Keeping Secrets in Seattle

chapter Twenty


May 13, 2012

Now that the truth is out there, exposed for all to see…the different details of that night are haunting my thoughts again. Especially the way my mother had looked at me that night when I stumbled through the door in a torn shirt with a swollen lip. She’d had pity written all over her face when she said, “This is what happens when you look like we do, Violet.” As if beauty constituted rape…

I didn’t hear from Gabe the next day. Or the four after that. Every night, as I lay in my bed, his words would reverberate in my mind, over and over again:

Why would a parent let their daughter’s rapist go free? I can’t believe they’d let him walk after hurting you.

The first few months after the rape were filled with questions like that. Why had my mother kept it a secret? Was I not worth justice? Over the years I’d simply pushed my feelings of unworthiness to the back corner of my brain where I stored all the other memories of that night.

I fished my BlackBerry out of my pocket after work on the fifth night and furiously punched the numbers on the keypad.

“Violet, dear, are you calling to tell me that you’re sorry?”

My molars ground together. “Hi, Mom. Um, no. What would I be sorry for?”

“For running off to Vegas with a boy I haven’t even met.” She sighed dramatically.

“I’m sorry. If it’s any consolation, we broke up.” I wandered over to the couch and flopped down.

“I guessed you did, considering you sent me an e-mail saying you were flying home alone and that the wedding was off.” There was a pause, and I heard the ice in her tumbler tinkle. It was four-thirty. Time to let her frosted hair down and begin her nightly ritual. Cocktails and vacation planning with my plastic surgeon stepfather. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I closed my eyes. “No. It’s over. In fact…um…Gabe came over after I came home.”

Mother drew a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Nora told me the wedding was canceled.”

“Gabe and Alicia were over before he came to my apartment.” I glanced at the center of the living room where Gabe finally told me he loved me.

“Are you sure about that?” she asked.

“Yes.” My head swam. “Why?”

“Well, Nora said that Alicia’s been over to their house twice since Gabe called off the wedding.” My mom’s voice had a hint of enjoyment in it. She’d always had a thing for controversy. It was the southern belle in her. “Crying and carrying on and such. Nora says she’s just distraught, but that Gabe wants nothing to do with her.”

Justified, I fist-pumped the air in my living room. “Well, she’ll get the hint eventually.”

“Are you and Gabe together now?” She sighed. “Like…for good? I mean, I know that neither one of you ever stopped caring about the other.”

“You did?” For years, I’d assumed that my feelings for Gabe were a secret I kept hidden from the world with all of the others. Apparently I sucked at being nonchalant.

My mother scoffed. “Everyone did.”

Case in point.

She shifted her phone again. “It’s about time you two admitted that you love each other.”

“I guess.”

“You guess?” She laughed breezily. “You two love each other, and he’s not engaged to that redhead anymore. What’s there to guess about? Go get him.”

“It’s not that simple,” I said, my voice thin and tense. “The reason I’m calling is…” I paused as the thickness in my throat increased.

“What’s wrong? You sound funny.”

“Gabe knows.”

That was all I needed to say. My mother didn’t even have to ask me what the hell I was talking about, because I practically heard her jaw drop over the phone.

When she finally spoke, her voice was hoarse. “You told him?”

“Gabe deserves to know everything.” I wiped my sweaty palms on the legs of my jeans.

“I see.” She drew in a long breath, then let it out slowly. “And how did he take it?”

Tears sprang to my eyes. “Not well.”

She cleared her throat. “I guess I should prepare myself for Nora’s phone call, then.” My mother’s voice now sounded like a guitar string pulled too tight, on the verge of snapping.

I nodded. “Probably. Gabe asked me for some space. I haven’t heard from him in days.”

“Space?”

“Yes. Space. He was really upset, Mom. He just found out that one of his best friends is a rapist, and that the other has been lying to him for almost a decade.” I was trying really hard not to snap at my mother, but I didn’t know how much longer I could hold out. I punched a hot-pink throw pillow instead. “This is all on top of finding out that his fiancée was a gold-digging liar. Let’s just say, Gabe’s got a lot to process right now.”

“A lot to process.”

I shook my head. “Is there an echo in here? Yes. A lot to process.”

“I guess that’s understandable.” Her voice resumed its happily disconnected lilt. “You’ll just need to give him time, Violet. He’ll come around.”

I closed my eyes. Talking to my mother was giving me a colossal migraine. “I really think you and I should talk.”

A pregnant pause followed, filled with all of the comments and questions we’d dared not utter for nine freaking years. “Why’s that, dear?”

Every exchanged glance between my mother and me, every stilted conversation, every ignored nightmare or panic attack—they all pressed against my skull, begging to be released and talked about. Possibly over coffee, and definitely in a Dr. Phil–style sit down.

