Caught in the Crotchfire

by Kim Hunt Harris

  “Jeez o Peet,” I said, without thinking.

  She nodded, taking a drink of her tea. We heard a motor start, and I realized Five had started my car. He must be ready to do the inspection now. “That one there. Walking across the street one night and got hit by a car.” Her voice trailed off softly.

  “That must have been terrifying,” I said.

  She nodded. “Oh yes, it was. Touch and go for a while. First they told us he wasn’t going to make it. But all his brothers gathered around him and told him they weren’t going to allow him to give up. At least one of them was by his side the entire time, twenty-four hours a day, until he was able to come home.”

  I have to admit, that got me a little verklempt. I imagined waking up in the hospital to four hot guys willing me to open my eyes. Lordy mercy…I felt my heart stir for the first time in almost twenty-four hours.

  Five bounded through the office and shouted down the hall at us. “I have to grab a tool from the shop, be right back.”

  “Make it quick, the lady is waiting,” Mrs. Pigg called after him.

  “He certainly seems to have recovered,” I said.

  “Right as rain most of the time,” she said, staring out the window.

  “How long has it been?”

  “Mmmm…I guess it’s coming up on nine years now.”

  She seemed to be lost in her thoughts, so I said, “I’m just going to hit the bathroom if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, sure, just across the hall and down two doors.”

  When I came out I went back to the break room, I could hear Mrs. Pigg arguing with Reverend Pigg.

  “It wasn’t right. They’re friends. They’ve had it rough.”

  “They had the same opportunity as everyone else. They got the same deal.”

  “We could have done better by them.”

  “They could have done better by us!”

  I stopped in the hallway and cringed. I did not want to walk in on anyone else’s drama. I had all I could deal with on my own.

  That was it, though, and I heard Five jog back up the steps to the office. I moved back to the front room and joined him there.

  “Okay, you’re all set and legal. Everything works again.” He wiped his hands on a dirty red rag and handed me the key.

  “And I am mobile once again,” I said.

  Where was I going to go?

  Chapter Fourteen

  A Serious Design Flaw

  I headed to the one person I knew who had walked the walk I was facing. I went to Tri-Patrice.

  The first time I’d come to the television station to see Trisha, I’d been there to fight, and getting in had taken a bit of stealth and subterfuge. We were friends now, though, and the people there were used to me, so I walked right in.

  “Hi Salem. I have another list of nutcases, I mean concerned citizens, for you if you want them.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Do you have time to talk?”

  She checked a clock on the wall. “Actually, yes. I’ve got about an hour before I need to start getting ready for the ten o’clock. Come on back to my office.”

  She closed the door behind us and sat at her desk, immediately kicking off her shoes. She gave a groan of ecstasy. “Oh, praise all that is good and holy. There is nothing like the joy of getting out of uncomfortable shoes or bras. Okay, the witch hunt that is the Knife Point — I mean High Point Bandits. You would not believe the calls the police are getting. Anyone who appears to have more than two dimes to rub together is suddenly a suspect.”

  “I guess I can rest easy then,” I said with an attempt at a smile.

  “Me, too. Let me pull up that list — ”

  “I’m actually not here to talk about the Bandits,” I said.

  Trisha looked up from her computer. “No?”

  “No. I…” Now that I was there, I was so nervous about bringing up the subject that I wasn’t sure I could go through with it. Trisha and I had had one very brief conversation about the issue and then had both pretended like it never happened.

  And as it turned out, nothing had happened. About eight years earlier, when Trisha and Scott Watson were engaged to be married and I was engaged in full-time alcoholism, his friends had brought me to his bachelor party and put us into bed together. Scott was drunk, too, and his feeble protests weren’t enough to overcome the nasty goal of his friends, who didn’t think highly of Trisha and were happy to play this “joke.” Trisha found us like that early the next morning. I’d forgotten the event until Trisha and I met up again years later, but she reminded me of it — in a confrontational, screamy kind of way — and bits of it came back. Trisha, crying, heartbroken and betrayed by the man she loved and the girl she’d once considered her best friend. Scott, beside himself with remorse and heartbreak. Me, still too drunk the next morning to do more than feebly protest and try to play it off as a joke.

