7. Brothers and Sisters and Skeletons in the Closet…
Note: This is the seventh installment of the serial publication of my memoirs, “What’s Left Behind.” To read previous chapters, go to https://medium.com/whats-left-behind.
I can’t be sure when my brother first touched me. It’s these memories that get particularly jumbled when I try to piece together the shattered portrait of my childhood.
As best I can remember, I was seven years old. Eight, at most.
Colin and I were in the backyard, and he had me backed against the garage door, kissing me. I remember feeling scared — not so much of him, but because we stood in plain sight of anyone who might walk past the house or if our mother were to look out the kitchen window.
But that kiss was only a drop in the bucket.
In no time at all, Colin was taking full liberty with me, doing whatever he wished, whenever he wished.
True to our respective natures, I was overwrought with nerves that we would get caught, while my brother remained flagrantly indifferent to it all. Eventually, what began as the occasional activity when we happened to be alone, snowballed into an avid compulsion with my brother making advances toward me while our mother sat in the next room.
“What the hell are you DOING!?” she screamed, standing by the bedroom door, which had boldly been left open.
A plunging jolt.
Panic ripped through my body; Colin jumped off me, skirting past our mother and scarpering away.
I grasped my sweatpants by their elastic waistband and tried to pull them back on, but I’d hardly gotten them past my knees when I felt the sting of my mother’s hand on my bare skin as she smacked me — for what felt like an eternity — screaming about what I had done wrong. I wailed with every strike of her hand, trying to break free. But all I could do was let her hit me while I cried, begging to no avail for her to “Please, just let me pull my pants up!”
I remember lying there afterward — mortified, enervated.
Alone.
I ran my fingers over the impression of her hand, white on my reddened thigh.
When I finally swallowed my pride and found the courage to leave my room, my mother approached me in the kitchen.
“I want to talk to you,” she said.
But the sting of her hand still lingered — the shame and embarrassment, the hurt and hatred. I walked away without a word, taking my food into my bedroom and not coming out again unless I needed to.
With the exception of sharing it as an “amusing anecdote” with her boyfriend at the dinner table a few years later, the incident was never mentioned again.
At some point, Colin began luring other skeletons into our sordid closet.
There was this one little Hispanic boy who lived a couple of blocks away from us. I remember nothing about him except his name was Mateo, he was younger than me (maybe by a year or two), and he spoke with broken English. One blazing summer afternoon, the three of us were playing in the dirt hills of the empty lot behind the burned-out gun shop when my brother, tired of climbing up and sliding down the huge mounds of unearthed soil, asked Mateo if he wanted to come over and “play in the garage” — always the first clue that he had something sinister in store.
When we got up to the pigeon coop, Colin sat beside us, instructing me to do to Mateo the things he’d normally have me do to himself. It wasn’t long before Mateo started crying, yanked his pants back on and ran down the stairs as fast as he could without falling.
I never saw him again. But to this day I can see the expression of terror in his face; I can still feel the touch of his skin against my own and the chill of his tears as they trickled down my arm.
Mateo was an exception. In general, it was always Colin’s older friends he invited over to play with me — as if he had a toy no other kid in the neighborhood could afford. They would take me upstairs into the pigeon coop and take turns with me, practicing things they’d heard from their friends or recreating scenes from dirty magazines.
I can’t remember how many boys there were. There are gaps in my memory so vast it’s disturbing; on the other hand, I can’t help but be grateful that my brain has protected me from this information that might be just a little too much to bear.
I do remember some boys were kinder than others.
One Fall afternoon, I was with Colin and a friend of his in a patch of woods near the railroad tracks where they had ignited a small fire in the brush. Colin loved fire. He found it fun and fascinating, whereas I feared it burning out of control, engulfing everything around me. I pled with them to douse the flames, but they paid me no mind.
“I’m going home,” I cried, turning to leave.
“No, wait,” Colin called after me. “Come back.”
There was a certain way my brother would talk to me, a particular tone in his voice, that I always knew what was going to happen next — probably because it was the only time he was ever nice to me. But rather than causing me to run, or even walk away, it turned me into a different person: a brokenhearted, helpless little girl with no sense of right or wrong, good or bad; a lonely, deprived child who sought nothing else in the world but acceptance and affection.
I knew it was wrong.
But there was a sort of comfort in it — a comfort I craved so intensely it invoked a submissiveness that became the lifeblood of an unremitting self-loathing and shame.
When Colin approached me that day, his friend looked on disbelievingly. My brother invited him to join in, but this was one of Colin’s only friends who didn’t take him up on the offer.
“That’s fucked up!” he said.
I’ll never forget the tone of his voice — or, more so, the pang of shame I felt when he said it.
His judgment didn’t deter Colin in the least, and once his friend had left, my brother continued to have his way with me beside the fire.
Later that same day, our mother sat us down on the same bed she’d recently caught us in and confronted us.
“A little birdie told me he saw you two doing bad things together,” she said.
Bad things.
There was no “little birdie;” mere hours after what had transpired in the woods, I knew exactly who spoke to her and what they had seen. But, in keeping with the traditions of my family, it was always easier to turn a deaf ear. So I sat there quietly, worried that the pounding of my heart might give me away, as Colin denied everything, and our mother never questioned it.
I can’t say for sure whether my mother knew what was going on between my brother and me; I can say that any parents even remotely attuned to their children would have known something was very wrong. Even our father, who probably spent less time at the house than the mailman, seemed privy to it.
I sat with my father one overcast afternoon while he worked on the deck in our backyard. It was during one of his many phases of contrition that came chock full of promises, my father decided to put his master carpentry skills to use at home.
The project: installing a Jacuzzi in the backyard and encircling it with a deck that would extend around to the back door.
Of course, had this been any other construction job, it would have been completed in a few weeks. But this was a special project. This was a project I think my father created just so he had something to do in case he fought with his girlfriend and had to come home for a few days. Consequently, the deck remained a shell of two-by-fours hemming in a hot tub which was never installed properly. In the summertime Colin and I would use the garden hose to fill it with water. Essentially, it became a makeshift swimming pool for my brother and I, and just another place he could seduce me.
Beside my father, I sat holding a small pile of three-inch nails. It was my first time seeing him since I had fallen out of the pigeon coop.
“Did it hurt?” he asked me, taking a nail from the palm of my hand.
Did it hurt? I thought, looking in my father’s blue eyes. Of course, it hurt! I fell out of a second story window, asshole!
“Yes,” I stated softly, looking away.
“Can I ask you something?” he said a minute later.
“Yeah.”
“Why is there a blanket laid out in the coop?”
Without a trace of eye contact, my father took another nail from my open hand and hammered it into a plank that lay between us.
“I don’t know,” I answered, the steadiness of my voice in stark contrast to the upheaval in my nerves — a skill I’d probably mastered before I could tie my own shoes.
“You’re not doing bad things, are you?”
Bad things.
“No,” I replied.
“Okay, just checking.”
Continue on to Chapter 8: Shame and Fear and the Strength of the Human Spirit
