by Randis, K. L
“I don’t know how I would get there. Could you take me?”
I wasn’t just asking her to drive me to the counseling center. I was asking her if I could trust her. If I could open up to her just a little bit more and agree to go to a place that specialized in domestic and sexual violence. Whatever would be thrown at me when I went, I needed to know that she would be there for me. I couldn’t do this alone, I didn’t want to.
Gina smiled. “Of course, of course I’ll take you. Let me know when you’re ready and I’ll make the call.”
We pulled up to the Women in Crisis building three weeks later. I figured it would be easier to explain where I was going if school had started. Gina could pick me up a half hour before school got out and I would be able to make it back in time for work.
The center was just an old Victorian home with a white sign out front. A tire swing hung from the branches of one of the trees and the sidewalk sloped leading up to the doorway. Gina told me she would wait in the car for me, so I pulled open the door and was greeted by the receptionist.
“Hi there, can I help you?” She smiled and looked behind me, most likely looking for a parent.
“I’m Brooke. I have a 2:30 appointment.”
The receptionist ran her finger over a thick schedule book and tapped the page. “Yep, here you are, I’ll let her know you’re here. Go ahead and take a seat.”
I picked the closest chair to the entrance and gazed at all the toys and coloring books that littered the cramped waiting room. It looked like a lot of children came here.
“Brooke?” I was greeted by a wide smile and a soft tone. She was a hefty woman in a printed dress. Her skin contrasted the pale colors she was wearing and she reached out her hand. “I’m Midge. Want to follow me?”
I nodded and followed her up a steep staircase. “These steps ain’t meant for us bigger women.” She snickered at herself. “They need to make the stairs bigger or I need to make myself smaller.”
We passed two other doors, one that had a sign on it: Quiet Please, Sharing is in session. I tried to calm my nerves by telling myself that if I didn’t like it here, I never had to come back.
“Pick any seat you want. Except the black one, I sit there because my knees won’t let me sit in the bean bags. But they are the most comfortable seats in the room!”
I chose a chair not too close but not too far away from the black chair she mentioned she would be in.
“Whew, all right then. I’m Midge.” Sweat glistened off her forehead and she patted it with a tissue. “I’m so glad you’re here, Brooke. It’s not every day we get a brave girl like you to come in here by yourself. You know what kind of counseling center this is?”
“I think so.”
Midge shook her head. “We work with all kinds of people here. Children, adults, teenagers.” She pointed at me. “A lot of people come here looking for answers because something in their heart is telling them they’ve been wronged or that they deserve better.” She leaned forward in her chair. “That sound about right sweetheart?”
I nodded.
“What brings you here all alone?”
“Well, I knew what insurance my parents had, so I looked up counselors in the area. There were a few but they had co-pays my mom didn’t want to pay. But I needed to talk to someone. So my boyfriend’s mom found this place.”
“You looked up counselors based on your parents insurance?”
“Yea.”
“How old are you?” A smile spread across her face, like she was laughing inside.
“Fifteen.”
“MmmHmm. All right well before we get too deep, just a few things I need to tell you first so you know what to expect. We can meet for an hour today, and any other day you want to come back and talk to me. There’s never any charge, and everything we say in this room, stays in this room, under the law, you understand?”
I nodded. It was good to know.
“Now, there are a few exceptions.” She held up her hand. “By law, I have to report the three following situations. If you tell me you’re going to hurt yourself.” She flipped up her index finger. “If you tell me you’re going to hurt someone else, and if I suspect or you tell me about any child abuse. Reason being is you’s only fifteen, you still a minor.” She wiggled all three exceptions. “That’s the only three times I can ever tell anyone about what we talk about in here. Understand?”
“Yea.” My heart dropped when she told me about having to report child abuse. I didn’t know how I could talk to her without her needing to report something. I suddenly felt like I made the wrong choice. What if someone found out I was here? What if Gina told?
“Now look, I want you to know this is a safe place.” She opened her arms and looked around the room. “There ain’t one thing you can tell me that I haven’t heard already and I’ve heard a lot of things. But no need to rush, I feel like we gon’ be good friends you and me. I don’t want to push you to tell me anything you ain’t ready to tell. Sound good?”
I sighed and relaxed a little. Her accent made me feel like I was in a movie somewhere in the south.
“So, Brooke, tell me about yourself. Anything and everything you want to tell me, go ahead. If you got a question, go ahead and ask it.” She rested her arms into the crest of her stomach and let me have the floor.
“I want to know what domestic and sexual violence is. How do you know if you’re being abused, like, what would it look like?” I tried to make my question hypothetical.
Midge nodded and pulled something out of a folder on her desk. “That’s a great place to start. A great question.”
She handed me a paper with a pie chart. In the center were the words Power and Control and each pie piece represented a different category of physical abuse.
“This is the best way to explain it, so you can see how domestic violence is a whole bunch of things put together and not everyone’s situation is the same.” She pointed to each section of the chart to explain them.
“This one is called emotional abuse. Not everyone gets abused by getting hit or slapped around, no child. Some people get put down by being called names or the abuser makes them feel like they crazy and that the abuse ain’t happening.”
