Abuse: The Complete Trilogy (81 page)

“We don't see
things as they are, we see things as
we
are.”

— Anaïs Nin

~~~

Grant
Wilkinson

Renata can’t
stop talking.

She talks while
we shower, while we dress, while we eat. We go outside to play with Mitten and
do some gardening. All the while, she speaks nonstop. I listen and nod
frequently when it seems appropriate. Occasionally, I ask her to clarify
something—but mainly I say nothing. I don’t know how to respond.

What if I say
the wrong thing?

She speaks so
fast her words seem to crash into each other in their hurry to escape her lips.
Clearly, she’s realized something significant. Whatever happened was cathartic.
By talking, she’s unloading, connecting the dots and putting the puzzle pieces of
her childhood together.

We kneel side by
side, working together on the garden bed of azaleas with weeding forks. Not
much work is getting done, but I have to keep my hands busy. Our eyes meet
often, yet I can’t sit across from her, just looking at her. Not while she
tells me such intimate truths.

Terrible
thoughts and shameful secrets boil out of her. This strange desire for her to
confess is just the tip of the iceberg. Will my wound up little motor-mouth
ever run down? I can listen all right, I’m used to that, but I have no idea
what to say.

I’m not a
counselor.

I’m not trained,
not experienced in this. My upbringing was the antithesis of communication, a
virtual black hole, where any attempt to express myself or be heard was sucked
in and obliterated.

Purging herself,
I’ve never heard Renata talk so freely about her life. I think I understand
what’s happening. It was like when I finally figured out I was afraid of my father—she’s
having realizations about her life so thick and fast she can barely articulate
them. In my case, I’d been shocked, not at all happy about what I’d discovered.
At first I had trouble speaking at all.

Renata’s
reaction is the polar opposite. It’s like she’s on drugs. She’s high as a kite!

She tells me how
she had been spanked before. Her dad used to catch her backside when she took
off at a run, frantically trying to escape his murderous temper. These memories
flowed through her mind as I was spanking her.

“I’ve lived my
life always feeling so guilty,” she admits.

“What?”
I
interject, unable to let that go. “Why?” I add in a softer tone. What could she
be ashamed of? What sin could she possibly have committed?

“Whenever I ran
away from him, my father took his anger out on my mother. Logically, I now know
his irrational tantrums were not my fault. But back then, as a child, I felt I
should’ve stayed. I’d hide, put my hands over my ears and feel ashamed. I
should’ve let him hit me, rather than her.”

“No,” I reply vehemently.
“Your mom wouldn’t have wanted that.” I shake my head. “No mother would.”

Our eyes meet.

Her grateful
smile squeezes my heart.

“You’re right,”
she says. “You’re so right, thank you, I never thought of that. My mother loved
me. She tried to protect me. I guess I’ve just never looked at it from my mom’s
point of view. I was so stuck in my own fear, guilt and shame. I felt
everything was my fault.”

I sigh with
relief. Pleased and encouraged, I decide it’s safe to say more. “I’m going to
tell you something you once told me. You said, ‘
You were only a child. How
much responsibility can a child take?’
I’ll never forget that.”

She laughs and
nods, amused to have her words thrown back at her. The musical sound cheers me.
Maybe I
can
do this counselor thing.

Delving further into
the topics of shame and guilt for a long while, she then returns to how she
felt when I was reluctantly punishing her backside.

“Holy shit, Grant,
that orgasm you gave me with that last spank ripped me apart,” she says
enthusiastically. “Talk about taking me to a place I never knew existed!”

I nod, faintly
following her train of thought. She leaps from subject to subject like a
skipping stone jumps over water.

“All the while
you were spanking me there was this struggle happening inside my mind. I was
fighting myself, yet also kind of outside myself. You wouldn’t believe all of the
terrible memories I had to wade through. The fear… the violence.” She shrugs,
then grins. “I just had to go through it.”

Why does she look
so happy?

Confused once
more about my role, I blink and try to figure out the correct reaction. I feel
my facial scars pull taut as I force a smile. Why? Because she’s smiling. But
why is she smiling?

“Ah… the
spanking brought those memories back?” I ask.

“Oh, yes. The
whole time. It was like reliving my childhood—but not.”

“I didn’t know,”
I say.

I understand now
why she quivered and shuddered through those first few spanks. At times I
couldn’t figure out if she was aroused or terrified. All the while the poor
woman had been taking a walk down nightmare lane. Yet, at this moment she’s so
happy, I can’t help but try to be happy for her.

“It was
difficult, but I could do it with you there, Grant. You made it easier for me.”

“That’s my job,”
I say. I’ll always be there for her. Even though I was afraid to hurt her, I’d
never want her to experience that kind of ‘physical’ therapy with anyone else.

She laughs at my
statement, then blithely continues, confiding more graphic details from her
past which I find difficult to hear. Incidences of beatings, of trips to the
hospital with broken bones. Being coached what to say to doctors and teachers.
The place high in the wardrobe in a cardboard box where she used to hide and
how she managed to live her life while in constant, crippling fear.

Listening to
this is killing me.

If only I
could've taken those beatings for her. If only I could beat the hell out of
him.
I force myself to be present and engaged. I'm here for her, to listen and
support my darlin’ girl through what is quickly becoming our shared pain.

Oh, Renata, I
wish I could've been there to rescue you from the dragon of your childhood.

I wonder if I
should be taking notes to discuss with André later. She’s heard my terrible
upbringing, now it’s my turn to listen to hers. However, as much as I genuinely
try, I can’t keep up with her. Each incident, each concept she confesses is so
intense. It takes time to wrap my brain around and process it.

Part of my
delayed ability to absorb everything she's telling me is probably due to my
reluctance to hear and understand her horrific childhood. I can’t help but
