47. Chapter 47
Chapter 47
Paige could tell David needed a break, so she suggested they take one. While she picked up their dirty plates and headed into the kitchen, he headed down the hall to the bathroom to take care of business. When he was finished, he washed his hands and looked at himself in the mirror, taking in his somber expression. He didn’t know if the ‘worst’ part of the evening was behind him, but he was relieved to have made it this far and been able to keep his dinner down; there’d been a few moments when it had been touch and go.
Back in the living room, he reclaimed his spot on the loveseat. When Paige settled in behind him again, he was inordinately pleased. He told himself that it was because it was comforting, but he also knew it was because he just liked it.
“The hardest part was actually making the call to seek professional help,” she said, continuing her story. “When I called Lauren and said I wanted to make an appointment with her, she asked me why I wanted to see her. For a second, I was like, ‘Well, that’s a stupid question,’ but then it occurred to me that maybe it was important that I say the actual words. So, for the first time, I said the words, ‘I think I was molested’.”
Paige could feel the slight tremor in David’s upper body and she rested her hands on his biceps, squeezing gently. “There was a long pause from Lauren and then she asked, ‘You think you were?’ That was when I grew a pair and told her, ‘I know I was,’ and it was shocking at how empowered that made me feel.
“The next six months was like mental boot camp. I saw Lauren twice a week and read countless books on sexual abuse and repressed memories. Sounds like good reading, doesn’t it?” she joked.
“Yeah,” he agreed, sipping his wine.
“I learned that repressing painful experiences is actually fairly common and is what basically allows someone to live a fairly ‘normal’ life while being almost completely unaware of the existence of such painful experiences.
“It’s a subconscious coping mechanism. And it made perfect sense why my subconscious would lock something shitty away and keep it there. Because how else was I supposed to get through Saturday nights with Carter, then take a math test at school on Monday, hang out with friends after school, go on dates with boys, fall in love, get married, and have sex with my husband?
“It especially made sense why locking shit away was helpful when I started remembering things that made life really difficult.”
“How difficult?” David asked quickly, twisting to look at her. “Like wanting to die, difficult?”
His face was so close to her, that she could see the individual flecks of gold in his hazel eyes that made them so beautiful. “More like there were days when I didn’t feel like living,” she clarified. “I’m not sure if you can understand the distinction, but I didn’t want to kill myself. I didn’t want to die … I just didn’t always want to be alive. Does that make sense?”
“A little.”
He turned to face forward again. “So, if this coping mechanism is supposed to help you live a ‘normal’ life, then why doesn’t the coping mechanism last forever?”
“Because not knowing was no longer helping me,” she answered. “See, the disconnect is vital for early survival, but it isn’t perfect. The body itself can’t be fooled because it has its own memory and remembers every trauma inflicted on it, which is why it didn’t matter that I loved you and wanted to enjoy sex with you. My body wouldn’t let me enjoy it because it couldn’t forget past traumas or stop reacting to them, even though you had nothing to do with the past traumas, or that I had no memories of them.
“So, basically, there’s no changing how the body reacts until the memories are revealed and dealt with and this only happens if your coping mechanism becomes counterproductive.”
“I don’t understand. Why had it become counterproductive at that particular time?”
She slid her hands up and across his chest, clasping them together and resting her chin on his shoulder. Instead of making him relax, the added ‘comfort’ immediately made him brace for an impact he knew he wasn’t going to like.
“Because that’s when our marriage ended,” she said quietly. “That was ultimately the catalyst for the flashbacks.”
“Are you kidding me?” Grabbing his glass of wine from the coffee table, David practically chugged it, barely tasting it as it went down. “Fuck. I knew I was making the biggest mistake of my life that night. I shouldn’t have left.”
“Please don’t think like that,” she implored him. “At the time, yes, it was terrible, but it turned out to be the best thing that happened to me. I mean it, David. Listen to me. I was never going to heal without a tipping point. I never blamed you, or hated you for leaving. Not even when it hurt like hell. I can say now, with all honesty, that I’m grateful you left me. My not knowing was harming me and harming our marriage to the point where it couldn’t survive and it wasn’t in my best interest to remain in the dark any longer. Losing something vital was the kick in the ass my subconscious needed to let me remember.”
“You seriously want me to feel good about leaving you?” He reached for the bottle, only to be dismayed when he was only able to get half a glass out of it.
“In a weird way, yeah, I do.”
