Chapter 9 #4
"Now that I know your pathetic little peepee is broken forever, I think it's a better punishment to leave you alive.
You'll never be able to rape anyone ever again.
" I leaned toward him, and he shied away.
"Every time you take a piss, you'll look at your sad, crushed little balls and you'll know I did that to you.
I hope you piss razors every day for the rest of your pathetic existence.
I hope you spend every second of your life in pain, Daniel Cohen.
I hope your life is miserable. I hope you live to be a hundred and twenty years old, and every single fucking second is hell on earth. "
I took my phone back and snapped a photo of him.
"Fuck…you…whore."
I laughed. It was forced, but still. "Whore. That’s what you always called me.
Did it make you feel better about raping a twelve-year-old child, calling me a whore, Daniel?
You're a pedophile. The vilest scum on the planet.
You're worse than scum, Daniel. You're less than the mold that grows on old dog turds. "
"Did you…" he groaned, shifted. "Did you come here just to—just to insult me?"
"I had to see you face-to-face. You surprised me last night. You were the last person on the planet I expected to walk into my place of work. I thought you were in prison for raping a grandmother or something horrible."
"Got out a few years ago."
“Still raping little girls and grandmothers?"
"Fuck you."
"You did. For four years."
He had the decency to look away, at least, looking ashamed.
"So, how's Larry?"
He shrugged, looking a little less hazy. "Dunno. Haven't been in touch in years. He joined the Navy after I went in." He blinked hazily. "He knew, you know."
"Oh, I know. So did Mom. I told her."
"You know she died?"
I swallowed hard. "She…she did? When?"
"Six months ago."
"How?"
"Some kind of cancer. Heard from a cousin who was neighbors with her. She got sick and was dead within a few months."
"Consider the floor spat on," I said, “but I won’t do the orderlies dirty like that.”
"She sucked my dick for coke," he told me. "All the time."
I laughed. "I'm not surprised. Is that supposed to upset me or something?
I hated my mother. I've always hated her.
I'm not sad she's dead, and the fact that she blew you for coke when she knew damn well what you were doing to me is absolutely unsurprising.
If anyone in that house was a whore, it was her. "
He shrugged. "Well, yeah. Literally. She whored herself out for drugs all the time. Rent money, too."
I shrugged back at him. "I don't give a fuck. Good riddance to bad rubbish.” I sighed. "I needed to look at you and see how it felt, now that I'm not taken by surprise."
"And?" He seemed genuinely curious, so I thought about the answer for a while.
"The longer I sit here looking at your ugly fucking face and listening to your horrible fucking voice, the more I realize I've been held hostage by a pathetic piece of shit.
You violated me. You ruined my life, which was already spectacularly shitty.
But you know what, Daniel? I survived you.
" The hate was still there, but as I spoke, I realized I was telling the truth—to both him and myself.
"I survived what you did to me. I survived how you made me feel about myself. "
He just stared at me, in pain as the opiates wore off, visibly uncomfortable at my presence.
I thought of something a professor said in a philosophy and ethics class I took in college: "Hate is the heaviest of emotions," she'd said.
"Hate is the most destructive force on earth. Hate is entropy. Hate has mass and substance. Hate blinds. Hate kills. Hate is a poison, but it poisons only you and harms the subject of your hate not a whit.”
I remember hearing my professor say that and knowing it applied to me.
I had gotten up and left, deeply uncomfortable because I was consumed by hatred for the man in the bed opposite me.
I have harbored that hatred for years. Nurtured it inside myself.
And behold, my professor was right. It had poisoned me and had eaten away at me.
It had caused me to push away a good, kind, honest man who cared for me.
While this festering puddle of diarrhea lived his life, blissfully unaware of my hate.
I hated and hated and hated, and only harmed myself.
I stared at him in silence for a long, long time, sorting through the swirling shitstorm of emotions inside me.
"What's the opposite of hate, Daniel?" I asked.
"Love?" He shook his head. "I don't fuckin' know. Why the fuck are you asking me that?" he demanded. "Can't you just fuck off, now? You've seen me. You got your revenge. You said your piece. Please, just leave me alone."
"No, I don't think the opposite of hate is love,” I said. “They're totally different. I know a soulless monster like you can't fathom what love is, but it's totally unrelated to hate. No, I think the opposite of hate is forgiveness."
