by Carl Weber
I looked up at Michael, pleading, “Please don’t let them do this to me.”
His defiant laugh told me that my request had fallen on deaf ears. I was living every woman’s worst nightmare, and there was no escape.
“Me first,” I heard one of them demand.
“No, you were first last time,” the man on top of me shouted.
“Let him go. He’s already on top of her,” Michael reasoned. That’s when I felt them grab my legs, spreading me apart like a wishbone.
“No! Oh, God! Please, no! Somebody help me! Somebody please help me!” I screamed until my throat was raw, but no one came to help as the first man had his way with me. Soon the sounds of their laughter changed, becoming an incessant pounding. I kept shouting, but nothing I did would make it stop.
That’s when I shot up in my bed, waking from the recurring nightmare I’d been having for six years now, ever since I was raped on my twenty-first birthday. I was still trembling and sweating as I realized that the pounding sound was someone banging on my door, and they obviously weren’t going away.
Monique
5
While everyone else was speculating about what could have made Tia leave Aaron at the altar, I was determined to find out the truth from the horse’s mouth. It had taken me a day to locate the limo driver who had driven Tia away, but by 7 o’clock the next night, I was sitting down for a little powwow with him and his boss. At first he had refused to give me any information about Tia’s whereabouts—until I informed his boss that I was the first lady of the largest black church in Queens. If he withheld Tia’s location, I told him, I would make sure that none of our members ever patronized his business again. With the threat of unemployment dangling over his head, the driver suddenly saw the light and told me what I needed to know.
It turned out that Tia was hiding in plain sight, not fifteen minutes from the church in the Marriott hotel by LaGuardia Airport. She’d checked into the honeymoon suite where she and Aaron were supposed to have spent their first couple of nights, before heading to the Bahamas for their honeymoon.
So there I was, knocking on the door, when I heard Tia’s terrified screams. I was so afraid for her that I started pounding with both fists, but still the screaming continued. I was just about to get security when the screaming stopped and the door was flung open.
“Monique, what are you doing here?” Tia looked disheveled, still clothed in her wrinkled wedding dress, with her hair all over the place and makeup streaked across her tear-stained face.
“I should be asking you that question.” I forced my way past her, wanting to see who or what had caused her terrified screams. “You all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said, though her tone left me unconvinced.
“You sure? You don’t look fine,” I said as I peeked into the bathroom. “Is someone here? I heard you screaming.”
“It was nothing. Just a nightmare.”
“A nightmare? What kind of nightmares make you scream like that?”
“The kind I don’t wish on anyone,” Tia said with a sigh, casting her eyes to the floor. “How’d you find me?”
“I’m the first lady of the only black megachurch in Queens. You’d be surprised by the resources I have at my disposal.” I folded my arms, suddenly feeling less worried and more impatient with her. “We’ve all been worried sick about you, Tia. You could have at least called. Nobody knew if you were dead or alive.”
“Look, no disrespect, First Lady, but as you can see, I’m very much alive and right now, I just want to be left alone.”
Now she’d pushed the wrong button and any sympathy I might have had for her was gone. I certainly didn’t come all the way over here to be dismissed by Tia. If that was the case, I could have just stayed home to deal with my own issues. TK had let me know in no uncertain terms that he didn’t appreciate the way I had “entertained” Jackson Young, as he put it. I didn’t understand what his problem was. I mean, who wouldn’t listen when she was being offered the chance of a lifetime? My husband was standing right next to me, for goodness’ sake. It wasn’t like I was flirting with the man. But TK saw it differently, and I had no doubt he would be harassing me about it later. With that problem in the back of my mind, I was in no mood to be disrespected by the girl who had our whole church in a tizzy right now.
“No disrespect? That’s a joke, right?” I said, moving closer to her. “This little visit of mine isn’t a social call, Tia. It’s a damn intervention. You should be glad I didn’t bring the bishop and the rest of the Holy Rollers with me.” She looked at me with wide eyes, probably horrified at the thought of anyone else seeing her in her current state. “Now, I want to know what’s going on.”
“Well, I don’t need an intervention, First Lady, and I definitely don’t need you all up in my business. I know what I’m doing.” Her voice had taken on a defiant tone I’d never heard before, and for a moment I was so confused by her transformation that I didn’t know how to respond. In my silence, she had the nerve to glance at the door as if she was waiting for me to walk through it and leave her alone.
“Do you really think you can just shoo me away? After all the money I spent on your ass, buying that dress and putting together your wedding shower?” I placed my purse on the desk then took a few attitude-driven steps toward her. “Now, I don’t give a damn if you talk to anyone else, but you’re gonna tell me something.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” This time her voice shook when she spoke, revealing her truly fragile emotional state. She retreated back to the bed and sat down, holding her knees with her arms in upright fetal position. She looked so lost, so sad.
“Tell me something, Tia,” I said, sitting down next to her.
“I couldn’t do it, Monique. I just couldn’t do it, all right?” The dam burst, and tears began pouring down her face. She was a mess, but I still felt like I’d made some headway, because she’d called me by my first name instead of my title.
