The Seduction - Art Bourgeau (36 page)

"Use your goddamn jacket," Peter said.
Which only left something to break the glass with. There was no loose
brick or stone. "Use
yourself
.
. ."
What? Oh, sure
.
And she went to the window over the kitchen sink, stuffed Peter's
leather jacket against it to muffle the sound and gave it a sharp hit
with her elbow. The sound of glass shattering momentarily froze her.
She waited in a half-crouch, expecting headlights at any minute,
swarms of police cars.

Nothing came. She brushed away the glass and climbed
through the window onto the sink and slid to the floor. The house was
dark, but it had always been dark, all her whole life. It was a
familiar darkness.

She didn't turn on any lights. They would only
attract attention, and besides she didn't need them. She'd always
thought of herself as a cat, a night person. Her instincts were all
she needed.

She paused outside the door to her father's study.
The night's strain had taken its toll; she felt exhausted. She needed
a drink and five minutes to unwind, to escape the gnawing pain in her
gut that had never left. She followed the dark hallway to the living
room, where she poured herself a large brandy and flopped into an
easy chair. She found a cigarette in a china box on the coffee table,
sat back and blew a column of smoke toward the ceiling.

What a mess—what a colossal mess she'd made of it
all. Just as her father had warned her . . . it was what happened
when you let your heart rule your head. Stupid . . .

Well, she'd never again be taken in by a man like him
. . . Like Felix. The two were so alike in her head she sometimes got
them mixed up . . . He had used her, deceived her, rejected her even
though she had offered him everything . . . And now, because of
letting her feelings run away with her, it looked as though he was
going to get away with it, go free after what he'd done to her, and
she was the one who was going to have to suffer for it. Just as
always . . . it wasn't fair, it wasn't, it wasn't . . .

And that bitch Laura . . . no question she'd milk her
pitiful little cuts for all they were worth. She'd convince Felix she
was Joan of Arc. The thought of them together was enough to make her
want to throw up . . .

She took a long drink of the brandy, and half-smiled,
her thoughts shifting to Cynthia. That was a bright spot. She'd
really enjoyed it and knew Cynthia had, too. Maybe she'd try another
older one, but not too much older. Like Cynthia, old enough to really
appreciate her, before their body got wrinkled and saggy like she
knew Miss Priss Laura's was.

Worse than all of that, here she sat, her body full
of pain on account of a pregnancy she didn't want, feeling it tearing
at her insides. And it was all his fault. Goddamn him. His? Felix's,
yes Felix, who else? He had made her inseminate herself and go
through this misery. Missy . . . Missy. Thanks to him and Felix and
that wimp, Carl. All faithless, all users.

As she reached for the doorknob to her father's study
the pain got worse. She would have liked to talk to him, to tell him
about it, what he'd done to her . . . Then maybe he'd fix it, as he'd
done when she was little. He'd kiss it and it would be all better.
"All better," that's what he used to say . . .

Standing at the threshold she looked at his big
chair, and what had been pushed away for so many years, what she'd
forgotten, needed to forget, began to come back . . . Her feelings
that awful night had been like the ones now . . . that night, too,
she had been pregnant, in pain, scared. "Well, I'm back, and I'm
pregnant again. Only this time it's worse. I don't know who the
father is, I don't even know what color he is."

She crossed the room to his desk. "I always seem
to—" She was about to say "disappoint you," but
something stopped her, her eyes widened behind the tinted glasses.
The room, the circumstances, all too similar. She shook her head and
began again. "No, doctor, I don't want to be a doctor, I can't
follow in your footsteps like you want, I could never live up to you
. . ."

Those long-ago feelings of the pain and shame—she'd
let him down again as she'd done that night . . . He was behind the
desk, doing something. What? Talking on the phone? No. Reading? No.
Working on his stamp collection? Maybe . . .

Looking around the room, it was as if she were
standing in the middle of a movie she'd seen and forgotten and now
remembered. She knew the room—recognized it, rather, but didn't
know it. She knew the actors' lines, though, or did she? At least
some of them. She'd stood there now in front of his desk. He'd been
behind it. Yes, that's how it had been. And it was the stamp album.
He was pasting stamps in it when she came in, didn't look up until he
was finished—

She tried to shake off the past, told herself to "get
busy, get the money, get out of here . . ." But this night the
past wasn't so easy to exorcise. She'd opened the gates, let it come
back, and it seemed to have a life, a will, of its own.

She set her drink down on the desk and walked over to
the photo of Cyrus Wakefield's medical class that was hanging on a
nearby wall. Behind it was his wall safe, his money.

The stamps . . . she had never remembered them before
. . .Before she'd only remembered coming to his study door with the
news of her pregnancy, then nothing after that until she'd come home
from the hospital without the baby. And for a long time she hadn't
even allowed that partial intrusion of the past. She turned from the
picture and looked at the desk. What happened after the stamps? What
did he do? What did she do? The scene focused. Maybe it was the pain,
the pregnancy, that did it. Memories of his voice rising as he
lectured about the dangers of trimester abortions . . . She could
hear him now, even though his voice sounded far away, as though she
was hearing it through water. Oh, God, he was calling her names,
saying things that hurt her so . . .

She could see herself standing there in front of his
desk. Was she crying? No. What then? When the answer came it brought
back a humiliation long denied . . . She stood in front of the desk
and lost control. The next sensation was the wetness, just as when
she was Peter with those girls . . .

The scene changed and they were no longer at home.
They were in his office. lt was night—the same night? Yes. They
were alone in the main examining room. He made her strip and get up
on the table—

"
Enough
."
She turned to the picture, took it off the wall and put it on the
floor, face-down. "Get busy, you've got to get out of here."
And the urgency in her voice now had nothing to do with fear of the
police. lt was her father . . . he had forced her to do something in
the office that night, something that had changed everything between
them . . .

