Butterfly

by Sylvester Stephens

  I hoped that was a one-time thing because my father was drunk that night. But almost every time I went to his house, he did something to me. Even when he got married, he still did something to me.

  When I got a little older and I could stay home all by myself, I rarely spent the night over my dad’s. Although I did not want to go at all, my mother still made me. He left me alone most of the time because my little sister and brother were getting old enough to know what was going on when he laid his nasty ass on top of me.

  About four months ago, my stepdad went to Tennessee to visit his mother, so my mother took that opportunity to spend the night out, too. She would not let me stay at home alone and made me go to my dad’s house. I begged her not to make me go, but all that she cared about was getting out of the house herself.

  All of the bedrooms were full, so I ended up sleeping on the living room floor. I thought since I was in an open area, I would be safe, but in the middle of the night, I felt my dad sliding beneath the cover with me. He grabbed me around my waist and pulled me backward and then he started grinding on my butt.

  “No, Dad!” I whispered. “Please don’t.”

  “Shh! Be quiet!” Dad whispered back.

  He tried to pull my pajamas down, but I kept pulling them back up. He rolled me on my stomach and held both of my arms behind me with just one of his big chubby hands. He was so big and heavy that he almost smothered me. He opened my legs with his legs and that’s all that I remember because I blacked out. I don’t know if it was from the anxiety of being raped by my father, or the pressure of his big nasty-ass body smothering me. Either way, I passed out.

  I woke up with my comforter on top of me and my pajamas around my ankles, but my underwear was nowhere to be found. I slowly stood up and wrapped my comforter around me. On my way to the bathroom, I met my father.

  “Nothing happened! You hear me?”

  I did not answer I kept going to the bathroom. My father followed me into the bathroom and stood in the doorway. “Did you hear me? I said nothing happened.”

  I looked at him through the mirror and answered, “Naw, nothing happened.”

  I took a shower, put on my clothes and then walked all the way home from the West End to Decatur. It took me seven hours, but I made it. When my mother got home, she whooped me for disobeying her and not staying at my dad’s until she got home. I wanted to tell her what had happened, but I felt like it would only create more problems. I could not tell my stepdad because my mother did not want him to know that we had been away from the house for the night. Had he found out, he probably would have killed my father with his bare hands! My father thought he was tough and always looked for trouble. He would have loved for my stepdad to step to him, so he could get some of his thugs to hurt him. My stepdad never started trouble, but he sure as hell never ran away from it, either!

  Two months after that happened, I got sick and I had a pregnancy test. Sure enough, it was positive. I was not a virgin, but I had not been with a boy in about a year, so I knew he had to be the father. Instead of telling anybody that I was pregnant, I secretly had an abortion and everything went away.

  The Monday after that, I was walking down the hall during my lunch period and the secretary called me into the office. She asked me why I was not in the conference my mother was having with Mr. Wilson, my science teacher. Shit, I did not know we were having a conference. She immediately made me go to Mr. Wilson’s class. I should have known by the closed door that something was up, but I thought he just wanted privacy for our conference. I opened the door and caught Mr. Wilson having sex with my mother from behind.

  She was bent over his desk with her skirt wrapped around her ankles. Their backs were turned to the door, so they could not see me when I walked in. I was completely in shock. I took a few steps toward them calling out to my mother. They were so into it, they did not even notice that I was standing right behind them.

  “Mama,” I kept walking closer and then I screamed, “Mama!”

  My mother and Mr. Wilson looked over their shoulders and finally saw me. My mother reached for her skirt and tried to pull it up. “What are you doing in here?”

  “I go to school here, Mama!”

  “Keisha, I know this looks bad, but your mother and I are in love.” Mr. Wilson bent down behind his desk and hid himself to pull up his clothes.

  “How could you do this, Mama?”

  I ran out of the classroom and then all the way home. My mother came home and explained to me that she and Mr. Wilson were in love. Mr. Wilson was the mystery man from the Internet. My father was a rapist and my mother was a cheater, and I was the child those evil people produced. Every single night I dream to be a part of a normal family...”

  END KEISHA’S STORY

  • • •

  “...But I wake up to the nightmare of the disgusting face I see in my mirror every single morning.”

  “Oh my God, Keisha! I don’t know what to say about your mother, but you have to tell somebody about what your father did to you.”

  “Tell who, Butterfly?”

  “Tell your stepdad.”

  “If I tell my stepdad, he’ll put his hands on my Dad and then he’ll be in jail.”

  “Then tell the police.”

  “I don’t want my daddy to go to jail, either.”

  “He’s not your daddy, Keisha! Your stepdad is your daddy! That man is a rapist!”

  “See, that’s why I didn’t want to tell anybody ’cause people are going to want me to do what they want me to do.”

  “Well, what do you want to do, Keisha?”

  “I just want to forget about it.”

  “But what if he tries to do it again?”

  “He’s not going to get a chance to do it again.”

  “But he raped you, Keisha. He has to pay for what he did to you.”

  “God will punish him.”

  “Yeah, but the police need to punish him, too.”