  Over the next few weeks after Trisha confronted me with this betrayal, we learned that nothing had actually happened. Scott’s friends had put us into the bed together, but we’d both passed out. All we had actually done was sleep together.

  But during the time Trisha thought I had had sex with Scott, she had come to hate me and when the time came to get revenge on me, she took full advantage of it. But she had forgiven Scott. She loved him, he loved her, and whatever they had together was worth it to her to forgive him. I needed to know what that took.

  “Look,” I finally said. “I hate to bring this up, because things between us have been going so well. But I need to talk about — you know, about that time. With Scott. And me.”

  Trisha’s face went carefully blank. “What about it?”

  I took a deep breath. “The thing is, I need to forgive someone. Well, my mom. I guess it’s okay to tell you. I need to forgive my mom. And I thought I had. Months ago. But then I saw her again, and it all got dredged back up again, and…” I raised my hands, palms up. “It all just rises back up again. The resentment. The anger. The unfairness of it all. And I know it must have taken you a lot of — of something, to forgive Scott when you thought, you know, that he’d…” I gave a lame tilt of my head.

  “Yes, I know.” She, too, took a deep breath, and sat back in her fancy executive chair. “And yes, it took a lot of something.”

  “I’m sorry to bring it back up. I just feel like I need some guidance beyond what Les is telling me.”

  “Les does seem to have some superhuman grace thing going on,” Trisha agreed with a wry smile.

  “He always tells me it’s the Holy Spirit and I have it, too. But I have to admit, either I don’t have as much as he does, or I’m not using it right. Because it does not seem to be working.”

  “And you need to hear from a mere mortal?” She smiled to let me know she wasn’t really insulted, or trying to insult Les either.

  “Yes, something like that. I mean, you married Scott. Even after you thought he’d had sex with your best friend, the night before your wedding.”

  She nodded. “Yes, I did.”

  “How?”

  “Well, it wasn’t easy. And if you’ll remember, it wasn’t quick. We got married two years after we’d originally planned to. For the first six months, I wouldn’t even talk to him. I moved away and didn’t tell him where I was. He finally heard through the grapevine where I was living and he started calling and writing me letters. He wore me down so that I finally agreed to meet with him. But I was so hurt and it was just…it was hard. Every time I thought about it, about you two…” She shrugged, looking very sad. “It just hurt.”

  “Trisha, I am still so sorry…” We both knew that, although it didn’t happen, it very well could have. I wasn’t above it.

  “I know, Salem. And he was, too. At the end of the day, I guess that’s how I was able to forgive him. He was sorry. He was very, very sorry. Heartbroken. As broken as I felt over the whole situation, he was more so. I loved him, and he was sorry. I actually felt bad for him, he was so broken by it. I mean, imagine being responsible
for that kind of hurt.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t have to imagine it. I knew very well what it felt like to be responsible. All I had to do was look at Tony.

  “All I can tell you is, forgiveness isn’t an event. It’s a choice, and it’s one you have to make over and over again. For years, it kept popping up. Years. Every time we’d argue about something else, it would be there, between us. And I had to make the choice every time to brush it aside. Choose forgiveness again. After a while it just became a little more automatic. Sometimes it was still so hard, even after a few years. But I had to make the choice, over and over.”

  I shook my head. “That’s what I was afraid of. That’s a messed up system.”

  She laughed, and I could hear tears in the edge of her voice. “Tell me about it.”

  We were silent for a moment, and then Trisha said softly, “Do you mind if I ask what, exactly, you need to forgive your mother for?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but then closed it again and gave her a shrug and a crooked smile. “So much stuff. Basically, just not loving me enough.”

  Trisha made a sympathetic “go on” kind of noise.