blame her mom, yet the poor woman was a victim too. A victim of domestic abuse,
then a murder victim.

But why is Renata
so happy?

She’s nearly
manic in her euphoria.

For just an
instant, I hope I haven’t driven her over the edge with that spanking and driven
her crazy. No. I smile, recalling that earlier I thought I might’ve killed her.

“I was afraid of
pain, you see?” she tells me, barely pausing to take a breath. “Petrified.
Terrified. Every day I’d dread being hit by my father. Fear of pain consumed my
mind, turning it into fear of everyone and everything. Reduced to an open
nerve-ending, I lost all perspective, Naked and raw, laid bare, I had no protection,
no way to cope with the fears that bombarded me. I could never appreciate
anything
. The absence of pain was merely more time spent beating myself up
with guilt and anticipation of more pain.”

“You were only a
child,” I repeat, jumping in to defend her. “You should have been protected
from a man like that.”

“Yes, but now,
for the first time, I realize I wasn’t
really
afraid of
pain,
” she
explains, meeting my eyes. “I was scared stiff of my father, especially when he
was drinking. To my mind,
pain equaled my father—pain equaled shame,
vulnerability, guilt, regret—pain meant dread and fear and possible death.
Do you see?”

Nope. Not a
clue, but I can’t tell her that.

I straighten,
put the weeding fork down and wait patiently for her to enlighten me.

“André was so
right,” she chatters on. “
Pain
didn’t frighten me, it was the implication,
the meaning
I assigned to
pain.
Pain itself isn’t the
problem. When my father beat me, it was his hatred and his desire to hurt me
that made it so horrible. It was not knowing how far he'd go. It was feeling
utterly helpless. It was being at his mercy of his rage and his loss of
control.”

I take off my
garden glove and wipe my brow. Am I like her father? I enjoy having her at my
mercy—yet, hitting her isn’t what turns me on. I don’t want to give her pain.
What I crave is the sense of power I get from her compliance… and today I
enjoyed focusing on her luscious ass.

Running a hand
through my hair, I try to understand what she’s saying. Surely, no one
likes
pain. You’d have to be a head case to seek it. My own memories of punishing
myself,
wanting
to suffer and enjoying pain, flash through my mind.

It seems to
prove my point.

Aware I’m not
getting her point, she explains, “You know how when you’ve exercised hard, and
you’re really sore? That’s pain, but it’s a
good
pain. That pain means
you pushed yourself and did as you planned. It hurts, but it makes you feel proud
of yourself.”

“OK.”

“When you
spanked me, you did it at my request. I know you didn’t
want
to hurt me,
but those little slaps stung and began to burn. You
did
hurt me. Yet,
because it was
you
doing it, the pain was just pain. It wasn’t wrapped
up in shame or humiliation. I didn’t feel frightened, violated or guilty. You
weren’t acting out of rage. What I actually felt through that pain was a
shockingly intense orgasm!”

Oh yeah, she
sure did. And didn’t that surprise us both?

I nod. “OK,” I
say again, grasping for understanding while trying to formulate an appropriate reply.

She smiles. “For
me, all pain brought me back to my childhood, a terrifying time of
vulnerability and guilt. Now I can separate it, you see? The funny thing is,
pain never changed—
I
have!” She throws her arms up in victory,
emphasizing her point. “I couldn’t see the pain for what it was—I saw it for
what
I
was.”

Shaking her
head, she smiles. “I don’t know if I’m making sense, Grant, but it’s as if
you’ve set me free. I’m going to enroll in a self-defense class. Pain is
OK—it’s only pain—it’s
not
all the other stuff I had connected to it in
my muddled mind. That’s what you helped me to understand. I don’t have to be
afraid anymore, do you see?”

“Ah,” I murmur.
I nod more than once, finally getting it. “Yes. That makes perfect sense.”

“I should have
listened to André,” she says. “I don’t know why I put this off for so long. I
guess I was scared.” Lips pursed, she stares at me for a long moment. I smile,
tilt my head and meet her gaze. Her expression softens. “Wait a minute; I do
know why I put this off.”

“Oh?” I say,
raising my eyebrows.

“I think I was
waiting for you.” The grateful look she gifts me with makes my heart lurch.
“I’m safe with you. I’m brave with you.” She pauses then says, her voice
trailing off into a whisper, “I honestly don’t know what I’d do without you.”

This open
comment must surprise her. Suddenly she averts her gaze, shyly shrugging off a
rare moment of vulnerability.

“Anyway, pain,
shmain,” she adds with a forced chuckle. “I’m going to beat the crap out of
everyone
once I join that self-defense class.”

I don’t know
much—but I can tell when Renata needs a hug.

I spread my arms
wide and she melts into my embrace. My emotional girl. She’s tall, but light.
With her slim limbs around my neck, I easily pick her up, carrying her against
my chest like a bride across the threshold.

I want to marry
her
now.
Today. I don’t want to put it off any longer.

My pulse kicks
up when I look into her pretty blue eyes. For so long I felt as though I was a
monster. Renata is light to my darkness, beauty to my ugliness. With her, I
found peace.

Beautiful
Renata, a woman who always considered she was a mouse. My ferocious little
tiger is ready to go out and fight the world.

I know now I’m
not a monster.

And Renata?
Well, she is no mouse. She’s the bravest, smartest, kindest and most wonderful
person I know. I’m the luckiest guy on Earth because she wants
me.

Our eyes lock.

That incredible
sense of closeness and connection sizzles between us. It isn’t merely sexual—this
is something deeper, a bond that’s far more intense.

I need to
kiss her.

When our lips
touch, I suddenly remember a line from
Alice in Wonderland.
Alice asks
the White Rabbit,
‘How long is forever?’
and the White Rabbit replies,
‘Sometimes,
just one second.’

In this one
eternal moment, I feel as though we’re joined together, fused heart to heart,
almost as if we’re one person, not two. I wonder, maybe there is reincarnation.
If so, I must have known her before.

I’m so close to
her.

I feel as though
I’ve loved Renata forever.

"Everybody
always asks why do they go after children? Because you can easily manipulate
them."

—
Ishmael
Beah