  “I just want to forget it ever happened and go on with my life.”

  “Listen to me, Keisha. Bri’s stepdad works for the Atlanta Police Department. He can help you.”

  “I don’t want anybody’s help. What I want is to be left alone so that I can put this behind me and move forward with my life.”

  “You’re my best friend, Keisha. How can I leave you alone? I care about you.”

  “If you really care about me, Butterfly, you’ll let this go because if this comes out, it’s going to hurt a lot of people, especially me. I don’t want all of our friends to know that my dad raped me. I don’t want people to look and say, ‘That girl had sex with her father.’ I just want to have a normal life.”

  “Your life will be normal in time, but you have to deal with what happened in order to get past it.”

  “You mean like how you’re dealing with your mother abandoning you?”

  “My situation is totally different from yours.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “I have to deal with my situation in an unresolved manner because I can’t deal with my mother directly. But your father is on the other side of town, and you can make him pay for what he did to you.”

  “We’re two different people, Butterfly. You’re mad at your mother and you want her to pay for hurting you. You want an explanation! I don’t! I don’t want to know why my father raped me. I don’t want him to pay for anything. I’m not mad at him; I’m afraid of him! I want him away from me...Forever!” Keisha yelled and then calmed down quickly. “I’m sorry.”

  I realized there was nothing I could do to convince Keisha to press charges against her father. She was too afraid that she would be put on trial in the court of public opinion.

  “Don’t worry about it. They can’t hear you in this big old house.”

  “I just want to have a normal life with a normal family.”

  “The older I get, the more I’m starting to realize that every family has some type of dysfunctional behavior, Keisha.”

&n
bsp; “Let me ask you a question, Butterfly.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “How are you learning to talk so good?”

  “You mean, talk so well.”

  “Yeah, how are you learning to talk so well?”

  “It’s an environmental thing, Keisha. I’m being pushed to speak properly and it’s okay to say a word or sentence the correct way without being criticized by your friends. You know, it’s okay to be intelligent.”

  “It’s like you just got smart all of a sudden.”

  “No, that’s not it. I got to a school now where communication is important through dialogue and not through action. And the Forresters, even Pa-Pa, make sure I’m speaking proper grammar.”

  “Damn, all that I learn from my house is how to speak biblical terms from my stepdad.”

  “Wait a minute, don’t get it twisted, Pastor Powell is responsible for me having the patience to sit down and listen when someone is trying to tell me some useful information. And he used the Bible to get through to me.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. I love the fact that my stepdad tries to teach me about the Bible, but I want to be smart like you.”

  “I’m no smarter than you, Keisha. It’s just that I have a lot of support behind me to excel. I know how you feel. Until I moved in with the Powells, I never had a sense of family. My father did all that he could as a father, but he knew nothing about being a mother. He knew how to survive. He knew how to love me. But he did not know how to teach me how to love myself like a woman should.”

  “Do you like have resentment, for your father for not being there for you the past eight years?”

  “Uh-uhn! Nope! What happened that night was self-defense. He did not go over there to hurt anybody. He went over there to see his kids that he loved. They started it and my father finished it.”

  “But you don’t think that if he would have just walked away, he could have still been in your life?”

  “No, I think he did what he had to do.”

  “What? Are you saying you think he had to murder those people?”

  All of a sudden, I had a vivid flashback to that night when the incident occurred. It was in slow motion and my recollection was more synchronized than I had ever remembered. I could see my father on top of the man, but he was not swinging as I had always remembered. He was only trying to restrain the man from hitting him.

  Chapter Ten

  And as quickly as the image flashed in my mind, it left. But it left behind a migraine headache. I felt this agonizing pain directly behind my right eye that seemed to circulate to the back of my head and throb.

  “Aw, my goodness, that hurts!”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t know I got this pain in my head and it’s killing me! Oh my goodness, it hurts!” I lay on my side and then covered my head with a pillow.

  “Hey girl, you all right?”

  “Can you do me a favor?”

  “Yeah, what’s up?” Keisha rubbed my head as I closed my eyes tightly.

  “Can you get me some Tylenol out of my medicine cabinet?”

  “Okay.”

  Keisha ran to the bathroom and brought me a couple of Tylenol pills and a glass of water. “Here you go.”

  “Man, my head is throbbing, Keisha.” I sat up and swallowed the pill and then lay back down.

  “Just out of the blue, like that?”

  “Yes, I don’t know where that came from.”

  “Just lay down and go to sleep then.”

  “I’m not sleepy.” I sat up and laid my head back. “It’s kind of going away now anyway.”

  “So that came out of nowhere when you was—I mean, were—talking about your father?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know what that was all about. But it’s completely gone now.”

  “For real?”

  “Yeah, I don’t feel anything anymore.”

  “Man, you need to have Dr. Forrester check your crazy ass out.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “Oh yes it is. You acting like you just had a damn aneurism or something.”

  “Now what were we talking about?”

  “You told me your father did what he had to do, and I asked you if you thought that your father murdering those people was what he had to do.”