  “I mean, I’m pretty sure she loves me. Sometimes she could be really cool, you know. Fun. We had a good time together, sometimes. But so much of the time I was just a pain in her neck. I cost too much. I was too much trouble. I was a hassle. I ruined her life.”

  “So, just a bad relationship in general?”

  “Yeah. Well, no. Not really. There are specific things. The way she never prepared me. Like, the first day of school, when all the other kids had new school supplies, new backpacks, new school clothes. I had last year’s clothes that were too small and maybe a pencil if I could find one. The way we moved around all the time. I mean, you remember how many times we moved?”

  She nodded. “Yes. You’d show up halfway through the year, be there a few weeks, then you’d be off again.”

  “Somehow we always ended up back at Idalou. Because Susan was there,” I said with a sneer. “Susan. That’s another thing. That’s the main thing, actually.” I took a deep breath, then spit it out. “She let her friend’s son rape me because she didn’t have the nerve to stand up to her.”

  Trisha gave a little gasp. “Salem! I’m so sorry!”

  I wanted to shrug it off, act tough, as if it didn’t matter. That’s how I would have acted, a few years ago. But I didn’t see any point of coming this far if I wasn’t going to go all the way.

  “Thanks,” I said. “It was pretty awful. But it turned out to be only the first time. You might remember my mom had a nice string of boyfriends and fiances and husbands. Not all of them were interested only in my mom. After what happened with Susan’s son, I knew she wouldn’t protect me.”

  “Salem, that is so sad.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. It is. The thing is, I am so…I’m just resentful, you know? She didn’t protect me. She chose her friends and her boyfriends and her husbands over me, every single time.”

  Trisha leaned back and ran a hand through her hair, looking stunned.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have put this on you. It’s too much.”

  “No, no, I’m glad you did. I mean, I’m not glad — ” She gave a weak smile. “I’m glad you can talk to me. I just…don’t know what to say. And I’m seriously wondering if this is something you should forgive.”

  I gave a short humorless laugh. “Yeah, me too. I keep checking the Bible, though, and it seems fairly clear. Forgiveness is kind of a requirement.”

  We sat in silence for a long moment.

  “Well, I suppose if we only had to forgive the little things, it wouldn’t be worth much.”

  I leaned forward. “Can I tell you something weird? I feel like, if I can forgive my mom for what she did to me, then Tony can forgive me for what I did to him. Is that crazy?”

  “Not crazy, exactly, just…”

  “One thing doesn’t necessarily cause the other, though, right? But I keep thinking of this reaping and sowing thing. If I sow forgiveness, I’ll reap forgiveness.”

  She shrugged again. “I guess that makes sense.”

  I leaned back. Then forward again. “Plus, I just don’t want to carry around all this resentment, you know. I want to keep my river clean.”

  She gave a distracted nod, and I started to explain it, but then went back to the resentment thing.

  “So for me, I feel like forgiving her would be a good thing. But then I feel like, she doesn’t deserve it. And she really doesn’t. You said forgiving Scott was possible because he was really sorry. She’s not sorry. Not at all. I tried to talk to her about the thing with Susan’s son, and she just got defensive and blew it off. Acted like I was making the whole thing up again. That’s what she always did — acted like I was just telling a whopper lie because I wanted attention.” I leaned my head back and stared at the ceiling. “She never believed me.”

  “I believe you,” Trisha said softly.

  I raised my head. “Thanks.”

  She was staring at me. Her expression had changed.

  “What?” I said.

  “I believe you.” She took another deep breath and leaned forward to put her elbows on her desk. “Okay, since we’re spilling our guts here. One reason I felt like I should forgive you for the thing with Scott — I didn’t, of course, but I — I did feel guilty about it — was that part of me felt like it was my own fault, in part.”

  “Your fault? You weren’t even there.”

  “No, but…” She put her hands over her eyes, and I realized she was as afraid to talk about this as I had been. “Remember that guy your mom was living with, the one with the handlebar mustache?”

  “Ummm, yeah,” I said dryly. “He was kind of hard to forget.”

  “Okay, so one time when I was over there, he — he made a move on me.”

