Mutual Release

by Liz Crowe

  They looked up when a doctor, carrying a file and wearing a serious expression, knocked on the half-open door. His parents were over the man’s shoulder, eyes frantic, taking in the scene. Evan frowned at them.

  “Mr. Adams?” the doctor asked, looking at him. Evan’s father cleared his throat, making the doctor glance around in confusion.

  “We are both Mr. Adams. I’m her brother. I’m the one who admitted her. You can talk to me.” He knew he sound pompous, but he did not care.

  The doctor seemed even more puzzled, but looked at Evan when he spoke. “I have some distressing news for you. We need to discuss it in private. Can I shut the door?”

  “We are her parents, doctor.” Evan’s mother shoved past him and into the room. “Tell all of us.”

  “Well, as you know, when you brought her in, Olivia’s kidneys and heart were already shutting down. This is what happens in extreme cases of anorexia. We have stabilized her body temp, and her heartbeat is getting slightly stronger, but she is still showing signs of various organ failures. The feeding tube helps, but we may be too late. However,” the doctor looked at the chart again then back at Evan, “I need you to know that upon examination, we discovered that Olivia had odd bruises and lesions around her stomach and groin which led us to examine further.” The man cleared his throat as Evan’s heart dropped to his knees. “Olivia has been sexually assaulted, multiple times we think, based on the scar tissue and damage to her vagina and cervix.”

  “How did she get to you, Evan? Her car was in the driveway, she… must have hitchhiked and been raped by… Oh my God!” Evan’s mother sobbed, sinking into a chair.

  “No, Mrs. Adams, we think this has been going on for some time. The scarring is too old, although she does show signs of fresh wounds, perhaps as recently as three days ago. How long has she been missing?”

  “Forty-eight hours,” Evan ground out, his vision dimming with rage. He looked away from his parents, those two who had coddled the monster that was Damian Slate and allowed this to happen to their only daughter.

  Olivia mumbled, cried out, flung her hand up to her face. “No. I don’t want…,” she muttered, tears sliding down her cheeks. Her eyes opened and she sucked in a breath. Evan was at her side in an instant, drying her tears and putting a cool cloth to her feverish forehead. He dotted some petroleum jelly on her dry, cracked lips and tried very hard not to turn around and order his parents out of the room.

  “But, doctor, how can you tell it was… assault?” His mother’s voice broke. Evan frowned and continued ignoring her, focusing instead on Olivia’s gaunt face.

  “Olivia’s labia are covered with scar tissue, and the inner lining of her vagina is nearly swollen shut from the old injuries. When something… ah…large is used to penetrate a woman’s vagina, if she is not sufficiently lubricated it will cause tearing of the very delicate tissue. It’s fairly apparent. Your daughter has been raped many times and once as recently as the day before she disappeared.” The doctor stood and squared his shoulders, his eyes taking on more of a judgmental look than Evan cared to see there. “I have to file a police report. They will be in shortly so you will need to tell them if you know the culprit.” He shot Evan a sympathetic glance then walked out.

  “Get out of her room.” He kept his voice calm. “And when the police come, I will tell them exactly who did this.”

  “Son, we can’t jump to conclusions. We don’t know he – ”

  Evan threw his father’s hand off his shoulder, rose, and shoved the man hard into the wall, putting a hand to his throat. Evan’s mother screamed, and Jack intervened, peeling Evan away from the murder he was about to commit. His parents left the room, and Evan sat, rubbing his sister’s skeletal hand, putting ice chips to her dry mouth, and planning his revenge.

  He looked up when his mother appeared and put something on the bed. She stood for a while then turned to leave, but he grabbed her hand. “You saw her… like this. And you just let her go to her room? What kind of mother are you?” He thought he knew – the absent-minded kind, but harmless. The sort of mother who, when she got bored, would ignore her own children until they got interesting again. He’d lived through it himself and understood its dynamic and how to handle her bouts of intense attention interspersed with neglect. But not this – this complete obliviousness was beyond him, and it made his chest ache with anger.

