My mother came home from the hospital one day a little more buoyant than usual. She was always relieved to be home, but dreaded how sick she would become because of the treatments, but this day was different. She very nearly glowed.
“This weekend, we’re going to have a guest for dinner,” she gushed as we piled pillows around her in her bed. Her hair was in the process of thinning, and she’d lose it all, eventually.
“Who’s coming to dinner?” Matt asked.
“My dear friend Carl,” she said. “I met him at the hospital.”
“Is he having treatment, too?” I asked.
“No, no. He works there, at the hospital.”
“A doctor?” Matt asked, his voice hopeful.
“No.” She shook her head. “He works in one of the labs there at the hospital. We ran in to each other a few weeks ago — literally. He’s become a very good friend.”
And when we met him for the first time, we were none the wiser to what hid behind that friendly smile, the non-threatening bald spot gradually expanding at the back of his head. We all laughed at his joke that he was balding in solidarity with our mother.
He was such a talented liar.
Carl bought our trust with his sheer consistency, through all the times he’d bring home little treats or presents for Matt and me, through the way he treated my mother as if she were the most important person in the world. It was strange and wonderful to see her so happy even as she battled a dire threat to her health. I’d never witnessed her around an adult man. She laughed so often. She seemed younger than what she really was.
As Matt graduated high school and started looking for work to help pay down our mother’s mounting medical bills, it seemed only natural that Carl should move in with us. He had become a stabilizing presence in our household. He helped cook and clean, assigned regular chores for Matt and me, enforced rules — became everything a father might do. If there was a book on fatherhood, Carl was following it to the last detail, right down to instituting a family game night, a rule that we should all always sit down for dinner together, a favorite family movie that we liked to watch while sitting around the living room, limbs draped over each other.
It was only a matter of time before Carl asked my mother to marry him. We had a simple wedding right there at the house, with only a couple of people from the hospital and a judge in attendance at the ceremony. My mother was too weak to travel at that point, and her bills were so high that we couldn’t do anything fancier for her.
“That’s all right,” she said, smiling, tenuous because of her bald head, looking like a little girl in the bright lipstick she’d chosen, that I’d helped her apply. “I don’t need anything fancy. I have everything I could possibly need right here.”
Carl’s presence in our life should’ve been a story with a happy ending, a man my mother could rely on through her illness, a man who would raise her children right no matter what happened to her, a family who would be together forever.
But that wasn’t how the story went. Carl was a nightmare lying in wait, and began to unfurl his dread wings as soon after the wedding as possible.
I heard sounds one day coming from my brother’s room on an early Saturday morning.
I walked into Matt's typically messy space to find him angrily shoving clothes into a duffel bag.
"Where are you going?"
He paused, but didn't turn around, grabbing at the shirts piled in his drawer.
"I can't stay here anymore," he said, not slowing his packing down. "I'm sorry, Meagan. I just can't."
I stood there in the doorway, mute, struck dumb by disbelief. Matt had never acted like this before. We'd always been happy -- a family.
"Where are you going?" I spluttered. "Why? You can't go!"
"Carl's right," Matt said, packing faster. "I'm an extra mouth to feed, and I'm never going to find a job here. This town's too small."
"You'll find a job," I said, snagging a pair of shorts he was trying to fit in his bag and holding on. "It's just a matter of time. Mom said so."
"Mom says I should go." Matt was so obviously hurting that he had to have heard wrong.
"She would never tell you to go."
"She didn't tell me I should go," he amended. "She said that Carl thought it would be best, and that she agreed."
"But where?" That truth stung even me. When I was done with high school, like Matt, would she side with Carl and boot me out of the only home I'd ever known? It seemed so implausible that I wanted to laugh, but here it was, happening to my brother.
"New York City," he said, his voice grim.
"But that's so far away!" I'd never been away from Matt in my entire life.
"The city's big enough that I'll find something," he vowed. "I'll send home whatever I can to help with mom's bills."
"You should stay just a little longer," I urged him. "You'll find something. I know you will."
"It's just not going to happen for me here, Meagan. I have to leave."
It wasn't fair. I hated it. And yet there was nothing I could do to sway my mom's view. Carl had convinced her completely.
"Meagan, Matt wants to go to New York City," she told me finally, sighing as she eased back onto her pillows. She'd lost every hair on her body at that point, her head smooth and somehow soothing to stroke whenever she happened to take off whatever hat or scarf she chose to cover up with.
"No, he wants to stay here with us," I protested, not caring that my brother was already days gone, getting himself set up in a hostel, meeting new friends, moving on with his life away from us, away from me.
“You’re making your mother upset,” Carl observed from the doorway, but I didn’t care. I was sick of tiptoeing around, constantly on eggshells.
“I can’t believe you’d listen to Carl and kick your own son out of the house,” I spat, turning on my heel and running away. I didn’t heed my mother’s cry after me, didn’t so much as look at Carl as I rushed past, up the stairs and into my room, slamming the door.