Frantically she started twisting the dial on the
safe, trying to open the doors. It was no good. Her memory was like
toppling dominoes. She couldn't stop it . . .

The examining room. She was on the table. The light
was shining from above, the corners of the room dark. She was
ashamed. Horribly ashamed. He made her lie on her side and draw her
knees high up to her shoulders. She shivered with the memory of the
cold liquid he had dabbed near the base of her spine, felt the
burning that followed the cold.

She had looked up and seen him standing in front of
her. He was gloved and gowned. Over the lower half of his face was a
surgical mask, and above it the light glinted off his glasses. He was
holding a huge needle.

"No,
please
,
don't . . . She mouthed the words in the darkened study, and they
still did not help her. He was ordering her to lie still, to stay in
that fetal position; then he was behind her, out of sight, and she
felt the pain and burning as he worked the needle through her muscle
layers and into her spine.

How could her daddy, her beloved daddy, do this to
her? She asked it then—she asked it now. Why didn't he understand?
Why was he hurting her?

The light over the table was hot. She began to go
numb. He bustled about . . . affixed the catheter, turned her over,
strapped her down, taped the syringe of anesthetic to her shoulder.
And then he was talking to her through his mask. "I'm going to
make a transverse incision; we call it a bikini cut. You'll like
that; you can still wear a two-piece at the beach . . ." A
stranger's voice. He shouldn't have been wearing green, should have
been wearing black . . .

"Daddy, please, please . . ." Words that
got you excused, but not this time-

Shake it away
, she told
herself, moving around the study.
This is all
wrong. It didn't happen this way, he'd never do this to you, he loved
you too much.

Still the dominoes toppled . . . The aseptic solution
on her belly. More coldness flittering through the numbness. She
didn't want to look but had no choice. Her head was propped up to
keep her from vomiting, he said.

The scalpel, its gleam and twinkle in the night. "No
. . ." His hand moved, quick and sure. She felt a tugging. Then
she saw the blood. Her belly was laid open.

Back in the study. "Brandy. Where's my brandy?"
It was on the desk where she'd left it. She went to it,
half-stumbled, picked it up with shaking hands . . . and there he was
again, anchoring a shiny metal ring the size of a dinner plate to the
side of the table, his hands positioning it over the cut, using it to
hold the retractors as he opened the incision wider. He was tearing
her apart with his bare hands, but she felt nothing. Not then, but
now . . .

The cut for the uterus came next—" Get a grip
on yourself," she said in the study. "You're acting crazy.
So he did a C-section on you. It should have been done in a hospital,
but you were too far along; that was your own damn fault for not
telling him sooner. At least now you know what happened. It hurt, but
that's medicine for you. He did what he had to do, no reason for you
to have blocked this out . . ."

She gulped from her glass and looked back at the
safe. "Now what was the combination?" She still couldn't
remember. All the dominoes hadn't toppled yet.

What she remembered was waking up in her own bed
upstairs and not knowing how she got there. Her belly felt on fire.
She was stiff, sore inside and out. When she moved she felt something
against her breast and pulled back the covers to investigate. It was
wrapped in a towel. She reached for it—"

"
No, don't
"
It was the adolescent Missy's scream, trying to reach back over the
years. And now she was there, memory replaced by crystal-clear
vision. She didn't know what was in the package, didn't want to know.
All she knew was that until now she had never been able to remember
what had happened that night. And whatever it was, the C-section
wasn't it. It was something worse, much worse-

She smashed her glass against the wall and ran from
the room, without thinking going up the stairs to the one place that
belonged to her. Years had passed since she'd been in her old bedroom
but nothing had changed. One wall was still covered with ribbons from
horse shows and trophies from camp. Barely visible in the darkness
were pictures of a younger Missy, pictures of her with her horse,
pictures from school. On another wall was aposter of Led Zepplin.
Below it had hung a picture of Cher but it was gone now. Her father
had made her take it down. She crossed the room and sat on the window
seat, wishing she dared to turn on some lights. Just one, that's all
she needed to break up these bad memories, but she couldn't risk
attracting attention. She sank down on the bed. It still had the same
frilly girlish spread her mother had picked out. She'd always hated
that damn spread. And looking at it, the past rushed in, not to be
denied . . .

She was groggy from the shock of the C-section when
she found the bundle in bed with her. The towel wrapping it was
white, and the bundle was cocoon-shaped, the size of a bread basket.
She remembered reaching for it, hoping it was a present from her
father, to show that he had forgiven her . . .

Her fingers touched it. She unwrapped it near the top
and peered inside. At first what she saw didn't register. And then,
when it did, she began to scream.

Inside the white towel was the dead fetus. Hers? Her
child? She shoved off the covers and tried to scramble away. She felt
the pain in her belly from the strain on her stitches. Never mind, it
didn't matter, She had to move, get away from it, not let it touch
her.

"Daddy, help, help," she called out, over
and over.

Seconds seemed like hours until the door opened and
he was there.

But he didn't come over to her. He was like a
stranger. And it was a stranger's voice that said, "Don't run
from your baby. That's no way for a mother to act . . ."

"Bastard, bastard," the words coming now
from Missy's huddled form on the windowseat, more a whimper than a
growl. She uncoiled herself and moved toward the door.

Downstairs she looked for her drink before she
remembered she'd smashed the glass when she'd run out of the room.
She picked up the bottle and carried it to the French doors that
opened out onto the brick patio and garden beyond. Staring into the
moonlight, she turned the bottle up and took a long pull from it.