Two Kingdoms, Chapter Four
Sun, Aug. 25th, 2013 02:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
judicious_imitationTitle: Two Kingdoms, Chapter Four
Canon: Polyfaceted
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Original characters (Meyers family); Brenda (Young) Meyers/Bill Meyers; past Brenda/Brett Saunders
Rating: R
Word Count This Chapter: 3,541
Warnings This Chapter: Past incestuous child sexual abuse (of a toddler and of an older child), present incestuous sexual harassment of a preteen, anxiety.
Summary: In this chapter, Karen's sexual abuse at Brett's hands comes out, and the family feels the effects of the revelation.
Master Post
Chapter Three
Bill sits outside with Karen by the neighbor’s picket fence, rubbing her back and holding her hair back when she starts to dry heave. He can’t ask while she’s like this; what she’s told him and what he knows about her biological scum is enough for now. Part of his mind is planning how to kill the bastard, something he won’t follow through on, he knows. The rest is worrying about his daughter and how they’ll tell her mother. This isn’t something he can keep from Brenda, not like Karen’s nightmares or anything lesser like that. It’s too huge.
Finally, Karen stops heaving and rubs her hands over her face. “Daddy?” she says in a small voice.
“I’m here, sweetheart.”
“He said—he said he’d kill Mom and Sam and Zach if I ever told. But—but I had to,” she pleads. “I couldn’t not now. With how Mom sounded and what you said, it—it was too much.” She chokes on a sob. “If he finds out—”
“Karen,” he cuts in before she can work herself into another panic attack, “do you think he could get through me?”
She darts a glance at him. “You’re not always with them.”
“If he actually followed through—and I think he’s too much of a coward and too afraid of prison to do it—it would be at home, when everyone’s here. And he could not get through me. Not even if he was armed.” He’s confident in that; the bastard is a high school history teacher. He himself is an honorably discharged former Special Forces sergeant. It’s almost pathetically mismatched.
Not that the scum would follow through on it. Not now. Maybe before, when it was just Brenda and the kids, but not now that Sam’s in high school and Bill and Dawn are in the house.
Karen twists slightly, enough to press her forehead against his upper arm; he has to let go his loose hold on her hair. “I’m scared,” she says, barely audible.
Bill can’t honestly say it’s going to be okay. It won’t be okay for a long time. “We’ll take care of you,” he promises. “We’ll deal with this.”
She nods tentatively. “You’re telling Mom.”
“I am,” he says, “but not today.” He can’t wreck the day she has the baby. “Tomorrow. Do you want to be with me?”
She gives him a terrified look. “Mom’s going to—” She cuts herself off.
“Going to what?” he asks patiently.
“I don’t know,” and now she’s crying, hiccupping sobs that tear through her voice. “She’ll—she’ll be mad at me, she won’t believe me, she—don’t make me be there, please don’t make me be there, I—”
His hand stills where he was rubbing circles on her back. “Sweetheart, she won’t be mad at you.” She’ll be furious at their daughter’s molester, but that’s different. “She’ll absolutely believe you. You wouldn’t lie to us.”
Karen breaks. She falls against his chest, clinging to him, wracked with harsh cries that tear themselves from her throat. His shirt has soaked spots within seconds, but that doesn’t matter. He wraps his arms around her, rocking her as best he can with their awkward position, him sitting against the fence, her facing it and her upper body against his chest. The best he can do is hold her, stroke her hair, and rock her upper body a few inches in each direction.
She cries herself dry. When she manages to pull back and look up at him, his shirt is drenched and disgusting. Her face is puffy, splotched with red, her eyes bloodshot.
“What now?” she asks.
“Now,” he says quietly, “we go home if your mom’s had the baby. You stick with your siblings, me when I come downstairs. You talk to me as much or little as you want.”
“After that?” she asks, her voice smaller. “Tomorrow?”
He sucks in a breath, steeling himself. “We tell your mom, and we call the police.”
She gives him a horrified look. “I—no, we can’t, please!”
“We call them,” he repeats resolutely. “We file a report. We get the evil bastard put away for a long time.”
“But it was so long ago,” she pleads. “Too long ago to do anything.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t think so. We’ll find out tomorrow.” He closes his eyes for a brief moment. “Kare, can I ask you something that’s going to upset you?”
She meets his eyes for a split second before nodding heavily. “Okay.”
“How old were you?”
“When it started or—” She can’t seem to finish.
Not just once. It happened over a period of time. Bill’s murderous thoughts gain a new foothold in his mind. “Started and ended.”