I felt that, for the first time, there were different factions in this family and I was on the wrong one, the lonely one. Carl and my mother were on the other side, and things weren’t going to go well for me.
I withdrew a little bit, hunkering down in a shell of my own making, shutting myself in my room, staying away from my mother and Carl. It was the wrong thing to do. I should’ve been supporting my mother throughout her treatment, trying to keep life at home as easy as possible compared to how badly she was feeling, the toll the medications were taking on her. But I couldn’t fathom the loss of my brother from my life. There wasn’t a way to communicate with him.
Time heals all wounds, or at least that’s what they say. The sicker my mother became, the closer I drew back to her. My angry words were all but forgotten with her, but it seemed like they stuck with Carl — or perhaps just the fact that I’d tried to turn my mother against him. He acted the same, but things were clearly different. We’d never enjoyed a close relationship, but things grew chillier while getting stranger.
I felt as if I were constantly watched in my own house.
It was disconcerting and made being at school that much more preferable.
It wasn’t until just after my 18th birthday, near the beginning of my senior year of high school, when Carl made the first move, making contact with me, telling me what he wanted, showing just how much power he could wield over my mother’s health and, by extension, me.
Twisted up inside, completely confused and isolated from anyone who could be considered an ally, I started reshaping my own brain, my own beliefs, to fit with this horrible reality.
All Carl wanted to do was watch me touch myself. Sometimes, he liked to videotape it. That was fine. That could be fine. Everybody pleasured themselves at some point or another. It was completely natural. If Carl’s thing was that he wanted to watch me do it, then that could be fine, too.
It was a small price to pay to ensure my mother’s wellbeing.
It
wasn’t, of course, but it was what I convinced myself in order to preserve what little of my sanity remained.
After I realized that Carl was serious about making my mother sick — or even killing her — to make me do whatever I wanted, I would’ve created any lie that my mind needed to hear in order to keep pleasing him.
I convinced myself that it was normal.
I convinced myself that Carl cared for me.
I convinced myself that I liked it.
I was so convincing in my own mind that I actually did start liking it — helplessly, physically, at least. My body somehow found it within itself to have real orgasms. I didn’t know if Carl would know or care if I faked it for his benefit, to get him away from me faster, but my body responded to itself just fine.
It was completely fucked up. I realized it, on some level, and ignored it on the rest. I had to make it work — for my sake, for my mother’s sake. I did everything Carl asked, in every pose and position he asked. I never once resisted him …
… until I did.
One day, and I had no idea what pushed me over the edge, I said no. I might’ve been tired. I might’ve been stressed out about something outside of the home. It was well after my high school graduation. Part of me hoped that I’d be sent away just as my brother had been, but Carl obviously had other plans for me, wanting me to stick around to help care for my mother. It was looking like I’d never be able to make my escape, and maybe that was what had broken me out of my funk of compliance. Whatever it was, I said no to Carl, and the next thing I knew, I was on my back, being dragged across the carpet of my room, out onto the landing, and down several stairs, painfully.
“Meagan? You all right?” my mother called from the living room.
I was breathing hard, Carl’s hand on my throat, prompted to slowly look toward the sound of her voice, through the balustrade and at the back of her head. She was watching television on the couch, her back to the stairs.
“Answer her,” Carl hissed. “Tell her you’re fine — that you just slipped.”
“I’m fine,” I said, my voice choked from the pressure of Carl’s squeezing fingers. “Just slipped on the stairs.”
“Be careful,” my mother said, not turning around.
“If you ever say no again to me, that woman is dead,” Carl whispered, his voice so low that the program my mother was watching drowned it out. “For now, though, you’ll just have to take your punishment.”
Carl’s idea of punishment was to take me by force and rape me on those stairs within full view of my own mother, who had only to turn her head to see the kind of horror that had befallen her daughter of late. But she was protected by the program on the TV that held her attention so thoroughly.
“Go on,” Carl grunted in my ear, thrusting against my limp body. “Struggle. Call out. Beg her to help you.”
But I didn’t. Both of us knew I wouldn’t. I couldn’t, because her seeing me like this would kill my mother. She didn’t need the knowledge of this in her life anymore than I needed this in my life.
So I just stared at the back of her knit cap and tried to go away.
“Now you know what’ll happen,” Carl said, pushing himself roughly away from me, doing up his pants, and walking downstairs. He stepped into the living room as if nothing had happened, probably still smelling like me, and sat next to my mother on the couch, putting his arm around her, his hand caressing her shoulder — the very same hand that had just been around my throat. He kissed my mom on the knit cap and looked over his shoulder at me, still collapsed in shock on the stairs, his eyes glittering.
I had to do what he said. He’d hurt me. He’d hurt my mother. I had to do what he said.
I crawled to the shower and washed myself inside out, trying to purge whatever kernel of rebellion had ignited within me. What had gotten into me? Why had I resisted him? Why had I told him no for something we did almost every day?
Why had I frozen up and allowed him to take me so horrifically on the stairs?
