“Where are Sarah’s parents now?” I asked gently.
“Lois Matthews died about seven years ago. Sarah’s father, Richard, is remarried and lives somewhere in Mexico. When I heard he was marrying again, I wrote a letter to his second wife. I told her I was a friend of Sarah’s and that she had told me about being abused by her father as a child. I warned her to be careful—to make sure that he wasn’t allowed around young children, especially young girls. She never wrote back. I don’t know if she believed me or not. Maybe the letter never got through.”
“So you did do something,” I said.
Mel nodded. “I suppose,” she agreed. “But I didn’t do enough, not about him. What I did, instead, was get involved in the sexual assault community. By my junior year in college I was volunteering at the rape crisis center in Charlottesville once a week. That’s also when I decided to become a cop and changed my major from English to police science. I’ve been involved ever since,” she added. “So now you know. That’s how I became one of ‘those women.’”
The very idea of incest disgusts me. The fact that someone could do such a horrible thing—that a man could repeatedly violate his own child—is something I can barely comprehend. Still, I was slightly relieved. I had been afraid Mel was going to relate something horrific that had happened to her personally. When Richard Matthews had come after her, she had managed to elude him, so at least the worst of the nightmare had happened to someone else. But Mel had been victimized, too. Her hurt was collateral damage to her friend’s lifelong violation and eventual death.
For the first time I found myself wondering about some of the other women in that glittering ballroom at the Sheraton. What had propelled each of them to enter the sexual assault fray? Maybe there was something similar lurking in the lovely Anita Bowdin’s background that would account for her involvement in SASAC, something all the silk and emeralds in the world couldn’t quite erase. Maybe even the doyen of women’s studies, the daunting Professor Clark herself, had suffered some similar circumstance that had marred her very existence. Maybe all the women on the board were, in one way or another, deeply damaged.
Mel had fallen silent and seemed to be waiting for some response from me.
“I’m sorry for your friend,” I said quietly. “And I’m sorry for you, too. It’s an awful thing to have carried around on your own for all these years.”
“Thank you,” she said. “But I haven’t been that alone. When I’m with the women from SASAC, none of us is alone.”
I’ve been a cop all my adult life. I know the statistics—six out of ten girls and one out of four boys are molested prior to age eighteen. And I had certainly seen the irreversible damage a history of child abuse leaves in its wake. I had seen the deadly results of the years Anne Corley spent watching her father routinely abuse her developmentally disabled sister. But I don’t think I had ever internalized it in the same way as I did when Mel made that one quiet and very simple statement about not being alone. And it gave me a whole new perspective on “those women” at the Sheraton—the gutsy, determined, well-dressed women who had somehow moved beyond whatever had befallen them personally and who were striving to help others. It made me embarrassed to think how churlish I’d been with Mel afterward. And it made me wish I’d made a larger donation.
“Being involved in something like that changes you,” Mel said after a long pause. “It changes your whole outlook on life. That’s why I don’t dwell on it and why I don’t talk about it very often—and it’s why I couldn’t talk about it last night, not after all the stories we’d just heard. It brought it all back, and it hurt too much.
“But I really want you to understand where I’m coming from,” she continued. “Working for SASAC and for organizations like it—raising money and raising awareness—means a lot to me. It makes me feel like I’m doing something in Sarah’s honor even though it’s too little too late to help her. Maybe I’m helping prevent what happened to Sarah from happening to some other unfortunate little girl. Or maybe when it does happen she’ll realize that there are places she can turn to for help, where someone will really listen to her. The only help Sarah could see was turning a gun on herself.”
Mel needed comforting, and I did what I could. “It sounds to me like you’ve accepted what you couldn’t change and you’re changing what you can,” I told her. “That’s part of what we talk about in AA. It’s how we learn to go on. Thank you for telling me,” I added. “I know it wasn’t easy.”
Mel gave me a bleak smile. “Thank you for listening,” she said.
“So now that I’m back in your good graces, what should I do?” I asked. “Make a bigger donation?”
“No,” she said. “What you contributed is fine. Listening is better.”