Closure

         She never thought she’d come back here. The gravel crunched beneath her feet as she made her way down the dusty driveway. The breeze was stale in the dry heat and did nothing but move the dark hair momentarily from her back as the sweat dripped down between her shoulder blades. It had been nearly two decades since she’d stepped foot on this property, since she’d faced what had happened here. Since she’d faced what she’d lost here. And the only reason she’d come back at all was to see it gone.

         Sound didn’t exist around that house. As it had when she was a teenager, the world slipped away and she, the house, and the ghosts of her past were the only things of substance that mattered right then. It wasn’t much of a house then, much less anymore, the structure resembling a dilapidated old shack. Even back then, the paint had been peeling, the deck was rotting, the boards sinking and swayed, bleached gray from the sun. The dry brown grass had grown wild and brushed the bottom of the dingy windows. The inside, she knew, wasn’t much better. The wallpaper was ripped in the living room, the bedrooms were in desperate need of repainting. The bathroom pipes were exposed and the back bedroom was nearly unlivable. Yet none of that bothered her.

         It was what happened upstairs that made her want to run away.

         She’d been sixteen when she met him—young, confident, carefree. Looking back, she hardly recognized herself, but she remembered him. He’d been the coolest guy at the party, the bad boy who stood back from the crowd, surveying the drinking teenagers with an above-it-all attitude. Every guy at the party deferred to him, the girls watched him with interest, yet he stood there surveying the crowd, completely uninterested in anyone around him. Then his eyes landed on her. It didn’t take long for the two of them to start dating. He’d pursued her relentlessly while still making it feel like she was the luckiest girl in the world just by receiving his attention. And, like the giddy teenager she was, she believed him.

         It hadn’t lasted long. Within months, the sweet façade began to fade and the “I love yous” followed by the subtle criticism and guilt trips. He’d tell her he loved her hair while saying she could be skinnier. He’d praise her legs while hinting her breasts could be bigger. He’d tell her how much she meant to him while implying she could do more to prove she cared. “I don’t know,” he said one night, sitting on the edge of his bed, “I just thought you wanted to spend time with me. But you’d rather go hang out with your friends.”
Suppressing a sigh, she shook her head. “That isn’t it at all. But I spend all my time with you; I hardly ever see them. Are you really going to tell me that means I don’t care?”

         “Whatever,” he replied, turning away from her. “Do what you want.” So, she’d cancelled her plans. Her friends could wait, but he wouldn’t and she was terrified of what she would be without him—if anything at all. No matter how she tried to please him, it was never enough and anytime she mentioned her feelings, she would end up with tears while he scolded her and told her she didn’t love him enough. After a while, she believed him, and the part of her that had been happy, confident, and carefree slowly died.


         “Are you lost?” a voice called, jarring her from her thoughts. An old man stood in the field, his dinging white shirt and coveralls blending in with the tall grass.

         Was she lost? In more ways than one. “No, I’m not lost,” she called back. “Sorry, I hadn’t realized anyone was here.”

         The old man smiled, an unlit cigarette dangling from the side of his wrinkled mouth. He nudged his shoulder toward the house. “Used to be yours?”

         She shook her head. “No, but I used to know someone who lived here.”

         “Same people for the last forty years,” he said. “Think the son owns it now. Shame, really. He let it go to shambles. They’re knocking it down next week. Too bad the kid doesn’t know how to take care of the things he’s got.”

         “Yeah,” she muttered, “too bad.”


         That night he broke her he’d thrown a party. The house was filled with people; everybody was drinking and having a good time. Everyone, that is, except him. She’d tried to enjoy herself, but his sullen, sulky moods always made that impossible. After a while, he grew bored and managed to convince her to go upstairs. “I just want time alone with you,” he said. “To talk. It’s so noisy down here.” Yet, once he got her alone, he only wanted one thing.

         She hadn’t wanted to sleep with him. Right then, she didn’t even like him. She’d grown so tired of the guilt and the shame, but still she couldn’t leave. She couldn’t make herself walk down those stairs. So, she stayed. And they fought. It felt like hours, though it may have been only one. But by the end of it, she was so turned around, so confused as to what they were even fighting about in the first place. He kept insisting if she didn’t sleep with him, she didn’t love him. Shame, insults, guilt, and declarations of love all mixed together in a cruel bout of emotional warfare. He could have been beating her with his fists and it would have made more sense. She was sixteen years old. All she knew is she wanted the pain to stop.