He took a deep breath, as guilt, remorse, and shame flooded him. It didn’t help to be told she was grateful he’d left because the bottom line was that she’d had to go through everything on her own. So, even if it was true that his leaving was what led to her salvation, David wasn’t sure that was something he’d ever be able to embrace. “Okay, well, I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Well, how about you just quit feeling bad about it?”
“That’s basically the same thing, Paige. That’s just another way of saying I should feel good about it.”
“I’m begging you to try and let your guilt go. It took me a long time to let go of mine, but if I can do it, so can you.”
He turned back to her. “What the hell did you have to feel guilty about?”
Paige pressed her lips together for a moment. “I never told you this, but after we’d been together for several months, I went to see my gynecologist, because I thought something was wrong with me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, sex was still sort of uncomfortable—”
David held up a hand, cutting her off. “Define uncomfortable.”
“It was a little painful,” she admitted quietly. “It was only painful for like the first thirty seconds or so, but—”
“That doesn’t actually make me feel better,” he broke in, rubbing at his face with both hands. “Thirty seconds can be a long time if there’s pain involved.”
Had he really thought the worst part of the night was behind him? Knowing sex had been painful for her, for any amount of time, made his eyes burn again and he was afraid that before the night was over, he’d be crying for real.
“I know,” she said. “I don’t want you to focus on that, though. It was painful because my body would lock down and not because of anything you were doing wrong. Okay? But at the time, I thought there might be something physically wrong with me, so I went to my gynecologist because that’s what women do when they think there’s something wrong with their vaginas.”
“Jesus,” he sort of groaned, the clinical phrasing making him squirm a little.
“What?”
“Can you not use that word?”
“Gynecologist?”
“The other one.”
“Oh, vagina?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“Why? What’s wrong with the word ‘vagina’?”
“Just quit saying it, please.”
She feigned ignorance. “Seriously, why? I’m not understanding.”
“I just don’t want to hear it.”
“You don’t want me to say the word ‘vagina’ so you don’t have to hear it?”
“Good, you’re finally getting it.”
“What I’m getting is that you’re really squeamish about the word ‘vagina’ which is a little immature, don’t you think?”
David raised his eyes to the ceiling and begged, “Please, God, make it stop.”
“Fine. ‘Vagina’ is off the table. I won’t say ‘vagina’ anymore,” she promised, hiding a smile before commencing with her story. “So, anyway, after examining me, my gynecologist determined that there was nothing wrong with my you-know-what and I was actually disappointed. I know this is going to sound insane, but I’d been hoping that there was something medically wrong with my you-know-what, something minor that could be treated and fixed. But there wasn’t. I was told that my you-know-what was in good working condition and there was nothing wrong with it.”
“Christ,” he muttered and she knew it was in response to all the ‘you-know-what’s’ she’d thrown out there.
“I was also told that some women simply just ‘don’t like sex’ and that I was likely ‘one of them’. Now, he might’ve really believed that and thought he was being helpful by giving me a ‘reason’ for my problem. However, what he said was actually the opposite of helpful and it wasn’t long before I was thinking he might actually be right when sex didn’t get any better. Being one of those women who just ‘don’t like sex’ seemed like the most logical explanation as to why I didn’t like it and I accepted that as my ‘normal’ setting and quit thinking about any other possible reasons for not liking it.
“When I found out what was really ‘wrong’ with me, I thought I should’ve figured it out sooner. Even after I knew our marriage ending was the catalyst for my recovery, it still didn’t stop me from illogically continuing to think I should’ve been able to figure it out before the shit hit the fan for us.
“It wasn’t until my therapist, Lauren, said the pieces fell into place when I was ready for them to, that I was able to let go of my guilt. She told me that some people, depending on the level of their abuse, are never ready and never get to really heal. So, the fact that it happened for me, is a gift. Granted, it’s a gift that only came with the loss of our marriage, but if it hadn’t happened, I couldn’t have healed and reclaimed myself.
“So, if I can let go of my guilt for not figuring it out sooner and needing the catalyst to recover, then you should be able to let go of yours for providing the catalyst that I needed to recover,” she told him. “You gave me the push I needed.”
Push? David shook his head a little, thinking it had been more like a shove out of an airplane without a parachute, into an erupting volcano. For a second, the visual of Paige free falling through the sky while yelling, “Thank you!” and him waving and shouting back, “You’re welcome!” distracted him, so that he almost missed what she said next.