I put a hand on her shoulder. “I thought you loved Aaron.”
She flinched at the mention of his name. “I do. I really do, but I can’t marry him,” she cried. I pulled her close, allowing her a safe place to put her sadness. “I can’t marry him, Monique. As much as I love him, I can’t marry him.”
“Tia, Aaron loves you. I’m sure that whatever this is about, you’re just blowing it out of proportion. It’s always worse in our imagination,” I said, attempting to reassure her.
“What kind of wife would I be to Aaron? I can’t even give him the one basic thing that solidifies a marriage.”
She’d just lost me. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. “What are you talking about? A marriage is solidified by love. You just said you love Aaron, and I know he loves you.”
“Monique, I can’t have sex with him,” she said flatly, lifting her head. She appeared ready to break down again. “And he’s waited so long.”
As hard as I tried to stay neutral, my tone rose with the shock of her revelation. “Wait. You and Aaron haven’t had sex yet?” I might be a first lady, but I’m a realist, and I know that very few folks actually wait until their wedding day anymore. Even the bishop and I had slipped once and gave in to our passions before he married me.
She shook her head as she wiped away her tears.
I had an inkling of what the problem might be: Tia was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to perform. Poor girl.
“Okay, I think I understand the problem,” I said. “First, let’s get you into a nice warm bath.”
She didn’t protest as I led her to the bathroom and ran the water then helped her out of her wrinkled gown. I found a small bottle of bath gel and poured it in, creating a foamy bubble bath where Tia could soak away some of her anxiety.
“I’m sorry you had to find me like this,” Tia said a while later when she came back into the bedroom wearing a bathrobe. She looked much better, but no amount of soap and water could disguise her dark circles and red, puffy eyes.
Her cell phone rang while she was eating, but she didn’t move to answer it. We shared a look that said we both knew it was Aaron.
“I wish he’d just stop,” she said. “Can’t he see I’m not going to answer?”
“You have to talk to him at some point. He’s not just going to go away. He loves you.” I could see from the look on her face that she knew I was right, but she still resisted.
“I don’t want him to love me.”
“Well, it’s not that easy. You don’t just stop loving someone, do you?”
She picked up her phone and began typing. I felt better, thinking that she was reaching out to him, making the first step toward working things out. Oh, how wrong I was.
“There. It’s done.” She placed the phone next to her plate and picked up her fork, shoving some food in her mouth.
“Good for you. Did you tell him where you were?”
“No,” she replied bluntly. “I told him to go fuck himself and move on with his life, because that’s what I’m doing.”
My jaw dropped and I had to resist the urge to slap her. “You did what? Don’t you understand that man loves you? Why would you do something so hurtful?”
Her whole body seemed to deflate, and her tears had started again. “I don’t want him to love me anymore.”
“Tia, you don’t have to go to these extremes. Plenty of people have problems in the bedroom. You’re not the first woman who was nervous about making love to her husband. I have a few techniques I can teach you. Or if you’d prefer, I have a friend who—”
“Stop! This is not about sex. This is about him.”
“Girl, what the hell are you talking about?” She was making absolutely no sense.
“I saw him, Monique,” she said quietly, her voice cracking. “I saw him, and just like that, it changed every damn thing.”
“Jesus, Lord, don’t tell me you snuck into that man’s bachelor party. I told you not to do that, Tia. When you go looking for a mess, you find a mess.” I put my hand on hers and waited for her to make eye contact. “So you saw him with a stripper?”
“No.”
I didn’t want to imagine what could be worse than that. “A church member?” I asked, praying I was wrong.
She shook her head vehemently. “Aaron didn’t do anything wrong, Monique. Hell, I wish he had. Then I wouldn’t feel so bad.”
This girl had my head spinning. It didn’t look like I was going to get to the bottom of things soon enough to go take care of my own home. “Then what? Who could make you leave a man you profess to love?”
Other than perhaps another man you love, I thought.
Tia began sobbing. Looking up at me through her tears, she cried, “It was my rapist, Monique. I saw one of my rapists the other night.”
I held her as she released her pain, wailing and shaking. When she calmed down enough to speak, she told me, “Just the sight of him brought it all back. I’ll never forget his face, and that hot, nasty breath of his kissing my neck as he…” All I could do was stare at her as the magnitude of her words sank in and tears fell from my own eyes. “It was like it was happening to me all over again. I still can’t shake the feeling. I don’t think I ever will.”
“Oh, no. Sweetheart, I’m so sorry.” I rubbed her back, making a futile attempt to comfort her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m a rape counselor. I tell women every day to be strong, to fight through it, not to let them win. I was hoping that if I could just get in the church and see Aaron I’d be all right, but I couldn’t,” she said, finally giving me the explanation I’d come for. Sadly, her reality was much more tragic than any reason I could have imagined for her disappearance that morning. “The closer I got to stepping out of that limo, the more ashamed I felt.”
“You have no reason to be ashamed,” I told her. “This was not your fault.”
