The Beat of My Own Drum (6 page)

Rigid with fear, I was still frozen to the spot when he lifted my nightgown—my favorite one with a pretty flower pattern. He laid me on my back and then he lowered himself on top of me. His body was heavy and his breathing ragged in my ear. He forced my legs apart with his hands, and the next thing I remember was searing, burning pain.

I cried out and pleaded with him to stop, but he kept going, pushing, thrusting. I screamed out loud, and he pressed his hand so hard against my mouth that I tasted my own blood. His hand was so big it covered my nose, too, and I thought I would suffocate.

“Be quiet!” he hissed. “No one can hear you! You’ll be in even more trouble if you make another sound!”

I tried to stop crying, but the pain only got worse and worse. It
left me breathless and, in the end, voiceless. He removed his hand, and my mouth opened and closed in a gasping, silent scream.

The next thing I knew I blacked out, or at least my mind shut down.

When I eventually became aware again, he was lifting himself off me. I heard a noise and realized it was coming from my mouth, which was fighting for breath with rasping sobs of pain and fear.

I lay there, exposed, shivering and crying.

“Go to the bathroom and clean yourself up!” he snapped.

I couldn’t move.

He went away and fetched some paper towels. I wondered why. Then he started frantically wiping something off my parents’ dark sheets before wiping himself.

Feeling sick, I rolled away from him onto my side. The pain made me cry out once more.

“Shut up!” He gripped my wrist and yanked me roughly to my feet as I almost blacked out.

I could barely stand. Everything was wet and sticky between my legs.

Shaking all over, I stood watching as he grabbed a wet rag and continued scrubbing at the sheets.

“Go clean up!” he commanded.

I shuffled to the bathroom with baby steps and switched on the light. I looked down and almost fainted, clutching the basin as my knees buckled. There was blood everywhere—running down my thighs and soaking into my nightgown. I think I must have blacked out again, and I don’t know to this day what happened to my favorite flowery nightie.

The next thing I remember, my attacker was with me in the bathroom. He looked as frightened as I felt. He must have seen all the blood. I stood in front of him shivering so much that my teeth were chattering.

Somehow I’d been changed into clean pajamas, and through the screaming in my head I could distantly hear him telling me to go back to my room and go to sleep.

“Forget about this and don’t tell a soul—or else . . .” he said, his eyes boring into me.

I shuffled painfully to bed and fell facedown onto my pillow. Afraid of waking my little brothers, I used it to stifle my cries.

Whenever I try to remember more details of that night, it comes to me in jagged pieces like fragments of broken glass. As an adult, I know that I must have disassociated myself from what was happening as my only method of dealing with it. Even today, when the memories occasionally creep back into my dreams, they appear as shards, but they always bring fear, pain, and shame—feelings I’m still unable to fully articulate.

Or perhaps the experience of a five-year-old girl being raped simply defies language.

The pain woke me the next morning. I didn’t know exactly where it was coming from, but I ached all over, and my tummy really hurt. I hobbled to the bathroom and tried to urinate, but I couldn’t—it stung too much. I wiped myself and cried out when I saw blood on the paper. Once again, I couldn’t understand its source. Having seen so much blood the night before, this fresh bleeding only intensified my fear.

Was I dying? What if I had to tell Moms what I’d done?

I sat on the toilet rocking back and forth, cradling myself with my arms and trembling all over.

It must have been summertime, as I can’t have gone to school that day and I have no idea how I spent the next few hours, apart from worrying how much my tummy hurt.

I couldn’t pee or poop, and I was so afraid of Moms finding out. I didn’t eat or drink anything, and when she asked me what was wrong I merely mumbled that I wasn’t feeling well.

Instead of showing Moms the blood, I tried to figure out how to tell her what had happened. I kept waiting for the right moment, but there never seemed to be one. It wasn’t until much later the following night that I finally broke down and told them that a Bad Thing had happened.

“What do you mean?” Moms asked.

