Page 42

Rhue

I have spent an entire year resenting Madison, hating Madison.

Yet the image of her and my father was a lie all along—or, better said, a horrific misunderstanding.

There are so many questions going through my head at this point, so many reasons to just kick and scream and boil over.

I’m angry, red hot on the inside, but my heart aches and bleeds.

I was almost ready to forgive her despite her perceived transgression--only for me to learn that it wasn’t a transgression at all.

My father lured her into the bedroom.

He raped her.

He raped the woman I was falling head over heels for.

If my feelings toward him had been complicated before, they’re incomprehensible now.

I need to make sense of this, right now.

I need to understand how I see this man.

Laura has said it more than once—we don’t choose what family we’re born into.

It’s a dreadful lottery. But we can choose whether to stay or to get as far away from the toxicity as possible.

What do I do if I find out that my father is a fucking serial rapist?

I swallow the bile rising in my throat and let my eyes wander back to the top of the first page.

I can hear my mother’s voice in the words she wrote, the crisp no-nonsense tone she used when recording her psychiatric notes.

I used to sit outside her office door, listening to her break down the worst behaviors and conditions of humanity, parsing through chaotic emotional explosions until she has something usable.

It always blew my mind how she could speak the darkest evils out loud without deviating from that clinical tone.

Now I know she wasn’t only exposed to the darkness living in her clients; she lived with it every day, faced it down every night.

She married a monster—and she stayed. Why?

Madison. Fuck, he even did it to Madison, and I can’t find the right words anymore.

She’s traumatized, wounded; maybe even wounded beyond healing.

Every acid-laced word I ever said to her rings through my mind, mocking me.

I tore into her, punishing her for daring to be wounded.

How much worse did I make it for her? Can I ever come back from that?

The moment in the cabin comes rushing back to me, making my stomach turn and my head pound.

Did she feel like she couldn’t say no? Am I a monster like my father?

I sit down hard, clutching the book as I read and re-read every instance of my father’s evil.

It’s all there, written in my mother’s clear, concise voice, in her neat handwriting.

There’s no room for misunderstanding. My father is a rapist. He always has been.

The entries show a slow progression from potential misunderstandings to outright violence, a gradual emboldening of terrible behavior.

There are years-long gaps between entries, and I wonder if those years were good for my mother—or if he just tried harder to hide his offenses.

Or maybe it has less to do with him, and more to do with the women he touched. How many of them hid the truth? My heart aches, guilt and disgust and rage all tumbling around inside of me.

“You let me think you had an affair with my father,” I say out loud.

“You let me hate you. You couldn’t have told me I was wrong?

You couldn’t have spared me months of siding with a rapist?

You let me think you were the fucking devil, Madison!

Why? You could tell my mother, but you couldn’t tell me?

I thought we were friends!” I’m back on my feet, shouting down at her.

“I couldn’t,” she whispers.

“Bullshit!”

“He threatened me!” Her voice is a wail, breaking her statement down the middle.

Like a crack of lightning, clarity strikes.

I’m doing it again. Is it her fault she couldn’t bring herself to go against him—when I can barely manage to openly defy the man myself?

I raise my eyes to Steve’s. He’s frowning at me in silent disapproval. I’ve earned it and I accept it.

There are other people around, doing their shopping, walking through the park; they glance curiously in our direction at Madison’s exclamation. This diary is a powder keg. One wrong word with the wrong ears around to overhear it, and this whole thing will blow up in our faces.

“We need to talk. But not here,” I tell them.

“We can’t go home,” Laura points out. “I mean unless you want dad in on the conversation from the start.”

“No!” Madison and I say it at the same time.

“We can go to my house,” Madison says quietly. “We’ll talk there.”

This wasn’t what I imagined when I thought about being in Madison’s bedroom for the first time. It’s exponentially worse—and exponentially more important. Madison’s dad wasn’t here when we got here, which was a relief. I’m not sure what excuse I could feed him for why we all look miserable.

Laura is sitting on the bed, having been carried up the stairs by Steve, who sits on a fuzzy pink ottoman nearby.

She’s watching Madison with big, worried eyes.

I’m by the door, as far from Madison as I can get in her small room; she looks like a wounded animal, and I don’t trust myself not to make it worse.

She leans against the window frame, hugging herself and staring at the fluffy white carpet.

My mother’s words, written in the diary, seem to echo in the silence.

Her description of Madison, of how she was behaving.

I remember what I did and said that day.

I remember how much of an ass I was, throwing her perceived affair in her face, calling her all sorts of things for being brassy enough to come back after I’d caught her.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, my voice tight. “I’m so fucking sorry. For everything. For what he did to you, for how I treated you--fuck, especially for how I treated you.”

“You didn’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter.” I glare at the floor, feeling like an absolute pile of shit. “I should have talked to you. I should have listened. You were only in my house because of me.”

“You’re not responsible, Rhue. If anything, I’m the one to blame. I should have never gone back there. I should have known something was wrong when he led me upstairs. I should have screamed. I should have done—something.”

“You’re both wrong,” Laura says. “The only person responsible is Dad. He’s the one who did it.