She slid her finger across the pie chart. “This here is economic abuse. Sometimes abusers like to keep all the money or control when and where a person can work. Sometimes abusers don’t let they family have jobs at all because it lets them have outside relationships.”
“Domestic Violence can mean isolation or threats too. The abuser will control who the other person sees or where they go or where they live. They make threats to hurt you. Or they’d say no one would believe you.”
She moved her hand over to the last section of the pie chart. I leaned over in my chair in anticipation, hanging on every word.
“This here is sexual abuse. That’s anytime someone make you do something with any private parts of your body that you don’t want. Sometimes abusers make people do things to their private parts too. It’s all sexual abuse. Big thing to know is that if you don’t want to do it, and they make you, it’s sexual abuse.”
I shook as I tried to absorb everything Midge said. She laid my entire life in a pie chart before me and everything started to come together. The move to Pennsylvania, Dad’s control of the money and food in the house, making it seem like nothing happened between us so much that I felt like I was going crazy. It was all there. My trembling fingers reached out to take the chart from Midge.
“Okay.” How could I word my next question without outing myself? I thought carefully before speaking.
“What happens…if someone didn’t know that this stuff was wrong? Like, what happens if they didn’t know they could say no? What if they thought this happened to everyone so they never knew they didn’t have to do it?”
Midge narrowed her eyes and brought her body closer to mine. Her voice was smooth and reassuring. “Child, let me make one thing very clear. In the state of Pennsylvania, no child,
not one, can ever consent to any type of sexual things if they under the age of sixteen and there’s a four year or more age difference. Never. You understand?”
My head bobbled around as she continued. “It don’t matter if you didn’t know, it don’t matter if you never said no. What matters is they was breaking the law, that it’s not your fault. You ain’t the adult, child, you done no wrong.”
I blinked away tears and focused on the paper sized window on the far wall of the room. I nodded at Midge and I think she could sense that we had an understanding. “Tell me more about you, tell me about your family and where you from.” The hour flew by and Midge had to hold up her hand to tell me we had to end our session for the day.
“Already?” I looked at the clock.
“Now look at you, already coming out of your shell. Let’s go downstairs and schedule another appointment and you can come back here and tell me more about Long Island and your school and your big family.” She meant it; her eyes told me she wanted to see me again, even if all we did was talk about friends and teenage things. I asked her if I could keep the power wheel.
“I’d prefer if you did.”
I scheduled my next appointment and rushed outside. As I flung open the door Gina didn’t even have to ask how it went. “I’m coming back next week. I made the appointment. You sure you can still take me? Maybe I can give you some gas money.”
Gina held up her hand and told me to buckle up. “Nonsense. I’ll take you as long as you need to.”
I slept with the power wheel under my pillow. Serving as a constant reminder, I would check it every now and then to make sure that what Midge had said was still there in black and white. A rush of empowerment surged through my head over the next couple of weeks. Rage flooded my veins when I would hear dad downstairs beating on Thomas or Adam. Mom would beg for more money for food. The signs were all there, every piece of the pie chart.
Midge and I met at the same time, once a week until the end of tenth grade. I gave her Gina’s cell phone number so if there was ever a cancellation or issue she could call her so she didn’t have to call my house. She was right, we became good friends.
I told her all about Paul and my job, my siblings and the role I had with them and school. She knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, and she was impressed with the passion I had for writing.
What I liked best about Midge is she never asked me to talk about my Mom or Dad unless I brought it up. For weeks we would talk about superficial things like football games and grades. Sometimes I would tell her about how my dad yelled or the way he shoved my brothers around, but the second I thought she was getting too interested, I reverted back to talk about my boyfriend and anatomy homework. She would never mind though. She’d rest her arms on her soft stomach and nod and probe me, but she never pushed me.
So I kept going back for more.
Chapter Fifteen
I remember the night Dad found the power wheel under my pillow. I don’t know why he was in my room, or what he was looking for, but he found it.
He gripped the edges of the paper so hard they crumbled in his hand. I probably could have cooked an egg on his face from the steam that appeared to surround him. There was little time to come up with an excuse, and even less time to react when he started to trash my room. Trembling, I stood my ground and watched my dresser get overturned, my vanity crash to pieces and my belongings thrown in every direction.
When he finished, and after he tore the power wheel into snowflake specks, he charged at me. My body braced itself and I closed my eyes, but the impact never came. A rush of wind past my face and the smell of his aftershave following told me he was targeting someone else, anyone else. At this stage of the game, he finally understood where to get me where it hurt.
He couldn’t touch me. I felt no pain for him. But when he laid a finger on one of my siblings, a wrath of fury simmered up inside me. I desperately tried to recall who was home that he could hurt. Mom was at CVS filling a prescription. My heart leaped into my throat as I turned to run after him.
“Dad, NO!” My legs were useless, they wouldn’t move fast enough. By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs and turned the corner, tears burned my eyes when I caught sight of Ethan.