“Three.” She coughs deeply, as though there’s something in her throat, and he thinks she might start retching again. “And—a few nights, I think, before Mom ended things. When I was about five.”
Bill’s gut clenches, and he briefly thinks it’s his turn to throw up. Two years. Two years, and no one knew. It might have even happened in Brenda’s home, given that the demonic scum would have stayed over when Brenda was dating him again. “We’re going to deal with this,” he says. He’s not sure which of them he’s trying to convince.
“How?” she asks. “It won’t just—just go away. I can’t stop the nightmares or remembering it or—or anything.” She swallows. “How?”
“Therapy,” he begins. “Getting him put away for a good long time. Terminating his parental rights. Everything we can to separate you from him as much as possible.”
“He used to make me sit on his lap,” she mumbles. “During visitation.” She drops her chin to her chest, and he can barely make out the rest. “Now he talks about how pretty I am and how I’m growing up to be a beautiful young lady.” The words she emphasizes have a hateful bitterness to them. “And Uncle Ron doesn’t know, so—so he couldn’t make him stop and protect me and—” Her voice catches.
“Sweetheart,” he says after a moment, when it’s clear she’s not going to continue, “I’m going to call and see if we can go home without upsetting you.”
She nods, and he shifts enough to get his phone out of his pocket; he originally had it on him in case he needed to call for help for Brenda. He hits the speed dial for Dawn automatically.
“How’s Karen?” Dawn asks the second she answers.
“Not good. Is the baby here?”
“Yeah, about two or three minutes ago. Everything’s quieter now. It’s—”
“Don’t tell me,” Bill cuts in. “We’ll be home soon, then.” He ends the call and looks down at Karen, stroking through her curly hair. “All done. You want to go home and meet the baby?”
She nods and pulls away, swiping her arm across her face. It doesn’t help clean her face at all, but he doesn’t say as much. She struggles to her feet; he thinks all the crying and vomiting has worn her out. “Let’s go home.”
Bill stands, taking Karen’s offered hand as unnecessary help up. He drapes his arm around her shoulders. “This okay?”
She darts a glance at him and nods. “It’s good.”
He nods, and they walk back home together.
*
Brenda insists on being with Karen when the detective interviews her. Her daughter, though, hesitates between, “I won’t do it if Mom’s not there,” and, “I don’t want Mom to hear.”
It’s Brenda’s demand they go with in the end. They sit in an interview room on hard plastic chairs across the table from Detective Moynahan. She’s a hard-edged woman with lines around her mouth and deep frown lines on her forehead; Brenda can only imagine what it’s like to investigate sex crimes as a career.
Detective Moynahan opens with, “Do you need anything, Karen? Some water, maybe?”
Karen, her hands clenched together on the table so hard her knuckles are white, shakes her head. “No,” she mutters.
“I’m going to record this,” the detective says. She sets a mini recorder on the table between them. “I need to be able to come back to this later, and I don’t want you to have to talk about it every time.”
Karen nods, her head just barely jerking, and Brenda says, “Thank you.”
Moynahan settles in her chair, looking as comfortable as anyone can in a molded plastic chair. Then again, she’s probably used to them. She turns on the recorder, says who she is, who she’s interviewing, the date, the case number, and finally looks at Karen. “Karen, tell me what happened. Just the overview,” she adds.
Karen’s mouth works before she chokes out the words, “My fa—father raped me when I was little.”
Brenda reaches for her daughter; Karen flinches away before leaning into the touch of Brenda’s arm on her back.
“And your father is Brett Saunders,” Moynahan says.
Karen nods.
“Aloud, please,” she says gently.
“Yes,” Karen mutters.
“I’m going to have to ask you some hard question,” Moynahan says, much more gently than Brenda would have guessed she could. “If you need to take a break, tell me and we will.”
More than once over the next four hours, Brenda wants to cut in, shield her daughter from any of this and make it end, but the only way it’s going to end is if Karen never has to see the bastard again. So she holds her daughter when she cries too hard to answer a question and keeps a hand on her when she can talk.
After, they drive home in near-silence; Brenda breaks it once to ask, “Do you want to get anything to eat?” since it’s been a good nine hours since breakfast, though she isn’t hungry.
“Not hungry,” Karen mutters.
Ten minutes later, she asks timidly, “Are you going to make me have therapy?”
“We’ll talk about that later,” Brenda says, which is not a no, and they both know it.
Karen just slumps down further in her seat.
They pull into the driveway a few minutes after that, and neither of them makes a move to get out. At last, Brenda sighs and looks over at her daughter. “Come on, honey. Let’s go inside.”
Karen blinks, her eyes bright. “Does—does everyone know?”