  “First of all, he didn’t murder anybody. It was self-defense and he was convicted of manslaughter.”

  Again the flashback of that night became very clear in my mind. I could see my father on top of the man holding him down, and Ms. Joyce, my younger brother and sister’s mother, running and jumping on my father’s back. My father stood up and pushed Ms. Joyce off of him and her boyfriend ran to his car.

  “Ah, shoot!” I screamed and grabbed my head.

  “Did it happen again?”

  “Damn! It hurts!”

  “Butterfly, are you all right, girl?”

  The pain was so intense, I could not even respond to Keisha’s question. It was in the same spot as it was before, directly behind my right eye. My vision was blurry and I was a bit incoherent.

  “I’m going to get Dr. Forrester!” Keisha stood up and headed for the door.

  “No!” I shouted. “No, don’t go get anybody!”

  Keisha stopped in her tracks and turned around. “This is not the first time this has happened to you, is it?”

  “Damn! This hurts!” I clutched my sheets to absorb some of the pain shooting through my head.

  “This is not the first time this has happened to you, is it, Butterfly?”

  “I can’t talk right now, Keisha! It hurts too bad!” I clutched the sheets again as another intense wave of pain hit me.

  “Girl, I’m getting help!”

  “No!” I grabbed Keisha’s wrist and would not let it go. “Ugh!”

  “It’s something wrong with you, Butterfly!”

  “I’ll be fine in a minute; it doesn’t last that long!” I dug my fingernails into Keisha’s wrist. “Oh my God!”

  “Ouch!” Keisha shouted. “Let me go! You’re hurting me!”

  Keisha snatched away from me and I tightened my body and lifted my head from the pillow. “Sheeeeeeit! It hurts!”

  I sat still for a while and then the pain subsided.

  “I’m telling Dr. Forrester in the morning about your headaches.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “Why are you trying to hide this from them? It could be something serious.”

  “If it was something serious, something would have happened already.”

  “You don’t know that, and if you don’t tell the Forresters in the morning, I’m going to tell them myself.”

  “Please, don’t do that! I’m not going to tell anyone your secret, so please don’t tell anybody mine.”

  “No! I’m not making that deal with you. If you want to tell my secret, tell it. Because as soon as I get up in the morning, I’m telling Ms. Alicia and Dr. Forrester there’s something wrong with you.”

  “Do what you have to do.”

  The next day, the Forresters had a house full of people for Thanksgiving. There were Auntie Cynthia, Little Mike and Uncle Mike, Pa-Pa, Auntie Tina and her husband, Mr. Curtis; their three kids, Ariel, Kija and Sasha; Auntie Pam, Keisha, Brit and me. They had three tables set up for the adults, the teenagers and the children.

  After we finished eating dinner, the men watched football. Dr. Forrester and Uncle Mike were from Michigan, so they were fans of the Detroit Lions. They had to be real fans because who would admit to being Lions fans?

  Keisha was enjoying the Thanksgiving activities to the point where she forgot to talk to the Forresters about my headaches. I was glad because I was not in a mood for serious conversation. I wanted to enjoy the moment and not worry about my everyday problems. It was one of those butterfly moments when I wanted to fly away to my perfect world of being with family and friends for a perfect holiday. And that was exactly what happened until...

  “We need
to talk.”

  I stopped and turned around. “Yes, sir?”

  “When were you going to tell me about these headaches you’ve been having?”

  “Keisha told you?” I asked. “Snitch!”

  “That’s not important; what’s going on?”

  “Nothing, they are just headaches that come and go.”

  “The way I hear it, when they come, they hurt like hell.”

  “They do, but only for a minute.”

  “Okay, you have a choice, Butterfly. Do you want me to involve Alicia?”

  “No, sir. She will have me in a neurosurgeon’s office tomorrow morning.”

  “Then tell me what’s going on, and I want the whole truth.”

  “Okay, uh, every time I think about the night when my father went to jail, I have this vision or flashback like I’m watching a movie. It’s like I’m there all over again.”

  “And this brings on the headaches?”

  “Yes, sir, very painful headaches.”

  “What is that you see?”

  “I see my father and Ms. Joyce’s boyfriend fighting and my dad is on top. Ms. Joyce jumps on Dad and pushes him off of her boyfriend. Her boyfriend runs to his car and comes back with a gun and then I wake up with both of them dead.”

  “Do you ever see your father shoot them?”

  “No, I never get that far.”

  “I think what’s happening is that you suffered such a traumatic experience in witnessing the incident, you’ve somehow blocked out what really happened.”

  “Is there anything we can do to stop the headaches?”

  “We have to get you to confront what happened that night. I think your mind wants to see your father from such a positive perspective that your subconscious has repressed the reality of what happened that night. It’s perfectly normal.”

  “Can we keep this between us? I don’t want Ms. Alicia and Ma Powell to be worried about me.”

  “I’m going to schedule a CAT Scan and see what’s going on. If there’s nothing abnormal happening, I won’t tell them, but if there is, I’m going to have to let them know.”