When Jeff Comes Home

by Catherine Atkins

"Yes. I hear what you're saying."

  "I gave in to him. I did what he wanted. Not once. Hundreds of times."

  "You had no choice," Dad said fiercely. I stared at him, surprised by the sudden emotion in his voice. "No choice at all."

  I waited a long moment. Then I shrugged, watching him. "Upstairs, you know. Before. I was remembering the first time with Ray. The first time he had sex with me."

  Dad nodded. "I'd like you to tell me about that."

  “What?” I laughed in anger and disbelief. He had no right. "Oh, Dad, come on."

  "You lived through it," he said. "I should be able to hear about it."

  Suddenly I was furious with him. "It's not that easy. You think listening to me talk about this shit changes any of it? It doesn't. It won't."

  "I know that. But don't you see, if I know everything you went through, I can help you more, and together we can—"

  "Where were you?" I asked, more to stop his words than anything else.

  Dad froze. "Where was I when?" He knew.

  I closed my eyes as I said the words I had so often thought. "Where were you when I was in that room? Where were you when I was alone with him? I waited for you. I counted on you. You never came."

  When I could not stand the silence any longer, I looked at him. Dad's head was lowered, his fists clenched on his thighs. My instinct was to comfort him, to retreat. I ignored the impulse, watching him calmly. Finally he looked up.

  "I tried to find you. I tried every way I knew how. I stayed in Fresno for weeks after you disappeared, searching for you personally. I made the rounds of the law enforcement agencies every day. I screamed until they brought the FBI in.

  "We contacted schools across the country," Dad continued, talking fast. "Twice a year, every semester, right up until last fall. Connie typed the letters, I made the calls, the kids stuffed envelopes. ..."

  "You thought I was going to school somewhere?" I bit back the urge to laugh.

  Dad looked at me sharply. "I had no idea where you were. I didn't know. That was the hell of it. I never knew if I was an inch away from finding you, or if I was running like hell in the opposite direction."

  He was grim-faced after that, silent for so long I felt I had to say something. "I'm sorry. ..."

  "Don't be sorry. Just listen. After you had been gone a few months, the FBI lost interest. Dave never gave up, and I'll always be grateful to him for that, but he was one person, and yours wasn't the only case he was working. I set up a toll-free number for people to call with tips about you, and I followed up on them myself. I traveled to Houston, Kansas City, New Orleans, New York, Los Angeles three times looking for you. I'd plaster the town with posters, appear on whatever media would have me, haunt the police stations . . . anything I could think of to get the word out."

  "Dad..."

  "I visited coroners' offices, Jeff," he said deliberately. " All across the country. About every six months I'd get the call, they'd found some body, some poor kid who half-resembled you. I went every time. Not because I believed any of those boys could be you. But I knew if I didn't see them with my own eyes, I wouldn't have been able to live with myself."

  I squirmed, uncomfortable. "Okay, Dad."

  "I hired a private detective out of L.A. He heard a rumor you might be involved in kiddy porn and he started sending me boxes of the stuff to scour for pictures of you." I looked at him quickly, and he nodded. "Oh yes, I did that too, until Brian got into it one day when I wasn't home and Connie got hysterical. So we stopped that and then I tortured myself with the idea that maybe you would have been in the next magazine—"

  "Dad, you made your point."

  "For the better part of two years," he said, talking over me, "I did almost nothing else but try to find you. I came damn close to bankruptcy, to losing this house, my job—everything we still had. The only reason I pulled out of it, actually, was to preserve the family for you. I knew you would come home one day, and when you did, you would need that structure."

  I sat dumbly on the couch, staring down at my hands.

  "I'm not looking for your sympathy. I know none of that was enough. I didn't find you, and that's the bottom line. You had to save yourself."

  I looked up at him, wondering if I'd heard correctly. "What?"

  "I couldn't do it for you," Dad said, "so you saved yourself."

  The idea was so radical I could only stare at him. "Save myself? What ... I didn't save myself. I'm screwed up, Dad. Screwed up and screwed over," I added deliberately.

  He didn't flinch. "You're alive. You convinced Slaight to bring you home. You won."

  "You know how I convinced him, don't you? You've known it all along." I looked away. "I don't see how you can know that and not hate me for it, even a little."

  "Jeff." He waited until I met his eyes. "The things Slaight did to you, the fact that he used you sexually"— Dad hit the words hard—"I hate him for it, of course. Not you. Never you."

