Chapter 5 Erin
Erin
Milo and I had our first kiss in a deserted gym in high school.
We were both nervous, but once we’d kissed, it kind of sealed the deal.
Mom and Dad liked him and his mom. Milo was not allowed into my bedroom under any circumstances.
We respected their rules for a long time.
Being with Milo was exciting and interesting and we laughed a lot.
We loved the same books; we watched the same movies over and over.
Good Will Hunting was our favourite. He was Matt Damon and I was Minnie Driver and we made up the happiest endings for ourselves.
Milo couldn’t afford to take me out for meals or buy me jewellery, but I didn’t need those things.
Milo was not a virgin. He had slept with a few girls.
I wasn’t entirely surprised by this. I think I was one of the last virgins in my class, but I was struggling with it.
My body yearned for him, as if it was a different entity to my mind.
I knew that God was testing me, but Milo said he would wait.
We didn’t go the whole way, though we came close.
We had worked out which steps on the back stairs of the house squeaked and I had oiled the handle of my bedroom door.
On the occasional nights when Milo stayed over in the spare room downstairs, he could creep up and quietly enter my bedroom at the top of the back stairs without anyone hearing, where we would make out and fool around.
We would whisper to each other about what felt good and what didn’t, manoeuvring each other’s hands and bodies until we were both satisfied.
We stifled our moans. Nobody knew. Ruby’s bedroom was between mine and my parents’ room.
She had famously slept through a storm that had taken the roof off the shack directly behind our bedrooms a couple of years earlier. Nothing would wake her.
I think at the time I trusted Milo more than anyone I knew.
He told me he’d wait until I was ready, but I was God-fearing in those days.
We knew that we were going to get married as soon as I graduated high school.
I knew Dad would go crazy, but as they had got married when Mom was twenty-one years old and he was twenty-two, he couldn’t say too much.
We planned to have three children after he qualified as a doctor.
We were stuck about where we were going to live.
Milo wanted to support me, but it was going to be a long time until he would be able to do that.
Besides, I wanted to go to Harvard. I reckoned that Dad could probably buy us an apartment as a wedding present, but Milo was uncomfortable with that.
He had got into Boston College on a scholarship that didn’t cover everything.
He had student loans too. The principal at Altman had helped him with his applications.
Principal Bermingham always took a special interest in Milo.
He mentored him and said he could see Milo’s potential. So could I.
I used to write short stories for my own amusement.
They were usually stories about wacky characters.
They were all different. One was about demon children who were born to this loving couple but who grew up to be psychopaths and murdered their parents.
Another was about a single mother who refused to feed her children; they were taken from her and put into foster care, but they were traumatized.
They refused to eat until they were put back into their mother’s care and then they ate her.
These stories were often disturbing. I was afraid to show them to anyone but Milo and he suggested I show them to my teacher.
I don’t know where these ideas came from, but Milo loved them – he said I should send them in to competitions.
Even though I was top of the class in English at school, my English teacher didn’t like them.
She found them distasteful and encouraged me to write about the real world.
I didn’t think Dad would have approved, especially if my teacher didn’t, and Mom wasn’t much of a reader.
I loved books and reading, though. Ruby once said that prettiness was wasted on me because I was such a geek. She was funny.
Milo thought I should be a writer, and I thought that was something I could maybe try in my spare time, but I wanted to read books rather than write them.
It was a huge surprise to discover that Milo had entered one of my stories into a competition in a literary journal and they had agreed to publish it.
Dad demanded to read the story and, to my surprise, he liked it.
I don’t think Mom understood it, but she was super proud and took me to New York on the train for the day to see The Lion King on Broadway.
We wouldn’t be home until late. That was the day Milo raped Ruby.
I wondered if it had all been a fantasy.
Was Milo playing me all this time? Did he like my stories at all?
He had told me he’d slept with girls when he was younger, he’d said the girls were older than him, but were they?
Did he ever plan to marry me? The shock of what he did to Ruby was overwhelming.
I thought about Milo’s dark moods. At the time we were planning our future together, I thought it was depression.
In those times, he wouldn’t call me or talk to me in school.
Once he had shouted, ‘Leave me the fuck alone,’ and punched a wall while I walked alongside him trying to engage him in conversation.
I was shaken by his aggression. I had not told the court about that.
I should have. Afterwards he had apologized, and he was back to his sweet old self, but I couldn’t forget the sudden rage and hostility.
Would he have hit me if I’d tried to hug him?
Maybe he was a psychopath. You read about these people all the time: ‘He was so mild-mannered, wouldn’t hurt a fly.
’ Milo hadn’t planned to rape Ruby, I was sure of it, but if one of those black moods had taken him, who knew what he could do?