“Not Zach,” she says immediately. Her six-year-old is much too young, though he’ll eventually find out what happened to his sister. “But Sam and Dawn… yeah, they know.”
In a small voice, Karen asks, “Aunt Liz and everyone? Gramma and Grampa? Grandma Sharon?”
Brenda shakes her head. “Not yet, but they’ll find out. Uncle Ron’s probably going to need to testify, since he went to visitation with you. I don’t know if anyone else will. It’s up to you if your cousins know, at least for now.”
“I don’t want to tell anyone.” Karen’s breath catches. “Will you and Daddy?”
Brenda reaches over to stroke Karen’s cheek. “Liz and Ron can tell Valerie and Melanie, if you want them to.”
“Sam’s going to be so—so mad at himself,” Karen sobs. “It’s not his fault, Mom, but—”
“We’ll talk to him,” she promises. “You can tell him, sweetheart.” From the corner of her eye, she can see Bill rounding the corner of the walkway to the front door. “Let’s get out, Karen.”
Karen swipes at her eyes and unbuckles her seatbelt. “Okay.”
Brenda opens her door as Bill reaches it. She meets his eyes and shakes her head minutely. He grimaces but says, “The baby needs you, beautiful.”
Karen’s door slams, and she slumps around the front of the SUV. Bill turns to her, but Karen shies away and speeds up.
“She might not want to be around anyone for a while,” Brenda says. She fills him in quietly as they follow Karen into the house.
Sam’s holding a fussy Will when he meets them in the foyer. “I’m going to talk to Karen,” he says softly.
“All right.” Brenda takes the baby, and Sam turns to follow Karen up the stairs.
*
Karen tries to keep to herself for as long as she can, but no one lets her. She has more nightmares, and, after most of them, she wakes to Zach crawling into her bed and cuddling up to her. He usually heads off any other nightmares when he does that; it’s enough that she wants to ask him to just sleep in her bed from the start of the night. She doesn’t, but he starts taking it upon himself, staying awake until she comes up for the night and then getting in her bed after her.
The first time he does, he asks, “Can I sleep with you?” like he’s doing it for himself instead of her.
She nods and kisses his hair. “Thanks,” she says softly.
He nods solemnly. “Will you tell me what’s wrong?”
“I—not right now. Later.”
“Okay. You need to talk to Sam,” he adds, yawning.
“I know. Let’s go to sleep.”
Zach nods and curls closer to her, and she wraps around her little brother. He doesn’t manage to stave off bad dreams, but she doesn’t have any real nightmares.
The next day, she finds Sam in his room and asks, “Can I sit with you?”
He looks up at her from his laptop. He has dark circles under his eyes, and she feels awful for it. “Yeah.”
She sits on the bed beside him, wrapping her arms around one of his like she did when she was little. “Is this okay?”
“Of course.” He presses a kiss to the top of her head, even though she’s getting close to his height.
She closes her eyes and rests her head on his shoulder while he types. After what seems like a few minutes, she asks, “Are you okay?”
He laughs bitterly. “I’m supposed to ask you that.”
“Everyone’s asking me that,” she mutters. “I like that you aren’t.”
“I’m not okay,” he says after a moment. “I feel terrible, Kare.”
“You shouldn’t,” she says as firmly as she can manage. “It’s not your fault.”
“I was in the other room,” he says flatly. “You’re my little sister. I should have protected you.”
“How?” she asks.
He’s silent.
“He would have hurt you if you tried to stop him,” she continues. “If you told Mom—he said he’d kill you and Mom if I told, and he would have if you told, too. I wouldn’t have let you.”
“I could have called 911 if I knew,” he tries.
“You were a little kid.” She shakes her head. “I never thought it was your fault or you could have stopped him. Nothing did, even getting visitation changed.”
“What do you mean?” he asks cautiously.
“Remember how he’d make me sit on his lap?”
“Karen…”
“Even with Uncle Ron right there,” she says. “Even then, he made me, and he’d have a hard-on. And when Daddy started going, Dad—Brett,” and even she’s surprised by the hate in her voice, “told me how pretty I’m growing up to be.”
Sam shudders. He shifts, then turns to wrap his arms around her, pressing his face into her curls. “God, Karen, I’m sorry,” he says, his voice muffled. “I should have done something, I don’t care if he would have hurt me. I should have protected you.”
