"But... I kept forgetting it was a video, that it wasn't the real you anymore. It was almost like I... didn't want to leave you... alone... with them... hurting you."
And abruptly, I understand. It comes to me through the layer of ice—the slightest bit of appreciation. Tammy's eyes are overflowing. Mine are dry now, gritty. I feel dead inside. "I'll tell you everything," I say quietly, limply, utterly depleted.
"No. You don't have to. I know now," he says.
"You know what you saw," I say determinedly. "And now you're going to listen to my side of it."
"Jamie..."
"No! You're going to listen to what I have to say about it!" I declare in a controlled voice that astonishes me. "It's only fair you hear my side of it. You've heard what Lard-Ash Feldman has to say, even though she knows fucking nothing! You watched my parents call me names while they stuck things in me, while they burned my ass with cigarettes, while they used me and tossed me like I was a piece of shit! Now you're going to listen to me!" My voice is shrill and gravelly, raw from screaming.
Tammy gives me a tiny nod of surrender.
book three:
unspoken request
thirty-one:
tammy
(december 29)
"They started beating me when I was about three," Jamie says in an eerie matter of fact manner, and I instinctively know he's employing his survival skills. He'll have to, if he's going to be able to tell me this without going insane. He gently frees himself from my embrace and puts needed distance between us. I let him, because he won't be able to do this with my arms around him. He has to be alone. There can be no vulnerability.
"It's the earliest memory I have. They managed to duck the authorities whenever a teacher called in the signs of abuse." He swallows. "They began to lock me in my room right after first grade began. They removed me from school and locked me in my room."
My eyes close. I had heard about Jamie being locked in a room, about how the Sommerville Police found him, but how many years?
"They let me out every so often, to shower and stretch my legs. One night, Daddy came into the shower with me and made me blow him. I tried to escape out the window. They caught me and beat me bloody, then they chained me to my bed, by my ankles."
I'm sick. I'm so sick.
Jamie just sits there, not a trace of anything on his face or in his eyes, like he's simply telling a story. He hasn't put his socks or his work shoes on yet, and I see his ankles beneath the hem of his scrub pants. Both of them have rings of scar tissue around them, an angry, glossy, lumpy deep red. The left still looks a degree worse, as though he has recently been re-injured there.
"They gave me a bucket by my bed to piss and shit in," Jamie continues. He walks slowly back over to the bathtub, curls his hands around the towel rack hanging there. "They fed me whenever they felt like it. When I was about seven or eight, they began to come into my room and make the videos, which they sold to their friends, their friends' friends, et cetera. They fed me less and less often. I couldn't leave my bed because I became too weak. The videos changed then. Though it was a lot more fun to film me trying to fight them off, they said, some of their friends really liked watching me lay there too weak to move while they fucked and beat me, too weak to even participate."
I don't understand why he's not crying, or going crazy, and I have to remind myself, his catatonia is a survival thing.
He grips the silver bar and pulls. "I stopped screaming. I learned to stop myself from screaming when Mom put her cigs out on me. I learned how to go away in my mind, to leave that room, to turn off my fear, to ignore the hurting... When I did that, they stopped making the videos. They stopped, because, if I don't scream, what fun is that?"
I dry heave. When the lurching of my stomach eases off, I interrupt him in a rough whisper, "Did their friends rape you too, Jamie? Did you have to have sex with their friends?"
"No, just my dad," he replies in sterile, sullen monotone, pulling the towel bar, slowly dislodging it from where it's fastened to the wall. "Aside from you, the only other person I've been with is my dad." His eyes change, become wild and angry. "I'm sorry! I didn't want to be fucked by my own father!"
"I know that, Jamie, I know..."
Brown pieces of wall and bits of white plaster begin to crumble from where he's pulling. "Say what you really think, Tammy!" He spits the words out like bitter seeds. "Just say it! Say what my parents' friends said! Say what you all think! I looked like I wanted it! I looked like I loved it, right? Right?! I made out with Daddy like I was a little slut for his big cock, right?!"
"No, Jamie. They made you do it, I know..." Why won't you believe me?
