CHAPTER TWENTY

Nov. 22, 2010

I never meant to write this, never wanted to write it. Dr. Burstein wanted me to put everything down on paper a long time ago. He finally dropped me as a patient. Maybe he didn’t want to share my guilt. And when I told my father that I felt much better, they just let the whole thing drop. I had had two years of treatment by then, once a week spilling everything to Dr. Burstein. My parents were never very comfortable with psychiatrists. It was against their beliefs—more to the point, their belief that we were perfect.

People are able to tuck things away in the back of the closet, eventually almost forgetting about them. I suppose all those years I had hoped, even convinced myself, that Richard Slade had died in prison, God help me. I’d talked myself into believing that he was just a train wreck waiting to happen, that if it hadn’t been my case, it would have been something else, some other girl.

But then somebody broke the code, came up with DNA, and everything that was tucked away in the darkest corner of that long-forgotten closet came tumbling out.

Everybody assumed that I’d just made a mistake, identified the wrong black boy. It had happened, still does, I suppose.

Only three other people know my shame, two really since Dr. Burstein is now dead. And I don’t believe it is possible for anyone to know the stain I bear. It is not possible now to even look in a mirror any longer than it takes to ensure that I am at least moderately presentable. Last week, I went out with only one earring on. Bitsy had to point it out to me.

I have sinned. I don’t even believe anymore that there is a God, but there is still sin. And I have wallowed in it and I’m covered with its slime.

What I want to do is get clean again, the way I once was. It may not be possible, but I intend to try.

I intend to keep writing, night and day, until it is all told, until I have vomited up all that I have done.

Since it happened, Lewis has tried to “talk some sense” into me. She tells me that, for the sake of the family, I must keep everything hidden. Who will gain, she asks me, if I tell everything now? Who will lose?

I tell her that she is right, but she seems to doubt my sincerity.

Now, when it seems certain that Richard Slade, whose name I blocked out for so long, will be a free man again soon, walking the streets in the same city, perhaps coming face to face with me eventually, those kind eyes I see in the newspaper stories quietly asking me why, I can no longer stay quiet. The lie within me is too large to contain any longer.

As my Sunday school teacher told us when I was six years old, the truth will out. . . .

Nov. 29

It is time to talk about Wesley.

He was my hero, always there to defend me if anyone tried to pick on me, always patiently showing me the way, helping me with my homework, including me in things when his friends might have thought I was a brat. Two years age difference is a lot when you’re ten or twelve.

He was handsome, talented and popular. Yes, I had a crush on my brother.

It seemed innocent enough. He’d show me how to kiss, tell me what to look out for from the older boys, even though, at twelve, I wasn’t turning any heads. We weren’t a particularly prudish family. When you have an older brother and sister around, and the neighborhood’s full of other kids, some of them world-wise beyond their years in their parents’ mistaken belief that knowing how to mix a cocktail before you’ve reached puberty is a proper step toward adulthood, you learn things, you try things.

A little experimenting, I heard my father tell my mother once, after she had found a joint in Wesley’s shirt pocket, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I was thirteen when Wesley lost his mind. He didn’t lose it all at once or forever, at least not at the start. He would have “spells.” He would have days when he couldn’t go to school. That summer, when he was fifteen, it became really apparent to everyone in our world that Wesley was likely broken in a way that he would never “grow out of.”

An infamous incident at the Quarry in which Wesley swam naked in front of a couple of dozen of our neighbors pretty much put it up in the sky in big block letters: WESLEY SIMPSON IS CRAZY.

Psychiatrists and a battery of drugs, much more primitive than the ones they have now, failed to do much more than delay the day when Wesley couldn’t live with us anymore.

The rest of the family, even my mother, seemed to step away from Wesley, trying to separate themselves from the taint of insanity.

“You know,” I heard my mother say once to a friend who was at least feigning sympathy, “I’ve looked back into my family, and so has Harper, and nobody in either of our families ever had anything like this.”

In other words, not our fault. Maybe not Wesley’s, but not ours either.

(I have since learned of a great aunt on my father’s side who spent her latter years in a “hospital” and a great-grandmother on my mother’s side who had to be more or less kept in the cellar.)

Me, I just ached for Wesley. I didn’t love him a whit less for his illness, even if it did make him someone different when it was upon him. I tried to make up for what seemed to be a poorly hidden lack of sympathy on the part of Lewis and our parents. Their belief, as crazy as any of Wesley’s delusions, was that if someone took him by the shoulders, shook him and ordered him to “pull yourself together,” somehow it would all turn out all right.

The summer I turned fourteen, it happened.

We had been fooling around in the basement. I don’t know where my parents and Lewis were. When I say “fooling around,” I mean everything else but what Wesley called The Final Frontier. Yes, we did oral, too. We convinced ourselves, or Wesley convinced me, that it wasn’t really sex, beating Bill Clinton on that one by a few years. We had seen porno flicks that Dad thought were well-hidden. We knew what went where. We knew other kids who were “doing it.”

I knew it was wrong, but we just kind of fell into it. I felt guilty, but I felt guilty about refusing Wesley. He needed someone to make him feel good. And, God help me, it made me feel good.

