Stunned by the woman’s rudeness, Allie blurted, “Wanda, he always looks like that.”
In the same instant she silently screamed at herself, That did not come out right!
She turned to him. “Doctor V, I didn’t mean...”. He stopped her with that tell-it-to-the-hand gesture. She searched his face, expecting to read hurt or anger. Instead, the psychiatrist met Allie’s eyes with a look of appraisal, an intense expression that culminated in an almost imperceptible nod of self assurance. Without a word, he got up and left the table.
Wanda also went back to work, leaving Allie alone in the room, trying to regain her composure. What just happened here? She hadn’t meant to insult him but her gut told her he had felt disrespected. Now she wasn’t sure where she stood with him. She had to respect the man, but sometimes he was such a jerk. If he was angry, there might be no more referrals. She could accept that, no problem. It was being at odds with people that disturbed her.
***
Crystal appeared to shrink into herself when she rounded her shoulders and squeezed her knees together. “I think it happened. I mean, I know it did, but I don’t remember it actually happening.”
“How is that?” Allie asked.
“I remember playing with one of my friends, a little girl named Mary-Kay. We were on the sidewalk in front of her house. We wrote on it with chalk. We drew hop-scotch squares. We drew in some numbers. I don’t think we wrote 'home'. We didn’t know how, so. I think we were probably four or maybe five years old.” She stopped and took a deep breath, avoiding Allie’s eyes. She reached for her hair, twirled a lock round and round between thumb and forefinger, repeatedly. Her head drooped and her eyes fixed on the blue skirt draped over her knees. Her gaze relaxed, softened, lost focus.
Allie knew she had momentarily lost Crystal, who was experiencing a drifting sensation that would take her into a misty state of no thought, no feeling, no memory, into what Crystal felt was safety. Allie kept her voice neutral in tone as she inserted it into the forming void, “You remember that very well.”
Crystal’s head jerked erect and she stared at the wall in back of Allie’s face. “We were just playing like kids do. It was in the spring time. It was warm and cool at the same time. We were sitting on the sidewalk in the sunshine. Then I remember I said to her, 'I was in bed with my uncle, and he was doing nice things to me and I was doing nice things to him'.”
She stopped, motionless, lifeless but for the almost imperceptible rise and fall of her chest. Silence hung in the stale office air for long seconds before she continued. “Then, maybe the next day or a few days later, I went over to play with Mary-Kay again.
“Her mother came to the door and asked me to come in the house. She had never done that before. I don’t remember what it looked like inside. I don’t remember how her mother looked. I felt like I was in trouble with her, like something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. When I was inside, she sat down and started to brush Mary-Kay’s hair. Mary-Kay had beautiful blond hair. Then her mother said, ‘Mary-Kay told me what you said about being in bed with your uncle. Is that true?’.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“You didn’t answer?”
“I couldn’t answer, like I was paralyzed. Then she said, 'Nice little girls don’t say things like that about their uncles. I don’t want you playing with Mary-Kay any more'.”
The outraged comment Allie wanted to make went unsaid. She was incensed at the woman’s lack of empathy and understanding but it was the client's feelings that mattered, not her own. She asked, “What did you do then?”
“I guess I just stood there like a statue. Then she said, 'Don’t come over here any more, understand? You can’t play with Mary-Kay any more'. Then she just got up and went over and opened the front door for me.”
Allie wanted to curse but instead she said, “That really hurt you, didn’t it?”
“Mostly I felt scared, because I told. I told after he warned me not to tell!” Her voice rose to half a decibel below a scream. “He told me not to. He told me about the bad things he'd do if I told.”
“What bad things?”
Crystal’s face drooped, emptied of emotion. She whispered, “I don’t remember.” She slumped back in her chair.
“It’s all right that you don’t remember,” Allie said. “If you need to remember, and when you’re ready to remember, you will. Until then, just do all the things we’ve talked about to take care of yourself, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Crystal, this uncle--is that the man you saw a few weeks ago? Before you came to see Doctor VanDeusen and me?”
Crystal nodded.
“Have you seen him since then?”
“No.”
“Can you stay away from him? You don’t have to see him, do you?”
“No.”
“Good. If he did molest you, we’ll have a lot to talk about.”
Crystal’s head jerked up. “Like what?”
“Whether to report him or not; whether to press charges or not. The statute of limitations against sexual abusers in this state is two years from the time a person first learns about or remembers the abuse, so we’ll have time.” Crystal’s eyes widened but she didn’t speak.
Allie sensed her mistake. Damn, why did I bring this up now? It just spooked her more. Anyway, don’t worry about that. Don’t think about it, just do what you’ve been doing, and I’ll see you next week. If you need me before then, you have my number here at the office and my message number, right?”
“Right.”
“Are you all right, Crystal?”
“Yes.”
When she had gone, Allie went back to the office but rather than sit to complete paperwork, she began to pace the small open area of her office, thinking about the uncle who had betrayed her client. With sexual abuse, she knew it wasn’t always the act itself that did so much damage, unless it involved a brutal, physical attack.