~~~

Gabriela
Lopez

“I won’t! I
won’t! You can’t make me!” the red-haired girl yelled, kicked, screamed and bit
like the very devil. “And my name is
Amy!
Amy McDougal! I don’t belong
here! I want to go home!”

“House Master, I
can take her client for her,” Susie offered, scared and shaking. “Will that
help?” Susie wanted to go home too, but mostly she was frightened for Pearl.

The little
girl’s name is Pearl,
Susie thought
. She should know that by now. Why
doesn’t she behave?

Susie came to
the
Big House
just before her eighth birthday. For a very long time after
she arrived, they gave her drugs. The drugs confused her and made her stop
caring. If she cried because she missed her family, the next thing she knew,
they gave her more drugs.

Why was this
happening with Pearl? Was it her red hair?

The drugs must
not have worked on Pearl. Susie hated witnessing this kind of confrontation. In
her heart of hearts, she rebelled just as Pearl did. Someday she would
escape—but only when it was safe.

This particular House
Master was one of the mean ones. He was big, stern and fierce, but he was an
adult. Kids
always
had to do what the adults said. When the House Master
punished a child, he told everyone it was for his or her own good.

“Put her in
isolation,” he growled to one of the supervisors. “I’ll deal with her later.”

“Yes, House
Master,” said the frightened supervisor. Susie knew the woman was scared
because even though she was a supervisor, she was trembling too. Looking down
at her feet, the woman was unable to meet the House Master’s eyes.

Susie watched
Pearl be taken away and wondered. Will Pearl be like the boy she once knew? The
one who refused to behave? Nickolas Marshal, he’d said his name was.

They had called
him Jimmy.

One day after Jimmy
refused to behave, he disappeared. Mr. Max, one of the supervisors, told Susie Jimmy
was dead. He’d been murdered and buried in the garden out back.

“That’s what
happens to bad girls and boys,” said Mr. Max.

Susie had
nightmares for a long, long time after that. While asleep, she dreamed it was
nighttime and she was in the garden. Unable to move, she found herself lying in
a grave. Dirt was being thrown on top of her.

Then she’d wake
up screaming.

The supervisor
gave her drugs until the nightmares went away. Thereafter, she was allowed to kept
a light on when she slept because of her ongoing fear of the dark.

Susie wished she
could talk to Pearl, to explain about the garden and why it was so important to
be good. Unfortunately, she never had the chance. Just like Jimmy, Susie never
saw Pearl again.

A few days
later, she began to have nightmares once more.