Part of my brain understood that it wasn’t my fault, that I was trying to protect my mother, that Carl was the real monster here, but I studied my reflection in the mirror after my shower, trying to find the parts of myself that were the same monster, the parts that were complicit in my own torment. What would it take to rid myself of those parts? Would I have to burn them out? Cut them out? Silence them with a handful of pills? What would it take to be normal again?
“Normal” was a laughable notion. I knew I’d never be normal again. I knew that Carl had planted his rotten seed inside of me, and that it was festering, eating my very soul.
If I didn’t get myself out of here, if I didn’t try to do something to save myself, I would lose too much. I would lose much more than my life.
I wished there was a way to get in touch with my brother, but he was well out of my reach. He hadn’t been in contact with anyone in the family since he’d left for New York City. Carl chalked it up to him being focused on getting a good job, but I wasn’t sure that my mother was convinced. I told myself that it was for the best, that something truly awful would happen if Matt knew just what our stepdad was doing to me.
It was up to me. I had to do it. I had to save myself. I had to figure out some way to get Carl out of my life, out of my mother’s life, once and for all. It was up to me to save myself.
But it wasn’t until several weeks later that I made my move, acquiescing to everything Carl asked of me in the interim and hating myself more and more.
I was afraid. That was the simple truth, but the uglier parts of me wondered if I was putting action off until later so I could feel good for now, doing the things I was used to doing for Carl. Touching myself at his command. Coming of my own accord. Letting him watch, videotape, pleasure himself in tandem.
No, I couldn't think of it like that. I was amassing my strength, gathering up my courage. Waiting for the right moment.
That moment came when Carl decided he wanted to leave my mother at the hospital during her treatment to come back to the house to get a little treatment from me for himself. It was slimy of him to do it, but good for me — I wouldn’t have to worry about my mother hearing what I was prepared to do.
“Touch yourself, Meagan.” It was his general command, the one that I’d grown distressingly accustomed to. And even as my twisted mind urged me to oblige him, I ignored it, springing forward and punching him directly in the face.
“You can’t control us anymore,” I shouted, grateful that my mother was away from this, desperate to convince myself that I was doing the right thing.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Carl gasped, blood spurting from his nose. I liked to see it. I liked the shade of red it was. I wanted to see more, so I lunged again, catching him on his ear as he flinched away.
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” I said, even though I’d never been in a fistfight before in my life. I aimed a hard kick at his shin and was rewarded by him going down on one knee, howling in pain.
“You won’t be able to come back from this,” he forced out between his gritted teeth.
“Neither will you.” I kicked him squarely in the groin, reveling in the way it squished upon impact, at the way Carl’s breath whooshed out of his lungs. I had power like I hadn’t had in a long time. It was exhilarating and intoxicating.
His mouth worked, and he tried to tell me something, but he was in too much pain for words. I decided to say them for him.
“You’ll be gone by the time I get home with my mother,” I said. “I don’t care where you go, but you won’t be here anymore. You’re done here. She won’t love you after I tell her everything. You’ll be locked away where you can’t hurt anyone ever again.”
I left him there, curled into a ball on the floor, taking the other car to go get my mother.
My mistake was assuming that he’d listen, hoping that he’d heed my warning.
Leaving him there still breathing.
My mother was surprised to see me
there at the hospital, a little concerned about Carl’s sudden errand that had taken him away from her side, and gutted from the procedure. I hated the toll the treatments took on her health, but every doctor we’d spoken to had told us that they were necessary to save her life — even if they robbed her of her comfort.
I waited on her hand and foot as soon as we got home, fixing a broth I thought she’d be able to stomach, watching TV with her until she was too sick to remain on the couch and asked me to help her to her bed.
“I wish Carl would get here,” she remarked weakly as I tucked her in.
“I’m not sure that he’ll even be back tonight,” I said, trying to hide my glee. “He mentioned that his errand was something really important that only he could do.”
And the only thing he could do for himself was to fuck right off and out of my family. Matt would be able to come home again, and we’d be able to support my mother until she was well again.
“That’s all right,” my mother said, smiling gently. “At least I have you, right? You take such good care of me, Meagan.”
She slipped into slumber — a good thing, considering how sick she was — and I immediately realized just how exhausted I was. I’d banished Carl from my life, saving myself and my mother. She was too sick to be told about just how much of a monster he was, but she’d figure it out, in time. I could let the police know tomorrow to be on the lookout for Carl, give them proof that he needed to be put away. I was sure I could turn up some of those awful videotapes, and as badly as it pained me to let anyone else see them, it would be worth it to add one more nail to Carl’s coffin.
Sleep was a blessing, and it was mercifully free from the nightmares that usually plagued it. Perhaps my mind was finally giving me rest in recognition of the achievement I’d managed today.
How wrong it was.
I awoke the next morning with a strange feeling — the feeling that something was different, both better and worse. My stomach clenched as I remembered what had happened the night before. I’d resisted. I’d used physical force to deny Carl the thing he wanted the most. It was both empowering and terrifying. I’d finally stood up to my stepfather.
JOSS: A Standalone Romance (Gray Wolf Security) Page 106