“Sam,” she says, and she’s surprised she’s not crying yet, not really, even though tears are sliding down her cheeks, “Daddy being there didn’t stop him, and he could kill him with his bare hands. Nothing stopped him.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again, his voice choked. It takes her a moment to realize he’s crying. Sam is crying. She can’t remember the last time he did. He’s seventeen, almost an adult, her cool big brother, and he hurts enough that—
That’s it for her. The thought wrenches a sob out of her, and she clings to her brother just as hard as he’s holding her.
She barely hears Dawn ask, “Guys?” some time later, and she doesn’t respond to their sister at all. She’s too wrapped up in her brother.
A little while after that, she does hear Mom, her voice broken, say, “Oh, my babies,” and Mom gathers the two of them in her arms.
Even then, with the two of them holding each other and Mom holding them, Karen cries herself dry. It seems like she’s doing that every day lately. Sam takes even longer to stop, and she doesn’t pull away from him until he does. Then she looks up, and Mom has tears running down cheeks.
The next day, Mom pulls the two of them aside and says softly, “I set up family counseling. It’s just going to be us to start with,” she adds, “but we’ll have Zach come a couple of times, and I think we should have your dad and Dawn come sometimes, too.”
Karen, too drained to argue, nods. That makes two therapists she’ll be seeing, plus a psychiatrist every two weeks.
Sam just says, “When?”
“Friday evening. I made sure it wouldn’t conflict with anything for you then.”
He nods. “I’ll see if Leila can go out Saturday instead.”
“Okay.” Mom kisses their cheeks. “Want to watch something together?” She tries for a smile. Karen can’t remember the last time she’s seen a real smile from their mother, not even with the baby.
“I have homework,” Sam says dully.
Karen hasn’t gone to school yet this year. Her psychiatrist has written a note for her to be out for at least two weeks, and she says it can be even longer. She’s probably going to end up seeing the guidance counselor, too, when she does start going, and she’ll have to see the nurse every lunch for her anxiety medication. She’s really not looking forward to it.
“I want to tell Zach,” she says suddenly, before Sam’s even left their little huddle.
“Are you sure?” Mom asks quietly.
“Just—just that Brett hurt me and that’s why we don’t see him.”
“I want to be there,” Sam says, his voice hollow. “In case he has questions.”
“We’ll all be there,” Mom says. “All three of us.”
Karen could argue and probably get her way, but she’s too tired for it. “I want to tell him after dinner.”
Mom nods. “Okay.”
She must say something to Daddy, since he takes Dawn and Will out for ice cream after dinner. Zach usually gets to watch something after dinner, once he’s taken a shower and helped clean up, but instead, the three of them sit down with him.
“I want to tell you why I’m having nightmares,” Karen says before he even gets to pick a movie.
Zach turns to her and nods. “Okay.”
“It’s why we haven’t had to see Brett.”
Zach studies her.
“When I was little, littler than you are, before Mom even got pregnant with you, Sam and I used to have to stay with him every other weekend.” Karen swallows. “I slept in the living room because he didn’t like me to sleep in the same room as Sam.”
“That’s why he got mad when he found out we share a room,” Zach guesses.
“Probably.” Karen was spitefully pleased when he got angry over it and couldn’t do a thing, not with Uncle Ron there and how he wasn’t allowed to talk to Mom at all or come to the house. “Anyway—why I have a lot more nightmares now. At night, after Sam went to bed, Brett would hurt me. Sam didn’t know,” she adds, “and he was just a kid, so he couldn’t do anything, anyway.”
Sam gives her a look like he wants to argue, but he doesn’t say anything.
Zach scoots over and hugs her around the middle. “You didn’t tell Mommy?”
Karen shakes her head. “No.” She swallows. “He told me—he said he’d kill Mom and Sam if I told anyone.”
Zach gasps.
“He can’t do anything now,” she adds hastily. “He’s in jail, and he can’t get out.” That’s not the whole truth—she knows about bail and how someone could still pay it for him—but Zach doesn’t need to know that. Besides, it’s like Daddy said. He’s around too much for Brett to have the nerve to even try anything. “But that’s—that’s why I’m having so many nightmares. You help a lot,” she adds.
“I’ll keep sleeping with you,” Zach says solemnly. “Is it like he hurt Mommy?”
“Yes,” Mom says before Karen can say anything, “it was like that.”
“What’s gonna happen to him now?” he asks.
“Eventually,” Mom says, “there’s going to be a trial. If he’s found guilty, he’ll go to prison for a long, long time.”
“Good,” Zach says forcefully. “We don’t ever have to see him again?”
“No,” Mom says, “you don’t ever.”
Karen knew that, of course, but hearing that unknots one of the many ropes in her throat. She hugs Zach tighter, and when she goes up for bed, he’s already in hers, watching the door for her. She comes in, and he sits up, opening his arms wide to hug her.