His eyes flickered. "Cool. Fuck off."
I stood up. Glared down at him. “What I’m about to say, I say for me, Daniel, not you. You can get fucked." I cleared my throat. "I forgive you."
He blinked a few times, surprised. "I—"
"Shut the fuck up, you ugly, stupid, dickless, shit-stained hemorrhoid.
Fuck you until the end of time. I really do hope you live the rest of your life in agony.
I will not forget, but I will move on, and I will live my life, and I will not be held hostage by hating you anymore.
When I say that I forgive you, all I mean is that I am going to try and let go and move on.
Put you in my past. Put what you did to me in my past. I do not mean it's okay, don't worry about it.
It's not okay. Do not worry about it. Worry about what I'll do to you if I ever, ever see your ugly fucking face ever again. "
"I didn't know you'd be there. I've been on oil rigs for most of the past few years."
"Shut the fuck up. I don't care. If you see anyone that even looks like me, you better fucking run the other direction."
At that moment, I heard the squawk of a radio in the hallway, and then two uniformed LAPD officers entered the room.
"Daniel Hezekiah Cohen?"
"Fuck," Danny muttered quietly enough that I almost doubted my ears; then, louder: "Nope. Not me."
The officer wasn't amused. "Daniel Cohen, you're under arrest for the violation of the terms of your parole and for the violation of a restraining order against one Elizabeth Gabardine."
I stood aside and watched, not bothering to hide my gleeful grin.
A second pair of men entered the room, these dressed in business suits that screamed FBI.
One of them, a Patrick Warburton lookalike, stepped toward Daniel. “Daniel Hezekiah Cohen, you're under arrest for—" he glanced at the LAPD officers. “Wait, you guys too?"
"Parole violation and violating a restraining order. What do you have him on?"
“Transporting Schedule One substances across state lines, possession of a Schedule One substance, possession of a firearm without a license, and tampering with a federal witness."
The LAPD gestured. "Please, be my guest. We can figure out custody for our charges later." He glanced at me. "Your boyfriend is not a nice guy, ma'am. I'm not trying to meddle in your life, but you're better off without him."
"Oh, he's not my boyfriend," I said. "He sexually abused me for four years, starting when I was twelve. I heard he was here and decided to…say hello."
The FBI agent who'd listed the charges gave me a speculative appraisal. "You wouldn't happen to know anything about what happened to him, would you? How he got here? The nurses said someone pushed him out of a moving car near the ER entrance."
"Me?" I put a hand to my chest. "No, sir, officer. Or…special agent, is it?" I gave him my best deer-in-the-headlights look. “Violence is never the answer, sir. That's what my mama always told me, at least."
The agent fought valiantly to suppress a smirk. "I see. Well, ma'am, once the hospital gives us the go-ahead, we're taking him into custody."
I patted the agent's dense, burly arm. "Thank you for what you do. And please, feel free to lose the key once you've locked him up."
"Ma'am, when the other inmates find out he's a pedophile…" he shrugged. "Well, let's just say that sometimes, with guys like that, justice comes after the law has had its say."
"That information has a way of coming out, does it?" I asked.
"Yes, ma'am, it does."
"Good." I did a finger wave at Daniel. "Too-doo-loo, Danny-boy. Enjoy prison…again."
He had sagged back against his pillows, face drawn, exhausted, and resigned. "Fuck off, Lindsey. You called 'em, I bet."
I laughed. "I wish I had. Honestly, though, no, I didn't. I didn't know you were wanted. I didn't know you were even out of prison. But this is the best possible outcome I could have hoped for. Goodbye forever, Danny. May your socks always be wet and your pillow always warm."
I heard a stifled snicker from one of the officers.
I breezed out of the room, feeling a lightness within myself so potent that when I reached the bright sunlight of the street, I felt like I could bound over the buildings like a Brobdingnagian astronaut.
I had to read Gulliver's Travels for a college lit class, okay? Just look it up, okay? Don’t judge me; I don't typically use $10 words, but that's just a fun one: Brobdingnagian. Say that five times fast.
I didn't even mind that my car was a hundred and forty degrees inside and the AC was on the fritz again. I knew I had more work to do to heal from what had happened to me, but maybe, just maybe, this was a meaningful start.