by Sasha Hibbs
It was seventeen years in the making.
Chapter Forty
I didn’t remember falling asleep. I only remembered replaying the events of the last twenty-four hours over and over in my head. I thought about Mickey and the long-buried pain I resurrected. I thought about him finally releasing his inner demons, exposing every last one of them for me to see. I thought about the tender way we loved each other. I thought about how my parents found me, their prefect daughter, having lost her virginity, wearing a t-shirt covered in blood. But I’d lost more than my virginity. I lost their trust. I felt a twinge of guilt as I recalled everything I said to them, but I had no regrets about Mickey. I loved him. I had to find a way to save him from my parents’ wrath and a way to save him from himself.
My eyes opened as the light from the hallway spilled into my room. I could see a shadow stretch across the floor as I lay on my side. I glanced up to my window and could see dawn sweeping through the curtains. I didn’t turn over to see which one of my parents stood in the doorway. I couldn’t look at either one of them. Not yet. And it wasn’t out of shame. I wasn’t ashamed of what Mickey and I did.
“Get ready. There’s something we need to do,” my father said from the doorway.
That made me turn over quickly. My heart raced as the idea of my dad forcing me go to the police station to make a report against Mickey burst into my mind. I couldn’t let that happen.
“What?” My mind raced. I looked down at the alarm clock beside my bed. It wasn’t even six yet.
“Hurry.” My dad’s voice sounded distant. He wore a similar withdrawn expression on his face. As he shut the door, I jumped off the bed. I ran into the bathroom and took a quick shower. This couldn’t be happening. I wouldn’t let it. As soon as I finished, I brushed my teeth, pulled my wet hair up into a ponytail, and threw on some loose jogging pants and a t-shirt. I stepped out into the hallway where I found my dad leaning against the wall. He glanced over at me. There was no anger, no resentment, only a look that said he was tired.
“Follow me.”
I felt my eyebrows shoot up. What was going on? I followed him down the long hallway where he stopped in front of his and Mom’s bedroom. He gently opened the door and I followed behind him. I instantly spotted my mom curled up on their bay window. She didn’t even glance my way as we walked in. Her silhouette looked sad and distant. My father walked over to her, placed a hand on her shoulder then leaned down and kissed her on the brow. I watched a tear escape my mother. She lifted her hand to rest on his, giving it a gentle squeeze. I had never witnessed them exchange subtle caresses, like they were in more than a marriage, as though they were in love.
My father whispered something into my mother’s ear too low for me to hear. She looked up at him and I could faintly hear her say, “It’s okay, Frank. We should have done this a long time ago.”
I couldn’t assimilate in my head what they were doing or talking about, but to say I was confused was putting it mildly. My father broke apart from my mother who sat quiet and still like a grave at the bay window gazing out into the distance. He walked around to the side of their bed closest to me and bent down. He took his shoulders and shoved the bed against the wall.
I was at a loss for words. With both hands inching around on the wooden floor, he stopped when he found a groove. He pried it open and set the perfectly cut floorboard off to the side. With shaky hands, he lowered them and withdrew a tattered-looking shoebox. Setting it aside, he replaced the floorboard. He picked the shoebox back up, placed it on the bed, and walked over to the opposite side. Scooting the bed back into place, he stopped to kiss my mother one last time. With the box tucked under his arm he said as he walked past, “Come with me, Autumn.”
I didn’t know what to say or think. I’d never witnessed my parents acting like this. I followed my dad downstairs and out into the driveway. He unlocked the Mercedes.
“Where are we going?”
He opened his door and glanced over at me before getting in.
“On a Sunday drive.”
****
“I’ll have two eggs over medium, rye toast, bacon, and black coffee,” Dad said as he folded and handed his menu to the waitress.
“And for you, hon?”
“Blueberry pancakes with a small orange juice,” I said.
The waitress finished scrawling out our orders on her pad, clicked her pen, and said, “I’ll put your order in and get your drinks.”
Dad leaned over in his booth and retrieved the old shoebox. Setting it on the table, he tapped the lid absently with a look of contemplation. He seemed to be debating on how to proceed, what to say to me. The silence killed me. An hour ago I thought he was taking me to the police station to press statutory rape charges against Mickey, and now we sat in a little diner an hour from our house, both of us having so much to say and not knowing how to begin.
He scrubbed his hand over his face, exhaled slowly, and when he gazed at me, I had never seen him look so weary. He finally broke the silence. “Your mother and I stayed up all night. She would have come with me, but there are some things too painful to relive, and this is one of them.”
“Mickey’s not the bad guy you think he is,” I said, my fear returning.
Dad waved a hand, silencing me.
“We’ll get to that part soon enough, Autumn. What I have to tell you goes well beyond what you did yesterday, but at the end of my story, perhaps, for once, you’ll understand what it’s like to be a parent.”
The waitress reappeared with our coffee, orange juice, and breakfast.
“Can I get you anything else?” she asked, sitting our plates down in front of us.
My dad glanced up at her. “I think this will do.”
“Okay. Flag me down if you all need anything.”