Chapter Five
Canon: Polyfaceted
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Original characters (Meyers family); Brenda (Young) Meyers/Bill Meyers; past Brenda/Brett Saunders
Rating: R
Word Count This Chapter: 3,541
Warnings This Chapter: Past incestuous child sexual abuse (of a toddler and of an older child), present incestuous sexual harassment of a preteen, anxiety.
Summary: In this chapter, Karen's sexual abuse at Brett's hands comes out, and the family feels the effects of the revelation.
Master Post
Chapter Three
Bill sits outside with Karen by the neighbor’s picket fence, rubbing her back and holding her hair back when she starts to dry heave. He can’t ask while she’s like this; what she’s told him and what he knows about her biological scum is enough for now. Part of his mind is planning how to kill the bastard, something he won’t follow through on, he knows. The rest is worrying about his daughter and how they’ll tell her mother. This isn’t something he can keep from Brenda, not like Karen’s nightmares or anything lesser like that. It’s too huge.
Finally, Karen stops heaving and rubs her hands over her face. “Daddy?” she says in a small voice.
“I’m here, sweetheart.”
“He said—he said he’d kill Mom and Sam and Zach if I ever told. But—but I had to,” she pleads. “I couldn’t not now. With how Mom sounded and what you said, it—it was too much.” She chokes on a sob. “If he finds out—”
“Karen,” he cuts in before she can work herself into another panic attack, “do you think he could get through me?”
She darts a glance at him. “You’re not always with them.”
“If he actually followed through—and I think he’s too much of a coward and too afraid of prison to do it—it would be at home, when everyone’s here. And he could not get through me. Not even if he was armed.” He’s confident in that; the bastard is a high school history teacher. He himself is an honorably discharged former Special Forces sergeant. It’s almost pathetically mismatched.
Not that the scum would follow through on it. Not now. Maybe before, when it was just Brenda and the kids, but not now that Sam’s in high school and Bill and Dawn are in the house.
Karen twists slightly, enough to press her forehead against his upper arm; he has to let go his loose hold on her hair. “I’m scared,” she says, barely audible.
Bill can’t honestly say it’s going to be okay. It won’t be okay for a long time. “We’ll take care of you,” he promises. “We’ll deal with this.”
She nods tentatively. “You’re telling Mom.”
“I am,” he says, “but not today.” He can’t wreck the day she has the baby. “Tomorrow. Do you want to be with me?”
She gives him a terrified look. “Mom’s going to—” She cuts herself off.
“Going to what?” he asks patiently.
“I don’t know,” and now she’s crying, hiccupping sobs that tear through her voice. “She’ll—she’ll be mad at me, she won’t believe me, she—don’t make me be there, please don’t make me be there, I—”
His hand stills where he was rubbing circles on her back. “Sweetheart, she won’t be mad at you.” She’ll be furious at their daughter’s molester, but that’s different. “She’ll absolutely believe you. You wouldn’t lie to us.”
Karen breaks. She falls against his chest, clinging to him, wracked with harsh cries that tear themselves from her throat. His shirt has soaked spots within seconds, but that doesn’t matter. He wraps his arms around her, rocking her as best he can with their awkward position, him sitting against the fence, her facing it and her upper body against his chest. The best he can do is hold her, stroke her hair, and rock her upper body a few inches in each direction.
She cries herself dry. When she manages to pull back and look up at him, his shirt is drenched and disgusting. Her face is puffy, splotched with red, her eyes bloodshot.
“What now?” she asks.
“Now,” he says quietly, “we go home if your mom’s had the baby. You stick with your siblings, me when I come downstairs. You talk to me as much or little as you want.”
“After that?” she asks, her voice smaller. “Tomorrow?”
He sucks in a breath, steeling himself. “We tell your mom, and we call the police.”
She gives him a horrified look. “I—no, we can’t, please!”
“We call them,” he repeats resolutely. “We file a report. We get the evil bastard put away for a long time.”
“But it was so long ago,” she pleads. “Too long ago to do anything.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t think so. We’ll find out tomorrow.” He closes his eyes for a brief moment. “Kare, can I ask you something that’s going to upset you?”
She meets his eyes for a split second before nodding heavily. “Okay.”
“How old were you?”
“When it started or—” She can’t seem to finish.
Not just once. It happened over a period of time. Bill’s murderous thoughts gain a new foothold in his mind. “Started and ended.”
“Three.” She coughs deeply, as though there’s something in her throat, and he thinks she might start retching again. “And—a few nights, I think, before Mom ended things. When I was about five.”