"I was no different than you were, Tammy! He told me he loved me. He told me he'd never let anything happen to me, that he'd take care of me, and I believed him!" His emotional reserve is deteriorating before my eyes. "He kissed me, he touched me, he made me feel loved. I went for days, weeks, without human touch, and when he gave it to me... I'm human, Tammy! He made me feel like he cared about me. Is that so horrible? To need someone to touch me?!"
One end of the towel bar comes free, leaving behind a gaping hole. More plaster rains into the white fibreglass basin. The other end remains bolted securely to the wall.
His voice rises to a fever pitch. "Am I such a horrible person?!"
"No," I sob. "No."
"Mommy," Jamie sneers the word, "Was the truly brutal one. Daddy just liked to fuck me. And I would do anything for him, anything he wanted, just so he'd keep touching me, kissing me, loving me. When he didn't come to my room for days, or weeks, I'd cry for him to come..." Jamie's barely holding himself on the edge, teetering on the cliff. "I loved him. I loved both of them. I only wanted to please them. I only wanted them to love me too!"
"Your dad manipulated you," I tell him. "Every bit as much as your mom did. I think that makes him more evil. I watched him. He made me puke, acting all sweet, making you believe he loved you! He didn't love you, he used you!"
"You think I don't know that now?!" he screams at me. "You think I'm still so stupid?! He wouldn't even let me eat until I blew him! I was hungry! I was so hungry, Tammy!" His wails bounce from the bathroom walls. Plaster continues to avalanche down into a snowy porcelain valley.
"I know... I know..." My heart hurts for the child that's still trapped. It hurts...
"The reason I can't bear to let you suck me," Jamie mutters between dry retches, his white knuckles gripping the edge of the bathtub, "Is because it would make me feel like I'm my own father, like I'm turning into him. I don't want to feel that, ever! Ever! Because I HATE HIM! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? I HATE HIM!"
"Jamie, I understand... I know..."
"If I blow you, I'm still me. If I let you blow me, I feel like Daddy, forcing a child..." Vomit spills from Jamie's mouth, tumbles down the front of his shirt, into the tub, mixing with the rubble.
Holding the freed end of the towel rack, Jamie begins to twist the metal off from where it's still affixed to the wall above his bathtub. "The police said Daddy shot Mom and then turned the gun on himself," Jamie says, deadness in his eyes, puke and saliva copiously dripping in long strings from his chin. His hands and arms work in a circular motion. Twist, twist, twist...
It's quarter past ten. He twists, twists, twists. The towel rack separates, a portion stays embedded in the wall. The twisting has created a long, thin, warped edge, sharp as a needle, a razor, a crooked ice pick. Jamie touches his index finger to it. "The cops ought to have let me die in that room. I'm ruined. I'm a maggot. I'm a dirty, disgusting piece of filth."
"Why do you blame yourself, Jamie?!" I sob, past the point of hysteria. "Why do you hate yourself when you did nothing wrong?!"
"There's no hope for me." His voice is as hollow and metallic as the towel rod he holds in his death grip. "You thought I was so pure, so sweet. I told you I was a virgin. I lied to you. I wanted to be a virgin, but the truth is, I'm garbage."
"Stop it!" I yell.
&
nbsp; "Go, Tammy. Just go home."
"No. I'm not going anywhere."
"You gonna watch me kill myself?" He positions the spindle-like point of the towel bar against the delicate, transparent skin of his wrist.
"I'm not going to let you kill yourself!" I step carefully towards him.
"I want to die. I don't want to live like this anymore."
"What about Stacy? What about your friends? What about your cats? What about ME?!"
His serene fatalism is a clean, cold blade, shredding my innards. "Stacy will have to deal with it. I'll leave instructions for the kids. You... You'll live over it, I'm sure. As for friends, what fucking friends? Everyone hates me."
"You know what? I'm sick of hearing that shit!" I shout at him. "If everyone hated you, you wouldn't have had Lloyd, Stacy or me! And my mom! She loves you, you know that?! If everyone hates you so much, why do they cheer whenever you're up there singing?"
