Ten The Child
Ten
The Child
After the first year, I stopped thinking about who I was before. That life was no longer relevant and the thoughts only made me sad and miserable. I had a choice: I could hope to die or I could hope to survive.
I chose to survive.
The monster became my father, my mother, my world. I had no one else.
When I was older, he started to allow me outside whatever shithole we lived in.
Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t happen often, but when it did it was like going to the circus for a kid who’d spent the past two years as a prisoner.
He made sure I looked nice and reminded me to smile.
As we left the car and walked into the market or wherever, he held my hand, smiling like a proud daddy.
It wasn’t like he had to worry that someone would recognize me from a milk carton. I had changed too much.
The first time out in public was the most difficult.
Not because I misbehaved but because I was terrified that someone else would take me.
I had lived through it once; I didn’t want to risk going through it again.
I needed the stability. As foolish as it sounds now, at the time, I knew where my next meal would come from and that I would be warm on a cold night.
I was well acquainted with the things he would do to me whenever he chose, and though I hated every second of it, I understood that I would survive those awful things.
I’d learned to go to my happy place while he took what he wanted, to tune out his sickening grunting and the disgusting things he did to my skinny little body.
It was my new normal. My everyday routine.
Food and warmth and routines . . . those things were all that mattered to a kid who had lost everything and who had been sexually abused in every possible way one can imagine.
You might think it’s impossible to do all the things to a small child one can do to an adult, but you’re wrong. Trust me when I say he did things to me that I will never share with anyone. Things no one can ever know because I cannot bear the reliving long enough to tell the story.
As I grew older, our relationship began to shift somewhat.
He realized he could use me for more than entertainment.
No one worried when a child wandered too close to a shopping cart or bumped against the heavy purse hanging from a shoulder or arm.
I learned the art of pickpocketing like other kids learn how to ride a bike.
It still amazes me the stash of cash most women kept handy in those days.
It was as if they feared the need for change or a few dollars while attempting to exit a public parking garage with two sleeping kids in car seats.
Or worse, the five bucks they used their debit card for at McDonald’s would end up part of a major card security breach that required new debit cards and PIN numbers. Always a pain in the ass.
Since there was inevitably the risk I might be caught by a shopper who wasn’t as distracted as I first believed, he taught me how to avoid being trapped into a confession.
How to lie like a pro. How to make the same lady I’d just robbed believe perhaps she was wrong after all.
When all else failed, there was the ace up my sleeve—the sympathy card.
I was hungry. My baby sister needed milk.
And then, of course, I learned how to evade capture.
I could slip away and hide where no one would find me better than Houdini himself.
But stealing wasn’t my only skill. I was also very, very good at begging in a way that didn’t actually give the appearance of begging.
I would stare, big eyed, at something most kids my age took entirely for granted—like a new pair of sneakers or a new pair of jeans.
I never bothered with toys. I had been taught they were pointless.
I still had the teddy bear, but it didn’t actually count.
On those occasions when I set out to get something only I wanted, I wore my most ragged clothes.
He didn’t teach me this technique; this is one I developed on my own.
Even the hardest heart could be melted by a poor, dirty child in need.
Children are starving all over the country, and no one wants to hear about it.
Put one in front of their faces so they have to look at it, and all bets are off. They can’t take it.
Funny thing was, I had no idea at the time that I was learning the skills I would desperately need later.
He still got angry and forced me into the dreaded box from time to time.
And he kept me illiterate. He refused to teach me to read or to write.
Too afraid, I suppose, that I would turn out smarter than him and then maybe figure out that I didn’t really belong to him.
The problem was, by then, I didn’t remember who I was.
I was the child. His child. I belonged to him, body and soul.
During the rare occasion when I had to flee a pickpocket situation, it never once entered my mind to find a police officer or to tell someone I needed help.
I was far more afraid of what might happen if I did this than I was of anything else he might do to me.
I had survived the worst he could possibly do.
Or, at least, I thought I had.
“I saved you.”