“Because Gabe really got me thinking about some things.” I held my breath. My mom was the queen of brushing things underneath the three-thousand-dollar imported Asian rug. If it was a subject that required her to step out of her chardonnay and aerosol hairspray-filled bubble, Leandra avoided it.

“Fine.” She sounded meek. “Come over tomorrow for some brunch. I’ll make waffles.”

The wad in my throat loosened the slightest bit. “Is ten o’clock all right?”

…

We stared nervously at each other. The mauve walls and Tiffany light fixture above our heads made me feel like my mother and I were meeting at a brothel, not her breakfast nook. A delectable aroma from the steaming plates wafted through the room. Usually our conversations consisted of local gossip, or we watched slideshows on her laptop of Curtis’s and her most recent vacations. But this morning, I had an agenda.

“I want to talk about it,” I said, taking a long pull off my orange juice to try and wash the lump out of my throat.

“Talk about what?” She blinked and took a dainty sip of her coffee.

“Mom,” I said, gripping my fork tightly. “That night.”

“Oh, that.” She cut a dime-sized bite of waffle. “Then we can talk, if it’ll make you feel better.”

Unbelievable. She was treating the fact that I wanted to discuss being sexually assaulted like menstrual cramps. Take two aspirin, darlin’, and tomorrow mornin’ you’ll be good as new! I wanted to throw my breakfast in her face.

I slammed my fork down on the table. “Dammit, Mom.”

Her smile faltered. “What?”

I cleared my throat. “I want to talk about what happened.”

My mother’s eyes flitted around the room. “We decided that all of this needed to stay private.”

“No, you decided that. I never decided that. I went along with what you said to do. And I should have spoken up for myself.”

“Why do you say that?”

I gaped at her in disbelief. “We let a rapist walk free.”

She leaned closer to me. “Lower your voice, Violet. Curtis is in his office.”

I rolled my eyes. “You see? There you go again.”

She was silent.

The backs of my eyes stung with tears. “Why did you tell me not to ruin Cameron’s life? Why did it even matter to you what happened to him after you saw what he did to me?”

My mom looked down, her deliberately clueless façade crumbling. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”

“How was throwing me into the shower and telling me to pull myself together the right thing?”

My mother covered her face. “I’m sorry.”

My face heated with anger. “You’re sorry? Mom, it ruined my life!”

“I…I…” Her words stalled like an old car in an intersection.

I used a napkin to wipe my eyes. “Do you understand how awful it was for me to keep a secret like that?”

“Of course I understand.” Her shoulders had shook. Holy crap, I’d made my mother cry. In twenty-five years, I’d treated my mother as if she were made of glass. As a kid, when she acted faint, I ran to get her a cold compress. And when she was upset over the loss of yet another boyfriend, I was always the one to curl up in her bed, stroke her hair, and remind her that there were more fish in the sea.

I reached across the small table to touch her shoulder. “Don’t cry. I…I’m sorry.”

She sniffled softly and used her napkin to dab at her eyes. Only my mother could look that lovely while crying. Her cheeks were slightly flushed while the rest of her was beautifully moistened. I hated that. When I cried, I was splotchy and red. Like I’d been punched in the face a dozen times.

“Don’t apologize,” she said. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”

I sat back in my seat, my mouth hanging open.

She wiped her nose with the napkin. “It only took me a few months to realize how wrong my approach was.”

“How so?” I whispered.

“As soon as you refused to go back to school, it occurred to me that seeing that boy every day in the halls at your school would be horrible for you.” She looked off in the distance wistfully. “I never had to face the man who raped me again.”

She’d never shared any details about her own attack with me. Only the simple fact that she’d been assaulted during the preliminaries for the Miss Texas State pageant.

“He was a judge,” she continued. “He was in his thirties, and had a family. Once the pageant was over, I never saw him again, and I’m so thankful for that. I don’t know what I would have done. I never considered how terrified you must have been to see Cameron at school.”

I looked away. “It was sickening.”

She leaned forward, her pearl necklace dangling precariously close to her plate. “When I went home to my mama after it happened, guess what she did to me? She said, ‘Pull yourself together. Don’t ruin that man’s family. Girls that look the way you look have to make allowances in life.’”

I grimaced. “Sounds familiar.”

My mom cut another bite of waffle but left it on her plate and just stared. “I guess I just thought this was the way you handled things like that.”

“Why didn’t you want to turn the judge in?” I asked. “Didn’t you want him to pay for what he’d done?”

Her shoulders slumped. “Yes. I came home from rehearsal by myself that night. My mama was waiting in the hotel room for me, and she was angry because we were late for the banquet dinner. When I went into the room, she could see something was wrong. My cheek was swollen from where he hit me, and my dress was torn.