Bill’s gut clenches, and he briefly thinks it’s his turn to throw up. Two years. Two years, and no one knew. It might have even happened in Brenda’s home, given that the demonic scum would have stayed over when Brenda was dating him again. “We’re going to deal with this,” he says. He’s not sure which of them he’s trying to convince.
“How?” she asks. “It won’t just—just go away. I can’t stop the nightmares or remembering it or—or anything.” She swallows. “How?”
“Therapy,” he begins. “Getting him put away for a good long time. Terminating his parental rights. Everything we can to separate you from him as much as possible.”
“He used to make me sit on his lap,” she mumbles. “During visitation.” She drops her chin to her chest, and he can barely make out the rest. “Now he talks about how pretty I am and how I’m growing up to be a beautiful young lady.” The words she emphasizes have a hateful bitterness to them. “And Uncle Ron doesn’t know, so—so he couldn’t make him stop and protect me and—” Her voice catches.
“Sweetheart,” he says after a moment, when it’s clear she’s not going to continue, “I’m going to call and see if we can go home without upsetting you.”
She nods, and he shifts enough to get his phone out of his pocket; he originally had it on him in case he needed to call for help for Brenda. He hits the speed dial for Dawn automatically.
“How’s Karen?” Dawn asks the second she answers.
“Not good. Is the baby here?”
“Yeah, about two or three minutes ago. Everything’s quieter now. It’s—”
“Don’t tell me,” Bill cuts in. “We’ll be home soon, then.” He ends the call and looks down at Karen, stroking through her curly hair. “All done. You want to go home and meet the baby?”
She nods and pulls away, swiping her arm across her face. It doesn’t help clean her face at all, but he doesn’t say as much. She struggles to her feet; he thinks all the crying and vomiting has worn her out. “Let’s go home.”
Bill stands, taking Karen’s offered hand as unnecessary help up. He drapes his arm around her shoulders. “This okay?”
She darts a glance at him and nods. “It’s good.”
He nods, and they walk back home together.
Brenda insists on being with Karen when the detective interviews her. Her daughter, though, hesitates between, “I won’t do it if Mom’s not there,” and, “I don’t want Mom to hear.”
It’s Brenda’s demand they go with in the end. They sit in an interview room on hard plastic chairs across the table from Detective Moynahan. She’s a hard-edged woman with lines around her mouth and deep frown lines on her forehead; Brenda can only imagine what it’s like to investigate sex crimes as a career.
Detective Moynahan opens with, “Do you need anything, Karen? Some water, maybe?”
Karen, her hands clenched together on the table so hard her knuckles are white, shakes her head. “No,” she mutters.
“I’m going to record this,” the detective says. She sets a mini recorder on the table between them. “I need to be able to come back to this later, and I don’t want you to have to talk about it every time.”
Karen nods, her head just barely jerking, and Brenda says, “Thank you.”
Moynahan settles in her chair, looking as comfortable as anyone can in a molded plastic chair. Then again, she’s probably used to them. She turns on the recorder, says who she is, who she’s interviewing, the date, the case number, and finally looks at Karen. “Karen, tell me what happened. Just the overview,” she adds.
Karen’s mouth works before she chokes out the words, “My fa—father raped me when I was little.”
Brenda reaches for her daughter; Karen flinches away before leaning into the touch of Brenda’s arm on her back.
“And your father is Brett Saunders,” Moynahan says.
Karen nods.
“Aloud, please,” she says gently.
“Yes,” Karen mutters.
“I’m going to have to ask you some hard question,” Moynahan says, much more gently than Brenda would have guessed she could. “If you need to take a break, tell me and we will.”
More than once over the next four hours, Brenda wants to cut in, shield her daughter from any of this and make it end, but the only way it’s going to end is if Karen never has to see the bastard again. So she holds her daughter when she cries too hard to answer a question and keeps a hand on her when she can talk.
After, they drive home in near-silence; Brenda breaks it once to ask, “Do you want to get anything to eat?” since it’s been a good nine hours since breakfast, though she isn’t hungry.
“Not hungry,” Karen mutters.
Ten minutes later, she asks timidly, “Are you going to make me have therapy?”
“We’ll talk about that later,” Brenda says, which is not a no, and they both know it.
Karen just slumps down further in her seat.
They pull into the driveway a few minutes after that, and neither of them makes a move to get out. At last, Brenda sighs and looks over at her daughter. “Come on, honey. Let’s go inside.”
Karen blinks, her eyes bright. “Does—does everyone know?”
