46. Chapter 46
Chapter 46
David grabbed his glass of wine off the coffee table and drained it in two swallows. In the background, “Landslide” was playing softly.
“I didn’t know it at the time,” Paige continued, “but I was having my first flashback and it was like a memory, but not like a memory I remembered, if that makes any sense. And it was such a fucked-up memory, that I didn’t think it could possibly be real … but at the same time the details were so vivid and clear that it didn’t seem like it could be fake, either.
“And there were so many details: the warmth of the water, the song playing on the portable radio, the sound of a neighbor’s lawnmower, and the overwhelming smell of chlorine.
“There were also things I knew, but couldn’t see. I knew I’d just turned six years old. I knew my mother was lying on a lounge chair behind me on the patio, asleep in the sun. I knew the hand covering most of my face was to keep me quiet, and would make it very hard for me to breathe if I struggled. And I knew that what was happening wasn’t happening for the first time.
“I knew all these things almost instantaneously. It was like information saturation, and as quickly as it happened, it was over and I was back in my car. The scary part is that I was driving when this happened, but it happened so fast—literally lasting only seconds—that nothing bad happened. You know, like crashing into another car, or running over a pedestrian.
“But once it was over, I felt sick, like I was going to throw up. My entire body was shaking and I couldn’t make it stop. I had to pull over in a parking lot because I was such a mess. I sat there in my car—for who knows how long—shaking and trying to figure out what had just happened.”
David’s eyes were burning and he blinked several times. He was dangerously close to crying as he pictured a six-year-old Paige in her favorite swimsuit in a pool with a pedophile. Her uncle. With his fucking hand covering her face, his fucking fingers inside her, and his hard dick pressed against her narrow back. All while her mother snoozed on a lounge chair a few feet away soaking up some rays, which added an extra layer of horror to an already horrific situation.
For a moment, he wondered if he was going to actually be able to listen to her story. He knew he’d said he wanted this, but maybe reading it was the way to go, so he wouldn’t have to hear her sweet voice tell him these appalling things. But then he thought about Paige having gone through these appalling things and knew he couldn’t chickenshit his way out of this; he had to hear it.
And she probably needed to be able to tell it to him.
“Are you okay?” she asked quietly, seeing his struggle.
He didn’t know how to answer that. Every hair on his body felt like it was standing on end, and at the same time, his skin felt too tight. “Um … not really,” he admitted, forcing himself to look at her. “Could you come sit with me? I just feel like I need to have you near me right now.”
She immediately got up and came over to the loveseat, but instead of sitting where she could face him, like he thought she would, she curled up behind him. “How’s this? Better?”
David nodded.
His hair was up tonight and she put her hand to the man bun. “Do you mind if I take this down?”
Her request surprised him. “Go ahead.”
She carefully freed his hair and tossed the elastic tie onto the coffee table, only to have Sputnik launch himself off David’s lap to pounce on it and bat it to the floor with a paw. He immediately followed it down and began playing with it, now using both paws to toss it into the air and then chase it out of the living room.
“Shit. You’re probably not going to get that back,” Paige murmured, as Sputnik disappeared down the hall, out of sight.
“Probably not,” he agreed. “Thankfully, I have another hundred at home.”
The brief moment of levity helped David relax a little, and when he felt her fingers gently running through his hair, he relaxed even more, leaning back into her more as she continued with her story.
“The second flashback happened a few months later. I was listening to Christmas music on the radio and wrapping a couple of presents for Jules, and “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” by Andy Williams came on. Anyway, I’ve heard the song a million times in my life, as everyone has, but this time was different. This time hearing it was a trigger, like the smell of the chlorine was a trigger for my first flashback.
“One second I was wrapping a present and the next I was a child again. It was just like the other time—it probably lasted less than ten seconds, but I knew everything. It was Christmas Eve and I was nine years old. I was wearing the green dress Carter had given me to wear for Mass that night. And while my mom was getting ready in her bedroom, I was in the living room, jerking off Carter while the lights on the Christmas tree blinked and “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” played on the record player.”
David took a calming breath before saying, almost to himself, “You were the only person I ever knew who didn’t like Christmas. That makes sense now.”