Lewis had a pretty good idea of what was going on, but she was in college by then, so it was just the two of us.

That day, he made me lie on my bed, naked, and then he talked me into letting him tie me up. He’d done it before, and it shamed me to admit how good helplessness felt. The other two times, though, he just felt me up a little, teased me, made me beg.

This time, though, he broke through The Final Frontier.

It didn’t hurt that much. There was a little blood, which we cleaned up. He was probably inside me all of two minutes.

But, of course, there are some things you can’t take back, some things you can’t do just once. . . .

Dec. 12

So finally we come to The Night In Question.

It was still warm that day, somewhere between Labor Day and the beginning of fall, a time I loved, up to that point.

I was sixteen. Wesley was eighteen. He was in one of his several stays at “homes” of one kind or another. This one was just across town. I knew my mother would soon relent and talk my father into letting him come back. They loved Wesley. I’m convinced of that. They just didn’t know what to do with him.

When he came back, we always did it. I still had not had sex with another boy. Wesley was all I knew.

Our parents didn’t seem to be aware. Lewis would summon me to her room and say things like, “You and Wes must be careful. He’s not responsible for his actions, so you’ve got to be responsible for two.” I think she had trouble finding the words for the enormity of what she knew we were doing.

Wesley and I had always kind of teamed up against poor Lewis. I say “poor Lewis” because, even though she was four and six years older than we were, we always seemed to be able to get her goat. Lewis didn’t have much of a sense of humor, and I always felt that she didn’t think she was as well-liked by our parents as Wesley and I were when we were young, but that’s just me.

We would play tricks on her, taking advantage of her when she was supposed to be babysitting us. She would report us to our parents (although she never could bring herself, later, to report on what really needed to be brought to their attention), but they likely as not would tell her that we were just children, to just laugh it off.

That night, our parents were having drinks out on the patio, and I was doing my homework.

Wesley must have slipped away from the group home. I don’t think it was too hard. My bedroom had a little side door that opened to the outside, kind of hidden away. I heard a light tapping, and when I looked out, there was Wesley, holding his index finger to his lips.

I let him in. He kissed me and told me that we were going to the Quarry.

I told him that I had homework, but the look of disappointment was enough to make me close my book.

I told my parents I was going up the street to see some friends. They didn’t even ask which ones. When they got beyond the second gin and tonic, they didn’t ask a lot of probing questions.

I met Wesley out on the street and asked him why we were going to the Quarry. He smiled down at me and said, “So we can be alone.”

I didn’t resist. I never did, really. We walked downhill until we got to the entrance. I remember that the night was still and sticky, like there was a storm brewing.

We slipped in through the hole in the fence. The water probably was still plenty warm for swimming, but of course Wesley had other ideas.

I was led, willing as a sheep to the slaughter, to the men’s dressing room. It still smelled of the damp of summer bathing trunks and the chemicals used when they cleaned the toilet.

I let him strip me and lay me down on the hard wooden bench. He produced some kind of lightweight rope, pulled my hands over my head and tied me to a hook hanging on the wall behind me. When he’d tied me up before, it seemed to be less scary, mostly because we were in our own house.

He teased me a little, with his hands, and something in his eyes, shining from a light pole somewhere in the distance, scared me. He didn’t seem like the old Wesley at all anymore.

I begged him to untie me, that I was scared. He said, “You should be,” and then he put my panties in my mouth.

And then he had me. He’d had me many times before, of course, but this was different. He was like an animal rutting, grunting and biting as he went at me.

He came twice, and then we heard the patrol car shush-shush-shushing through the gravel.

Wesley motioned for me to be quiet, a superfluous request, since my underwear was in my mouth. He almost appeared to be grinning as he got off me. I thought he was going to untie me, but he just zipped his pants, scooped up my shorts, bra and T-shirt and slipped away, gone into the night.

It seemed like an hour before they found me. I could hear voices the whole time, and was trying to keep quiet, thinking I would prefer to take my chances wriggling free from the ropes sometime before morning, rather than be discovered au naturel by some of Richmond’s finest.

But it was not to be. The policeman who poked his head in the door didn’t seem to see me at first. I suppose he was still a little night-blind. But then he stopped. He said, “Holy shit,” and then there were three of them. They seemed as embarrassed as I was as they untied me. Somebody found a robe.

They could see the shape I was in. They could see everything. When they brought the boy in, he looked frightened and confused.

“Is this the one?” one of the cops asked. I could have said he wasn’t, but somebody did it, and telling the police the truth seemed too much to bear. In my cowardice, I nodded my head, and they took him away.

I have never since, to this day, seen Richard Slade in person. . . .

Dec. 26

I see, to my amazement, that I am almost finished. I count 152 pages so far. I feel better, even if I don’t know what to do with this just yet.

If I give this, my confession, to the police, it will leave a stain on our family name that might never go away.

If I don’t, I am doomed. I cannot live any longer with what I have done.

Lewis knows something, and she is afraid, I think. When I mentioned writing “my memoirs,” she turned pale and said some things were better left unsaid.

I think she has been snooping around my computer, which is why I have been making printouts as I go along.

The one I feel most sorry for, believe it or not, is Wesley.

How, though, can I be silent any longer?