Come Back With a Bonus Excerpt: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

by Claire Fontaine

  The possibilities chilled me. “Really? A ten-year-old has the literal ability to drink or smoke marijuana or have sex, that’s okay?”

  “Why not? How will they learn about themselves, about life? And why shouldn’t they feel the pleasure of their God-given bodies? Other cultures allow it.”

  Other cultures allow cannibalism. I was recalculating our departure date with each answer.

  “Sex isn’t something children should be protected from, Claire. It’s like protecting them from good food or music.”

  I practically sprang from my chair and strode off to clean, cook, anything to get away from his satisfied face, his folded hands.

  Because the air in my house felt deadly. From the stink of animal breath. There is a wolf outside our door, I thought. Watching with glittering eyes and waiting. Till Mia was older, to do what wolves do with big girls, ravish them. After they’ve lost their bowlegged, baby-fat bodies and grown slim hips and tender breasts.

  Forget the degree, get any job and then a divorce. I have time for that, I thought, she’s not yet three, she’s still safe. What on earth could anyone even do with a toddler’s squirmy little piglet body? An absurdity, an impossibility.

  Sexual abuse wasn’t in the media then. I’d never even heard the word pedophile.

  Or I’d have remembered that wolves liked little pigs.

  It was the tears.

  It was Sunday morning and Mia was in the laundry basket, handing me things to fold. He was reading the Sunday paper. On the front page was a story of the children who were molested in a home care center. He was reading what the kids said the owners did to them after their parents dropped them off. When the owners were done, they would bring in the bird. Sometimes a cat. Mostly birds. Their necks were easier to twist.

  At night, in their beds at home, I thought it was not between their legs nor their soft lips that those children touched, to comfort. I thought it was their necks.

  I thought they were older kids, school age.

  Mia tumbled from the basket and I picked her up to fly her around the room. She giggled and gasped in flight as I dipped her high and low.

  He stopped reading to ask softly, “Why is what they did so bad? Why do people hate them so much?” With genuine, sad puzzlement. I stopped dead in my tracks. Mia was aloft in my hands, in midflight. A twitchy disgust tied my tongue.

  “Not the bird part,” he said, without looking up.

  “Because they’re sick, sick,” I said, bringing Mia down, walking to the door.

  “But what makes them sick?” His voice was tight, pleading. I hadn’t heard that voice before. I held Mia close and turned in the doorway. And I saw that it wasn’t me he was asking. He was staring out the window, with tears in his eyes.

  Something in me contracted, I felt shrink-wrapped, suffocated. My body was sending up an alarm, saying leave now. Only years later, I would look back and know that what my body was also trying to tell me was this: that the wolf had already come in the door, unzipped his husband-suit, and stepped out with his hungry hands.

  He was very quiet when I told him. We can do it amicably, split everything down the middle. He just nodded and left. I sat up waiting. Because quiet scared me. He was back at 3 a.m., surprised to find me awake and telling him to pack some things and leave. He didn’t pack, he didn’t speak. He exploded.

  He roared, picked up a glass-topped coffee table and smashed it to slivers at my feet. Then he flew through the house like a crazed beast, grabbing everything in his path and smashing it, hollering and screaming gibberish.

  He threw chairs, demolished shelves, pulled down pictures and whizzed them at me like Frisbees. I played dodgeball with books, shoes, and records. He blocked exits, ripped the phone from the wall.

  He wasn’t going to kill me tonight, he bellowed. Noooo! He’d do that when I wasn’t expecting it. When I was leeeeast expecting it.

  “THIS IS JUST” as a wall clock smashed into me—

  “TO SCARE” as my sewing box sailed into a window beside me—

  “THE SHIT” as knives and silverware whistled through the air—

  “OUT OF YOU!” as he stomped a lampshade to death.

  Mia’s screaming sent me bolting down the hall. I grabbed her out of her crib and kept dodging him, trying to get to the door, a window, any escape. The madness continued as long as there was anything to demolish. Food, plants, furniture. Mia dug her fingernails so far into my neck she drew blood.