  “You don’t know how hard it is, Evan.” He watched as she fussed around with Olivia’s hair, wiped her face. “I never thought I would ever resent… either of you. But it was so much, the two of you were such a handful but so attached to each other, it was as if I wasn’t even needed most of the time. But I gave you both everything I had.”

  “No, mother, you didn’t. You gave us what you felt like giving and not an ounce more even when we needed it. And once Olivia hit puberty, she thought you hated her, did you realize that? Did you even fucking care?”

  His mother glared at him dry-eyed, squared her shoulders, and walked out of the room. Evan opened the small jewelry box she’d left on the bed and watched, bleary-eyed, as the tiny ballerina turned in a constant circle to the music he knew was “Swan Lake.”

  He closed it, put the box near her pillow, and held on to his sister’s hand, falling into exhausted sleep with his head on the side of the bed.

  “Evan?”

  He mumbled and tried to drag a pillow over his head to block the noise. Someone touched his hair, a light, feathery contact that made him sit up. When he realized where he was, and why, he sighed and took his sister’s hand. Her eyes shone, wide open in the dark room. The monitors were bleeping along, but slowly. He glanced at them, then down at her, brushing strands of hair away from her face. She was burning hot, but her teeth chattered.

  “So c-c-cold, Evan. I’m scared. I don’t want … I have to get away from him.”

  “I know, I know. I won’t let him near you ever again.” He tugged one of the three blankets she had covering her up to her chin.

  She shook her head. “You don’t understand. You never did. He wasn’t like that, was never rough with me. Was always gentle and kind and … ” She gulped, licked her bone-dry lips. “I was still a virgin until a few months ago, did you know that, brother?” She was babbling now, and it frightened him. “Yep, virginal Olivia, waiting for her swan prince to sweep her off her feet. And there he was. He claimed we were together, but I saw him with other girls. When I’d ask him about it, he’d hold me close, kiss my hair, call me his precious jewel, the one he couldn’t live without. And I let him. Then, I met a boy in my child psychology class. We talked, had coffee, were just friends. Although I was starting to like him, I think. He was so… normal, you know?”

  She looked up and his heart broke for the thousandth time in three days.

  “Damian kept me close but pushed me away. Told me I was the most important woman in the world for him, then would say I was fat, that I needed to lose weight so he wouldn’t be disgusted with me. And I let him.” Evan wiped the tear that dripped from her lashes. “I miss dancing. So much. I let him talk me out of that, too, so no one to blame but myself there.”

  She went on, words pouring out of her mouth like water from a pitcher, jumbled in places, tripping over themselves but bringing Evan face to face with the horror he had been accused of imagining.

  “I was having coffee with this guy, just talking, sort of feeling like not such a loser for a change. Wondering if I could cut Damian loose somehow. And then he was there, in the coffee shop, yanking me up and away and dragging me out into the street without my backpack or my coat or anything. I cried, screamed, made a scene. But he took me to his apartment and told me it was time… time for him to make me his, or some shit. I laughed. And he backhanded me across the room. I don’t remember much after that, other than when he… he…”

  “Shh… shh… .Please, stop, please. I can’t hear anymore,” Evan begged her, his voice breaking.

  She went on as if he had not spoken. But her eyes were gla
ssy, unfocused. He grabbed the music box and put it in her hands. She smiled at it. “His ballerina, he called me. His and only his. I wasn’t to dance for anyone but him. And I believed that shit. He ripped my clothes off and raped me, Evan. Said he was happy I wasn’t a virgin anymore, while he… he…” She gulped. Evan’s vision blurred as the horror story continued.

  “He held me when I cried, cleaned me up, and told me I was his now, forever. He loved me, I think. In his way. But every day he hurt me more, using his… penis and his fist and some kinds of… I don’t know, dildos or something. I bled, got infections. He got me medicine. I stopped going to class. I could hardly walk. So I stopped eating. It seemed like the only way to make it stop. If I disappeared, then he couldn’t hurt me, not anymore.”