  It was my turn to gasp. “No! Really? I mean — ” I shook my head. “I’m sorry I said ‘really.’ I believe you. He was a piece of crap. I just — I didn’t know.”

  “I know. I never told you. I never told anyone. But I’ll never forget it. You and I were lying on your bedroom floor looking at Teen Magazine. Then your mom had called you out to the yard to help carry groceries in from the car. He came in and sat down on the floor beside me, which I thought was weird. But I didn’t want to be rude, so I just lay there and let him talk. But then he scooted closer. And he put his hand on the back of my thigh. I mean, I just froze. I didn’t know what to do. He hadn’t done anything yet, just put his hand on my thigh, but it felt so wrong. I could hear you and your mom bringing in the groceries and arguing, and I hoped you would come in there. But you didn’t. And I guess when I didn’t move, he took that as his cue to go higher. So he slid his hand up higher. I was paralyzed. I just laid there like a slug, my heart pounding. He moved it up higher. Finally, he got all the way to the top of my legs, and he cupped my bottom, and he squeezed so tight that his fingers went into my crotch. When I felt his fingers against me, I just — ” She shuddered. “I jumped up and ran out of the room. I could hear him laughing this evil laugh.”

  I shook my head in disgust. “I remember that laugh.”

  “I gave some excuse to you and went home. I locked my bedroom door. I’d never done that before — locked my door. But I had never been so terrified. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I should tell someone, but I was so afraid for anyone else to know.”

  “I know.” I understood perfectly. The thing to do in that situation is to tell, of course. But I knew the full weight of shame and fear that came along with being violated in that way. So did the perverts. They knew the likelihood of a kid telling anyone that someone had touched them were slim. Because when that happens to you, you don’t want anyone to know. You want, desperately, for it not to be true. It takes time to work through that feeling, and by then it really feels like there’s no point. By then, you knew, people would start asking questions like, “Why didn’t you say something?” and o
ther hard-to-answer questions, which, inherently contained the assumption that you, somehow, held responsibility for the question.

  “I thought a thousand times about telling my mom, but I couldn’t do it. It took me a few days to realize that if he’d done that to me, he would probably do it to you, too. I thought I should warn you. But I just…couldn’t. I couldn’t get myself to say the words.” Her eyes had filled with tears. “I’m so sorry, Salem. I should have talked to you about it, I should have told my parents.”

  “Trisha, you were a kid. You were traumatized.”

  She gave a snuffly laugh. “Traumatized. He touched me through my clothes. Compared to what he could have done, it was nothing.”

  “It was not nothing!” I shot back. “Look, there’s not some kind of bar to reach for things to qualify as real trauma. What he did was wrong, it was a violation of his position, of your trust, and it caused real harm.”

  “If I’d said something…”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference. Memory is a weird thing, but if I remember correctly, that was the third man who couldn’t keep his hands to himself. By that time, I’d decided that if anything was going to be done about all the men, I would have to do it myself. So I just told G-Ma I was moving to the motel until he was gone. And that’s what I did. It didn’t take long. I think I was back in Idalou before summer came.”

  “Yeah, I remember when you moved, and when you came back. I was so relieved and thought that everything had worked itself out, and there was no need for me to talk. But Salem, if I had, maybe your mom would have believed you. That would have helped, wouldn’t it?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. But Trisha, let’s remember — there’s one bad guy in this situation. One. He’s to blame. You and I were kids and bear no responsibility.”

  Even all these years later, on some level I had to remind myself of that. The truth was, as a kid I had a bad attitude and a smart mouth. The handlebar mustache guy — whose name was Keith — liked to tell me how he was going to make sure I got an attitude adjustment. He’d said someone needed to teach me respect, that someone needed to teach me to either shut my mouth or put it to good use. Rebellion got me into trouble every time. Well, not every time. Rebellion also got me to G-Ma’s and out of that house. After that, every time Mom brought a new guy home, I found a way to be out of the house and never alone with any of them. Best to not give them the chance.