  He yelled “Give me the baby!” at the same time he was throwing our house at us. Until there was almost nothing left to destroy, until he’d worn himself out. Until he stood, spent, amid the splinters and shards, cried, and left.

  Mia and I stayed with my mother for only a few days. It made her nervous, all the drama, my bruised ribs, gouged neck. Mia, however, acted as if nothing had happened at all. When we returned home, she marched about the wreckage, singing, making forests and islands of the debris. She imitated me taking photos of the carnage.

  I didn’t know if this was a child’s remarkable resilience or if she thought she’d dreamt it or if she’d simply buried and forgotten it. I called her doctor, who assured me that if she was distressed, she would show it.

  A neighbor came by to ask how I was, said they were afraid he might have hurt me. “They” turned out to be half my block, who stood in my front yard in their jammies at 4 a.m. listening to “all that screamin’ and bangin’ goin’ on.” Ringside seats to the show. No one wanted to knock or call the police. It “wasn’t really our business.”

  Nick didn’t call, which unnerved me. The thing about being told “when you least expect it,” is that then you always expect it. I spent nights in her room, sitting up, listening. Jerking my head up when I nodded off.

  I was half-dead with exhaustion. I finally took a cab to the lake, too sleep deprived to drive. I staggered across the beach to a wide-open spot, jammed our umbrella in the sand, and waited for Mia to take her nap. I tied her to my waist with a jump rope, lest she wake up and toddle away from me, then passed out cold beside her.

  It was almost dark when I woke. Mia was sitting beside me, patting me and muttering to herself. She burst into a smile when my eyes opened. “Thee, mudder, I patected you! Did you have a good thleep?”

  “The husband shall have the right to decide how and where the child has her hair cut for each alternate haircut until the child is old enough to decide on her own.” He insisted on the clause in the divorce papers we were having drawn up.

  I insisted on sole custody and no overnights, but I had no choice but to allow visitation. All I could do was demand he see her with his family present. I began making plans to move as far away as possible. I assumed he’d go on with his life and leave us alone. I assumed wrong.

  Mia and I moved into a depressing orange shag, slimy pool, popcorn-ceiling apartment. Nowhere else would take a child. I took a sales job I hated near my mother so she could watch Mia.

  Mia was an easy child, happy but not boisterous. Her laughter was light, her movements delicate, considered. She was intensely curious, quietly exploring the world like a little scientist. She was not chatty, she spoke carefully. When she giggled, “You’re a mean mommy!” in the tub one night, I was surprised. I knew all of her small vocabulary and “mean” wasn’t in it.

  “What’s a mean mommy?” I asked her, playing along. “Uh-oh, I’m gonna be in biiiig trouble!” she laughed giddily.

  Her behavior had been jittery and odd since I’d picked her up from a visit earlier that day. I asked Nick why he told her she’d be in big trouble. Fuck you, he screamed, you’re poisoning her! She’s already calling someone else daddy, I can tell! Which was ludicrous. Mia wouldn’t want to call anyone “daddy” again for the rest of her life.

  A week later, I picked Mia up at my mom’s after work. She’d been playing there with my sister’s baby, Rosie. After I took her home and put her to bed, the phone rang.

  “Now stay calm,” my sister said to me.

&n
bsp; I sat down and suspected that whatever calm I still had was about to vanish altogether.

  When my sister was changing Rosie’s diaper, she said, Mia scooted in front of her, spread the baby’s legs, and demonstrated on her “what my daddy do to me.” Mom saw it, too, she added.

  All I could hear after that was my own voice saying he did it he did it he did it he didn’t wait till she was older he did it to her little piglet body to her little self.

  I sat up all night, trying to “stay calm.” I wanted to yell, I wanted to cry, I wanted to wring his neck. I wanted to watch her sleep. But it made my heart break.

  I took her to her pediatrician in the morning to see if she was hurt in some way, to ask him what to do. She didn’t seem hurt, just hyper, clingy.

  When I told the doctor what she demonstrated on her cousin, he didn’t say much. Just looked her over, checked her chart, then had her go play in the waiting room. He closed her file, smiled at me and said, “So, I hear you want to take Mia out of state?”

