“Did you ever have something happen to you where it wasn’t your fault-I mean, you know it wasn’t your fault-but you still hold yourself responsible?” Mel asked.
Let me count the ways, I thought.
My mother died of cancer. My ex-wife died of cancer. Sue Danielson died of gunshot wounds. Anne Corley died of gunshot wounds. Only with Anne did I personally fire the weapon that killed her, and even that ended up being ruled justifiable homicide-self-defense. In all the others I was held blameless-as far as the world was concerned, but not on my own personal scorecard.
“Once or twice,” I conceded.
“Have I ever mentioned Sarah Matthews to you?”
I racked my brain and came up empty. “I don’t think so. Who’s she?”
“She was my best friend in high school-Austin High School in El Paso. Her father was a staff sergeant in the army and my dad was a major at the time. We were in the same homeroom.”
I was scrambling to pull together what little I did know about Mel Soames’s background. She had grown up as an army brat. Her dad, William Majors, was retired military who now lived somewhere in Italy with his second wife, Doris. Mel’s mother, Katy, was living in Florida with a long-term boyfriend, name unknown, whom she had so far declined to marry. I knew there had been bad blood all around during the breakup of their almost thirty-year marriage. As a result I had yet to meet any of Mel’s parental units.
“Major Majors?” I asked, trying to inject a little humor. “That must have been fun.
Mel didn’t respond in kind, and her grim expression didn’t change.
“Sarah and I were in the same homeroom for three years,” she continued. “My senior year Dad was transferred back to D.C. Sarah and I stayed in touch for a year or so-through graduation and for the first semester of our freshman year in college. She committed suicide a few days before Christmas of that year. She shot herself.”
“Where?” I asked.
“In the head,” Mel answered. “Blew her brains out.”
“No. I mean where was she when she died?”
“She was still in Texas-University of Texas at El Paso.”
I knew Mel had graduated from the University of Virginia. “So you weren’t anywhere around when it happened?” I asked.
“No,” Mel said. “Sarah was in El Paso. I was in Charlottesville.”
“So how could her committing suicide possibly be your fault?” I asked.
For an answer, Mel picked up a small book that had been sitting on the floor beside her. She got up, walked across the room, and handed it to me.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Sarah’s diary,” Mel replied. “I’m sure she was afraid someone at home might find it, so she must have hidden it on my bookshelf. When we moved, it got stuck in a box of books that stayed in storage until after my parents bought the house in Manassas at the beginning of my sophomore year. Mom found it and gave it to me. It pretty much explains everything.”
I was holding the book, but I didn’t think Mel actually intended for me to read it.
“What does it say?” I asked.
Mel’s eyes filled with tears. “Her father molested her,” she said. “From the time she was little. She tried to tell her mother, but her mom didn’t believe her.”
“Did she tell you?” I asked.
Mel shook her head. “Not in so many words. I think she tried, but I was too naive to understand what she was really saying. But if I had bothered to read the book…”
“You just told me that you didn’t know about the diary until after she was already dead.”
“Right, but…”
“But what?”
“If I had been a better friend, I would have listened more. And when her father tried to put the moves on me-”
“He went after you?” I demanded.
Mel nodded. “It was at a Christmas party at a neighbor’s house. He caught up with me out in the backyard. He was drunk enough that I was able to get away, and I never told anyone about what had happened. I was too embarrassed.”
“He was what,” I asked, “in his thirties?”
“Around there,” Mel conceded.
“And you were in high school? Whatever happened has nothing to do with you,” I declared. “It was his fault, not yours.”
“It’s not so much what happened before I read the diary,” Mel interjected. “It’s what happened afterward.”
“What did happen?”
“Nothing,” Mel answered hopelessly. “Not one damned thing. I kept my mouth shut and didn’t say a single word. By then Sarah’s mother, Lois, was already sick, crippled by MS and confined to a wheelchair. She was totally dependent on the man. If he’d gone to the slammer then, I don’t know what would have become of her. Sarah was already dead. What difference did it make? Even now, I doubt the diary itself would have been enough to convict him. So I just kept quiet.”
Mel sat in the window seat. She seemed to be staring out at the water, but I doubt she was seeing any of it.
“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.