Just learning to walk, stumbling across the living room with a Lego’s block in his hand, he smiled when he saw me. His doll-like arms stretched out for me, his focus locked into my eyes, he never saw Dad behind him. “Leave him alone!” I screamed, and charged at Ethan.
I scooped him up against my chest like a football just as Dad’s steel toed boot made contact with my stomach. I doubled over, the baby in my arms, and lost consciousness before I knew if Ethan was okay.
I don’t know how long I was on the floor. Soft hands pulled at my face. Bits of sound became clearer and I focused on Dad’s voice, telling me it was my fault, I shouldn’t have got in the way.
Ethan was crying above me when I finally opened my eyes. He didn’t look hurt, but I struggled to get up. Snot ran down his face as he cried out “Da! Da!” pointing at Dad from across the room. I used my sleeve to wipe his face and I cradled him against me, making my way towards my room.
If I ran away when I turned eighteen, Ethan would be alone. Kat and Thomas were home, but were undoubtedly hiding from the second they heard the commotion coming from my room. Just like I taught them to do. Ethan was the only one who couldn’t fend for himself. He couldn’t hide; he could barely talk to tell me if something happened to him. I shook my head as I sat Ethan on my disheveled bed with a book so I could pick up the remnants of the tornado that had ripped through my room.
By the time all of us would be old enough to move out, Ethan would have no one to diffuse Dad’s wrath. He would be the only target, the only one left who Dad could still hurt, and in turn, hurt me.
I remembered when we lived on Long Island. Adam and I usually wore Dad’s old t-shirts to bed because we didn’t have pajamas of our own. One night we stumbled upon a stash of magazines with naked women in them at the bottom of one of Dad’s drawers. We giggled and pointed at our unusual find until we decided that Dad just had to see what we found. I must have been around six years old at the time.
Adam held the magazine as we entered the garage just off the kitchen. Dad was tinkering with something and looked up as we came out. “Daddy, look what we found! This magazine is so funny.” Adam pushed the magazine under his nose.
A wheelbarrow is what stopped Dad from grabbing Adam as we both screamed and ran from him. His voice bellowed behind us, and as we turned the corner to the living room Adam pushed me behind the grand piano to hide.
I’ll never forget the look in his eyes as he realized there was nowhere else for him to go. He had given me the only hiding spot in the room. Lowering to the floor he sat in a cross-legged position and put his finger to his lips to motion for me to be quiet.
I watched in horror as Dad turned the corner and I realized what Adam had done. He had sacrificed himself; he put himself in the dead center of his path, for me. Dad kicked him like a linebacker and I covered my mouth as Adam’s body soared through the air, ending with his limp body crashing into the front door behind him. Dad never found me.
I wanted to believe, for years, that Adam didn’t remember that night because of how hard he hit his head. The truth was, I think that night Adam’s spirit was broken, because it was the first and last time he ever put himself in Dad’s path. Unknowingly, Adam took one blow, and passed the torch on to me. Adam’s years of ignoring and denying what happened in our home wasn’t ignorance, it was self defeat.
Ethan flipped through pages, pointing and calling out baby gibberish. My hand moved through his silky blonde straws of hair and my lips sunk into his cheek.
For years, I thought that ignoring and denying what happened in our home was protecting my brothers and sister. I knew, now, that it was only enabling him. The longer I kept his secrets, the longer he could continue to do whatever he pleased. As Ethan nodded off to sleep in
my arms I touched his nose with my index finger. “You, little man, are my saving grace.”
***
Paul went to the bus stop to get Joseph, and I watched him cross the front lawn before I picked up the phone in the kitchen. My hands trembled as I dialed the number for social services and slipped a piece of paper out of my pocket. I knew I would forget something, so I wrote down what I needed to say in a paragraph. An operator picked up and I smoothed the paper out in front of me.
When I finished rattling off what I needed to say, she asked for my name and to explain how I knew what I knew. “I can’t tell you my name. But you have to believe me. Listen to my voice, I’m a child, and I’m terrified. You need to help these kids.” I hung up and returned the phone to the dock in the kitchen.
Joseph bounced through the door. “Hey Brooke, wanna watch Spongebob with me?”
“No,” Paul replied for me, “She doesn’t. Watch it yourself.” Paul walked past me and stormed off to his bedroom. I followed.
“What’s wrong?”
“Why do you always ask that? Do you have a guilty conscience?”
“N-No, you just seem…”
“Seem what? I don’t have time for this. I’m going to Judd’s.”
“I just got here.” My voice rose when I didn’t want it to. “I thought we were going to hang out today.”
“Why because it’s convenient for you? Are you sure you don’t have to go meet with your counselor or go spend hours talking in the kitchen with my mom?”
“What is your problem?”
“You. You are my problem.” He chucked his book bag onto the bed and shoved a pair of jeans inside. “I’m only fifteen. I don’t need to be worried about you like I am all the time. All I do is wonder if you’re okay and I don’t even know why!” His hands shot up into the air. “You don’t tell me anything and when I finally do get to spend time with you, you look like you’re going to cry or all you want to do is talk in whispers with my mom.”
“Are you sure this is all about me?” I pressed. “Nothing else bothering you.”