Once she left our table, my gaze flickered back to the old shoebox. “What’s in that?”
“Your mother and I were once very different from what we are now. In this box,” dad said, his fingers thrumming against the lid, “is a past we’ve run from for seventeen years. When you spend the better part of your life trying to bury your past, I guess it finally catches up with you. And it did yesterday when your mother and I finally found you.”
“I don’t understand.” My stomach started turning. I pushed my pancakes to the side.
“I know you don’t. We never wanted you to, but we never once expected to find you the way we did. But seeing you, finding you”—my dad struggled to compose himself—“took me back to a day I never wanted to remember.”
“What are you talking about, Dad? You’re scaring me.”
“It sent me back to the day I took another man’s life.”
Chapter Forty-One
I stared at him in quiet shock. I shook my head. Surely I didn’t hear him correctly. His eyes started to fill with a past torment that lent credibility to what he was saying, but I couldn’t believe him. With shaky hands, he removed the lid from the shoebox. He picked up an old newspaper clipping and unfolded it. He smoothed out the creases of years gone by.
“You said some things about your mother last night, and while true, you need to understand how we came to be the way we are. Your mother is an alcoholic. I’ve known that for years but loved her too much to tell her how to cope with what she went through, what I helped put her through.”
My mind was racing. It was my father sitting in front of me, I knew that, but this was a man I’d never met before.
“Your mother and I are from a small rural town of no consequence on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia.”
“We’re from Clarksburg,” I said, correcting him. He wasn’t making any sense.
“No, Autumn. We’re not. You were born in Virginia. Once I got out of prison, we moved here to start over,” Dad said with the sorrow of the past lingering in his gaze.
“Prison? What are you talking about, Dad?” I couldn’t have been more astonished.
“Your mother and I lived a few miles apart. She and her m
other moved to her uncle’s farm when she was seventeen after her father died on the rigs. I never knew her before then. In the summertime, I baled hay for her uncle, Raymond Evens. I’ll never forget the day I first laid eyes on your mother.” For the first time in my life, I watched my dad try to fight back tears. “It was May. Summer was around the corner and I went to Mr. Evens’s farm to work out a schedule with him. I can see it all like it was yesterday. I knocked on his door, and the most beautiful girl I ever laid eyes on opened the screen door. I can see her long blonde hair now, remember the way the sun hit it. She was wearing a little pink sundress and was barefoot. For several seconds I couldn’t speak. I stared at her like an idiot. She introduced herself. Estelle. It was the prettiest name I’d ever heard. It wasn’t too long before Mr. Evens came around her and took her away from my sight. Well, after that day, I couldn’t rest until I found out who she was, how old she was, if she had a boyfriend. And soon enough, I started finding every reason to go to Evens’s farm aside from actually working on it.”
“Mom told me her parents died in a car wreck and you never knew your father and your mother died giving birth to you, that you were raised by your grandmother,” I said, trying to grasp a truth that changed everything. Why would they lie to me? For what purpose?
“Part of that is true. I never knew my father and my mother did die giving birth to me. My grandfather died before I could remember him, and my grandmother did raise me. We only told you what we felt was enough. I know this is a lot to take in, but there’s more, Autumn. So much more,” he said in a pained voice.
“Okay.”
“I graduated at the end of May. I had that last summer before starting college to work and save for some extra cash. I was going to start college at Virginia Commonwealth University in the fall. My grandmother worked hard her entire life, and I won a few scholarships, but not enough to pay for the full tuition. Between my scholarships and what I could save up working for Mr. Evens, my grandmother was going to supplement the rest. Before I met your mother, college was all I could think about. I didn’t really want to take over my grandmother’s farm. She knew that and encouraged me to pursue my dreams. But once I met Estelle, I became infatuated with her. She was all I could think about. I’d be working on Evens’s farm and she would sneak out, find ways to talk to me. I won’t fill your head with our summer love affair, but in those three months, I was the happiest man on the planet.”
My dad looked down at the newspaper clipping, drowning for a minute in the troubled waters of his past before gazing back up at me.
“Autumn, your mother had a hard life. A very hard life. When her father was alive and home from the rigs, he was an abusive alcoholic. And even when he died and Estelle and her mother moved in with Estelle’s uncle, her mother’s only brother, her hardship didn’t end there. It only grew worse. She lived in a dark place that no human being ever should. And I’ll always hate myself for not seeing it sooner.” My dad swallowed hard and the tide in my mind nearly hit its crescendo. I didn’t know if I wanted to hear anymore.
“We were kids, Autumn. You have to understand,” he said like a bad omen before continuing. “I hadn’t figured out how Estelle was going to fit into my life once I started college, but the one thing I was sure of and still am, was that I loved her more than anything in my life and felt I would find a way for us. She still had one year left of high school. Late one night in August, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my grandmother. She’d just served some pecan pie. There was a loud crash through the front door. My grandmother screamed and I ran to see what the commotion was.”
He finally choked up as the tears he fought, held at bay, had at long last won out. He grabbed his napkin and wiped at his eyes. Clearing his throat, he started back down a dark path where I felt sure could have no light waiting at the end.