“He hurt me,” I blurted, saying it as quickly as I could to get the words out and away from me. As I said them, big, fat, oily tears began to roll down my cheeks. Catching my breath, I looked out the window and noticed that it was dark already. Night was coming, and I didn’t think I could face another one with all that pain and fear.

“Who hurt you?”

“The babysitter.”

“The babysitter? How?” my mother pressed.

I shook my head. I knew from her expression that he was going to get into trouble for what I’d said, and then he’d be really mad at me. If he was mad at me, he might come back and hurt me again. I believed that I’d be in trouble for making trouble. Too afraid to say another word, I shut down once more.

So that was as detailed as my allegation got. At such a tender age, I lacked the vocabulary to explain what had happened, and my fear of stirring things up prevented me from saying more.

The ensuing hours and days have remained so confusing and distressing to me and to my family that we are rarely able to discuss them—even after all these years. I do know that after my parents gave up trying to pry more information out of me, there was suddenly a lot of movement in the house. I remember how upset and angry they were. That’s when I knew I really was in trouble.

They confronted the babysitter about what I’d said, but he laughed and flatly denied everything. Then they came home and continued to question me, asking, “Are you sure, Heart?”

They wanted more details.

“You have to tell us what happened—exactly.”

“Are you sure you didn’t just have a bad dream?”

It had never occurred to me until that moment that they didn’t believe me or that I couldn’t tell them the truth.

“This is serious, Sheila. Talk to us!”

I began to panic.

They didn’t know what to think.

“Maybe you had a nightmare?” Moms pleaded again.

I half nodded, afraid to say any more. I couldn’t speak the words I wanted to say, and she wasn’t able to hear them. I’m sure her mind blanked them out, as the truth was simply too painful to face—for all of us.

The more she asked, the more I clammed up, until the silence seemed for the best.

Not long afterward, my attacker cornered me in the hallway, pulling me to one side. His fingers pinched my arms, and his eyes glinted as he lowered his voice to a growl. “I’ll be back,” he told me between gritted teeth. “Shut your mouth, or next time I’ll hurt you even more.”

His threats worked, because I decided never to say anything about it again.

Incredible as it may seem now, because of my silence nothing was ever done about it. The young man who raped a five-year-old girl in what should have been her safe haven got away scot-free. He remained part of the family and was even an occasional guest at reunions and celebrations.

That’s the part that kills my parents to this day.

That’s what my mother especially still holds on to.

She feels that she let me down.

The truth is, I couldn’t talk about it then, and I wasn’t able to speak about it properly for more than thirty years. It was my dirty
little secret, and I locked it away in the dark where no one else could see it.

My ordeal might have ended there but for the fact that I developed a morbid dread of going to the bathroom. In my child’s-eye view, everything distilled down to the blood—the blood between my legs. My blood on him. The blood he’d wiped from my parents’ sheets.

Blood had come to symbolize the intense and unhappy time we had in
that
house. I’d had terrible nosebleeds there. My aunt upstairs had blood all over her hands. I’d bled after the dog bit me. Moms had lost a baby there and bled. Juan had spurted blood after falling onto the glass. The president and his assassin had all been covered in blood on our TV screen.

Blood stained everything there.

I bled for a few more days, and every time I saw it, I felt even more afraid and ashamed and dirty and bad. Those feelings poisoned both my mind and my body. For the next few nights I waited until daylight to go to sleep because I was convinced the babysitter would come back.

I went from being a carefree little girl from a happy, loving home to someone who felt scared and anxious all the time.

Our bathroom became the center of my universe. Part of me wanted to lock myself away in there, but the other part was frightened to, in case I saw blood on the toilet paper again.

Whenever I did enter that scary place, everything around me seemed to come into much sharper focus. That little space became all I knew, and I saw every detail with dazzling clarity—the tiled white floor, the sink on the right, the toilet to the side of that, the shower to the left. There was opaque glass in the window so you could see people walking by, or—worse—standing outside waiting.