“She started a shower for me and told me to get in. I did what my mother told me to do. And when I got out, I asked her when we were going to call the police. I remember being sad because it meant that I probably wouldn’t be able to participate in the pageant the next day.”

Only Leandra Cohen would be recovering from being beaten and assaulted and still be concerned about the beauty contest she’d entered.

My mom took a shaky sip of coffee and continued. “She showed me the pageant program, where there was a picture and a snippet about each judge. Under the picture of the judge who’d pulled me under the stage, there was a paragraph detailing his talent agency in Austin, and how his favorite pastime was to go windsurfing with his wife and three sons. She said we weren’t going to ruin that man’s life just because he couldn’t help himself around me. She gave me a Valium and told me to go to sleep. The next morning, she put pancake makeup on my bruised cheek, sent me down to the auditorium, and I won the whole pageant.”

My mouth dropped open.

“By the time I went away to college and met your father, I’d pretty much gotten over it. Sure, I still got a little nervous when I was alone, and I carried a kitchen knife in my purse, but overall, I was okay.” She offered me a dainty smile.

I gaped at her. “Mom, carrying a kitchen knife in your purse doesn’t constitute okay.”

“Yes, but when your father and I got married and moved up here to Washington, I stopped thinking about it. Old news. Your father never even knew about it. When you came home that night, it all came back to me. The fear, the horror. I just wanted to help you pull yourself together. I handled it the same way my own mother handled it. She’d forced me to get over it, so…”

“So you expected me to get over it, too?”

My mom’s smile faltered. “I just assumed that we would clean you up, keep you home from school for a week or so until you felt better, and then you’d be back to normal.”

“What was normal?” I glared at her. “Once I left Cameron’s house, there was no more normal in my life!”

She flinched. “I didn’t know how to backtrack. I knew that if we called the police weeks and weeks later, that there would be no evidence left. Plus, I knew it would become something of a spectacle, and—”

I looked my mom dead in the eye. “Heaven forbid we create a spectacle.”

Her eyes filled. “I’m so sorry. It wasn’t that I didn’t want people to know. You told me that you’d flirted with that boy. And that you led him on. The other kids saw you. I was trying to save you the pain of trying to prove your innocence to people.”

“It made me sick to know that he was walking around free. To know that he got to keep going to Wallingford High like a normal kid while I got shipped off to Utah because I couldn’t function anymore.” I looked up at the ceiling when the tears came. I would not shed any more tears over this.

My mom dabbed her napkin at the corners of her eyes again. “I didn’t want people to judge you. You couldn’t avoid the Parkers forever. They were asking questions and wanted to know where you were. Nora was on the case, and she would have hit the roof if she knew what really happened.”

I sucked in a breath. “I wish we would have told them the truth.”

My mother took hold of my hands across the table. “I never meant to make you feel like you weren’t important enough to fight for. I wish I could do it over again. I wish I would’ve picked up that phone and called the police myself. Had I known all of the pain that was going to stem from that one night, I would have handled everything differently. Everything.”

“You have no idea what that means to me.” I squeezed her hand back. “I’m sorry, but I lost my appetite.”

She looked at her plate. “Looks like we wasted some perfectly good waffles. Gabe would be disappointed.”

“True.” My heart tugged at the mention of his name. I wondered where he was, or what he was doing.

My mother patted her frosted hair helmet. “Can I give you a ride home, darlin’?”

“What? Sure,” I answered, gazing out the window at the Parkers’ back deck. I searched the three people standing under the awning, out of the rain, for Gabe. He didn’t appear to be there.

I sighed. I was headed there next to see if Nora and Guthrie had heard from him this week.

My mom tilted her head to the side. “Did you hear from Gabe today?”

Squinting across my mother’s lawn and the Parkers’, I shook my head. “No.”

She stood up and began clearing the table. “Sounds like you two need to sit down and sort all of this out.”

I nodded and leaned closer to the window, the hair on the back of my neck standing upright. I recognized Guthrie’s balding head as he stood laughing at something his wife had said, her long braids swaying as she gestured to their houseguest, whose blond hair remained gelled and unmoving in the breeze. Through the distance and closed windows I could scarcely hear the sound of their voices, but one person’s laughter stood out amongst the others.

Watch where you’re going, Muffin Top. The cafeteria is that way.

I’d heard that same maniacal laugh so many times during my teenage years, it haunted my dreams. His face came into focus through the wavy restored glass of my mother’s Victorian-era windows, and every last drop of blood in my body ran ice cold.

I threw open the back door and charged halfway across the yard in the pouring rain before even giving a thought to what I would say when I walked into the Parkers’ yard. I could hear my mom calling my name behind me, but it was muffled like I was underwater. The only sound that came through loud and clear was my heartbeat.

Cameron Hakes was standing on the Parkers’ back deck.