He shrugs. "They're just people in town. They don't know me, and if they did, they'd hate me."
"They just saw you kiss me, with tongue! And they cheered... most of them."
"Whatever," he rolls his eyes. "They're strangers."
"'Cause you won't let anyone in, Jamie!"
"Because I can't trust people, Tammy!" he retorts. "I can't trust people not to pretend to care, only to stomp on me as soon as my guard is down!"
"And you think I'm one of them! You think I couldn't give two shits about you, don't you?!"
He shrugs indifferently. I can't button my mouth now. "You selfish, heartless... You're cruel... I can't believe how cruel you are!"
"I might as well be dead, Tammy. I feel dead. They ruined me, forever. They killed me. I just didn't realise it, until now."
"They did not kill you! You're a survivor! And you know it!"
His eyes interrupt their lifeless stare with a small blink.
"What we have, Jamie, it's beautiful. It's real. It's always been real..."
"I was happy alone," he whispers.
"You're lying to yourself!" I hiss. "You weren't happy! You were miserable! Just like me! Miserable, alone, hiding, afraid. Fucking afraid... just like me!"
"Please, Tammy," he says dispassionately. "Just let me go. Let me die..."
I feel the entire world being crushed by a giant, invisible, insidious evil. "I guess you are fucked up. Go ahead, then! Do it!"
"Leave," he commands in a small voice.
I lunge at him and grab the towel bar. We struggle for a few seconds, and I pry it from his clammy fingers and fling it. It clatters metallically into the tub. I take him in my arms and hold him. He resists, thrashing and screaming. My voice is a pained howl. "I'm not letting you go. I'll never let you go."
He yields, his body becomes pliant, and he sobs into the front of my shirt. "Now you know why I don't trust anybody, why I'm so afraid and ashamed, why I only feel safe when I'm alone, behind locked doors. I don't know who I can trust. I don't know who's for real, who's going to hurt me next..." He frees a torrent as I hold him against me.
"You punish yourself for everything they did, Jamie. You lock yourself away, like they locked you in your room..." His body congeals again. "You deny yourself food, because they starved you."
He begins to squirm. "Tammy, please!" He sinks to the floor, his body rolling up like a woodlouse.
"And you burn yourself, like they burned you."
"Stop!"
"Look at this!" I shout, reaching down and lifting his left ankle. "Look what you do to yourself!"
I can feel his heart fracturing. I can feel his shame. He wears it like a badge, a scarlet letter. His pain is exposed, open, a wound, a large, swollen, blistered sore. "I don't know why I do it," he sobs. "I went to school, became a nurse. I had a foster dad who loved me, but I keep doing it. It hurts, but I can't stop!"
"You think you're a bad person. You think you deserve what they did to you. You think you deserve to be lonely. You think you don't deserve any happiness. You're in prison, Jamie! You're still locked in that room with those monsters! You have to break out!"
"Tammy, stop!"
"You can't punish them, and there's nobody else to punish, so you punish yourself!"
"Please!"
"It's all you know. You have to break out! You have to let yourself trust again! Don't push me away. Let me love you. Let me care!"
He wants to sink down, all the way down, and I won't let him. I reach down and pull him back up.
Even through the starchy cotton of his vomit-encrusted scrub top and the soft layer of the white shirt he wears underneath, my fingers trace over the big, thick scars over his shoulder blades. "What are these from, Jamie?"
His breath hiccups. "They're bedsores. From lying in bed, from starving, from my bones poking out..."
I thought my heart was already broken.
thirty-two:
jamie
(december 29)
A gut-wrenching sob squeezes from his throat, "Jamie..."
And his arms constrict around me, crushing me, smashing me against him.
Here it is, the feeling I had when Lloyd hugged me that night, so long ago when he spoke of his horror at finding me starved, tortured, beaten, lying in my own waste, in a death bed, condemned to die for no reason other than my parents hated me and wanted to kill me as surely as they'd killed themselves.