And all the time I was sitting and rocking and holding everything in, hyperventilating with the pain.

I was still so sore, it was uncomfortable even to sit. I couldn’t allow myself to strain in any way. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t function. I stopped eating and drinking so that I wouldn’t have to go. After a while my stomach began to bloat and I became feverish and sick.

When I wasn’t in the bathroom, I shuffled around with my head lowered. My entire focus was down—down to where it all happened. Moment to moment, I was just trying to exist and breathe through my fear.

What am I going to do?

How can I not go to the toilet?

What if I can never go again?

Everything hurt. It was getting worse. I lived in secret horror for weeks.

My parents were both busy working and Pops was out every night, but they kept asking me what was wrong. I merely repeated that I didn’t feel good. I wouldn’t explain why, and their growing frustration with me was evident.

All my life they’d been supportive and protective, but they couldn’t help me, and I couldn’t ask them for the comfort I needed—comfort they’d have lovingly provided if only they’d known the truth.

I had never felt so alone in my life.

After weeks of being unable to use the toilet, I became so sick that my mother had no choice but to take me to the hospital. My stomach was badly distended. The doctors at the community Highland Hospital checked me over and took my temperature and drew off some blood.

When they got the results, they told Moms it was a good thing she’d brought me in when she did. “Your daughter is so full of toxins that if you’d waited any longer, her life could have been in danger,” they told her gravely.

To my enormous embarrassment, they put me in a diaper. I was humiliated and begged them to take it off. “I’m too old!” I cried. Then they said that they’d give me some suppositories. I didn’t know what they meant, but when I learned that a stranger planned to put something inside me I became hysterical, screaming, “I don’t want anyone to touch me! Moms, please don’t let them touch me!”

The doctors tried to reassure me that suppositories would release my blockage, but I wouldn’t let them near me. My mother persuaded them to let her administer them at home, which she did while I cried. Then she took me to my grandmother’s house.

All the while, she kept asking me over and over why I didn’t tell her something was wrong. “Why did you feel like that?” she asked. My grandmother quizzed me too.

I couldn’t tell either of them; I was clammed up so tight. I wasn’t letting anyone else in.

What seemed like hours later, Moms found me standing awkwardly in the hallway outside the bathroom. The suppositories were finally taking effect, and my stomach was cramping painfully.

“I’m scared,” I told her as she knelt down beside me. I was still convinced I was going to die. Eventually, and despite my best efforts to contain myself, I began filling my diaper, and the shame of that forced me to the bathroom.

I sat on my grandmother’s toilet and finally let go. I didn’t want to hold on anymore. I purged. Outside, I overheard my cousins asking Moms what was wrong. “Sheila’s just a little sick,” Moms told them.

I was “just a little sick” for a very long time. I felt damaged. Violated. I didn’t know the word
rape.
I just knew that I felt different; that I
was
different. A part of me was gone forever.

I became so terrified of the dark and of going to bed that I asked for a night-light. My parents also had to keep my bedroom
door open so that the light from the hallway shone into the room.

My innocence had been stolen, without warning or apology.

The Bad Thing that happened
that
night in
that
house scarred me forever.

•  •  •

I suppose I must have recovered my senses eventually, because that same year my parents took me to Sweet’s for my first live performance with Pops. Nobody can recall now if it was designed to cheer me up, but—whatever the reason—it worked.

It felt so wonderful to be up on that stage in the spotlight that night and to lose myself to the music. I was happy again. I didn’t so much play those congas—those congas played me.

That night was the moment the dark direction my life had taken began to turn back toward a brighter path.

Not long afterward, we moved away from that evil house and all its horrid memories, which was a huge relief for me. I tried to put what happened there behind me.

It was never discussed again.

Many years passed before I could finally begin to acknowledge the profound sense of loss that accompanied those events and to start to believe in myself again. I locked my secret deep away inside me for so long, never realizing what damage it was doing.