He pulled into his driveway and cut the engine. I thought about it for a minute, but decided against it. It was time for me to act on my own behalf and face the demons I’d unleashed.
“I’ll be good,” I replied, but my legs were shaking when I climbed out of his truck and walked across our lawn to the front door.
I turned around on the porch and waved at him, then turned to head inside and face my fate, and the possible wrath of my mother.
“There you are!” she exclaimed the moment she saw me. Their baggage was piled next to the front entrance, still unpacked and tumbling over each other as if she’d thrown it.
I could see through the door to the living room where Nat was curled up on the couch on her phone, typing away with her earbuds in, her music tinny and loud even from here.
“Here I am,” I said. “Sorry, I was at a study group. When did you guys get home? What’s going on?”
“Reg shot himself!” she cried out and frantically dug through her wallet. “I don’t know who to call, or where our insurance information is. He’s at the hospital now, he’s been there for a couple days. Didn’t you notice anything?”
“I was at Penny’s,” I said quietly. “I wasn’t even here. I didn’t know what had happened, I was too scared to be here by myself and thought he was with his friends.”
I held up my backpack to let her see that I’d been gone.
How surreal it was, to be back in this house after everything that had happened here. Not just the horrors of everything that had been done to me, but the ecstatic release of anger in the form of a bullet into Reg.
I almost regretted that he’d survived.
“I think you took advantage of Reg’s absence to get away with too much,” Mom said as she dug in her purse this time. “We’ll talk about that later, but for now I need to get over there to Oakville General and you need to take care of Nat. She’s in a mood, not because she gives two fucks about her father, but because her best friend did better than her during their little dance recital.”
I didn’t ask for details. I just nodded and said, “I’ll take care of her. If you’re there overnight, I can take her to school in the morning before I get on the bus.”
“Thank you, dear,” she said, kissed my forehead and stepped back. “Have you been taking your medicine? You look flushed.”
“Of course,” I replied, but of course that was a lie. Mom was satisfied though, and she yelled goodbye to Nat on her way out. My little sister didn’t even look up from her phone.
I hadn’t taken my pills with me the night of the party and I hadn’t thought to grab them the day of the shooting. I was two days off of them, my daily mood stabilizers, and I felt better than ever.
I’d always suspected they made me groggy, tired, and sometimes depressed. Mom and my doctor, a kind older man named Doctor Joe, had insisted I needed them and they weren’t responsible for those side effects. I’d always been told those were from being a teenager, hormones, and not concentrating enough on my studies.
But now I wondered what they were actually for. The thought of my Mom knowing about Reg’s activities made me sick to my stomach. It felt like a gut punch of betrayal that went lower than I’d expected even from her.
She hadn’t been the best mother, or the most attentive, but she had never given me any sort of idea that she was okay with me being raped right under her nose. I had to continue with the idea that she hadn’t known, at least for now, or I couldn’t handle the tilt of this strange new reality.
Once she had pulled out of the driveway, I checked on Nat and she hadn’t moved. She was still texting madly while listening to her music. I rushed to the dining room to assess the damage and couldn’t believe what I found there.
Nothing.It was as if the shooting had never happened. The Organization hadn’t been lying when they said they’d cleaned up, the gun cabinet was repaired, the table fixed, any bullet holes in the walls hidden, the blood spatter was gone, and the whole room had a fresh, recently shampooed scent clinging to it.
I ran my fingers along the top of the table where Reg had slumped and half expected to find flesh embedded into the wood, but it was nothing but smooth polish under my touch.
I checked the latch on the gun cabinet, and the door swung open with ease. It still wasn’t locked, but when it opened completely it revealed an empty case. Every gun was gone, even the pellet gun and the airsoft rifle we used for shooting targets in the back yard.
I closed the door and looked around again, and finally spotted a single dark red circle at the base of the table leg, on the inside. I knelt down and looked at it, a drop of blood that had gone overlooked. I didn’t know what came over me, but I licked my finger and reached out to swipe the dot away. It smeared my flesh with a small splash of red, so I stuck it in my mouth again to clean it off.
I realized what I’d done, a subconscious act that filled me with disgust, and I stood abruptly and shuddered. Being in the dining room felt like being in a trance or being underwater. It no longer felt connected to the rest of the house or the real world. It was a strange space that represented my violent uprising against those who would have kept me in bondage to them through drugging and rape.
I shook it off and took a couple deep, cleansing breaths before exiting the room. I had to act normal around Nat, I couldn’t let her catch on that I was the one who had hurt her dad.
I went into the living room and flopped onto the couch near her. I picked up the remote and turned the TV on to watch some brain melting entertainment and let myself escape the hamster wheel of obsessive thought for a while.
I couldn’t do anything about the Organization, Reg, Rick, or any of the other men who had abused me over the years so I might as well zone out for a bit.
Half an hour into the show, I had to laugh a few times at how over the top the teen drama was, Nat finally turned off her music and turned to look at me.
“What’s up, brat?” I asked and she removed her ear buds.
She gave me a knowing smile, shook her head and said, “You’re not fooling anyone, you know. Mom might be stupid, but I’m not.”
“What do you mean?” I asked as my heart sunk in my chest. Had she already figured out who’d shot Reg?
“I know what you did,” she said and leaned forward with her chin resting on her hands and her elbows on her crossed legs. “Tell me exactly what happened.”