  "But I was there too, Dad." I took a deep breath. "Anyway, it wasn't just the sex. Ray . . . loved me, I think. He told me so and I built on that. He was kinder to me then, so I... that's how I fought him. I convinced Ray that I loved him. I kissed him back, Dad. Do you get it? I kissed him back.”

  "I get it," Dad said roughly. "And I'm telling you, good. If that worked, good."

  "You don't know the details. You don't know how I was with him. You don't know everything I did."

  Dad shook his head slightly. "There is nothing you can tell me, nothing I can find out, that will ever make me turn away from you."

  "Is that true?" I asked after a moment.

  "Yes," he said simply.

  I closed my eyes, trying to absorb what he was offering: unconditional love. Unconditional acceptance. I felt lighter, the pressure I had come to accept as normal lifting away from my chest. I took a deep breath, letting it out as a memory hit me like a fist in the stomach.

  "When I told you about my back, you stopped touching me."

  "Yes," Dad said. My stomach turned over. I hadn't expected him to agree with me. "I thought that was what you wanted."

  I stared at him. He was right. Yet... "Dad, it wasn't just that you didn't touch me anymore. You could barely stand to look at me after that."

  Dad lowered his head. "Spare a thought for me in all this. How do you think I felt when you told me about your back? I wanted to kill Slaight, but I knew whatever I did to him wouldn't help you now. I felt so guilty, so . . . helpless, I had a hard time facing myself, much less you."

  I had to know for sure. "You didn't stop touching me because ... because you thought I was disgusting?"

  He shook his head slowly. "No" was all he said. It was all he needed to say.

  We sat quietly for a moment.

  "He scarred you," Dad said. I gasped, sitting back in the chair. "Not just physically. I know he's living in your head now. Maybe you feel he's still with you ..."

  "He is."

  "You can heal, Jeff," Dad said intensely. "You will."

  "Scars don't heal," I told him with a short laugh. "That's why they're scars."

  "Tell me what you see when you look at your back," Dad said.

  "I don't look."

  "Then what do you imagine?"

  "Cords," I said immediately. "That's what they feel like. The scars. Sometimes I think of them as worms. Thick white worms gliding across my back ..." Tears slipped down my cheeks. I stopped talking before my voice veered out of control.

  "Let me see."

  I waited for a feeling of outrage, or panic, to give me the energy I needed to turn Dad down, turn him down in such language he would never ask me again.

  It didn't come. Instead I felt tired, and weak, only a small spark of fear making me hesitate. Who cared anymore?

  I stood up slowly, moving over to where he sat. I turned around, pulling my T-shirt halfway up, keeping it in place with my arms tight by my sides.

  Dad stood behind me, pressing one hand lightly against my neck to move me forwar
d. I took two steps and listened to his breathing.

  "It's not so bad, Jeff," he said after a while, his voice thick. "May I touch your back?"

  "Okay," I said, working to keep my voice casual. I felt like running when I felt Dad's cool fingers on me, but I stayed where I was.

  He pushed his hand up under my shirt, rubbing my upper back gently. I shivered suddenly as gooseflesh covered my arms. Dad worked his way down, his hand moving from one side of my back to the other, his fingers now barely grazing the skin. Each mark tingled as he hit it, until I imagined the stripes illuminating, one after the other, on the canvas of my back.

  Dad took his hand away and, so gently it brought fresh tears to my eyes, pushed my arms up from my sides and pulled the T-shirt back down around me. I kept my eyes down as he turned me around to face him.

  "I want you to look, too," he said quietly. "I want you to see what I saw." He sounded tense, waiting for my protest.

  "Okay," I said. I trailed after him to the guest bedroom, to the full-length mirror on the outside of the closet door. I stood in front of the mirror, staring at my feet, while Dad went into the bathroom.

  He returned with a hand mirror, which he gave to me. "I'm going to wait in the living room. You look as much as you need to, and then come back and join me."

  "Okay, Dad," I said, feeling fragile.

  He left, closing the door behind him.

  He trusts me.

  I took my shirt off, tossing it on the bed, then turned around slowly, my back to the mirror. I held the hand mirror to the right of my face, peering into it.

  I saw nothing more than my back gleaming whitely, and I looked away quickly, feeling hope and anger mixed. I knew what I had seen could not be the truth.

  Moving to the lamp by the guest bed, I flicked it on to add more light to the room. I returned to the closet mirror, closer this time. Taking a deep breath, I held the hand mirror up again, angling downward to get a better look.

  It was then I saw what I had felt for so long: my back scored by a fine tracing of white lines that extended from below my neck to just above my buttocks. The scars were faint, but visible. Two of them, on my lower back, stood up slightly from the skin.