“You and I were in an unsustainable relationship and your decision to end it was a good one. I know you thought you were weak to leave me, but you weren’t. You were strong. You saved me, David. You did,” she insisted, when he started to protest. “I actually wanted to tell you that a few years ago, but Ashley got in the way of that.”
David thought about what Paige had been going through, then getting sucker-punched by that bullshit email from Ashley.
“I really wish that hadn’t happened,” he said.
“Me, too. Especially since it happened shortly after I told my mom … which didn’t go very well. I didn’t sleep at all the night before because all I could think about was the heartbreak I was going to deliver. I was really worried about how she was going to react to the double blow of learning that I’d been sexually abused and that my abuser was Carter.”
Claire had never been David’s biggest fan, which, in turn, hadn’t made him hers; but at that moment, he felt nothing but overwhelming compassion for his former mother-in-law. Remembering that Valerie had said this scene in the book broke her heart, he imagined it had done the same to Claire. “She must have been devastated.”
“Actually, she wasn’t,” Paige said, matter-of-factly. “Because she didn’t believe me.”
His eyes widened in dismay. “She didn’t?”
“No.”
“You’re … serious?”
“Yes.”
And just like that, every trace of compassion for Claire was gone. “What the fuck?”
“Part of it was my fault—not the part where she didn’t believe me because that’s on her—but the part where I was so shocked.”
“How were you not supposed to be shocked?”
“If I had listened to Lauren, I might not have been,” she explained. “She’d warned me that a lot of parents don’t believe their child’s claims of abuse. This is especially true if a family member is involved, which meant there was a strong possibility that Claire would be one of those parents, especially with Carter being her twin brother. Lauren said I should be prepared for it, but …” Paige trailed off. “I wasn’t prepared. I just couldn’t imagine my mom not believing me and that completely worked against me.
“When I told her that Carter had molested me, she said she knew her brother and he would never be capable of doing something like that. But if he had, then why didn’t I ever say anything? She told me a normal person would’ve said something and the fact that I never did, was proof that nothing like that had happened. She also said there was no way she wouldn’t have known that was happening, because she was a good mother.”
He almost choked on that. “A good mother would’ve believed her child.”
Paige nodded, then continued. “At this point, her face was all red and she was actually yelling at me. I’d never seen her so angry, let alone angry at me. It was … surreal.”
David was pretty sure there was a better word for it, but he kept it to himself.
“She told me she couldn’t believe I was saying such ugly things about Carter, especially since he’d been so good to us after my dad died.
“The worst part, though, was when she defended Carter and said he dated a lot of women, so he had no need to have sex with a child. That’s what she called it. Having sex with a child. Not grooming a child, or molesting a child, or raping a child. Having sex … like that was okay.”
He reached for his wine glass, only to remember it was empty, then he reached for the bottle, only to remember it, too, was empty. His eyes fell on Paige’s half-full glass not too far away and he grabbed it like a desperate alcoholic.
“She then said she couldn’t stand to look at me anymore, grabbed my arm, and literally threw me out of her house, slamming the door in my face for good measure.”
David sat there, stunned, his heart actually hurting for Paige. He thought about his own mom, who hadn’t wanted him to marry for anything less than love and had boxes of his shitty macaroni art saved in her attic.
“She called me a few days later,” Paige continued. “I thought she was calling to tell me she’d had time to think and that she believed me because I was her daughter and she loved me. Boy, was I wrong. Oh, my God, so wrong. She was actually calling to tell me that she’d gone to Carter, told him about our ‘crazy’ conversation, and wanted me to know he’d denied everything. He told her he was really hurt by my false accusations, and was afraid there was something terribly wrong with me. He wondered if I was having some kind of a nervous breakdown, brought on by severe depression following my divorce and my mom latched onto that as evidence there was something wrong with me, and I was lying.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.” David rubbed at his face again.
“Ironically, part of my therapy was supposed to include my mother—for my healing as well as hers—but that never happened, for obvious reasons. And after the shitshow at her house, I actually had to spend quite a bit of extra time dealing with her rejection and the feelings of anger, betrayal, and even the hatred I was left with.
“I thought about sending her the bills for those extra sessions and that isn’t a joke. Therapy isn’t cheap, especially when your shitty health insurance only covers twenty-five percent and you’re in therapy for almost two years.”
“Almost two years? Holy shit.”
“It takes a little while to work through fifteen years of abuse,” she said with a What can you do? shrug and he knew she was trying to lighten the moment.
“Have you had any contact with Claire since then?” David asked, even though he figured it was unlikely.
“Yes. She called me last December, the day Carter died.”