The guy who pumped her gas once, so she didn’t have to stand in the rain. Who only wanted her because her light shined on him and all his darkness.
The man who only passed through town on his trucking route. You know, the guy who had a wife and three kids at home.
It was a parade of shitty, useless, often abusive men who she got herself involved with, losing herself in the process, and temporarily severing that bond that was between us when she was single.
I was alone a lot as a kid because of it.
Spending all my time in nature or buried in books about nature, dreaming of one day living in it without the outside world’s interference.
“My mom’s in prison for murder,” Crow said, shocking me out of my memories, leaving me staring at him, wide-eyed. “Figure knowing that secret about me might help you say what you want to but can’t,” he said, shrugging it off. But something in his tone and his posture told me there was nothing casual about that admission for him. That he only shared it with people he trusted or felt needed to know. So, yeah, it was a big deal that he told me.
It didn’t mean I had to tell him my story.
Traumas weren’t playing cards to be passed around for fun.
But, for some reason, I wanted to tell him. I wanted him to understand.
“When I was sixteen, my mom started dating a guy named Brent,” I told him, my gaze moving out the windshield, finding it hard to talk about it when I was looking at someone. “And Brent was a winner. I mean, you know, compared to all those losers she’d dated. Brent was a salesman who drove a fancy car and took my mom to expensive restaurants. He even took me to fancy places too,” I added, even though fancy places had never been my thing. I would have much preferred being brought to a national park like one of my mom’s other exes—a burnout who couldn’t hold down a job, but had a good heart—would do.
“He became a bigger part of our lives over the next few months. My mom would spend nights at his place. He would spend them at ours. It was like we all lived together part-time, and I lived alone part-time too.”
“Why didn’t you go to his place when your mom did?”
“I don’t know. He lived in a penthouse that was all glass and metal. It just didn’t feel homey. I liked being in our little cabin next to the lake. That was always my happy place. Until one day,” I said, exhaling hard as my stomach twisted. “My mom was out having a full-on spa day, courtesy of Brent. So I was home alone just working on some clay earrings to sell at the craft fair. And in walked Brent.”
Crow’s hand moved out, grabbing my knee from over my skirt, and giving it a reassuring squeeze. He knew where this was going. But also seemed to know that I needed to get it out, not just let the insinuation hang in the air.
“I was surprised. I mean, he knew my mom wasn’t home. He’d been the one to drop her off at the spa. But I was just a kid, y’know?” I said, shaking my head, thinking of the fancy dinner we’d had just two nights before to celebrate my seventeenth birthday. “He was just walking around, making himself a drink, and I was kind of ignoring him. It wasn’t until I was getting up to go get some clean water for my paintbrushes when he grabbed me,” I told Crow, feeling a familiar nausea rise up in my throat.
“I was so shocked that I didn’t fight. I didn’t even scream. Until… well…” I said, closing my eyes tight, forcing the memory away. “When it was over, he just… finished his drink, told me to clean up, and went to pick up my mom.”
I couldn’t say how long I sat there on that floor, sobbing, too stunned and in pain to process anything.
“He didn’t bring my mom right home,” I said, voice sounding choked. “And when he did, I don’t know. I just couldn’t say it. I couldn’t find the words. I was so traumatized and ashamed even though I knew I hadn’t done anything.”
“Your mom didn’t know something was off?”
“Not for a couple of weeks. She seemed completely oblivious to the depression I’d fallen into. But when I refused to go out to dinner with Brent for the fourth time, she got angry with me and demanded to know why.”
“So you told her,” Crow said, easing the story forward when I felt stuck in that awful memory, that moment of betrayal that was somehow almost worse than the rape itself.
“And she accused me of trying to take her man,” I said, my own spit tasting bitter. It always did. Anytime I thought or spoke of my mom. Because I couldn’t conjure up anything but bitterness and anger and betrayal when I thought of her. “She screamed at me for trying to ‘ruin’ her ‘first good relationship.’ And she called me a whore and a liar.”