  Bastard.

  Nick must have figured where my first stop would be if he got caught. He’d already started damage control, called on the boys to close ranks. Oh, that vindictive wife, that mean mommy.

  “You know, Nick is a good man. Are you sure you want to do this?”

  I was sure I wanted to slap his splotchy, grinning face, yank out his sparse fluffs of hair. Gritting my teeth around men was becoming something of a skill by now.

  “This is about Mia, not me. What do I do about what he did to her?”

  “I wouldn’t make much of it, she’s okay. I’m sure once you tell Nick what she said, it won’t happen again. I’ll talk to him.” He smiled and left.

  I was frustrated, angry, confused—he’s a jerk, but he’s still a doctor, he must know what he’s talking about. Should I not make much of it, not reinforce the event in her mind? The one thing I did know was not to make Mia feel she’d done something wrong. But I would make damn sure Nick knew he did.

  “Mia told what you did to her, you pervert,” I told him. “She tells on you, she demonstrates! You’re worse than a rapist, it’s your own child!”

  He didn’t hang up, didn’t argue. He just listened. I was shaking.

  “You touch her again and you will rot in jail. You know what they do to molesters in jail, don’t you? Even murderers can’t stand a child molester!”

  He was silent, then quietly said thank you, and hung up. Of course, he didn’t argue, I thought, he knows he’s been caught. That ought to stop him, he isn’t about to get himself thrown in jail, oh my the family name. He won’t dare touch her again. The doctor said so. And the mother listened.

  Nick had made the earlier mistake of thinking that my agreeableness was acquiescence. My mistake was worse. I mistook his for fear. I thought big, scary me, the Powerful Mother, I locked the evil wolf out for good.

  “I’m not fat, pink, and ugly!” Mia blurted in the tub after a visit with Nick.

  She started to cry, jumped out of the tub, and went streaking about naked and wet. Her behavior began changing. Some days she’d grow suddenly somber and clingy. Others, she’d laugh out of the blue. She started wetting her pants. Her nursery school told me she’d become withdrawn, twice they found her with her panties off.

  I thought she was regressing to baby behavior, probably from the separation caused by my working. I had no idea that what she was doing was not regressing, it was advancing. To adult behavior.

  One rainy night, she stopped talking as I ran her bath. She refused to go into the bathroom. She clenched her fists and turned red with a kind of contained rage. I picked her up and she screamed. She went rigid and said, “Daddy hurt me down there.”

  Life changed forever. I talked listened moved ate slept but in a reality filtered through this. The world thrummed with the strange, sick tone of a nightmare. One I couldn’t shake, because it wasn’t mine. It was as if the devil himself was dreaming, he was asleep and dreaming of our lives, Mia and I.

  We would be a long time waking him.

  4.

  My days of suburban isolation were over. This time, her doctor’s partner reported it to The Authorities. Mia and I were about to enter the city’s labyrinthine mechanism for the protection of its youth, Child Protection Services. Once you step over that threshold, your life is no longer yours. You spend months and years waiting, in endless freezing hallways, in dingy offices, on dirty plastic chairs, waiting to hear your fate for that week. You get scrutinized, ignored, supported, vilified, validated, admired, scorned, pitied. You can’t ask, you get asked, you can’t tell, you get told.

  THE AUTHORITIES, STEP ONE:

  A POLICE REPORT

  The big Officer sat in my pink velvet chair asking me but what did you yourself actually see, I don’t wanna know what your sister saw. I tell him again about what Mia said to me that night, about Nick’s lap, the erections, about what he said about kids and sex.

  The Officer sighed impatiently, repeating, “Okay, so he read the Sunday paper with her, that’s it?”

  “No. Why won’t you write what I’m saying?”

  Writing “Child stated and demonstrated sexual molestation by father” was simply not a possibility for this Officer. This was before wives had much credibility with the law in domestic matters, children even less. It was also before I knew anything about relevant statistics. If one in three or four women have been molested as children, the percentage of men doing the deed can’t be too far behind. If you were a gambler, the odds on Mr. Officer weren’t too bad. Maybe I’d hit the jackpot.