  She opened the box, and together they stared at the miniscule ballerina twirling endlessly to the familiar music. She shut her eyes. “I’m so tired. Evan, leave this open. I want to hear it while I sleep.”

  He bit back tears, tried to put on a reassuring smile as she sighed and closed her eyes. Even her eyelids seemed thin, translucent. He sat, frozen with fury and disgust at himself for letting this happen. Just as he was about to stand and stretch his legs, thinking she’d fallen asleep, she opened her eyes, looked at him, and held out a shaking finger.

  He touched his to it. “You’re going to be fine, Olivia. I swear to God you will,” he whispered as she nodded, then closed her eyes again.

  The following two days he found DVDs of her favorite ballets and played them over and over in her room. But after the burst of energy that night when she’d told him everything, she slipped away, without any real fanfare. His parents had gone back to their hotel room when the doctors told him her kidneys were within hours of shutting down, so Evan himself had to sign the do-not-resuscitate order for his sister. Jack came and sat with him.

  Felicia showed up a few times but he ignored her, hating himself for his behavior the last few months while that monster was abusing his sister.

  When the end came, Olivia opened her eyes, sucked in a breath, and looked up at the television playing its loop of the white and black swan’s mortal battle for a young woman’s soul.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, startling him from a light sleep. He held her hand as she stared at the picture, face alight with happiness. “I’m going to dance again!” She turned to him, her eyes clear. Touching his face with a shaking finger, she sighed. “Don’t cry, brother. I’m fine now. Twin promise.”

  She gave a long, deep breath and settled into what looked like sleep but for the cacophony of alarms that started blaring when her heart slowed, then stopped for good.

  “Go. Dance,” he whispered. The nurse came in, turned all the monitors off, shot him a sympathetic glance before hurrying out of the room.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The funeral was a blur of furious agony. Felicia came for moral support. Karen showed up as well, which was awkward. But Jack managed to keep Evan from either drinking himself stupid or killing Damian Slate when he had the unmitigated gall to show up for the service.

  The guy had jumped ahead of the game and gone to the police himself, pulling a horrified, sick-at-heart boyfriend move, and dumped the rape onto the hapless kid from Olivia’s psych class. That boy endured countless hours of interrogation, but for some reason no one ever really questioned Damian.

  Evan sat staring at his hands the night before he was to graduate from law school with mediocre grades and absolutely no desire to do anything but crawl in a hole and hide. Jack brought out a bourbon bottle and they passed it back and forth for a while in silence. “So, I found you a gig. It’s in Ann Arbor, at a patent attorney’s practice. I mean, if you want it. It’s not the kind of money you would have made here, but it’s, you know, positive income in a new town.”

  Evan shrugged. He was still numb, reeling, unable to function much beyond the requirements of food, rest, keeping reasonably clean, and finishing school on time. He absolutely refused to see Felicia, had thrown his toy chest and its entire contents into a Dumpster swearing he would never be so stupid, so blinded by his own selfish, sick perversion again. “Whatever.” He sucked back more booze, welcoming the haze coating his brain.

  “Listen, Adams, you have got to move past this. I can help. We’ll get you set up in a new town, away from Plymouth and your parents and all that shit. You start over. Okay?”

  Evan wouldn’t meet his friend’s eyes. He had nothing, less than nothing, really. And he didn’t care anymore. “Like I said, whatever.”

  “Well, I need to tell you something.” Jack’s voice was light, but Evan knew that something was very heavy. He looked at his friend, trying to focus beyond his own agony. Jack ran a hand through thick, black hair, nervous. Which made Evan realize exactly what he was about to say.

  “You are actually gonna ask her to marry you?” He leaned back, knowing he sounded less than supportive of a guy who’d been nothing but that for him for the last few weeks.

  “Yeah, I am.” Jack didn’t sound angry, just a little distant, as if making the decision had taken a lot out of him. Evan stared, but the other man stayed silent, held out the bourbon bottle keeping his eyes trained out onto the dark night.

