance in its shafts.

  Nothing about this is easy, I’d told Kellen.

  I pulled the envelope from my chest and ran my thumb over Seth’s perfect printing. I had to read it. I hated it, but I had to know that one more thing. And I would.

  But not now. Not alone.

  I tucked it under the cushion of the window seat.

  Betsy wasn’t at the Piebald Sunday; according to Gray she had a “church thing.” When I told Gray and Ms. Helen about the letter, neither of them asked me why I hadn’t opened it. They seemed to know . . . more than I did.

  “So,” Gray said, poking the wooden stir stick up and down into her latte. “You’re afraid to.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Coward that I am, yes, I’m afraid.”

  “All right, let’s get something straight.”

  We both looked at Ms. Helen, who had her hands on the hips of her pale purple slacks.

  “Uh-oh,” Gray said.

  “I do not want to hear you calling yourself any more names, Tara,” Ms. Helen said.

  Speaking of name-calling, when she stopped calling me honey and started calling me Tara, I knew she was not to be argued with.

  “Did I call myself a name?” I said.

  “You haven’t stopped. We’ve heard coward, stupid—”

  “Heathen,” I added. “But somebody else put the kibosh on that one.”

  “Whatever you call yourself you’re eventually going to believe. And why would you want to believe things that aren’t true?”

  “Did you ever get bullied when you were a kid?” Gray said, and immediately shook her head. “No, you probably didn’t. I did—I got Gray Beard, Lard Butt, oh, and my personal favorite, Thunder Thighs. I bought all of it, which made it very easy for me to believe my husband’s lack of interest in me was all my faul
t.”

  Ms. Helen tapped the table with a nail—taupe today. “The point is, honey, just because you’re afraid doesn’t make you a coward. I’d be afraid too.”

  “But you’d open it,” I said.

  “Eventually.”

  “I think we ought to look at exactly what you’re afraid of,” Gray said. “Besides TMI from Mr. Fiancé.”

  “I don’t know what else there would be.”

  “You mind if I take a guess?”

  “Okay.”

  “What if he does reveal something, I don’t know, icky.”

  I had to laugh. “Icky would be euphemistic, but okay.”

  “Did you actually use the word euphemistic? My gosh, I like you. Okay . . . what if it’s awful? What do you think you’re going to do?”

  “Explode,” I said, without hesitation.

  Gray leaned in, ponytail flopping to the right. “And that scares you to death.”

  I nodded. “I’ve never been so all-over-the-place with my emotions. It’s like the thing with calling myself names. I never did that. I’ve always had pretty solid self-esteem. And now . . .”

  “This whole thing has sucked that right out of you.”

  Ms. Helen pushed her hand across the table until it reached mine. “But, honey, you have the power to take that back.”

  “It’s hard when everything has fallen apart.”

  “Except you.” Gray’s already pink face deepened to a rose, born of suddenly feeling pretty good about her sweet self, I was sure.

  “What?” I said.

  “Just remember—you are gonna love this—this is about self-esteem, not Seth-esteem.”

  “Oh, honey,” Ms. Helen said. “That is so bad it’s good.”

  “Really,” I said.

  Gray nudged my arm. “You get it, though, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I get it.”

  Fear of breaking apart into confetti still kept me from opening the letter by myself. But it didn’t keep me from taking it with me when I talked to Ned after the service on Monday. Winter had taken a rare bite out of Savannah during the night, and I could see wisps of my breath as we walked together across the cloistered lane and into the Green-Meldrim House. Even after we settled onto our couch in the corner I still couldn’t get warm. I must have looked pathetic because Ned took off his light leather jacket and tossed it over my lap. I buried my hands under it until my fingers could open the envelope.

  “Do you want to read it out loud?” Ned said.

  “Oh,” I said. “I think I do. Maybe if I hear it, it’ll make more sense . . . I don’t know.”

  “Give it a go. If it’s too hard, you can stop. It’ll still be here tomorrow.”

  I nodded and unfolded a sheet of plain vanilla paper covered in single-spaced type. We were going to need until tomorrow. The sheer length of it made me shiver.

  “Dear Tara,” I read. I skipped the paragraph about how good it was to hear my voice and how he knew this was hard for me and went to paragraph two. The one that started with,

  I need to tell you what happened when I came back from Maine.

  I looked up at Ned, who had his eyes closed. “Do you remember that part?”

  “Beach house. Cousin. Hustlers and Playboys. Seth found comfort.”

  “Right.” I located my place again and read,

  I went into withdrawal when I came back. My anxiety was worse than ever and I was sleeping maybe three hours a night. It was getting to be time to go back to school and I was starting eighth grade. I was freaking out because I just knew I was going to flunk out.

  I looked up again. “Seth was a straight-A student. That was a huge deal for him.”

  I read on.

  There was this kid at church—he was a freshman then and he was only there for a year or two—but I went to his house one time with Dad when they first moved to Savannah and this kid had a computer in his bedroom. He was actually the first kid I ever knew who had his own and he started showing me all this cool stuff on the Internet. And then it was like he read my mind, and he said, ‘I want to show you the coolest thing yet, but you have to swear you’ll never tell anybody. Especially your dad.’ He opened up this porn site and I just got a rush, better than anything I ever got from a magazine.