  THE AUTHORITIES, STEP TWO:

  CHILD PROTECTION SERVICES INTERVIEW #1

  Carrie H was a beautiful woman with big, sad eyes who took Mia into a room full of dolls and toys. To find out who did what, who didn’t, and if the who didn’t could be trusted to protect Mia. She couldn’t share anything Mia said with me. But, can you tell me how can I help her, I pleaded, I don’t know what to do, my baby girl’s stopped smiling. She yells at the daddy ducks to get dead, she wants to kill the daddy gorilla at the zoo, she wets her pants again. What does this mean, is she damaged emotionally? What do I do about her sadness, her anger, her little slumped shoulders? She had no answers, none of them would.

  Carrie interviewed me, too, but I remembered little of it. I could hardly remember my own address. I moved slowly, comprehended slowly. I felt trapped in a dark, cottony silence. And yet I was astounded when Carrie noted in her report that I appeared depressed. I didn’t say anything about being depressed. It never occurred to me that she could see on my face what I saw on Mia’s.

  THE AUTHORITIES, STEP THREE:

  CHILD PROTECTION SERVICES INTERVIEW #2

  A perky Intake Counselor bounced into Mia’s bedroom to assess her, using her toys and stuffed animals. To find out more of who did what and make recommendations. She didn’t interview me and wouldn’t tell me anything Mia said either, though she did tell me that until further notice I must not allow her father to see her.

  THE AUTHORITIES, STEP FOUR:

  DR. FLYNN

  All I wanted to do was give Mia a treat afterward, something sweet to balance the exam, like at the pediatrician.

  Dr. Flynn snatched it from me. “You want her to associate having someone touch her genitals with a treat? You’re supposed to be teaching her never to let anyone touch her there!”

  I had no idea, I had no training for this. She looked at me as if I were an accomplice, as if I let it happen.

  I buckled Mia into her car seat, went around the back of the car, and sat on the bumper, where Mia couldn’t see her mother fall apart, in the street between two cars. Maybe Dr. Flynn was right, maybe I was to blame. Maybe I should have smelled the coffee and left him after his mother’s first visit.

  THE AUTHORITIES, STEP FIVE:

  THE STATE’S TWO CENTS

  Mia played in yet another room full of toys for a state attorney behind two-way glass. Again, little was said to me. Mia rarely told me much, ei
ther. Our time together was almost free of him, she didn’t speak of what he’d done and I never asked. We did what we always did, played at the beach, spent days at the zoo. She just did it more sadly.

  While I waited during her interview, I picked up a doll from a basket in the waiting room. A girl ragdoll with pigtails. I tossed her back and her dress flipped up. Someone had taken off her panties and she wasn’t like any of the dolls I used to play with. She had genitals, openings. I picked up the other dolls, children and adults with private parts, and was pierced with a sudden despair.

  I crawled about the floor searching for the girl doll’s panties, I fixed all their clothes, zipped up zippers, buttoned shirts. I laid them in their basket home. Then I noticed that their mouths were holes, too. I looked at the children on their backs with their open pink mouths and felt like I couldn’t take another breath on this earth. I curled up on the floor and wept.

  Nick was busy, too, either crying to my mother, all I did was love my daughter, I don’t want to go to jail. Or continuing to discredit me. Our accountant greeted me with how can you do this to him, to such a good Catholic boy. I’d gone from vindictive wife to vindictive Jewish wife.

  He called people snarling he’d find the person who did this to Mia! Too stupid to realize that he’d just acknowledged that a “this” had happened at all, a day after telling a detective nothing happened, that his wife had made it all up.

  He’d end up implicating himself in all kinds of ways. Most pedophiles don’t see their transparency. Because keeping your actions a secret isn’t that difficult. Concealing your very nature is almost impossible.

  He would make a career of threatening “to get” people—me, my mother, his therapist, his therapist’s children, Mia’s psychologist, oh, they’ll all be very sorry.