“Your mother was pregnant with you, you see. It was over that pecan pie that I was working up the courage to tell my grandmother. I never had the chance to tell her. I ran out of the kitchen and found your mother beaten and bloody, sprawled across our living room floor. I picked her up and I can still hear her … her screams. The look she had in her eyes that night will haunt me forever. I tried getting her to tell me what happened. Who did this to her? Was she okay? Was the baby okay? That I needed to take her to a hospital. She begged me over and over for us to run away right then and there. She wasn’t making any sense. My grandmother was trying to clean the blood off her. When my grandmother felt her legs to check for damage, Estelle became even more hysterical. It was then, I knew in my gut Raymond Evens had done this to her. In those few seconds, I remembered every creepy glance he’d ever given her, the way he looked at her, not as an uncle but a man in lust. And I hated myself, because I knew. I’d suspected it all along, but after asking Estelle about it once, she shrugged it off and I tried not to ever think of it again. Until that night. It hit me before she ever confirmed my biggest fear.”
“What happened, Dad?” I asked. Like him, I already knew. I could see it in my dad’s face, hear it in his voice.
“Her uncle had molested her from the time she and her mother moved in with him. But once she told her mom about being pregnant with you, her uncle found the opportunity to rape her. She fought. I could tell by all the blood on her, but the damage had already been done.”
“Oh God, Daddy,” I whispered as tears welled up in my eyes. I had no idea, never dreamed that my parents, the perfect Frank and Estelle Chamberlain, could live through such horror. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. I felt sick.
“When I heard what he’d done to my beautiful Estelle, something in me snapped. I don’t remember much about that night beyond that. I remember Estelle and my grandmother pleading with me to stay, that my grandmother would call the cops, get it sorted out that way. But I couldn’t hear them. All I could see was Estelle. The blood. The tears. The image of her being held down while that filthy old man defiled her, hurt her and she was too little and too weak to fight against him. It was too much for me. I grabbed my hunting knife and ran and ran and ran until I found myself on Raymond Evans’s farm. I didn’t wait for him to answer the door. I broke it down. He was sitting on a dirty recliner watching the evening news like nothing happened. Estelle’s mother was sitting on the couch in a numb kind of state. I’ll never know why she didn’t try to stop it, and I’ll never care. She was her mother and she sat back and did nothing. Raymond stood up and came toward me, but it was over before he had a chance to struggle. I slit his throat, Autumn. I dropped the knife and waited for the cops. I knew they’d come. There was no running away with your mother after I did what I did.”
I couldn’t hold my tears back. They fell against my cheeks, my heart breaking over and over for my parents and the cautionary tale my father hid buried deep for so long, now brought to light, the pain it was giving him to tell me.
“Is that why mom is so distant with me? Does she … does she blame me?”
“Oh God, no. You were the best thing that ever happened to us, Autumn. Don’t ever think like that. We love you so much, so very, very much. I can see now that we’ve struggled to show you in the right way. But don’t ever, for one second think your mother doesn’t love you, that I don’t love you. You are innocent in this. You were created out of our love for each other, and regardless of how ugly that night was, you were the only beautiful thing that came out of those darks days.”
“I’m so sorry, Dad.”
“Don’t be,” Dad said reaching across the table and taking my hands in his. He gave them a gentle, reassuring squeeze before letting go. “The cops came. I was arrested and charged with breaking and entering and domestic homicide. I never regretted killing him. The world was better for it. The only regret I had was your mother being alone for two years until I could get out of prison. My grandmother sold her farm to pay for lawyer fees, constantly trying to appeal the court and get my sentence reduced. After two years, she finally did. I don’t know how Estelle survived on her own with my n
ear destitute grandmother and a baby. But I’d financially crippled my grandmother, and I couldn’t support my family from a prison cell. I wouldn’t accept visitors in prison. It was no place for my grandmother, for Estelle and no place for a baby. The night before I was released, my grandmother died in her sleep. I never had the chance to tell her I was sorry for what I put her through, for what I cost her. I never laid eyes on my own child until you were almost two years old.”
Dad pulled out newspaper clippings and handed them to me. I wrapped my hands around his and gently shoved them back.
“I don’t need to see them, Dad. It doesn’t matter what happened then.”
“But it does. You have to understand the past to understand the present. You see, the stress of me being in prison cost my grandmother her farm, caused her death. Estelle won’t talk about it, but she doesn’t have to tell me. I know those years I was gone were hard on her. On both of you. She took waitress jobs and tried to support you both on meager tips. She missed out on so much and she had to go it alone. Once I got out of prison, I made a promise to her and myself that she would never know poverty again. It was hard at first to obtain employment with a criminal background, but eventually I found a kind old man sympathetic to my cause. Old man Davies, the original owner of Clarksburg Financial, gave me my first break, and I’ve never been so thankful in my life. He was a blessing. Only he knew my secret and it died with him. And so, I’ve worked hard every day of my life since being released in an effort to make sure my family would never want for anything. The sad thing is, I never realized until yesterday, that you can’t throw money at a problem to fix it.”
