Page 89 of Release

Chapter Twenty

Then

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. Back then, most kids my age didn’t spend the amount of time I did contemplating the best way to die. Sometimes, I could manage to go a few weeks without thinking about it, until he’d enter my bedroom early one morning, and I’d once again try to decide how to best do it.

I guess it’s a good thing my parents didn’t have a lot of money. We didn’t have a computer in the house, so I didn’t have ready access to information my peers might have had.

Because of my secret, I didn’t have a lot of friends, either. I was afraid to trust, afraid of being discovered.

Afraid of being labelled a “bad” person, and my father’s dire warnings coming to pass.

That I’d never see my mom again.

Better, then, to not be alive at all.

After I turned thirteen, when school ended for the year, I spent that summer mostly at the library during the day. I claimed I was reading books on our list for school, so I’d be completely caught up and ready when school started again in the fall. Not only did I read all of those, but I discovered a love for hard-boiled and noir mysteries, classic detectives, pulp crime fiction, suspense, and thrillers.

I eagerly devoured them, not even having to take them home because I could read them so fast. That summer was all about Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, John D. MacDonald, and others.

I learned there was evil in the world, and maybe I wasn’t as bad as I thought I was.

That maybe the villain in my life was my father, not me.

In my secret longings, I wished for the money to hire a cop-turned-detective to extract revenge for me and fix my problems. I imagined with no small amount of satisfaction how the gumshoe would terrorize my father before running him off forever, leaving me and Momma to have a good life together.

My father had an irregular work history. I knew he drank and smoked, but it wasn’t until later I learned what a miserable fuck he was long before my ordeal started. How he couldn’t hold a respectable job for more than a few months at a time. How, for the last three years of his life, what Momma and I both thought was “real work” was, in fact, him being a bouncer paid cash under the table at some seedy bar or strip club.

Momma was actually the true breadwinner in our house. She didn’t know at the time what he was really doing, though. She thought he was working for a legitimate employer. He brought home cash every week, and she was too tired, between her own job, taking care of me, and taking care of the house to keep tabs on him.

My father kept swing-shift hours. During that summer, as long as I was paying close attention, I could complete all my chores either the evening before, while he was gone, or arise very early in the morning before he awakened, and then I could scoot out of there. Momma worked Sunday nights through Thursday nights, meaning she was usually home on Saturday and Sunday mornings. She and I went to church together, did the shopping, and she was always around so he had no chance to do anything to me.

The thoughts of killing myself eased up, too, the longer he went without touching me. I began to have a little hope that my prayers and hard work had finally paid off.

For the first time in two years, I thought maybe things would finally be okay.

I lost a lot of baby fat that summer, too, between puberty hitting and all the miles I biked every day back and forth from home to the library. Still, my father didn’t mess with me during that time.

I didn’t know it then, but it was later I realized it’d had absolutely zero to do with my fervent prayers and was most likely because of a high-profile arrest there in Louisville, just before the end of the school year. A man caught molesting his two nieces, his younger sister’s kids. Turned out he had been going after them for several years.

Their father learned what happened and nearly killed his brother-in-law, almost beat him to death. When the father told the cops why he’d attacked the man, they dropped all charges against the father and arrested the uncle in his hospital bed.

The uncle was killed in the jail three days later by other inmates, who were never charged for it. In fact, charges were dropped against one of the men, who’d been awaiting trial for something minor. Another received a probation for the charges he’d been in jail for, when he should’ve at least gotten a couple of years.

In other words, they were rewarded for helping make something right.

The lawyer I am now cringes and worries about the state of our legal system, but the thirteen-year-old girl who took matters into her own hands knowingly nods.

I guess even my father knew when to back down and let things cool off. Maybe he was afraid of me breaking my silence because of all the media coverage about that case, I don’t know.

I’ll never know, and frankly, I don’t care.

Once school started again, I guess I let my guard down because it’d been several months since he’d made any attempt to touch me or enter my bedroom. Deep inside, I’d hoped that maybe he’d stopped for good.

That maybe my prayers had finally worked.

That I really was a “good” girl now.

I had diligently said my nighttime prayers, and another one every morning I awakened and didn’t have any issues. My heart lightened, because I thought the situation had finally improved.