Chapter 3 #2
“I couldn’t figure anything out. I thought it was my fault because I wasn’t used to living with people.
We had these strained conversations about nothing at all.
They never asked me any questions, I never asked any of them.
They were both gone a lot because of business.
It was a little like being back in hospital, only I was dressed and could go out if I wanted.
Then one day, my father came home early.
” Chloe closed her eyes. She’d had endless therapy but the memory could still jolt her out of her serenity.
In an instant, she was right back there, living it, not remembering it.
A sunny day in Boston, hot and humid. She’d found a whole wardrobe of pretty summer dresses in her room, an unusual gesture of kindness from her mother. She’d spent so long in hospital gowns and track suits; the pretty clothes delighted her.
Being outdoors was still a novelty for her, a treat.
The feel of the sun on her face and the breeze in her hair a shocking delight, even on a humid Boston summer day.
She’d had on a sun dress with spaghetti straps and no bra because really, why wear a bra when your breasts were like two small teacups?
The house had a garden, one she delighted in exploring.
A Mexican came twice a week to do the heavy lifting in the garden.
Mr. Martinez. Diego. Old and kindly, willing to explain to her what he was doing.
Telling her the names of the flowers in both English and Spanish.
She spent hours in the sunshine with him without ever thinking that maybe she was interrupting his work.
Coming in from the garden that day with a fistful of asters, flushed from the sun, she came across her father staring at her intently.
He walked right up to her, looming over her.
He’d been a big man, very tall, and he used his size and height to intimidate everyone around him.
Certainly her mother was often intimidated, as were the cook and the maid and the few dinner guests they sometimes had.
He intimidated her all the time, which she dealt with by rarely being in the same room with him.
Without really realizing what she was doing, something she recognized only with hindsight and after painful therapy, she had avoided him as much as she could. Walking out of a room the moment he entered, keeping furniture between them, stepping back when he approached her.
Her skin crawled if he got too close to her. Once, brushing by him, the hairs on her forearm rose.
That day, there was no walking away from him. He cornered her, big hands against her shoulders, pressing her against a yellow damask-covered wall.
God, she remembered the instant panic, full-blown, almost outsized for that specific moment, as if this were a situation she’d already faced.
Chloe had even sometimes wondered if she were in some way psychic because her nightmares were and always had been of being with her back to a wall and having a huge man attack her.
She’d had every variation of that nightmare, over and over again. And that afternoon, it became reality.
“Did he?” Mike Keillor’s very deep voice was low, harsh. The skin was tight over his cheekbones. He’d said something and she’d only caught the tail end of it.
Chloe blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“We’ve heard a version of this story a lot of times.” He glanced at his partner without moving his head. “Did your father rape you?”
Chloe bowed her head. It was that obvious? She looked like a woman who’d been raped by her father? Oh God. She’d worked so very hard not to seem like a victim and yet here was this man, who had only just set eyes on her for the very first time, and he’d pegged her completely.
“No,” she whispered, looking at her knees. “Though he tried.” Backbone, Chloe. The voice of Sister Mary Michael sounded in her head, calm and strong.
Calm. Strength.
She lifted her head. “I fought back. Which was dumb, because he was a really big man. I should have run. But I didn’t.
” She remembered every second of it, vividly.
Rage had come ravening up, from some completely unsuspected place inside her, black, blinding rage, an emotion she’d never felt before, certainly not like that.
It had been as overwhelming as his blow.
“It was ridiculous. My, um, my father was six two, almost three hundred pounds. He backhanded me. To shut me up, I guess, because I was screaming while I was trying to hit him, hurt him.”
She’d known in an instant what was going on.
Though she hadn’t had sex, had never kissed a boy, had never even touched a boy, she’d read enough and anyway, instinctively, she knew.
Knew that his red face, flaring nostrils and wild animal scent meant trouble.
It had come from some place deep inside of her.
Through her reading, she even knew what the tent in front of his linen trousers meant. An erection.