“Really? Because it sure as hell doesn’t feel that way. I met this guy, and I probably drank too much, but I had already made up my mind that I was gonna end my birthday in his bed.”
I listened in stunned silence as she shared details of that night that she’d never told me before. Actually, I realized, other than admitting that she’d been raped, Tia never said anything else about it. Now I understood that her reticence did not mean she had healed.
“Monique, I wasn’t a good girl back then. I went to his house and got high. Heck, I was planning on sleeping with him, and we’d just met. But he and his roommates had other plans. They gang-raped me over and over and over until I passed out. I woke up in a Dumpster somewhere near the Staten Island ferry.”
My stomach churned at the thought of her ordeal. What type of men could do that to another human being? “Those bastards. I hope the judge made them rot in jail for a good long time.”
She shook her head and whispered, “I never went to the police. I was too ashamed.”
“You never went to the police? But it wasn’t your fault.”
“I never should have been at his house. I was afraid they would just tell me I asked for it by going home with a stranger.”
As she broke down in tears again, I knew that nothing I said would really comfort her. So I did the only thing I could; I held her as she cried.
After a while, I asked, “When did you see him?”
“At my bachelorette party, after we left the rehearsal dinner,” she told me.
“But it was a private room. How could he possibly have gotten in?”
“He was the bartender out front,” she said. “I’d recognize him anywhere. I’d recognize all of them anywhere. It was him, Monique. It was him.” She clutched onto me, burying her head in my sweater as she trembled with tears.
I rubbed her back again and tried to soothe her. “Come on, Tia. Don’t let him take your life away from you. You’ve worked so hard to build a good life. Don’t let these bastards hold you back. You can make it through this. What about therapy?”
“I thought I could.” She stood up, separating herself from me. “That’s what I kept telling myself over and over, that I could get through this. But then on the limo ride to the church, I just kept seeing his face. I could feel him. I could smell him. I could feel his sweat dripping off his skin onto mine. I could hear his body smacking against mine, using and abusing me as if I wasn’t even human.” She shuddered, a look of pure disgust on her face. “I felt dirty and violated all over again. The last thing I could do was allow Aaron to touch me. We couldn’t start our lives together like that.”
“We’ve got to tell Aaron about this, Tia. He needs to—”
“No! I can’t. I can’t go back to Aaron, and I can’t go back to the church.”
I closed my eyes and said a quick prayer for guidance in this situation that felt impossible.
Bishop
6
The stress of the past couple of days had caught up to me, and it felt really good to be lying in my bed doing nothing now. I couldn’t remember ever being this worn out. I was definitely feeling my age.
With Aaron’s recent celebrity status, Tia’s disappearance had turned my church into a three-ring circus, with me in the middle circle as the ringmaster. We had media parked outside the sanctuary, cameras flashing during Sunday service, and a congregation that was overrun with gossip and speculation about things that had absolutely nothing to do with them. We’d had our share of touch-and-go moments the past few years at First Jamaica Ministries, and media scrutiny pretty much came with the territory of being pastor of a large church, but this time around felt particularly stressful to me.
It wasn’t helping matters much that my wife and I seemed to be on different wavelengths. Her sudden disappearance without even a phone call on a Sunday afternoon caused my anxiety to skyrocket
. Normally I wouldn’t worry about Monique; we had a tight bond and a strong marriage, but I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that she might be out somewhere with Jackson Young. I wasn’t usually prone to jealousy, but something about the way she had lit up when he started paying her compliments just didn’t sit right with me. That was one shady character, and I was really struggling to understand why my normally confident and self-possessed wife had turned into a giggling, blushing girl in his presence.
When I heard the front door open and Monique called out my name, I felt a mixture of annoyance and relief. I wasn’t about to let her know it, but I was glad she was home.
“In the bedroom!” I hollered. A moment later she entered our bedroom, waving as she made a beeline for the bathroom and quickly shut the door behind her.
“TK?” she called out from behind the door.
“Yeah, honey?”
“I saw Tia tonight.”
“What did you say?” I sat up in the bed but resisted the urge to go into the bathroom. Married or not, I’d always believed in giving her privacy in the bathroom. I preferred to see the finished product and not the things that went on behind the curtain.
Monique peeked her head out of the door. “I saw Tia,” she said solemnly. The troubled expression on her face erased any lingering feelings of anger I’d held about her disappearance that afternoon.
“When? How? Where?” I rattled off, my head spinning with possible scenarios. Could this mean they were headed for a reconciliation? I certainly hoped so. Maybe it was a bit selfish of me to be thinking this way, but their presence as a couple in the church was inspiring to the young people. It made them consider slowing down, taking time with a relationship rather than simply “hooking up,” to steal the phrase they so often used to describe their encounters with the opposite sex.
She stepped out of the bathroom and approached me. “TK, if I tell you this,” she started, “you can’t tell anyone, especially not Aaron.” It wasn’t like Monique to issue a warning when she shared information with me, so I immediately understood the seriousness of whatever she had to say. As much as I wanted to put Aaron out of his pain by sharing Tia’s location with him, I knew that I couldn’t betray my wife.