The damage often went straight to the survivor’s sense of safety. It cast doubt on her trust in herself, trust in others, in the world in general. It could affect her ability to know and speak the truth. The demand for agreement to a blatantly untrue statement was confusing at best and crazy making at worst, statements like, “That doesn’t hurt, that feels good. That’s what all kids do with their uncles ...fathers ...brothers ...neighbors...”.
Allie felt the blood rise to her face in a rush of anger fueled adrenalin. The lies, the secrecy, the shame! Early on during her internship and therapy practice, she had refused to work with offenders. She wanted nothing to do with them because her ability to feel empathy or compassion had its limits. Pedophiles were far outside the boundary of her compassion. If the truth were known, she wanted them all dead.
***
The client slept and dreamt. In her dream, she trudged a wind-swept desert. Thirsty, exhausted, she lay down on her back, spread-eagle in the sand to rest. She gazed up to see the sky lowering. pressing her down.
She floated above herself and saw her own body rise up and walk away. It left a perfect imprint of head, arms, buttocks and legs in the sand, a sand angel.
Wind came up, carrying streams of sand that flowed like water over the surface of the dunes, drifted over the impression of her body, blurred it, filled it, leaving no evidence that she had been there.
Then she was on her feet again. The landscape had changed to farm land in heartland America. She saw a house in the distance, pastures, and in front of her, an old fashioned well. The circular housing of mortared stones rose as high as her waist. Wooden four by four beams on either side supported a low peaked roof and a shaft to crank by hand, around which coiled a rope with a bucket attached.
She began to turn the handle to lower the bucket. When she looked down, she saw a face in the water, a man’s face. His mouth opened to shout for help. She saw the red mouth and white teeth but she couldn’t hear him. Suddenly she herself was in the well. She tried to shout, cry for help, b
ut no sound emerged from her throat. Again and again, her mouth strained to emit the shriek echoing in her brain, but she was mute. She couldn’t make a sound. She woke in anguish.
Chapter 3
The shadows in the hollows were charcoal dark while the shoulders of the frosted earth were ghostly pale. The new moon, low on the dark horizon, was a silver blade poised to cut its way upward through the blue-black fabric of the sky.
His house sat on a ridge in the sterile landscape of rocky, hard-pan earth dotted with low creosote bushes, desert broom and prickly pear cactus. Its roof was a dark smudge against the sky, its frame all but invisible. She knew the garage squatted beside and slightly below the house, backed into the hill. Distant lights from the highway to the north were the lone signs of life.
She had chosen this day for a dark phase of the moon. She arrived unseen in the early evening and found a place to crouch in a shallow declivity between the trunk of a scraggly mesquite tree and a large boulder, where she could watch his comings and goings. She needed to make sure there was no one else in the house to witness what she would do, no victim of his that she might unintentionally victimize even more.
When he left an hour later, she guessed he headed to town to get his mail from the packaging store or maybe buy take out food from one of the dozens of fast food restaurants that littered the exit from the highway.
As soon as his car was out of sight, she unfolded her body from the hiding place and hurried to the front door. She knocked. No answer. The handle didn't turn. He had locked the door. She went around to her right where on this side of the house the un-curtained window gave her a view of a kitchen table, chairs and a refrigerator. No sign of movement. Continuing around to the rear of the house, she saw a small window left open a few inches. It was set too high to look into.
One by one, she tore three large, flat rocks from the dry earth. By stacking them, she built a wobbly platform under the window. She balanced precariously, pried out the screen with her pocket knife and let the screen fall to the ground. She pocketed the knife then lifted the window with both hands.
She stood on her tiptoes, managed to part the curtains and saw a bedroom that contained little else but a bed covered by limp and dingy sheets. Grasping the sill with her gloved hands she heaved herself up, levering first with her knees and then her feet against the siding. She pivoted her body and tried to straddle the window in order to lower herself down but lost her balance and crashed to the floor.
She lay on her bruised shoulder and hip holding her breath to listen. No sound in response to the racket she had made.
When the pain subsided, she scrambled to her feet and looked around the dimly lit bedroom. The furniture had the raw, unfinished look that decorators of cheap motels described as rustic. The walls were bare except for one framed print that featured a pair of hand tooled, yellow leather cowboy boots. She edged a little closer to the bed to search the print for some detail that might reveal a meaning, but discerned none.
She turned back to look at the other piece of furniture, a dresser that held an old television set, the screen grey with dust. She opened the top drawer beneath it to see three rows of old boxed cassette videos. 'The Magnificent Seven, True Grit, High Noon,
The Good the Bad and the Ugly'. They were all there, every Western genre film she had ever heard of and others with unfamiliar titles. Where were the horror films, the slashers?
She went to the closet door and feeling both frightened and foolish, held her breath as she opened it. No one tied up in there, nothing but clothes hanging from the wooden rod, a shelf that held several cowboy hats and on the floor, shoes and boots. A glance into the bathroom revealed the toilet seat upright, marked by yellow stains. That was enough.
She turned and walked through the other door into the hallway. The house was cheaply constructed with a shotgun floor plan, named for the narrow hallway that bisected the house from front door to back wall.