My attention jerks to the piece of shit huddled in the darkest corner of his prison. Ah, so he’s decided to talk today, has he?
“You saved me?” I scoff at the concept. Obviously his brain was damaged during all those years in prison.
I walk closer to where he huddles. I am not afraid.
In addition to having a wide, ugly wound on his upper arm, he’s bruised and battered quite thoroughly.
As I approach him, he shudders visibly and draws into a tighter ball.
How pathetic. I think of all the times he beat me far more brutally than what has been done to him.
I think of the endless ways he used my frail, tender body as a child and the need to kill him now—this instant—surges until my heart is thundering in my chest.
“You beat and raped me day after day, week after week, year after year, until they took you. What the hell do you think you saved me from?”
It doesn’t matter, really, what he thinks.
He is nothing. Less than nothing. I have no idea why I bother interacting with him.
Perhaps on some level I am curious how such a monster can believe himself the victim after what he has done.
Or more to the point, how could he possibly do the things he did to me or to any other child and believe he deserves anything less than every ounce of pain I am capable of inflicting?
How has he lived with the memories of his grievous acts against the weakest members of society?
And why did he come back to Nashville? He could have gone to Murfreesboro or farther north. I suspect I know the answer to that one, but we’ll see.
“I saved you from the people who brought you into this world.” Even as he boasts, he braces for my retaliation.
Coward.
I consider kicking him in the side. I’ve done this numerous times already. Why bother?
“Do you know what today is?” I ask him rather than kick him as I first considered.
He shakes his head, fear filling his pathetic eyes. I do not possess the proper words to articulate how very much that fear pleases me.
“It’s day three of our reunion,” I say. “I’m surprised you didn’t think of this when you were planning this elaborate game you set in motion. Do you remember what you did to me on day three after you took me home with you?”
He shakes his head adamantly at first, and then the movement subsides as the memories flood his wretched brain. The fear tightens around his throat and chest in a choke hold. I hear the change in his respiration. See the growing terror in his eyes.
Oh, how it pleases me.
“But don’t worry. I’m sure you were raped plenty of times in prison.” I shrug. “Statistics show that men like you were probably raped as children, too. Is that true? Did your daddy or an uncle, maybe a grandpa, rape you as a child? Is that what turned you into the disgusting perv you became?”
He looks away. In all the years we were together, he never spoke of the men in his family.
There had to be men. He spoke only of his mother—the one who died of an overdose when he was just eight years old.
Before he dies, I’m going to tell him about searching until I found where his mother was buried.
I went to her grave in the middle of the night and shit on it.
Probably wasn’t her fault he turned out the way he did since she died when he was so young, but she was the one who spit him out of her loins.
For that, she deserved to be shit on, alive or dead.
“I’ll make this a lot easier on you if you just tell me the truth.”
After he was taken away to prison, I watched the news.
I heard the armchair shrinks create scenarios based on his known history.
His father had gotten himself murdered when Fanning was seventeen.
His grandfather had been in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s.
When Fanning was nineteen, somehow his grandfather ended up dead in the shower at the care facility where he was a resident.
Strange thing. The staff had no idea how he got out of bed and into the shower, much less fell and bashed his head on the tile.
The shrinks speculated that the grandfather had molested Fanning as a child.
The monster remains silent, hovering in that corner like a trapped animal.
“We both know it was your grandfather. That’s why you killed him.” I experience much pleasure at saying these things to him. I want him to feel the way I felt. The worthlessness, the humiliation, the desolation. The utter uncertainty.
“Then why ask?” he snarls.
I smile. “I just want to hear you say the words, that’s all. I want to hear all the terrible things he did to you. Maybe see if you learned those nasty tricks of yours from him.”
“Shut up!”
The hoarse shriek gives me another shot of immense pleasure.
I really don’t need any answers from him, I know how the story likely went. Does his damaged childhood make me feel the least bit sorry for him?
No.
He chose to continue the vicious cycle of abuse. Since he didn’t have children of his own, he abused other people’s children.
That is never going to happen again.
Never, ever, ever.