Confessions at 2 A.M. on Mother’s Day

In my mind, she hands me a naked Barbie and tells me, “Put the Band-Aid where it hurts.” My hands flutter in my lap, unsure whether to point at the pussy or the head or the heart, and knowing that only the first would elicit any response or change. But it never hurt there, not really. I press my thumb into the soft face and over the hard, plastic breasts, the perfect stomach, skip the problem spot, and go straight for the feet, turning Barbie over and dangling her above the rough, industrial blue carpet.

“It doesn’t hurt,” I tell her finally, in my head. “I’m not sure it even happened.”

I remember holding my hand above my head to touch the plastic sheets that hang from the unfinished ceiling. Doorframes stand without walls between them, without doors swinging open and shut like in my own house. A thin layer of sawdust and used sandpaper litters the floor. I smile and titter; I am with the first friend from Mrs. Higham’s first grade class to invite me to their house, even though said house isn’t constructed yet. We run on the rattling, teeter-totter floorboards and shriek with laughter if one of us topples over and finds an earthworm peeking out of the wet earth between the cracks.

The beginning of this memory is yellow. Light streams through the plastic sheets and blinds me momentarily as I run through them, looking over my shoulder at Alex, whose platinum blonde hair also catches the light and winks at me. My bangs are getting long and fall into my eyes in sweaty clumps; Alex is much prettier than I am and I know it, even at six. Every time I see Alex’s dad leaning on a lone-standing doorframe, smoking, I remember I’m being silently surveyed, and then forget again, squealing as my friend jumps out from behind her father and screams, “Boo! I got you! I scared you so bad!” She teaches me the word “caca” when we go outside and draw with the neighbor kid’s chalk stubs that he left outside in the rain and never bothered to pick up, not even when he saw the brand new pieces deteriorate in colored swirls down the street drain.

I may be piecing together many separate days of play dates, but in my mind it’s one, fluid memory. One moment we are laughing and reflecting the sun through the gaps in an unfinished house, and the next the entire scene is in grayscale. Alex and I stand awkwardly with our legs apart, each of us with one foot on a floorboard (separated by two-inch gaps). We stare in awe at the exposed innards of the toilet. The sink will one day look artfully placed, sticking out of the wall with its pipes and rubber tubing hidden, but for now they curl to either side like Princess Leia’s hairdo.

There’s a moment of black—a gap in my recollection—and suddenly my butt is on one of the rickety floorboards that rocks back and forth and makes a racket because I’m shaking, and Alex is standing over me, her curtain of hair falling into my eyeballs and making me blink tears, and I’m wishing she’d get her spit and her bad breath out of my face. “Just let me kiss it,” she says. “I’ll make it better.”

I shake my head and try to scramble back, the pipes digging into my back and the floorboards just shaking harder. I am so unsteady, suspended eight feet over the house’s concrete foundation. My arm is clamped over the bowl and my head is trapped between the sink and the side of the toilet. I’m biting my trembling lip and snot runs into my mouth.

“It’ll be okay,” says Alex’s dad. He’s smoking and leaning against the doorframe, but there’s a wall around this frame and suddenly all I call see is him, him and the ugly, exposed bricks and drying grout. “Just calm down.” He leans forward, but I can’t see what he’s doing anymore because Alex has tugged down my magenta, cotton shorts, and I’m fighting to keep the elastic above my waist. She’s still standing above me. Her thighs are skinny, the same width as the bone beneath with no meat, no mystery to them. Knobby, trembling knees. She shifts her weight to try and get the advantage, and I see little, round burns dotting the inside of her thighs, like from the butt of a cigarette.

“I—just—want—to—see,” she grunts, clawing at my arms now, leaving angry marks with her jagged, chewed fingernails. “You have to let me look.”

“No,” I moan at her, “No,” twisting to my side so my head wrenches free and my hipbone juts up and hits her nose. Alex begins wailing, but I don’t care, I’m pulling my shorts up and standing and running out the door—Alex’s dad isn’t in the way any longer, he’s to the side, his dirty jeans piled around his ankles.

I tear through the plastic sheets and run across Alex’s lawn to the sidewalk where we played with chalk and kick every last piece into the street drain, not stopping to think that Alex’s dad might be calling my mom to say, “No, it’s fine, you don’t have to pick her up. I’ll bring her home later.” I take off running again, pulling my shirt down every few seconds as it rides up my plump, bouncy belly, trying to ignore the trickle of sweat running down my chest and near my secret place. I’m still crying, so I stop under the lone, fruitless apple tree my mom planted in front of our brick-and-stucco house a few weeks before and wipe my face on my sawdust-covered hands. After a few minutes I snort all the gritty snot back up my nose and walk inside.

“You’re filthy. That must mean you had a fun time,” my mom jokes, and I nod, feeling weak and wanting to go to sleep. I collapse in my mom’s arms and when I wake up, I’m hugging my Barney pillow with my thumb in my mouth.

Now it’s eleven years later and I’m considering telling the psychologist I asked my mom to get me. Mostly we talk about anger management, but I don’t have the kind of anger issues she’s telling me how to deal with—there’s nothing to count to ten over. I know which battles are worth fighting over, and usually it amounts to none. Or if I do express my anger, I regret I did as the aggressor carries on with her huffing and puffing while I’m billowing the fireplace for when she drops down the chimney to try and eat me. I’m sure Dr. Blackwell wonders why I come in and sit on her couch, probably wonders if my mom is an alcoholic or if my dad beats me or if I’m into drugs. I only have eight sessions with her on my insurance, so I should get the reason out soon, if at all.

I’ll begin with, “Dr. Blackwell, something happened to me when I was younger that I’d like to talk to you about, but you really can’t tell my mother. It’s nothing bad. It doesn’t hurt me. It doesn’t hurt. But it would hurt her.”

Because maybe when I was six my mother could have helped me; she could have stroked my hair and carefully avoided the still-tender spots on my skull and secretly have put Alex’s dad in jail and gotten Alex a new dad over the phone, speaking in angry whispers. But when I was six, my secret place was mine and I couldn’t articulate that it existed, let alone that someone wanted me to divulge it. I wasn’t sure it was wrong. I thought, maybe Alex and her dad were just playing a game. Maybe my secret place is fun. Maybe it would have made them happy.

When I was around ten, Alex came to Oklahoma to visit. We’d moved a few times by then and I liked to pretend I didn’t dream about her at night—but then there she was, solid, much less scary than the entity she’d warped into over the years. My mom and I picked her up from the airport and her platinum blonde hair was almost to her waist. It was thin and wispy, while mine was still thick and tangled. I sent her sideways glances, but she always looked straight ahead, the whole visit. She spoke when spoken to and was the last one to leave the dinner table, her eyes unfocused and grim. She left without a word while I was still sleeping, and when my mom got back from the airport I heard her talking to my dad that she thought Alex might have been abused as a child.

It wasn’t until I was older and sat up straight in bed one night, having woken from a nightmare, that I realized that Alex and her daddy were very, very bad and I should have told someone when I had the chance but now it was too late. My mom would just cry and blame herself, and my dad would just get purple in the face and blame my mom, too.

Now I want to tell everyone. Perfect strangers. “I was sexually abused as a kid.” Exaggeration, since no one ever touched me, but it still feels so good to see acquaintances’ pupils get wide and their nostrils flair as they struggle to come up with something to say, and when they finally do, “I’m sorry,” we get back to normal and everything settles down like after a river swell. I find the tension enthralling, like I’m living back in that moment with my head trapped and Alex’s cold fingers poking around at my waistband and Alex’s dad’s pupils growing larger and larger as he staggers sideways and fumbles with the button on his jeans.