I knew that Milo masturbated because sometimes, on those nights when he crept up the back stairs into my room, I helped him jerk off.
But there was no way around it: his semen was inside her vagina so he must have come inside her.
The whole time he could have said it was consensual, but he insisted that Ruby came on to him, that she wrapped herself around him and that he had stopped her, that she fell and knocked her head.
He insisted there was no penetration at all and that he’d had to fight her off.
A tiny girl like Ruby? The DNA sealed his fate and broke my heart in two.
Some time after I returned from Worcester, Margie was lurking outside the house one day when I was getting in the car to go to the supermarket. I went to the gate to meet her.
‘He didn’t do it, you know he didn’t.’ She was half crazy with rage.
‘I warned you something would happen if he started mixing with you rich kids. I never imagined it would be this. Your sister is a liar, and you fucking know it. He’s not stupid, Erin, why would he do such a thing and think that he wouldn’t be caught? ’
Dad heard the commotion and came out and threatened to call the police. He ran her off the property.
Mrs Kelly had come to the house twice, begging to talk to Ruby until Mom and Dad got a restraining order against her. Ruby and I stayed home, thinking our lives were over, and perhaps they were, because nothing was ever the same again.
Sometimes, Ruby could forget and laugh at The Simpsons or Friends on TV, and we encouraged that. Dad was angry and silent for months. He said his faith was being challenged and prayed about it endlessly.
The story wasn’t in the newspapers but some people in the church knew and everyone in Altman knew. I had only told Saima and I’m sure she didn’t tell anyone, but Ruby’s friends were less discreet.
And then, four days after Ireland was suggested, Mom and Ruby left.
I thought it was temporary. They’d stay for the summer and then they’d come home.
Mom begged me to come with them, but I needed a break from Ruby.
I knew it wasn’t her fault, but I couldn’t bear to see her pale face and sad eyes.
It was one of the worst days among many terrible ones.
Dad thought I should go to a prayer retreat for a while.
It was a kind of religious retreat with daily massages as well as group baking, prayer circles, flower arranging, music therapy and painting sessions.
I slept a lot and talked a lot in group sessions, about trust and betrayal and family, and I made cupcakes for a party I would never attend, funeral wreaths for my heart; I wrote angry songs that nobody would ever sing, and I painted my soul in shades of grey and green with splashes of rotting yellow. I did not mix with the other guests.
Two weeks later, Dad came to pick me up, a fake cheerful smile on his face, and I noticed his hair was greying at the temples. Milo’s actions had taken their toll on everyone.
The house was quiet all the time now, and the tension was gone.
I don’t know if that was because the trial and sentencing were over or because Ruby was no longer there.
I missed Mom badly and called her often.
She always wanted me to talk to Ruby, but those conversations were brief and awkward.
Dad and I got along okay. I had missed a school year; I was going to have to repeat it.
Dad hired a maid to cook and clean for us, but I ironed Dad’s shirts in the particular way he liked.
He got back to full-time work and his ministries, and Saima persuaded me to spend the summer working as a supervisor with her at a camp for middle school kids in Vermont.
I felt bad about leaving Dad alone, but he encouraged me to go.
It also gave me an excuse not to go to Dublin to see Mom and Ruby with him.
That summer in Vermont was freedom. Nobody knew anything about what had happened.
There were no sympathetic looks. I could be normal.
Dad returned from Dublin upset. Mom was pressuring him to move there, but even I knew it was a ridiculous idea.
Dad had no friends there, no business contacts, no church community.
He broke the news to me that Mom and Ruby were not coming back to Boston.
Ruby had refused and Mom couldn’t leave her there on her own.
I tried to hide my distress from Dad, but it was hard.
I was technically an adult, but I still felt like I needed my mom.
Mom came back to see me, leaving Ruby with Grandma, but she was still convinced Dad would change his mind and that we would all go to Dublin.
I could see their relationship was frayed but there was nothing I could do about it.
Back at school in the fall, things were different.
Saima had graduated and gone to Boston University College of Fine Arts.
I was doing my final school year. I knew some of the kids in my class, but I didn’t feel like mixing with them.
Milo had made some real friends during his time in Altman, and they all knew what had happened.
The boys shunned me, and I only spent time with the girls in my class who were in Dad’s church.
Principal Bermingham avoided looking at me when we passed in the corridors.
After a few weeks, we heard that he had quit.
I realized he must have other things on his mind. Not everything was about me.
In my spare time, I studied. There was nobody to write stories for, so I stopped writing them.
I’d applied and got accepted into Harvard.
Dad took me out for dinner when I got the letter of acceptance.
He said Saima could come too, thank the Lord, because Dad and I had run out of conversation a long time ago.