From the front entrance, the kitchen and dining areas were to the right, the living room to the left and the two bedrooms at the rear, with the bathroom between them. Like most houses in this rocky, upper desert area, it had no attic or basement. She reminded herself she had to finish and get out of here before he came back.
The living room held a few more pieces of roughhewn furniture, the sofa upholstered in a cheap Southwest fabric picturing horses. Above the sofa, the head of a dead deer gazed into eternity with glass eyes. The television here was a newer flat screen. The row of DVDs beneath it held what she expected. horror and slasher films in every category and sub-category from vampire to zombie flicks.
She turned, went to open the end table and there she saw it, the gun she remembered so vividly, the cold blue Ruger. She stared at it, fighting the memories. Then it occurred to her that it might be a problem later. Should she take it? No, she couldn’t bring herself to touch it. His essence was here in the house. It infected every object down to the molecules of the air, but this gun embodied him.
When she had checked every room, rifled through drawers and closets, peered under the bed and the sofa, she went back to the hallway, assaulted by new questions. This house wasn’t the show place a typical real estate agent would want to own. It was rumored he had made a lot of money from his early days in real estate sales, but this house flatly denied affluence. She thought that its sole asset must be that it sat on several acres of land, isolated from its neighbors.
So, where did his money go? Did he spend it on his perversion? Trips to the Middle- and Far-East, where she had heard that child victimization was a despicable shadow industry?
There were no actual victims here, but what about virtual victims? She hadn’t seen a computer or any scrap of hard copy child porn. Then she spotted his smart phone hiding in plain sight on the seat of the sofa. She picked it up, then put it down again to pull off her thin, transparent gloves. With bare hands, she pressed the icon to see his pictures.
Oh, God! There they were, childhood degradation in livid color. Some included his own image engaged in horrifying acts. She focused on the small faces. Most of them looked Asian, but no, maybe they were actually Native American.
She couldn’t be sure. Resisting the urge to throw the phone down and crush it with her heel, she stilled herself, told herself to think. He’s smart not to own a computer for this dirt. The phone is small and he almost always has it with him but he can plug the charger into a USB port on any computer to sync it for sharing with other perverts. So what of it? It’s proof, but it doesn’t matter. I’m going to kill the worthless piece of trash.
Yet, for some reason, she looked again at the smooth black oblong, turned it over, pried off the back, then with her fingernail lifted out the tiny micro SD memory card that she knew contained the photos as well as saved text messages and other data. It looked virtually paper-thin, no bigger than a button. She held her breath as she scraped it off her finger into the breast pocked of her shirt. Then she put the back on the phone, returned it to where she had found it and pulled on her gloves. He wouldn’t know the memory card was missing until he tried to access the pictures. She had been in the house less than ten minutes but she sensed she didn’t have much time left.
Back in the bedroom, she rubbed out the scuff marks her sneakers had left on the vinyl floor then lowered the window to its previous position. She returned to the front of the house, where the door locked by a simple turn of a lever on the door knob. She opened the door a crack to peek out. When she saw no one, she turned the lever to lock herself. She shut the door, ran around to the back of the house, kicked down the platform of rocks and erased the few other faint signs of her break in.
Five minutes later, she watched from her hiding place as he returned and parked his car. It had been too close. He emerged from the garage carrying a small grocery bag and a hand full of mail.
***
On Thanksgiving Day Allie gathered four other orphans, those who had no family in town, to her apartment for a traditional dinner. Her ov
en provided a tight fit for the twelve pound turkey. On the plus side, its heat warmed the tiny apartment to midsummer temperature. She opened the door and all the windows to let in the cool outside air.
It was a challenge to hold a dinner party in this limited space. She added a folding table and chairs to the small table in the dining area. Covered by blue table cloths, set with Blue Willow dinnerware, she thought it would do.
Up since seven o’clock to get the turkey and dressing into the oven, she barely had time to shower and dress before Sue, the woman who lived alone in the apartment next door, knocked. They hadn’t socialized much but they were cordial neighbors. Sue held a covered casserole dish that exuded the oniony aroma of green bean casserole.
Betty, a colleague from the office, arrived next carrying a huge bowl of mashed potatoes. “Betty, you look wonderful,” Allie said, as she put the bowl in a shallow pan of hot water to keep it warm.
Betty was a tall, slender older woman who wore her long white hair swept back from her face. The way she carried herself suggested no apologies for her low-slung breasts and bloodless uterus. It was obvious she had sailed through menopause undaunted. Now she encouraged other women who were at that certain age to say they had 'power surges' rather than hot flashes. “It's just vascular instability,” she told them. “We're stronger than that.”
Betty licked a dab of mashed potato from her finger before holding her hand under the faucet. “Maybe I look wonderful for my age,” she said to Allie. “But I know where I stand since a friend told me I’m at that awkward stage for a woman.”
At Allie’s puzzled look, she smiled. “The awkward stage, the years between when men open doors for us because we're hot, and when they open doors because we're old.”
Allie laughed. “Was she implying that men have a gap in their motivations between the ages of lust and respect?”
“Let’s hope not.” Betty gave Allie a quick hug that produced a flutter of her clothing with a hint of fragrance.
The Well - Book One of the Arizona Thriller Trilogy Page 5