Tammy soaks me as he holds me so tight that I'm likely to smother. But I love it. My arms slide up around his neck. I feel my heart slowly beginning to gather itself back together.
I'm safe. I'm loved. I'm home.
I belong... here.
"I know why you call me 'Daddy'," he cries. "You're trying to deal with feeling dirty. But you don't know how. So you go back to that place where you can pretend you like feeling dirty, and then you punish yourself. It's all you know. You can't help it. You're still trying to survive. You're a survivor."
My heart and lungs discordant, I wince at the familiar compliment. How does he do it? How does he understand me, inside and out?
I don't understand why God is so good to me, giving me these people. Every time I think God hates me, every time I think God wants me to go away and die, He gives me someone to help me, to care, to love.
"Tammy, I never meant to imply that I don't like making love with you. I like it... I love it... I don't mean to make you think that I feel like you're raping me every time we do it. I didn't mean to call you that. It just... came out. It's like... I became a little boy again, just to deal with feeling so dirty, because every time I feel pleasure, it feels dirty."
"I know, Jamie, I understand."
"In so many ways, you're dealing with a little boy, you know?"
"Yeah," Tammy says quietly. "I know."
"How can you forgive me for all this?" I sniffle. "How can you love me after this? How can you look at me?"
"There's nothing to forgive, Baby," he whispers.
"I lied to you, told you I'd never had sex. I used you as a surrogate 'Daddy' to try to deal... I said horrible things to you. I'm so hateful. I said you probably got off on the video. I accused you of cheating on me with Yvette."
Now I really have something to be ashamed of.
"You were a virgin, Jamie. You lose your virginity when you make love for the first time, as a consenting adult, with somebody you care about. When you were little, you did what you had to do to survive. I know you love me. I know you know the difference between me and your father. I know what you feel for me is real, otherwise you would have latched on to any guy who paid attention to you."
That's right.
He continues. "As for the thing with Yvette, I know she's a slut, and she is a mean, spiteful bitch, and not to be trusted, but I need you to trust me. I don't like her, and I'll never sleep with her. I love you. I'll never stop loving you. And I forgive you, for wanting to kill yourself. God, do you know what it would do to me if you killed yourself?!"
"I'm sorry, Tammy," I whisper, my head hanging down. "And I'm sorry I slap
ped you. I will never, ever hit you again."
"I'm sorry too, Jamie. Asking you if you liked doing those things. I knew you didn't. I was being hateful too, because I was hurt, but I know good and well you didn't like any of it."
"I know you know."
"I swear to you, I didn't ask that bitch to send me the video."
"I know."
"I didn't know it existed. I'm sorry I watched it. It upset me so much. I don't want to think about it anymore. And I don't want you to either. It's over. It happened, and neither of us can do anything about it. If I could, Jamie, I would have jumped into that video and saved you. I'd have killed those fuckers..."
He inhales and exhales slowly, his chest expanding against mine. "And I'm sorry I forced you to tell me about all this before you were ready to."
My arms tighten around him. I squeeze him with all my strength. I've got to let him know. "It's okay, Tammy, it's okay now. I'm glad I told you. Maybe you had to force me. Maybe I never could have otherwise."
"I don't want you to die," he whispers raggedly.
"I'm not going to."
"Are you sure?" he asks.
"I don't want to die."
"Are you sure?" he repeats, his breath quickening.
"I want to live. I'm going back to Miss Halliday."
"I need a good counsellor myself," he admits.
"I'm sorry, Tammy."
"We're going to be okay now, aren't we." He isn't asking.
"Yes." I bury my nose in his chest, nuzzle his throat, my eyes closed, like a newborn kitten seeking the scent of mother's milk.
"I love the way you smell," I sigh.
"I'm not wearing cologne."
"I don't care. I just love your smell... your skin... your hair."
"What about my breath?"
"That too."
"So it doesn't stink?"
"No." I clap my hand over my mouth. "Does mine?"
"No."
"I just puked," I say through my hand.
"I puked too. You smell fine."
"I'm getting puke all over you. My top..."
"You never stink, even after you smoke, which I wish you wouldn't do."
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