“High cholesterol, it's good for you, trust me.” She laughed at him. And he told her to get dressed. He took her for a short walk down First Avenue, and then brought her back when she was tired. And he watched the baseball game while she slept in his arms that afternoon. She looked so beautiful and so peaceful. And when she woke up, she looked up at him, wondering how she'd been so lucky.
“What are you doing here, Mr. Mackenzie?” She smiled sleepily at him, and he leaned down to kiss her.
“I came over so you could work on your dictation.”
“No kidding.”
They ordered pizza that night, and he had brought some work with him, but he absolutely refused to let her help him. And after he'd finished, she looked at him, feeling guilty. It seemed late in the day to be keeping secrets from him, although she knew that he would never press her.
“I think I ought to tell you some things, Charles,” she said quietly after a few minutes. “You have a right to know. And you may feel differently about me after you hear them.” But it was time, before they went any further. Not everyone wanted a woman who had committed murder. In fact, she suspected that most wouldn't. And maybe Charles wouldn't either.
He took her hands in both of his, before she started and looked her in the eye squarely. “I want you to know that whatever happened, whatever they did to you, whatever you did, I love you. I want you to hear that now … and later.” It was the first time he had told her that he loved her, and it made her cry before she'd even started. But now she wanted him to listen and see how he felt after she had told him all of it. Maybe everything would change then.
“I love you too, Charles,” she said, holding him, with her eyes closed, and tears rolling down her cheeks. “But there's a lot you don't know about me.” She took a deep breath, felt for the inhaler in her pocket, and started at the beginning. “When I was a little girl, my father beat my mother all the time … I mean all the time … every night … as hard as he could … I used to hear her screams, and the sound of his fists on her … and in the morning I'd see the bruises … she always lied and pretended it was nothing. But every night he'd come home, he'd yell and she'd cry and he'd beat her again. After a while, you stop having any kind of life when those things happen. You can't have friends, because they might find out. You can't tell anyone, because they might do something to your daddy,” she said sadly. “My mother used to beg me not to tell, so you lie, and cover up, and pretend you don't know, and act like nothing's wrong, and little by little you become a zombie. That's all that I remember of my childhood.” She sighed again. It was hard telling him, but she knew she had to. And he squeezed her hand more tightly.
“Then my mother got cancer,” Grace continued. “I was thirteen. She had cancer of the uterus, and they had to do some kind of radiation, and …” She hesitated, looking for the right words, she didn't know him that well yet. “I guess that changed her … so …” Her eyes began to swim with tears, and she felt the asthma closing her throat, but she wouldn't let it. She knew she had to tell him. Her survival depended on it now just as it had on opening her eyes at Bellevue. “My mother came to me then, and told me I had to ‘take care’ of my father, to ‘be good to him,’ to be ‘his special little girl,’ and he would love me more than ever.” Charles was looking seriously worried as she told the story. “I didn't understand what she meant at first, and then she and Daddy came into my room one night, and she held me down for him.”
“Oh my God.” Tears filled his eyes as he listened.
“She held me down every night, until I knew I had no choice. I had to do it. If I didn't, no matter how sick she was, he would beat her, I had no friends, I couldn't tell anyone. I hated myself, I hated my body. I wore baggy old clothes because I didn't want anyone to see me. I felt dirty and ashamed, and I knew that what I was doing was wrong, but if I didn't do it, he would beat her, and me. Sometimes he beat me anyway, and then raped me. It was always rape. He loved violence. He loved hurting me, and my mother. Once when I didn't do it, because …” she blushed, feeling fourteen again, “because I had … my period … he beat her so bad, she cried for a week. She already had bone cancer by then, and she almost died of the pain. I did it anytime he wanted after that, no matter how much he hurt me.” She took a deep breath. It was almost over now. He'd heard the worst, or almost, and he couldn't stop crying. She gently wiped the tears from Charles's cheeks and kissed him.
“Oh Grace, I'm so sorry.” He wanted to take the pain away from her, to erase her past, and change her future.
“It's all right … it's all right now …” And then she went on. “My mother died after four years. We went to the funeral, and lots of people came over afterwards. Hundreds of them. Everybody loved my father. He was a lawyer, and everyone's friend. He played golf with them, went to Rotary dinners with them, and Kiwanis. He was the nicest guy in town, people said. He was the man everyone loved and trusted. And no one knew what he really was. He was a sick, sick man, and a real bastard.
“The day of the funeral, everyone spent the afternoon eating and talking and drinking, and trying to make him feel better. But he didn't care. He still had me. I don't know why, but somehow in my mind, it was all tied up with my mother. I was doing it for her, so he wouldn't hurt her. But I figured when she was gone, he'd find someone else. But of course he didn't want that. He had me. Why did he need anyone else? Not right off anyway. So when everyone left, I cleaned up, washed the dishes, put everything away, and locked the door to my room. He came after me, he threatened to knock the door down, and he got a knife and sprung the lock. He dragged me into her room, and he'd never done that before. He always came to my room. But going to her room was like becoming her, it was like knowing that it was forever and it would never stop, never, until he died or I did. And suddenly, I just couldn't do it.” She was choking again, and Charles had stopped crying, horrified by everything she'd told him. “I don't know what happened after that. He really hurt me that night, he pounded at me, he hit me, he'd won, I was his to beat and rape and torture forever. And then I remembered the gun my mother kept in her nightstand. I don't know what I was going to do with it, hit him, or scare him, or shoot him. I don't really know anything except that he was hurting me so much and I was so scared and half crazy with misery and pain and fear. He saw the gun, and he tried to grab it from me, and then the next thing I knew, it went off, and he was bleeding all over me. I shot him through the throat, and it severed his spinal cord and punctured his lung. He fell on top of me and bled horribly, and after that I don't remember anything until the police came. I'm not sure what I did. I called the police, I guess, and the next thing I remember was talking to them, wrapped in a blanket.”
“Did you tell them what he'd done to you?” Charles asked anxiously, wanting to change the course of history, and agonized that he couldn't.
“Of course not. I couldn't do that to my mother. Or to him. I thought I owed him total silence. In my own way, I guess, I was as crazy as he was. But that's what happens to children, and women too, in situations like that. They never tell. They'll die first. They called in a psychiatrist to talk to me, when they took me to jail that night, and she sent me to the hospital, and they found out that he'd raped me, or ‘someone had had intercourse’ with me, according to the DA”
“Did you ever tell them the truth?”
“Not for a while. Molly, the psychiatrist, hounded me to tell her. She knew. But I lied to her. He was still my daddy. But finally, my lawyer wore me down, and I told them.”