She’d gone into overdrive, kicking and screaming, grabbing a brass candlestick and bashing him in the face with it. His look of astonishment would have been comical if she hadn’t been so desperate. Weak, sick Chloe, fighting back. She’d shocked even herself.
Her rebellion hadn’t lasted long, though.
“He broke my arm,” she said. “It had been operated on recently and it broke easily.” Cheap at the price, because he’d stopped dead in his tracks and stared at her, cradling her visibly-broken arm.
Harry Bolt suddenly looked sick. Mike Keillor looked furious.
“My mother walked in and without a word to my father, took me back to the hospital, told them I fell down, and left me there overnight. The next day, cast and all, I was on a flight to London, where I was enrolled in the Sacred Heart School for Young Girls, where I boarded for the next three years.”
Chloe smiled. She had no idea if her mother had checked up on the Sacred Heart, if there had been some kind of parents’ site giving ratings of schools for foreign girls, or whether her mother had simply thrown a dart at a page of choices.
Whatever, she’d struck pure gold. The years at the Sacred Heart had been the happiest of her life, hands down.
The nuns had been warm and welcoming, the other girls from all over the world had provided friendship and she’d felt at home for the first time in her life.
“I stayed in England, went to university at University College London. When I graduated, I found a job back at the Sacred Heart, teaching English. I never saw my parents again. My mother and I emailed from time to time, and sometimes she talked about coming over to London, but she never did.”
She’d sent money, though. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, which Chloe had dutifully banked, spending as little of it as possible. She liked pretty clothes but she didn’t need a huge wardrobe. Her tastes were simple and the account grew and grew.
She glanced down at her wristwatch. She’d been talking for half an hour.
“I’m really sorry,” she said, looking up. “I know I’m taking up your time but I needed to say all of that, so you’d—you’d understand.”
Again, it was Michael Keillor—Mike—who spoke. “Oh, we understand all right,” he said grimly. He shot Harry a hard glance. “Don’t we?”
Harry Bolt shook his head. Not the ‘no’ gesture, it was more like shaking himself awake.
Okay. So far, so good. Chloe’s hands started shaking again because…it was time. Her life was going to split in two. If this went well…
Don’t go there. Think of something else.
But somehow her usual trick of dampening expectations wasn’t working. Hope had caught her heart in an unshakeable iron grip. While recounting her past, she’d used the old distancing trick, talking about herself as if recounting the story of a remote acquaintance.
Now the story grew closer, more personal. Possibly with a terrifying ending. Possibly with a joyful one.
She leaned forward a little and so did the two men. Like a group of conspirators, hatching a subversive plot.
“As I said, I never saw my parents again and we communicated rarely. So…I had no idea that they’d died in a car crash.
On the 18th of April of this year. It took my, um, my father’s lawyer almost a month to track me down.
It was end of term at my school so I flew over to—to settle my parents’ affairs. ”
The crumpled envelope on her lap felt like it was filled with bricks. Heavy, lumpy, cumbersome.
The closer she got to the heart of it, the harder it was to breathe. Something squeezed inside her chest. She watched Harry Bolt’s eyes, light golden brown, watching her.
“My father hadn’t left me anything in his will, which didn’t surprise me.
However, my mother outlived him by three hours and she was his sole heir and I was her sole heir, so the entire estate came to me.
Settling the estate was complicated, but I had lawyers and time and a place to stay—their house.
Since I was there, I explored. It was a brand-new house.
Yet again, one I’d never seen. I gave notice at my school because this was important.
I spent all my time sifting through papers and books and objects, trying to get a handle on my parents, trying to get a handle on my past. I took my time because it seemed to me that it was an opportunity to find out things that had puzzled me all my life. ”
She stopped and simply breathed. Her entire life arrowed toward this point and she, who thought out everything so carefully, who tried to anticipate all problems, had no idea what was coming next.
“There was a safe, a big one, like one of those safes in the movies. There was no way I could open it. But the lawyer told me I had a right to have it opened. He gave me the name of an expert. A man who’d done time as a safecracker and was now a ‘security consultant.’ A man you hired to crack into safes, legally. ”