“Not Zach,” she says immediately. Her six-year-old is much too young, though he’ll eventually find out what happened to his sister. “But Sam and Dawn… yeah, they know.”
In a small voice, Karen asks, “Aunt Liz and everyone? Gramma and Grampa? Grandma Sharon?”
Brenda shakes her head. “Not yet, but they’ll find out. Uncle Ron’s probably going to need to testify, since he went to visitation with you. I don’t know if anyone else will. It’s up to you if your cousins know, at least for now.”
“I don’t want to tell anyone.” Karen’s breath catches. “Will you and Daddy?”
Brenda reaches over to stroke Karen’s cheek. “Liz and Ron can tell Valerie and Melanie, if you want them to.”
“Sam’s going to be so—so mad at himself,” Karen sobs. “It’s not his fault, Mom, but—”
“We’ll talk to him,” she promises. “You can tell him, sweetheart.” From the corner of her eye, she can see Bill rounding the corner of the walkway to the front door. “Let’s get out, Karen.”
Karen swipes at her eyes and unbuckles her seatbelt. “Okay.”
Brenda opens her door as Bill reaches it. She meets his eyes and shakes her head minutely. He grimaces but says, “The baby needs you, beautiful.”
Karen’s door slams, and she slumps around the front of the SUV. Bill turns to her, but Karen shies away and speeds up.
“She might not want to be around anyone for a while,” Brenda says. She fills him in quietly as they follow Karen into the house.
Sam’s holding a fussy Will when he meets them in the foyer. “I’m going to talk to Karen,” he says softly.
“All right.” Brenda takes the baby, and Sam turns to follow Karen up the stairs.
Karen tries to keep to herself for as long as she can, but no one lets her. She has more nightmares, and, after most of them, she wakes to Zach crawling into her bed and cuddling up to her. He usually heads off any other nightmares when he does that; it’s enough that she wants to ask him to just sleep in her bed from the start of the night. She doesn’t, but he starts taking it upon himself, staying awake until she comes up for the night and then getting in her bed after her.
The first time he does, he asks, “Can I sleep with you?” like he’s doing it for himself instead of her.
She nods and kisses his hair. “Thanks,” she says softly.
He nods solemnly. “Will you tell me what’s wrong?”
“I—not right now. Later.”
“Okay. You need to talk to Sam,” he adds, yawning.
“I know. Let’s go to sleep.”
Zach nods and curls closer to her, and she wraps around her little brother. He doesn’t manage to stave off bad dreams, but she doesn’t have any real nightmares.
The next day, she finds Sam in his room and asks, “Can I sit with you?”
He looks up at her from his laptop. He has dark circles under his eyes, and she feels awful for it. “Yeah.”
She sits on the bed beside him, wrapping her arms around one of his like she did when she was little. “Is this okay?”
“Of course.” He presses a kiss to the top of her head, even though she’s getting close to his height.
She closes her eyes and rests her head on his shoulder while he types. After what seems like a few minutes, she asks, “Are you okay?”
He laughs bitterly. “I’m supposed to ask you that.”
“Everyone’s asking me that,” she mutters. “I like that you aren’t.”
“I’m not okay,” he says after a moment. “I feel terrible, Kare.”
“You shouldn’t,” she says as firmly as she can manage. “It’s not your fault.”
“I was in the other room,” he says flatly. “You’re my little sister. I should have protected you.”
“How?” she asks.
He’s silent.
“He would have hurt you if you tried to stop him,” she continues. “If you told Mom—he said he’d kill you and Mom if I told, and he would have if you told, too. I wouldn’t have let you.”
“I could have called 911 if I knew,” he tries.
“You were a little kid.” She shakes her head. “I never thought it was your fault or you could have stopped him. Nothing did, even getting visitation changed.”
“What do you mean?” he asks cautiously.
“Remember how he’d make me sit on his lap?”
“Karen…”
“Even with Uncle Ron right there,” she says. “Even then, he made me, and he’d have a hard-on. And when Daddy started going, Dad—Brett,” and even she’s surprised by the hate in her voice, “told me how pretty I’m growing up to be.”
Sam shudders. He shifts, then turns to wrap his arms around her, pressing his face into her curls. “God, Karen, I’m sorry,” he says, his voice muffled. “I should have done something, I don’t care if he would have hurt me. I should have protected you.”
“Sam,” she says, and she’s surprised she’s not crying yet, not really, even though tears are sliding down her cheeks, “Daddy being there didn’t stop him, and he could kill him with his bare hands. Nothing stopped him.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again, his voice choked. It takes her a moment to realize he’s crying. Sam is crying. She can’t remember the last time he did. He’s seventeen, almost an adult, her cool big brother, and he hurts enough that—
That’s it for her. The thought wrenches a sob out of her, and she clings to her brother just as hard as he’s holding her.
