He reminded me he chose to do that, to break with Eden, and his life. That he’d compromised everything he believed in, spent all those years hiding me, keeping me safe from Adrian and Curtis. That he’d educated me and loved me like a father, a brother, a lover, and if I loved him at all I would do this for him.
When I still refused, he flew into a fury and attacked me. He said words I still do not comprehend about the night I was given to the Reasoning, the Reasoning that started the life in my womb. That the man Adrian was not the one who’d been there in my blindfolded darkness, but it was Doug, my surrogate father, my best friend and teacher, who’d held me down and raped me for hours. He was full of rage, his eyes wild and fiery, and he put his hand around my neck and forced me to listen to his confession, and in those brief moments of cataclysmic shock, I realized what he said was true.
He knew exactly what touching me in violence would do. The bastard did it on purpose so I’d follow his instructions. Between his threatening touch and his awful, painful truth, I had no choice but to fight him off.
Before I knew what had truly happened, he was dead on the floor, my hands locked in a death grip around his neck. When I came back from the dark place, realized what I’d done, I sobbed, tried to bring him back to life. When it didn’t work, and I began to comprehend the enormity of my situation, what I’d done, I cleaned him, wiped the blood from his face with the dishtowel I’d somehow wrapped around his neck and followed through with the rest of his ridiculous plan to bring these hateful shadows into the light.
I will always be haunted by the knowledge that at the end, when I began to put pressure on his throat, he did not resist me. He wanted his death to be at my hands.
And now I have what some people like to call closure, what he’d always wanted for me. All I ever wanted was to be with my daughter, but I’d never admitted that to him, or even myself. I spent years pretending to be something I was not. Doug kept me at home, dressed me as a boy, educated me himself. When I went out in the world, I kept to myself, made no friends and continued the charade, because I loved him for saving me.
Always on my mind, though, was the child I will never see again.
They are good people, her adoptive parents. Kind. They love her. Though they still don’t seem to realize that locked doors are no match for a true mother’s love.
I am happy she loves them, and they her. She probably won’t remember me when she’s grown, or if she does, she’ll have a foggy recollection of a strange woman who held her close and whispered I love you a thousand times over the course of a starlit night.
Rachel’s bedroom is pink and full of soft things. She sleeps like a lightning bolt, arms and legs spread away from her body at odd angles, the sleep of a child well loved, and safe. I spent the dark hours of that night tracing her limbs under the sheet, looking at the tiny similarities between us—she has my nails, long-bedded and elegant, and my nose and eyelashes and freckles. She has parts of him, too, the broad forehead and cornflower-blue eyes, and while I should hate him for what he did, I smile to see them.
I have forgiven him. I know now why he did what he did, and how his actions, though horrible, saved me from a far worse fate. I am grateful his blood flows through her veins and not the filthy, tainted blood of the killer who should have been her father.
That night, watching my daughter sleep, her rosebud mouth puckered as if she just learned to stop sucking her thumb but it hadn’t forgotten the motion, I knew exactly what must be done. She is so beautiful. So perfect. So clean. I cannot allow anyone else to be sullied.
I am not clean. I am not good. I am a depraved, broken human being who has no right to live. I want things to be all right, to go back to the way they’re supposed to be. If only I had lived in a world where my parents loved me, walked me to the bus stop and met me there when school let out. Parents who made more of an effort to find me when I went missing, and were happy when I was rescued, all these years later.
If wishes were horses, right? Or something like that.
Here is the truth, if you are brave enough to hear it.
There is darkness in the world, a heavy hatred of all that is good and right. You might call it evil, or immorality, or simple a callous disregard for humanity. Some people choose this path through the shadows, their breath hot and frantic on the wind. Their poison spreads, infecting others who also embark on the dark journey.
Curtis is one of these people. Mother to us all, she was bereft of any maternal qualities. She allowed unspeakable things to happen to me. She used me as her personal broodmare. She forced drugs into me and made me listen to her endless ramblings about the mystic cosmos and our place in it. She marked my soul, and my skin, made me her drudge, tortured and humiliated me, then built me up, fed me golden stories and washed my hair and feet like I was a supplicant.
She is a demon, come to earth to punish the wicked.