Jack & Jill (6 page)

"
Why did you do it?" I asked him, anger burning like hot coals in my chest. "Why did you hurt us?"

My father seemed to sag, withdraw into himself
as I watched, the result, I suppose, of having his estranged daughter, his
victim
, walk back into his life after a million years of enjoying conveniently rewritten history, only to have her throw the truth like ice-water right in his face. It gave me pleasure to see him affected this way.

"
I never did anything to you."

"
If you honestly believe that," I told him, "then I'm sorry for you. That you can sit there and lie to my face after what you put me through..."

"I never
hurt
you is what I'm saying," he protested.

"What's the difference?"

"There's a big difference in the eyes of the law. If you'd told them I was doting on you instead of
hurting
you, everything would have been different."

"But you
were
hurting me. Both of us. You were..." The words stuck in my throat. I realized I hadn't said aloud the things he did to me and John since that night Chris and I had sex for the first time. Even then it had been like trying to regurgitate barbed wire. Even then it had been the abridged version.

Stop, stop. Wait.

What's wrong? Did I hurt you?

At least Chris had had the decency to ask.

No, it's just...I need to tell you something...

"I'm a sick man, Gillian,
" my father said.

Don't I damn well know it.

"I've been ill for quite some time, and they've advised me to avoid stress. My heart..." He put a hand on his chest over the offending organ for dramatic effect. "It isn't so good anymore."

"And...w
hat? I'm supposed to take pity on you?"

He looked
almost sulkily at me. "No. I'm telling you why I can't talk about this anymore."

"Too fucking bad."

"Watch your mouth."

"Or
what? Don't act like you're my father,
Jim
. It's a little too goddamn late for that."

"
I want you to leave now. You ruined my life with this same crazy bullshit, and I only let you in because I hoped that maybe you'd finally come to your senses and realized what really happened, what I really did for you. I hoped we could try to fix the past, salvage something, but no, you're as stubborn as your brother was. Neither of you knew how to be loved."

I
'd expected resistance, excuses, even pleas for forgiveness. What I hadn't expected was finding my father so utterly embroiled in delusion that he genuinely seemed to believe he had done nothing wrong. And even though such an attitude seemed perfectly suited to the monster that had chased me in my dreams for the better part of my life, I found myself appalled and stunned into silence seeing it here.

"
Now, please Gillian," he said, rising from his chair, hand still clamped on his chest, "I'm asking you to leave...before I have to call someone."

"
And who would you call?" The temporary paralysis his words had inspired melted quickly under the heat of renewed anger. "Mom? Can't do that. She's buried in wormy earth, driven there by a cancer I'm sure came about as punishment for a lifetime of looking the other way while you raped your children."

His face crinkled
in disgust. "You're a vulgar bitch, you know that? How dare you come into my house and say such things. Haven't you caused enough trouble? We could have been a family. I loved you. I loved your brother, and look what you did. You took something special and you perverted it, made it ugly. Now get out of here, Gillian. Get the hell out of my house."

I stoo
d too, my body positively thrumming now. "Or what?"

"I'm an old man. Old and tired and sick. I was a good father to you. You just didn't know how to be loved, and you made me regret ever trying. I won't try again."

"Love? Molesting children is not love, it's hate, no matter what way you try to justify it in that sick fucking head of yours. And how exactly have you paid for trying? Eight years of a twenty-five year sentence? Then what? You've been sitting here in the safety of isolation, able to convince yourself that you never did anything wrong, never having to face me and answer for what you did. Never calling to ask my forgiveness. I bet you never bother to visit John's grave either, do you? No, because I guess it would be too much effort for you to beg forgiveness from a child you don't even have to look in the eye."

My father's face wa
s slack and pale. Standing less than three feet from him, I knew that if I swung a fist, I could hit him, knock that look of self-pity off his withered old face, smash the teeth that smiled at me while he ran his rough hand up my inner thigh, shred the tongue that whispered false promises and veiled threats, blind the eyes that peered at me through lids hooded by arousal. I could have ended it right there and then, and though I wasn't sure if it was something of which I was capable, I was aware on some level that things had changed over the past few months. My chemistry, perhaps, as the experts would say. My wiring.  In layman's terms, the things that made me tick had been altered and not yet tested. Because every time I woke from the dream, it was without a piece of my restraint. I had felt it around my own family, felt my control weaken around Jenny and Chris. If I lost it completely, better it be with the man responsible for it all than with them.

The old man
's breathing grew heavy. His skin was almost gray.

"
Why aren't you saying anything?" I asked him. "It's your turn, your
time
to say something. You've had long enough to be quiet." I was shouting, and knew it was inadvisable if I didn't want to draw unwanted attention. Those neighbors, of whom I thought fondly—particularly Mrs. Farris next door (though I had no idea if she still lived there), my savior when the time for running came—would have learned to regard my father's house as an ugly, loathsome place. They would have kept their children well away, gossiped amongst each other, and taken to advising new residents of where exactly the registered sex offender lived.

"I have
to get my pills," my father said, and for the first time, I wondered if perhaps he hadn't been faking the severity of his ailment after all. He headed for the door.

"Get your pills then," I said
icily. "But we're not done here. Not yet."

"We should be," he replied
. "We have nothing more to say to one another."

"There's plenty to say if you just had the guts to say it."