She barely hears Dawn ask, “Guys?” some time later, and she doesn’t respond to their sister at all. She’s too wrapped up in her brother.
A little while after that, she does hear Mom, her voice broken, say, “Oh, my babies,” and Mom gathers the two of them in her arms.
Even then, with the two of them holding each other and Mom holding them, Karen cries herself dry. It seems like she’s doing that every day lately. Sam takes even longer to stop, and she doesn’t pull away from him until he does. Then she looks up, and Mom has tears running down cheeks.
The next day, Mom pulls the two of them aside and says softly, “I set up family counseling. It’s just going to be us to start with,” she adds, “but we’ll have Zach come a couple of times, and I think we should have your dad and Dawn come sometimes, too.”
Karen, too drained to argue, nods. That makes two therapists she’ll be seeing, plus a psychiatrist every two weeks.
Sam just says, “When?”
“Friday evening. I made sure it wouldn’t conflict with anything for you then.”
He nods. “I’ll see if Leila can go out Saturday instead.”
“Okay.” Mom kisses their cheeks. “Want to watch something together?” She tries for a smile. Karen can’t remember the last time she’s seen a real smile from their mother, not even with the baby.
“I have homework,” Sam says dully.
Karen hasn’t gone to school yet this year. Her psychiatrist has written a note for her to be out for at least two weeks, and she says it can be even longer. She’s probably going to end up seeing the guidance counselor, too, when she does start going, and she’ll have to see the nurse every lunch for her anxiety medication. She’s really not looking forward to it.
“I want to tell Zach,” she says suddenly, before Sam’s even left their little huddle.
“Are you sure?” Mom asks quietly.
“Just—just that Brett hurt me and that’s why we don’t see him.”
“I want to be there,” Sam says, his voice hollow. “In case he has questions.”
“We’ll all be there,” Mom says. “All three of us.”
Karen could argue and probably get her way, but she’s too tired for it. “I want to tell him after dinner.”
Mom nods. “Okay.”
She must say something to Daddy, since he takes Dawn and Will out for ice cream after dinner. Zach usually gets to watch something after dinner, once he’s taken a shower and helped clean up, but instead, the three of them sit down with him.
“I want to tell you why I’m having nightmares,” Karen says before he even gets to pick a movie.
Zach turns to her and nods. “Okay.”
“It’s why we haven’t had to see Brett.”
Zach studies her.
“When I was little, littler than you are, before Mom even got pregnant with you, Sam and I used to have to stay with him every other weekend.” Karen swallows. “I slept in the living room because he didn’t like me to sleep in the same room as Sam.”
“That’s why he got mad when he found out we share a room,” Zach guesses.
“Probably.” Karen was spitefully pleased when he got angry over it and couldn’t do a thing, not with Uncle Ron there and how he wasn’t allowed to talk to Mom at all or come to the house. “Anyway—why I have a lot more nightmares now. At night, after Sam went to bed, Brett would hurt me. Sam didn’t know,” she adds, “and he was just a kid, so he couldn’t do anything, anyway.”
Sam gives her a look like he wants to argue, but he doesn’t say anything.
Zach scoots over and hugs her around the middle. “You didn’t tell Mommy?”
Karen shakes her head. “No.” She swallows. “He told me—he said he’d kill Mom and Sam if I told anyone.”
Zach gasps.
“He can’t do anything now,” she adds hastily. “He’s in jail, and he can’t get out.” That’s not the whole truth—she knows about bail and how someone could still pay it for him—but Zach doesn’t need to know that. Besides, it’s like Daddy said. He’s around too much for Brett to have the nerve to even try anything. “But that’s—that’s why I’m having so many nightmares. You help a lot,” she adds.
“I’ll keep sleeping with you,” Zach says solemnly. “Is it like he hurt Mommy?”
“Yes,” Mom says before Karen can say anything, “it was like that.”
“What’s gonna happen to him now?” he asks.
“Eventually,” Mom says, “there’s going to be a trial. If he’s found guilty, he’ll go to prison for a long, long time.”
“Good,” Zach says forcefully. “We don’t ever have to see him again?”
“No,” Mom says, “you don’t ever.”
Karen knew that, of course, but hearing that unknots one of the many ropes in her throat. She hugs Zach tighter, and when she goes up for bed, he’s already in hers, watching the door for her. She comes in, and he sits up, opening his arms wide to hug her.
Chapter Five