  I stopped. “Why would this kid take that chance with the pastor’s kid?”

  Ned gave a small shrug. “My gut response is that he sensed something in Seth. He even says it was like the kid read his mind.”

  “You mean, like, one addict being able to recognize another?”

  “Something like that.”

  It was my turn to close my eyes. “This is so freaky, Ned. It’s like he was a part of a whole other world I never knew about, and I thought I knew everything about him.”

  “That’s painful,” Ned said.

  You might not remember this,

  I read on,

  but my relationship with that kid—I think his name was Micah—caused kind of a rift between Kellen and me because I was spending more time with Micah than him. I know Kellen wondered why I didn’t include him, but I didn’t want him to know. That might have ruined our friendship totally if I hadn’t gotten a laptop for Christmas that year. Then I didn’t need to go to Micah’s. I had access to porn in my own bedroom. And I was never without it again.

  “Does that surprise you?” Ned said when I paused. “That his Internet usage was unsupervised?”

  “Not really. Why wouldn’t Randi and Paul trust him? He was such a nice kid. He was the Good Kid, especially compared to Evelyn, who was already giving them fits, and she was only three.” I found myself warming to the subject. “This was the kid who always knew he wanted to work with some kind of ministry. Of the three of us—Seth, Kellen, and me—he was the most Christian. And it wasn’t just because his dad was the pastor. There was just something in him that we didn’t have.” I let my gaze flow down the page, picking up a word here and there. The next sentence was,

  There’s more.

  My throat closed.

  “Can you read the rest to me?” I said. “Would that be okay?”

  “If that’s what you want.” Ned took the letter and adjusted his glasses before he looked at me. “I’ll stop anytime you say.”

  “Okay,” I said, but I knew if we didn’t get straight through this I might never come back to it again. I buried my hands under the jacket once more and nodded for Ned to begin.

  Two words in and I almost regretted that choice. Hearing it spoken by a male voice close to Seth’s age made it more real somehow. More like the truth.

  Since I talked to you, I’ve uncovered some memories I’d buried.

  Ned read.

  They weren’t very far down, but it was still hard to dig them up. It was like they were embedded in rock. Here’s basically what happened: When I was ten, maybe a little before, I was molested by someone I trusted. Numerous times.

  Ned’s voice slowed.

  And sworn to secrecy and threatened if I told. I know you don’t want to hear the details, so I’m going to spare you those. I hope it’s enough for you to know that I’m getting to what’s caused my pain and anxiety all these years and doing that is making me less dependent on porn already. Will you trust that I’m being healed? I love you, Tar. Seth.

  I had to swallow twice before I could speak. “Is he saying he was sexually abused?”

  Ned looked grim as he folded the letter. “I was afraid of that. It’s not uncommon for sex addicts to have that in their past.”

  “So that’s the pain he was talking about? That was the reason for all the anxiety?”

  “The pain is from being abused. The anxiety is from having to keep it a secret.”

  I felt like a piece of wood, except for one small flash of realization. “You know what’s weird?”

  Ned shook his head.

  “This is like the first time I actually know how he felt. I mean, just a little, you know.”

  “The anxiety of keeping something lock
ed up?”

  I put my hand against my solar plexus. “It’s like this big ball of spines and it shoots out everywhere. Sometimes I can’t stand it.”

  “Neither can he.”

  My hands balled into fists. “That part—being abused—that wasn’t his fault.”

  “And can you imagine what that’s like at ten, when you don’t have the resources yet to realize you didn’t do anything wrong?”

  “It’s hard enough at twenty-five.” I let my head fall back on the sofa. “Now I totally feel like a heel, not helping him.”

  Ned’s eyes grew firm. “You really want to go there, Tara? Look, you didn’t know where this all came from. He didn’t even know. And while that explains a lot, it doesn’t excuse anything. He hurt the person he loves most in the world, and it’s going to take time for you to heal.”

  “Every time I think, okay, I know it all, now I can move forward, there’s one more thing and it’s worse than the thing before it.”

  “It does seem that way.”

  I brought my head back up. “For instance, who was this person he trusted? Is that going to be another big ol’ steel pole hitting me in the head?”

  Ned gestured with the letter he still had in his hand. “Seth seems to sense that you wouldn’t want to know.”

  “I feel so horrible for him. Oh my gosh, how could someone—he was just a little boy—I don’t even know how to think about this.” I plastered my hand to my mouth and spoke through my fingers. “Ned,” I said, “I’m going to be sick.”

  I made it to the kitchen. Ned waited discreetly in the hall and handed me a wet washcloth when I came out.

  “You really are the full-service priest, aren’t you?” I said. My voice trembled like a candle flame.

  “I’m not going to ask you if you’re okay. Nothing about this is okay.” His eyes went from concerned to very sure about something. “Except one thing.”

  I pulled the washcloth from my mouth. “Please tell me what’s okay. Please.”

  “God is in this, somehow, some way—God’s slogging through this with us. Do you want to keep going?”