         So, she said yes. And she thought it would stop. But all it did was change form. She’d never seen him move so fast. She stood there while he kissed her, while he undressed her, tears streaming down her face, arms limp at her sides. When he laid her down on the bed, she didn’t embrace him. Instead she laid there on that corner of the bed, crying silently, staring upwards and counting the cracks in the ceiling tiles, waiting for it to be over.

         There were thirty-two.

         When he finished, he dressed and went downstairs to get himself another drink. Once he was gone, she dressed as quickly as she could, then curled up in a ball on the other side of the bed and cried herself to sleep.

         She wished she could say that was the end of it, that the abuse stopped. But it didn’t, not the emotional or the sexual. She wished she could say she’d left him after that first time, but she couldn’t. It wasn’t always bad, she recalled. And she understood now why women stayed with their abusers. No matter how loud her voice was screaming that his poisonous words didn’t matter, his voice was louder. Always louder. And for the longest time, it kept her from believing she had any worth. So she stayed, because she didn’t believe she was good enough to be with anyone else.

         The fear had set in then. She was terrified to displease him. But no matter how hard she tried, it was never enough. She was never enough. When it happened a second time, she learned how to hate. This time, when she gave in after fighting the mental battle she knew she would lose, there were no tears. There was no love. She’d gone numb. She didn’t need to count the cracks in the ceiling tiles because she knew how many cracks there were. She knew his breath against her skin, his body rutting on tops of hers. She knew it wouldn’t last long. She’d been there before. And right then and there, she promised herself she would never be there again. So, she waited. And when he finally got off of her, she left. And still, she didn’t cry.

         She’d gotten the nerve to break up with him a couple weeks later. She thought she’d feel free, or at least lighter, but she didn’t. At the time, she hadn’t understood what those incidents meant, and she blamed herself for everything he’d put her through. She didn’t call it rape. She never called it rape. She believed it was her fault. Sometimes, late at night when the world went quiet and all she had were her thoughts, she still believed that.

         It wasn’t until she was in college that she even admitted anything had happened. The word “rape” didn’t even cross her mind. She’d said yes, hadn’t she? It was a botched flirtation with her new boyfriend that planted the seed that she’d gone through anything wrong. Until she’d been sobbing uncontrollably after something as innocent as being tickled, she hadn’t even considered it. “What happened to you?” he asked, staring at her in horror.

         Pulling her knees up to her chest, she looked away. “Nothing happened to me.”

         He shook his head. “People don’t start crying over nothing. Something happened.” Taking her hand, he caressed her skin, gently running his other hand through her hair. She tried not to flinch. It didn’t make sense—she knew it didn’t—but in that moment she didn’t feel safe. She’d never been attacked, never been physically abused, so why was she pulling away from this boy who loved her? Why did she suddenly feel so vulnerable and ashamed? Nothing had happened to her. But in the back of her mind she knew that was a lie. From that point on, whenever she asked herself that same question, those two nights counting ceiling tiles with tear-stained cheeks came to mind.

         Then one day she was sitting in her Human Sexuality class, and the words “Coercive Rape” were written on the board. She wasn’t even paying attention to the reading; it had been a rough day and she wasn’t in the mood to learn. But she couldn’t block out what she was hearing. Words like “manipulation” and “coerced consent” flooded her senses, and as her instructor read the description aloud, anger filled every fiber of her mind and tears flooded her eyes. Without a word, she’d gathered her things and fled from the room.

         It wasn’t until a few nights later, half a bottle of vodka gone and ugly words covering the pages of her journal, that she was able to admit what had happened. She’d been raped. No, she hadn’t been attacked, but she had been violated. She’d said yes, but what she’d meant was she wanted it to stop. He could have her body if he would quit hurting her mind. Guilt and shame were more effective weapons than fists could ever be. Staring down at the pages of black ink pressed hard into the paper, she ran her fingers over the tear stains blurring her words. Rape. She’d been raped. And all those suicidal thoughts, all the depression and hateful words she’d been so dismayed by all those years finally started to make sense. Something had happened to her—she was a statistic. Now she had to figure out how to move on.


         He’d taken so much from her, she thought, staring at the darkened windows of his bedroom. Her innocence, her confidence. Her safety. Even now, years later, he’d taken a part of herself she still didn’t know how to get back. Was it any wonder she needed to overfill on whiskey to feel even a little bit safe in bed? Didn’t it make sense that she could so easily detach her emotions from the act of love itself? Even when she’d run into him five years before, she’d had a panic attack the moment he’d left. How much more was she going to let him take from her?

         Moving over to the shade, she sat down at the base of the tree and watched the man collect old clothes and garbage from the field, smoke from his cigarette swirling around in gray spirals up into the sky. She suspected there would be a fair amount of cleanup even before the demolition.

