Come Back (27 page)

I’ve pulled myself out of my funk. I still refuse to move up levels, but my attitude’s better—I just try to think of this as my permanent home. I’ve made a list of books to read, I’ve started playing basketball every day, I made a list of art projects. As long as I’m in here, I may as well be productive.

I still go to Unity family twice a week, though I almost don’t need to be there anymore. I feel just as comfortable with guys as girls now. I’m about to eat my words.

During group, I tell them that we’re suing my father and that I think it will help me get some closure.

I finish and Mr. Greg calls on Jason, a golden-haired guy who’d be considered handsome if his face wasn’t covered in zits.

“I’ve been sort of pissed off since Mia came in the family. Not at her, I mean you, but just agitated. I haven’t been around a chick in a long time and it’s bringing up a lot of shit for me.”

Dittos are murmured. I’m suddenly very self-conscious. Sometimes guys are slow to react. I’ve been with them for three months and I’m just now bringing up their issues?

“See, back home, I had this girlfriend. We were together like five months.”

He stops and looks around the room, then back at his shoelace, which is now twisted in a gigantic knot.

“Well, I sort of raped her.”

There’s an awkward silence. There’s rapists here?

“I raped her!” he repeats, almost frantically. “Me, I’m a rapist! She looked at me like I was a monster.”

“How does Mia bring this up for you?” Mr. Greg asks gently.

“Every time she looks at me, I feel like she knows, it’s like my old girlfriend looking at me. Just being around her makes me feel like shit.”

He continues, beating himself up over and over. The fact that he watched his dad beat his mom growing up comes out, too, and explains the origins for the lack of respect for women.

“I’m just scared shitless I’m gonna end up like my dad. I always got in fights with him to protect my mom, I thought I was different, but then I did something like that!”

Eventually, anger turns to tears. It’s strange, but the more he called himself a monster, the less I saw him as one. His actions were selfish and cruel, but seeing how strong his regret is, seeing that what he has to live with is its own torture, makes him painfully human.

After my dad, then Derek, I stopped seeing guys as human. They were like this alien species you could lock in a cage with peanuts and
Playboy
and they’d be happy. How a father, or friend, could do the things they did was so illogical it seemed like a mistake. The only way I could understand it was by seeing guys as fundamentally different, by grouping them all together as assholes.

“I was raped,” I interrupt him.

I sit on my hands to keep them from shaking.

“My first reaction when you started talking was anger. I wanted to leave the room, I thought you were deranged and perverted, probably all the things you were scared I’d think. But the more you spoke, the more I felt myself wanting to say, it’s okay, you didn’t mean to, just because you’re so miserable and guilty.

“And it’s not okay, it’s plain wrong. But you know that now and you need to stop beating yourself up and move on. Have you apologized or communicated with your girlfriend since then?”

He shakes his head. “She probably hopes I’m dead.”

I touch his arm to prompt him to make eye contact with me, which he’s avoided.

“She probably hopes you’re sorry, Jason. When you were talking I found myself getting mad at the guy that raped me because I don’t think he regrets it, or even feels like he did anything wrong. Same with my old dad. If he ever apologized, if he even just admitted what he did, it would have meant a lot to me. Not that I necessarily would forgive him, that’s not why you apologize, but it would have meant something to me.

“She’s probably just as hurt by your taking off and never talking to her again than by the rape itself. Half of what hurts is the violation of trust. For them to acknowledge they’re just as horrified as you helps for some reason.”

He looks at me and nods his head contritely, a little boy nod that reminds me of something Mike told me last session.

He said that some of his favorite cases are boys, but that they can be much harder to reach. They’re like rocks, he said, they seem unemotional, they’re hard to move. Most of the time you drop a rock and it just sits there. But every now and again, when you drop one, you look down and see a shining geode at your feet.

“P. BOY.”

Tiny blue letters painted on little white ceramic cubes, strung together and tied to his newborn wrist. Nick wasn’t always a violent, druggie husband, or a stoned, moody fiancé.

I came across his birth bracelet in a yellowed dossier while searching for documents needed for the lawsuit. He’s refused to acknowledge any responsibility, financial or otherwise, for Mia’s problems, so we’re going to trial. I’ve spent months gathering statements, canceled checks, receipts, Mia’s psychological records. Both Nick and I have been deposed, myself over the phone. He still denies that he ever abused her in the first place, which I expected.

I’m surprisingly relaxed at the prospect of seeing him in court. Focus was like having a demolitions expert detonate the charge of accumulated emotional garbage I’d been schlepping around for years. It gave me some new tools, then kicked my ass out into the world with them, where I could do the hard work of being awake and aware in my own life and conscious of my choices. Or I could keep doing what I’ve always done. Which would give me more of what I already had. No, thank you.

