Читать книгу A Girl Called Karen - A true story of sex abuse and resilience - Karen McConnell - Страница 7
ОглавлениеSometimes when you bury things, the memory stays but details get lost. I’m not sure of the date or time of what I’m about to tell you, but I remember for sure every detail I’ve written here. And more besides. I’m certain no adult trauma or sophisticated inquiry or appalling case study will ever scrub the shock of that awful night from my mind.
I know that before it happened, I had been scared, and I wanted my mother. I was eleven at the very most. My mother was not there, and I went looking for her scent and the comfort of her place. It was late, and my father was not home when I curled up in my parents’ bed. Sleep came quickly, deep and hard. Waking came gradually and in stages.
A hand was between my legs, touching, stroking, kneading. I froze. I didn’t breathe or move or make the slightest sound. I felt funny in a pleasurable, scary kind of way. The hand kept touching me down there in the place my parents said I must never touch except for when I should wash myself in a hurry. The nuns at school said so, too, and they threatened us girls with eternal damnation if we let anyone put their hands Down There.
I knew I wanted that hand to stop, but I didn’t want it to stop. Maybe, I thought, if I just take tiny breaths or don’t breathe at all, this will turn out to be the weirdest, most shocking nightmare I ever had and I can forget all about it when I wake up. But even as I forced my breath into the littlest sighs, the hand went on roaming over my Secret Place, first lightly, then faster and more insistently, fondling and fingering, rubbing and circling until suddenly an invasive, brutal finger rammed into my flesh and plunged all the way inside me.
It was a real nightmare, it wasn’t a dream.
I never knew you could shove something right into the flesh down there. I never knew there was an opening to a cave that could almost devour a rude exploring finger. I never even knew I had a hole down there.
I think now that things would have been bad enough if that had been the end of it. But my nightmare continued. There was so much I didn’t know – much that I had to learn. As I thought about it all night long, I got more confused, more terrified. Maybe that was the way people got babies, I thought. Was I going to have a baby and be the shame of the whole neighborhood? I prayed I wouldn’t get a baby. I prayed I wouldn’t shame the neighborhood.
I loved my neighborhood. It was the best place, and my house was the best place, and I was the most important child in our home because I was the oldest and the best at taking care of my five young brothers and sisters. Everybody knew that.
Until that Awful Night, I thought my family was about like all the others on our street. True, our house was more rambunctious, bigger, shabbier, livelier, noisier; more alive with tears and laughter and songs and chatter and rivalries and squabbles. It was seldom empty – mostly full of people, very young people. When my mother’s roses were in bloom, our yard was a riot of sensuous color, and they were the pride of our community. Otherwise our yard was the biggest mess in the neighborhood.
True, we had special perks. Even though Toledo was a long way from darkest Africa, because our father was the veterinarian for the zoo, our fun and games included free rides just about whenever we wanted them on a scruffy dusty camel or a gentle gray elephant called Toots. Those unusual privileges made us the envy of the neighborhood kids.
Our family was the largest on Algonquin Parkway. That’s because my mother became pregnant eight times and gave birth to six babies in eleven years. Keeping track of that heroic record, our priest gave joyful praise after every birth, and my Grandpa John (my father’s father) snorted “no self-control” every time his son sent word that another one had arrived.
Whether my father was astonished or perturbed at such fecundity was never clear. He loved us kids very much, there was no question of that, and he worked endlessly with only a few interruptions to support the lively brood that he and Sally made.