         She didn’t hate him. Oh, how she wished she did. But she couldn’t hate him—not really. The fact was, she’d never really seen him as the bad guy—not even when she was finally able to put the responsibility for his actions on him. He scared her, yes, but not because she thought he would physically hurt her. More, she was afraid of what she would let him do. He had a way of getting inside her head and twisting her thoughts and she didn’t even think he realized he was doing it the majority of the time. For that, she felt sorry for him, she was leery of him, but she didn’t hate him.

         She hated herself though. For a long time, she blamed herself for giving into him, for believing him, for letting him break her down so low that he could build her back up the way he’d wanted. Over the years, she’d desperately fought to regain her control, even thought sleeping with him again on her terms might be the answer, but in the end it had just left her empty. She’d had to tear apart everything she thought she was, take the control back from him like breaking a bone to set it again.

         Until one day she’d finally been able to breathe.

         It hadn’t been easy. Every step forward had been hard-won. Every time she thought she was making progress, something would bring her back to that bedroom, to those ceiling tiles, and her climb to being healed would start all over again. But she was relentless. No matter what he took from her, how many barbed words he used to slice her confidence, he’d never been able to get through that stubborn streak or her determination. She refused to be a victim. She was more than that, better than that. She needed to know her past would not define her or dictate her present. So, she fought and little by little she regained all the pieces she’d lost along the way.

         When she met the man she called her husband, she’d had to steel herself to tell him the truth. He deserved to know. She’d told people in the past and received responses ranging from “Oh man, that sucks,” to “Well, you said yes. Why didn’t you tell the police? It wasn’t really rape.” She had no idea how he would take it, but to her surprise, his eyes filled with sympathy and compassion. Taking her hand, he kissed her fingers. “I’m so sorry that happened to her,” he told her. He brushed a tear from her cheek. “But I promise, nothing like that will ever happen to you again.” And he’d meant it. He was kind and gentle, with a quiet strength he was never unwilling to share when hers wavered. They had a little girl now; they were even talking about having another. Was she really going to let this horror from her past dictate her future or how she thought about herself? Was she going to let it taint the relationship she had now, or the relationship she had with her daughter? Was she going to let the shell of a house take away the confidence she’d fought and bled for? She needed to let it go and she knew watching the house get demolished wouldn’t actually help—as satisfying as it might be.

         “Don’t stay out here too long now,” the old man told her. “It’s hotter than hell in this sun.” When she nodded, he smiled his crooked smile and flicked his cigarette butt into the grass, sparks flying over his gnarled knuckles.

         She waited until he disappeared down the long drive before she got to her feet and approached the house again. So much pain haunted those walls when in reality it was just a pile of wood, nails, and glass. And yet, all her nightmares had begun in that house. Reaching down, she picked up a rock the size of her fists and let it fly. It hit the siding with a satisfying thunk followed by the final thud as the board fell to the deck. The anger in her stirred and she reached for another rock. This time, she threw it at a window, loving the sound of glass breaking. Elated, she threw more. Stone after stone after stone, she chucked them into the air, half giddy and half crazed when they struck their target.

         Finally, her chest heaving, her hands on her knees, she felt emptied of all the negative thoughts she’d harbored for so long, each and every one of them scattered in pieces on the deck at the very place they’d been born. She’d been raped. And even though she’d said yes, it wasn’t her fault. No, her case would never be reported, never be tried, and she was okay with that. But she had finally come to terms with what she was, and that was never a victim. She was a survivor.

         A few feet from the house, a small blaze caught in the grass. Smoke curled in the air with the faint scent of nicotine. The old man’s cigarette butt must have caught fire. Exhausted, she went back to her shady seat and sat down. It wasn’t long before the flames had made a meal of the dry grass and were beginning to lick the sides of the deck. Leaning back, she settled in. She watched as the fire consumed the bottom floor of the house. Waited until it blazed in the upper window, purifying the wrongs that had been done there. Night had fallen by the time she stood and started walking to her car. She’d call the fire department when she got to her car, she decided. Once there was no chance of those memories being saved. Smoke permeated the air now, and off in the distance, she could hear sirens. Good, someone else had beaten her to it. She only hoped they didn’t get there too quick.

         It was over. After so many years of feeling that pain like a sliver beneath the skin, she’d finally pulled it out and watched it burn. Taking her key fob from her pocket, she clicked the top button. A ways up the street, her parking lights flashed in the encroaching dark and she smiled. She would never have to go back there again. The gravel crunched beneath her feet as she made her way down the dusty driveway.