He’s the one who keeps getting away with it—but Mom might be a little bit responsible for that part, too.

” She says it so sadly. I understand that; thinking of our mother hiding his horrific transgressions for so long, then killing herself before she even did anything about it, makes me heartsick.

I always considered my mother the best of people.

Madison exhales deeply and presses herself more firmly against her windowsill as though she‘s trying to put space between herself and the rest of us.

I feel like an intruder in her safe haven, her childhood room; sweetness and innocence are embedded within these walls.

I can see it in the fluffy toys and the choice of furniture from years ago, back when she was still growing into this space.

But now that I know what happened, I can sense the shadow, too.

The presence of a dirty memory. I can almost feel her pain.

She’s been living with this trauma for too long.

And Dad’s been getting away with it.

Worst of all, Mother—for all her talk in the diary of saving the day—did nothing. What does that make her? An enabler? An accomplice? Was Madison’s story just the final straw that broke my mother’s mind?

“Maddie,” I say, keeping my voice soft. She lifts her head slightly, so that her eyes barely meet mine. I feel like an asshole pushing her right now, but I need to know. “You need to explain what happened with my mom. Please.”

She turns her face to look out the window. “You read the diary. She wrote it all down.”

“But she didn’t explain why she acted the way she did afterwards.

Why she killed herself instead of moving forward with the case like she said she would.

There has to be something, some clue in her words or actions that she didn’t write down, something.

I don’t understand why she killed herself after swearing—not just to you, but in her diary—that she was going to take action against Dad.

What did she say?” I’m right on the edge, I can feel it.

I clamp down on my emotions, trying to force myself to look and sound less threatening.

Madison thinks for a moment, then swallows hard.

“She--she begged me not to tell anyone. Said I’ve suffered enough.

That there was no point in making anybody else suffer, especially you and Laura.

” Her tone is flat, her expression distant.

“In return, Roxanne promised she’d make sure your father wouldn’t do anything like that again.

” She pauses and sucks in a breath. “When I heard she’d killed herself, I understood it.

The shame, the disaster that would’ve ensued if I had gone public.

At that point, Rhue. I wasn’t even sure what the right choice was.

Roxanne had a point—and I’ve never seen a woman look so afraid and so furious all at once. ”

“A point? You think she had a point.” Anger grinds my tone to a razor edge. “She enabled my father by urging you to stay silent. And then she offs herself and leaves her kids to pick up the pieces!”

“I’m so sorry,” Madison says. “I shouldn’t have told her, but she insisted. I was drowning and she reached out and I was too weak to turn away.”

“Rhue,” Laura says quietly. “I know how it looks. Trust me, I went through the same thing after I found the diary. I couldn’t believe that Mom could be so selfish. But--” she stops, biting her lip and wringing her hands. Steve puts his hand on her shoulder and shakes his head slightly.

“Don’t do that,” I snap at him. “But what, Laura?”

She’s looking at Steve, not me. She sighs, squeezing her eyes shut.

“Rhue...” she falters.

“But what, Laura?” My voice is tense, pleading and demanding. Give me something, anything to save mother’s memory, to allow us one parent who isn’t complete shit.

Laura hesitates, then straightens her shoulders like a frightened child preparing to step off a diving board for the first time. When she speaks, her voice is shaking. “I’m not sure Mother’s suicide was really a suicide.”

My heart beats faster, my adrenaline spiking. “What are you saying?”

She looks at me, her eyes big and deep with endless sadness. “He’s brutal, Rhue. What if he—what if she told him and he--?”

I swallow sharply, hoping I don’t swallow my fucking tongue. Befouling my mother’s memory is one thing, but killing her? No. I can’t. I can’t entertain that idea.

“Dad’s a ruthless bastard, I’ll give you that. A rapist, yeah, sure--but to make the jump from that to murder? No. I can’t see it, and I won’t hear it. You two better figure out what you want to do about this, because you’ve been sitting on this information for an entire fucking year.”

Madison sighs mournfully and with that breath the temperature in the room drops a dozen degrees.

I feel her walls come up again. Our fragile new intimacy dies, and I’m isolated from her again, sitting in a room where I don’t belong.

Just like that, I’m a stranger again. Madison doesn’t need words to hurt me or to point out things I’d rather not see.

It’s in her attitude. In the defeated slope of her shoulders.

In the way she presses her sweet pink lips together, as if she would prefer to never speak again.

I know that I am no longer welcome here.

I don’t blame her. This is on me. Had I stayed blind, I wouldn’t have thought of my father as anything more than a philanderer, a prick with too much money and undeserved power.

Oddly enough, I have no trouble believing that he defiled Madison.

Why am I compelled to draw the line there, though?

Why can’t I accept that he might be a murderer, too?

Because he’s my father.

That’s an easy answer. He’s my blood, pretty much the only family I have left besides Laura.

He may be bad, but that bad? No. That would spell trouble for me, too.

If he’s capable of such horrible things, what the hell does that say about me?

How far does the apple fall from the tree?

These are questions I am simply not ready to answer.

I hope Madison and Laura can forgive me, but I cannot accept the possibility that my own father killed my mother. I just can’t.