“Over the next few months I had a few more flashbacks. They were always triggered by something seemingly random and were never chronological. Sometimes I was very young and other times I was in high school. The strangest one happened when I was shopping at Target.
“Completely by chance, I ended up walking through the sporting goods section and saw a little display of ping pong accessories, like balls and paddles. Shit like that. I stopped and stared at this set of red, rubber coated ping pong paddles and just like that, I was in Carter’s finished basement, where he had a big screen TV, a huge couch, and a ping pong table that I had no recollection of until that moment.
“I was fourteen. I was spending the night and had pretended to fall asleep on the couch while watching Saturday Night Live. Sometimes that worked—not often, but every once in a while it did. That time it didn’t. When Carter came down to get me, he said my name a few times, getting louder each time. Then something slammed into the back of my thigh, just under my ass, and it actually made me cry, it hurt so much. I jumped up off the couch and saw that he had grabbed one of the ping pong paddles off the table and struck me with it.
“He was really pissed and told me to get upstairs, so I hurried. But I stumbled a bit on the stairs, mainly because I was crying a little and my leg was on fucking fire where he’d hit me—he’d really put his arm into it. Then his hand was on my ass, shoving me up the stairs to make me go faster and the flashback ended right there, on the dark, carpeted stairs.
“But I knew what was going to happen once we got to his bedroom. It was the same thing that happened almost every time I spent the night, the same thing that had been happening for the past two years.”
David cleared his throat and when he spoke, it sounded like he had swallowed glass. “He started raping you when you were twelve?”
“I think so, yes,” she said, stroking his hair. “I don’t remember the first time. I actually don’t remember any of the times, thankfully. All the flashbacks I have fade to black before I see it actually happen. But I know it happens. I know how old I am, where I am, and if there’s music playing … all those other specific details that make it painfully real and impossible not to believe.”
“You said you were spending the night. Did you spend the night a lot?”
“Yes.”
“Alone? Without your mom?” he asked, even though he thought he knew the answer.
“Yes.”
“She didn’t think that was odd?”
“On the contrary, she thought it was great. She’d drop me off at his house on a Saturday afternoon and the next day he’d take me home in time for a Sunday dinner. My mom thought he was just being a doting uncle, or a surrogate father, almost. It gave him perfect cover.”
She pressed her cheek to David’s shoulder, breathing in the scent of his laundry detergent and traces of his cologne, which she recognized as Hugo Boss. “I didn’t tell anyone about these flashbacks while they were happening, not even my mom or Jules, because I didn’t know what they were at first. I wasn’t even totally convinced they were real so I started doing some research. I Googled ‘sexual abuse memories’ and all these articles came up about repressed and recovered memories, which at first seemed incomprehensible to me.
“Because even though my flashbacks were incredibly vivid and very specific, I was still thinking they had to be fake. Being sexually abused just didn’t seem like something that could’ve happened to me. That’s the shit that happens to someone else, right? Right.
“But then one day, I went to the post office to get stamps and a man got in line behind me. He was wearing Old Spice aftershave and while the smell of it wasn’t overpowering, it overpowered me. The second I recognized the smell, the association to Carter was made and this crushing fear almost paralyzed me. I started shaking and couldn’t breathe, and it took everything I had to move. I got out of line, pushed past everyone like a lunatic, including the guy wearing the Old Spice aftershave, then literally ran to my car.
“This was the first time I’d been triggered by something without experiencing a correlating flashback. Instead of remembering a specific event related to the smell of Carter’s aftershave, all I felt was fear. Current fear. I was terrified in that moment, of the possibility that Carter was standing behind me and could hurt me. It didn’t matter that I knew I was an adult woman in her thirties … I felt like a helpless, voiceless child.
“That was the moment I quit thinking I was losing my fucking mind and knew what I was remembering was real.”
“The moment you know …” he whispered, thinking about the title of her book.
“Yes, that was my moment. It was the moment I knew without any doubt that I’d been molested and as I cried in my car in the post office parking lot, I knew I needed help.”
David looked at her over his shoulder again and to his surprise she was smiling at him.
“So, I quit fucking around and got it,” she told him.