  Evan barely made it through graduation, still drunk from the night before, hitting the hangover hard by about noon. His parents showed up, even though he’d told them they were not invited. His father appeared shrunken, reduced, miserable. But his mother was still the ever-organizer, making inane suggestions about packing up his house and moving back to Plymouth.

  He glared at her at one point during their terrible family meal. “Mother, I don’t know if you are on some new medication or what, but rest assured it will be a freezing cold perfect day for skiing in hell before I move back home to be anywhere near you.” He slammed the drink his parents had bought for him and shouldered his way out, ending up sitting, shivering, at the front door of Felicia’s building.

  She found him there, pulled him up, and shoved him into the elevator without a word. A hot shower, five painkillers, and a cup of hot tea later he sat, still shaking, on her couch. She draped another blanket around his shoulders and held him all night while he yelled with nightmares and shed lame tears of uselessness.

  The next morning she was back to business. “All right, you have that out of your system. Time to move on. Jack found you a job. I say you go there and leave all this behind you.”

  “But …” He stared at her, needing her to jump in and take control, let him relinquish any decision making. He put his head in his hands. “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah.” She patted his shoulder and walked away for a while, leaving him to his thoughts. After another hour of wallowing, he called out for her, looking up, wishing for her lips, her body, anything to force the clanging guilt out of his head.

  “Felicia …,” He held out a hand but she shook her head.

  “No, Evan, it’s man-up time. You are doing your sister’s memory a disservice. And I’m sick of it.” The sound of a cracking bullwhip made him yelp. She’d had it behind her back, but now it unfurled in the air, striking his shoulder, then his chest. He sat, let her do it, as a familiar quiet blanketed his aching nerves.

  The pain focused him. He stood watching her. Her eyes were bright. She kept backing up and snapping the leather, hitting him just enough to make him wince and continue to slowly focus. He walked her up against the wall near the elevator, propped his hands on either side of her head and kissed her until he was dizzy. Then he stopped, cradled her smooth, dark face, and wiped the tear that dropped from her lashes.

  “You’re right. Thank you. But what if I don’t want to leave… you?”

  She shook her head as answer. Then smiled when he hit the down button but didn’t make another move towards him as he walked into the elevator and turned. Her face was set in firm lines, but her eyes betrayed her, welling with tears as she spoke. “Go. We’re through. Goodbye, Evan. I’ll never forget you.”

  His heart ached as
the doors slid closed. But he stood straighter, touching the stripes on his skin left by his Mistress and felt, if not truly himself, at least not ready to jump off the nearest bridge.

  An improvement. A small one, but he’d take it.

  The house was in utter chaos when he got back, after stopping for a giant cup of coffee. He climbed out of his car, noted the lawn full of red cups, two empty kegs on the front porch, and wandered up to the front door. Running his hand over an apparent fist indentation across the wood, he unlocked it and stepped inside.

  The first thing he thought was that something had literally died in the place. It reeked to high heaven. He bagged up some garbage in the kitchen, getting rid of the worst of the stale beer, old food, and whatever else stank.

  But when he wandered out into the living room he looked down and saw a puddle of puke at his feet. And a hand, sticking out from under the table. Crouching down, he was horrified to discover his roommate and friend, Jack Gordon the ever-in-command, lying in another puddle of his own vomit. Evan shook him, his panic ramping up when the man didn’t move. He backed up, called an ambulance, and sat staring at Jack’s face and begging him to wake up.

  Later, at the emergency room, doctors pumped his friend’s stomach empty of bourbon and whatever else he’d ingested. Evan made a quick call to two of Jack’s old friends to let them know what had happened. They released Jack to him that afternoon.

  Evan stayed quiet, figuring the man would tell him the whole story when he was ready. He drove them home, turned off the engine, and started to get out. Jack put a hand on his arm, stopping him.

  “Fucking whore. Why didn’t you tell me? She said you even… that she… and you… Oh, hell.”