The stakes are too high, I don’t get a do over, this is it. Going through the records of my life and Mia’s really drives that home. Twenty years of my life is spread out on my living room floor, which is some mirror.

It’s all spread out before me, tufts of brown carpet sticking up between stacks of papers. Mike feels I’m ready to read the packet my mom sent me about my old dad.

“She labeled everything,” he says. “I’ve spread it out for you by type—court documents, various letters, reports. Do you want me to be here when you read them, leave and come back when you’re done, leave and not bring it up until you do…how do you want to do this?”

“I think I’d like to read them alone. But can you come back when I’m done?”

“How about I go electroshock some people for the next couple hours and then swing back by?”

I smile, that works. I decide to start with the hard facts and reach for the court reports when an envelope marked Do Not Bend catches my eye. I’ve never seen a picture of my father. My heart pounds lightly as I slide it out and stare at it for a few minutes. He looks so nice and safe. I study the soft brown eyes and shiny, light hair. He looks like the type of dad any little girl would want; I’m surprised to see he’s not the seismic force of evil I’d always envisioned.

I scan the photo for any resemblance. There’s some, but I’m definitely more my mom’s child, which is comforting. One by one, I go through all the documents. My mom’s written a history of our life and hours pass as I catch up on the Chicago years. Before I know it, Mike’s peering through the door.

“Still need more time, kiddo?”

“No, you can come in, I was just finishing up.”

I read for a minute more and then we sit in silence for a while. I feel like I should be crying or raging, but I’m calm. After another minute, I look up.

“I’m not really that upset, Mike, is that normal?”

“It’s not normal, it’s not abnormal, it’s yours.”

I nod. Mike’s comfortable prodding if I’m not talking, but he’s silent now. I have to do this one on my own.

“It’s weird, like reading about someone else. It’s just details, you know. They almost seem irrelevant now. It didn’t change how I feel about myself or my old dad. It helped me see those events as…just events, not anything that necessarily defines me anymore.”

Mike smiles. “And that’s a good place to be, Mia. I have to remind kids constantly that no one’s touching you now, no one has for years. It’s the beliefs you form about yourself based on those events, it’s what’s going on in your own head that’s paralyzing you.”

I nod and grab a Tootsie Roll.

“My mom’s stuff was hardest. The court reports were tough, but in a physical way. It made me feel squirmy because it’s gross, but it didn’t screw with my head too much. Reading about her tying me to her waist and sleeping on the beach—that was hard.”

I always thought of my mom as fragile, emotionally. But she was rock solid. She was just a few years older than me when all this happened. I couldn’t do
what she did—the death threats, the not being believed, being a single mom in college, it’s amazing, she’s amazing. And I’m amazingly lucky.

In going through my family history, I was looking for closure. And I guess it did close the door with my dad to a degree, but what I didn’t expect is that it opened an even bigger one with Paul.

I always subconsciously figured that if my first dad abandoned me, Paul could, too. Also, something about knowing another dad of mine was floating around out there was just weird and until I had completely laid him to rest, it was hard for me to fully let Paul in. As hurt as I was, I wasn’t ready to let my old dad go.

I wasn’t ready to let go of my anger at him, or my secret hope that he would apologize. The hardest thing to let go of though, was the fear. It controlled me for so long, it made me feel so weak and small, it just seemed like it was part of who I was.

But after reading about how drugged up he always was, how dysfunctional his family was, he shrank from a towering, terrifying presence to a cowardly, wretched little man that, poof, I can just blow away.

Nick looks like a dimmed version of himself. He’s paler and his voice is thinned, higher, he sounds squeezed. Even his familiar combination of arrogance and menace is watered down. One thing hasn’t changed. His eyes are still bloodshot.

He sits across the room from me and his presence doesn’t upset or intimidate me anymore, nor does it elicit any hatred or anger. I look at my first husband and feel two things: sadness and pity.

His first tactic in the case was to refuse any responsibility to pay for psychological care related to the abuse, as court ordered, because he never abused Mia in the first place. Sorry, Mr. P, that case has already been tried and the judgments stand.

His next position was that he wasn’t obligated to pay for treatment because no one ever informed in all these years that Mia ever had any problems at all related to him.

“Is this your handwriting, Mr. P?” my attorney asked in deposition.

Ooopsie. Claire kept your letter asking her to stop writing to you about Mia’s emotional difficulties. I’d kept him very well informed since the divorce, and sent bills for Ella and Colleen, which he never paid. By the time Mia was twelve, well, he’d just heard enough of Mia’s “problems and therapy.”

Okay, then, he doesn’t have to pay because he was never contacted by
professionals
. But the order never stipulated that, Mr. P; your wife’s notification wasn’t enough?

Claire could be lying. She could have made up all those invoices.

But there are canceled checks, Mr. P, going back years.

It’s still a possibility these bills aren’t legitimate, he claimed.