  My fear, which in some corner of myself I had known to be untrue, was that my back was a patch-work of hideous, disfiguring ridges. I could see that was not the case. But my fantasy, which I had been able to hold until this moment, was that nothing was visible, that my back was as smooth and innocent as the day I had been kidnapped. That wasn't true either.

  Dad leaned back against the couch, his eyes shut, arms stretched out across the top. I stood in the doorway, watching him.

  "Dad," I said softly when it became apparent he didn't know I was there.

  He sat up quickly, rubbing his eyes. "What do you think?"

  I shrugged. "Not so bad, I guess."

  "That's what I was thinking," he said carefully. "Not so bad at all."

  "Not so good, either," I added.

  Dad waited a moment, then nodded. "Come sit beside me," he urged, patting a spot on the couch next to him. I picked my way over, sitting farther down the couch than where he'd indicated.

  "I'll never be normal again," I said after a while, needing to hear his reassurance, knowing I could not believe it.

  "I don't know what that word means. You're here and I love you. That's all I care about."

  "He's lying," I said abruptly. Dad looked over at me. "Ray. Those things he said about me. I wasn't hitchhiking. I didn't ask to stay with him."

  "Oh, Jeff," Dad started, sounding angry. I tensed. "Of course he's lying," he said more calmly. "Of course he is. Everyone will know that. That's not something you have to worry about."

  "The kids at school believe him," I said.

  "Do they?" Dad asked gently. "All of them?"

  "Maybe not," I said. "Dad, why did this have to happen to me?"

  He sighed deeply, closing his eyes. "I don't know."

  "He raped me," I said, testing the words to see how it felt to say them out loud. "He raped me," I said again, feeling the shell of my detachment falling away. "How could he do that to me? How could he treat me that way?"

  "I don't know," Dad murmured.

  "I hate him so much. I hate him," I screamed.

  Dad was crying. "I hate him too," he said, holding his arms out to me. I hesitated only a moment. Dad pulled me to him, half onto his lap.

  Ray Ray Ray

  "No," I shouted, holding Dad tighter. As if he understood, he wrapped his arms around me, holding me close to his chest, kissing my cheek.

  If Ray saw us now, he’d laugh and he’d say. . .

  "I hate him, Dad," I said again, my voice muffled.

  "I know, baby, I know."

  "Don't call me that," I moaned. He stopped stroking my hair for a moment, and I felt his sudden intake of breath.

  "Slaight doesn't own words," Dad said finally. "Most of all, he doesn't own you. He's nothing to do with you now."

  I nodded, listening to his heartbeat, knowing I looked ridiculous, more six than sixteen, feeling safer than I had since I'd come home. Dad kissed the top of my head, murmuring endearments as if I were a little child. Gradually I let myself relax into his embrace.

  We stayed that way for a long time, so long I felt myself falling asleep against his chest. I didn't want that—the idea panicked me—and I tried to sit up.

  "Dad," I said awkwardly, a little scared, "I'm pretty tired. Maybe I should go up to my room now." He released me at once and I pushed myself off his lap. I sat next to him, embarrassed, facing the other way.

  "Hey," Dad said questioningly. I felt his light touch on the back of my head.

  Without answering him or looking back, I nodded. I didn't pull away from the pressure of his hand.

  "Why don't you sleep here?" Dad said. He cleared his throat. I turned around to look at him. "I'll stay here and you can rest your head on my lap—if you want."

  I knew he needed the physical contact with me, needed it as much as I did.

  My head on his lap? I couldn't, that was sick, that's like something Ray . . .

  "Okay," I said.

  Dad nodded. "Good," he said. I stretched out full-length, and laid my head on his thigh, feeling the warmth of his flannelled leg. After a moment Dad began to stroke my hair.

  Something had been nagging at me, something outside myself.

  "Why were you so late tonight?" I asked sleepily. He stopped what he was doing, his hand motionless upon my head.

  "Slaight's about to make bail. I'm doing everything I can to stop him."

  "But you think he will."

  Dad hesitated. "I... yes, I think he might." I didn't respond, and he went back to touching my hair.

  "You need another haircut," he said, almost to himself.

  I smiled faintly. "Could Mel cut it?" I asked, trying to sound casual. "Maybe I could go to San Francisco with you tomorrow. Meet with Stephens or something, if you want to arrange it."

  Dad waited, resting his fingers lightly on my skull. "Is that what you want to do, Jeff?"

  I turned onto my back and looked up at him. My father.

  He watched me, ready, I knew, to accept anything I told him.

  "Yeah," I said, "I think I'm ready to talk."