Pausing only to give me an exasperated look, he eased himself out into the hall, leaving me alone with the sounds of the rain hammering on the roof and my pulse pounding in my ears.

As
I listened to my father's slow passage up the stairs, each step punctuated by a grunt of effort, pity tried to dilute the anger and to a degree succeeded, but couldn't hope to water down the hate I felt for the old man. He was mentally ill, deluded, his words were testament to that, and I guessed him too far gone to be cured of it. Besides, to be cured, you have to accept that there's a problem, and he believed no such thing. In his mind, he'd loved his children dearly, perhaps too much, and they'd turned on him as a result.

Twenty minutes pass
ed. It was quiet upstairs. I wondered if he'd died up there, and envisioned him lying on the floor, skin white, lips blue, eyes bulging from their sockets, and I felt an alien and unwelcome pang of dismay. I justified the feeling by telling myself it was because no one wants to see a dead body, or to be burdened with the task of calling the necessary authorities and waiting around for it to be removed.  But that wasn't the whole truth, and in this, it would seem my father was not the only one capable of creating alternate realities in which certain truths were omitted.

Reluctantly, I had
to acknowledge the fact that, while I did not know what might have precipitated the change in him, nevertheless for a time, he was a good father, a normal father whose children had had no cause to question the purity of his love.

Once
upon a time, Jack and Jill had a Dad.

An abrupt
ache in my bladder, courtesy of the bottle of water I'd chugged on the way here, incited a ridiculous inner debate on what using the bathroom might signify to my father. I needed to go, but it seemed ill-advised to do so here, for fear that even something as simple as the need to use the toilet might be interpreted as a momentary dependency on him.
For decades you've had no use for me
, I imagined him thinking,
but you have use for me now, for I am KEEPER OF THE FACILITIES!
I sniggered quietly to myself. What a crock of shit. I was being absurd. But at least it had stopped me thinking about the good old days, which would have done nothing but lessen my resolve.

I look
ed up at the ceiling. A moment later, I heard him shuffling around up there. I did not sigh with relief, but felt it, and hated myself for even momentarily entertaining anything other than hostility toward him.

Perhaps he wa
s hiding up there, afraid to come back down.

Perhaps he was
searching for a weapon.

Jesus, get a hold of yourself.
I was wasting my time, but at least I had confronted him, said aloud to his face the words that had been tattooed on my soul for longer than I could remember. That would have to suffice, and, I hoped, might make some little bit of difference to the turmoil that had my subconscious cocooned. From here, I had no recourse but to permanently erase him from my life, and now that I knew he was lost to his own lies and therefore incapable of change or remorse or salvation, it would be that much easier.

I shook
my head, took one last look around the room, which not only looked much smaller now, but sadder too. There was a film of dust over everything as if it had resigned itself to being permanently forgotten and believed it should look the part. I had no connection to this place anymore, or anything in it. It had never been a home, just a stage where people acted their parts until the curtain was forced to close.

"I'm leaving," I call
ed out, and made my way to the bathroom.

THIRTEEN

The first thing I notice
d was the smell of urine. The toilet hadn't been flushed and the water was a dark, unhealthy amber color beneath a ring of rust-colored grime. Specks of fecal matter clung to the back wall of the bowl. Empty toilet roll wrappers, cardboard tubes and used tissues overflowed from the small white plastic wastebasket to the left of the water tank. Sports magazines were scattered about the floor. They looked like they'd been there quite a while.

As I gently close
d the door behind me, I caught a glimpse of myself in the water-stained mirror above the sink, which was veined with gray hairs and spotted with dark green buttons of hardened toothpaste. The woman staring back at me looked old and haggard, eyes beady, face an unhealthy pallor and framed by lank black hair. The repulsion on my face at the smell and the condition of the bathroom made me look ugly, witch-like. I was wearing the same jeans and blouse I'd worn the previous day, which made any harsh judgment of my father's slovenliness seem ironic. Luckily, I resemble my mother, which has kept me from seeing him in my reflection all these years or I’d most likely have been unable to live in a house with reflective surfaces.

I flush
ed the toilet and tugged free some lengths of toilet paper, which I placed around the seat as a makeshift barrier against whatever filth might linger there, then shucked down my jeans and sat. Even through the paper, the wooden toilet seat was cold, bringing a shudder and gooseflesh to my skin.

The only light in the room came
from the stained, naked bulb built into the molding above the mirror and the small rectangular window over the bathtub to my right. The daylight was fading.

As I sa
t there, shivering slightly and listening to the inordinately loud sound of my pee hitting the water, I noticed something that hadn't registered on the way in. Directly in front of me, too far to reach out and touch from where I sat, was the door. When I'd lived here, that door had been solid wood, but sometime since, it had been replaced with one that had a glass panel inset in the top. That alone, would not have been enough to trouble me.

What did, so much so that I froze,
my pee stopping painfully mid-flow, was that through that glass I could see the head and shoulders of someone standing outside the door, a shadowy figure, hands cupped around the face that was pressed against the warped glass. Peeking.

"What the hell are you doing? I'm
in
here!" I yelled, hoping that of the many emotions evident in that exhortation, it was the outrage not the fear that reached the voyeur.

With a
sound of crinkling plastic, the face pressed closer to the glass and my bladder lost its previous reservations. For the moment, I was stranded on the seat, and willed the stream to hurry.