Then
he argued he shouldn’t have to pay because Claire found someplace too costly. He’s read about teenagers in state institutions that are doing pretty darn well.

State institutions are for indigent people, Mr. P. Are you saying Mia’s indigent?

Well, he doesn’t exactly like the word “indigent.”

Then
, he tried saying he was never notified that Mia had any problems
recently
.

But, Mr. P, we’re all here because you received notification six months ago.

But he had no clue in the world that all those dates and names of doctors and psychologists and institutions and treatments meant that Mia was getting treated for anything.

You’re telling me that you don’t know what the phrase “medical and psychological expenses for Mia Fontaine” means, Mr. P?

It’s a falsehood, he announced, there is no Mia Fontaine. (She hasn’t used his name since the divorce.)

Round and round we go. “The girl’s” problems had nothing to do with him. It’s not a treatment program, it’s just a private school.

I cannot force him to apologize to Mia. Nor can I force him to pay, even if we win the case. Because, as I expected, his financial affidavit shows a man with no assets except a pension fund. And that’s untouchable. Because our government feels that no child, abused, unsupported, or otherwise neglected, should afflict a man’s golden years.

But I can ask the court to hold him responsible
and
accountable. Even if all he pays is a dollar a month, that dollar will remind him of his crime every month. A judgment would say that you, Mr. Nicolas P, are accountable for the pain and shame Mia’s felt, for the nightmares and self-loathing and fears.

There’s a synagogue nearby that I stop in for a moment before meeting old friends for dinner. I pray for Mia to be safe and know happiness, for God to watch over Paul, my mother, all my loved ones, over children everywhere. That last one’s always a sticking point. How could God create a world where children suffer so much?

God doesn’t create suffering, Claire, we do. We make the world and
then we break it. It occurs to me for the first time that I don’t think you pray to change the world, you pray to change yourself. That
you
may change the world.

I remember something I read in Samantha Dunn’s moving memoir of her spiritual awakening after her horse nearly severed her leg. She wrote that when God wants your attention, first He throws feathers. After that, He starts throwing bricks.

I obviously missed the feathers, God. But, let me make of these hard clay lessons not a wall but a staircase to climb, to lift me out of blindness, anger, judgment, ego. To see more clearly and deeply, within myself and others, so that I may live what I’ve repeated in a hundred yoga classes,
Namaste
: the God in me sees the God in you.

And, so, before I leave, I pray for Nick, too, that he may know peace.

I’m picturing my father in court, a man I know nothing of but his own personal demons, and I see a haunted man. The feelings he instilled in me, self-hatred, anxiety, sadness, he must feel these every waking moment. And having lived and felt as he must—and then had the chance to change—I feel sorry for him. Sorry that he was too weak to face himself and change, that his pain was so great it poisoned him and he chose lies instead of me. Sorry that the only legacy he left with me was one so dark.

And it hurts all the more because I understand it. Because I know how it feels to only be able to operate from the shadowy part of you that feeds off pain, because it’s familiar and it makes itself available in such abundance.

Sometimes I wonder if I was attracted to the streets, to those darker places, as a way of getting to know him, of feeling some connection with the man who half put me on this earth. I knew nothing of him but that black hole he left inside of me. There were times I would wake up in so much pain it felt like the world was crying in my ear as I slept. It was a sadness I wasn’t equipped to handle and I did it the only way I knew how. Maybe diving in was my way out. Maybe this is what I had to understand to let him go.

I spend the next day driving around the places we lived. I drive by the complex where I rented my first apartment with Mia. Where a policeman sat in my pink velvet chair and forgot the English language.

I walk around the university in a light rain, enveloped by the smell of
wet sidewalks, the quality of the light, the heaviness in the air. All at once, the sense of it floods me. Of my life here, of the craziness of being in the system, of him whispering threats in the courthouse elevator; and of the memory of Mia behind me on our bike, giggling as her red helmet bobbed up and down with the bumps, of the hours in the library while she slept in her stroller, of singing in our campus apartment in the dark, of the anticipation on her face at the word “beach.”

The sky clears as I drive there, to where we built sandcastles and she made me chase her in the sand, saying catch me, Mudder, catch me! I can see the image of us running along the water’s edge and it almost takes my breath away—how young I was! Barely six years older than Mia is now. I see my young face and I feel such tenderness for that girl. She did the best she could with what she knew at the time. And I wonder: what if in looking back no one were to say bad Mommy, bad Claire? What if
I
didn’t? What if I forgave myself completely and saw her smile back at me?

I walk until I find the place I slept with Mia on a hot day under an umbrella. With her tied to my waist so she couldn’t run away while I slept. In the end, she did run away, when I was asleep in my own life, when I wasn’t looking because I didn’t want to see. She untied the knot between us and ran as far and fast as she could. Because, I now believe, she knew, she always knew in her heart, that her mudder would catch her, still.