On Abuse, Survival, and the Word ‘Victim’

At midnight, I listened to B.B. King’s “Sweet Sixteen” on my mother’s Gateway computer on the spare room’s particle-board desk that was always covered in empty Diet Rite cans, some filled with drowned cigarettes. In the far corner sagged an armchair in which our dog Riley slept, a fine snow of his sloughed skin and fur beneath him on the floor. My mother said she couldn’t afford to take him to the vet, and he was so ill tempered from the sores he scratched and scratched that she had to keep him away from the other three dogs who ruled the house, the hardwood darkened in places where they’d pissed or shat when my stepfather, too far gone, was the only one at home. Most nights Riley wagged his tail when I came in, but sometimes he bared his teeth and then looked abashed, as if he’d expected someone else to find him in the blast radius of his filth. I begged my mother to get the dog some help or else put him down, an ask at which she raged until she wrung out fat tears.

I hated being in there, with the sick dog, but this was our only computer, a second-hand thing with a dial-up modem that legioned loud and long before it connected. My mother liked to keep the phone line open when she was home in case her friend Sharon called, so I had to wait to get on AIM until she fell asleep on the sofa, a hairdryer in her hand every night hissing heat and noise.

I had started talking online to Reese a few months before, shortly after I started taking guitar lessons from him. I was twelve. My father paid for it all; he knew Reese’s wife from work. My lessons started out at a guitar shop called The Picker’s Exchange. The owner looked like Ringo Starr and had a shop dog named Mavis, a graying boxer with a great underbite. I started taking lessons on Saturdays but, in high school, I changed my slot to a weeknight so I’d arrive in my school uniform skirt, which Reese said he liked when I stood up in front of him and did a twirl.

I felt like a sympathetic string that would ring every time I got near him. I told him everything—about my friends, my crushes, my marching band practice, my first time with my boyfriend Greg—in between learning my chords, my scales, my modes, a solo. He was the first man who really listened to me. Or he seemed to.

I listened too. I started learning the riffs of songs he liked—Van Halen, GnR, Zeppelin, and White Snake. I learned fast. I wanted my hands to be a part of our conversation. Strong and pliant. Practiced.

He told me things too: Lonely, he said, bending the tremolo.

The night I turned sixteen, I listened to B.B. King’s “Sweet Sixteen,” which I’d asked to learn. I sometimes picked suggestive songs, knowing he’d have to listen to them over and over before he could teach them to me. I wanted him to know I liked him. We would play the songs together in our lesson, him on rhythm, me trying out lead.

When I first met you, baby

Baby, you were just sweet sixteen

You just left your home then, woman

Ah, the sweetest thing I'd ever seen

But you wouldn’t do nothing, baby

You wouldn’t do anything I asked to

You wouldn’t do nothing for me, baby

You wouldn’t do anything I asked to

*

Suspend your disbelief for a minute. There was a ghost in our house—a little girl who had died on the street outside a few years before we lived there—or so my mother told me. The story went like this: the little girl’s mother had parked her car on the street in front of the house, there just before the mailbox—do you see?—on the blind crest of the hill. The mother went inside to the house that was not yet our house to drop something off with a friend. While the mother was inside, a speeding car crested the hill but—too late, too late to swerve or break—rear-ended the parked car in which the girl sat still buckled in the backseat, crushing the car by half, upending it. The girl, instantly dead, her skull crushed, neck broken.

When I was small, I would sometimes walk up the slope toward the road and stare at the pavement, wondering if it had been paved over since the accident, if the sparkles in its cracks were shattered glass. I tried to see bloodstains in slicks of motor oil, mud, and rain.

The faucet would sometimes open to rush when no one was in the bathroom. More than once, my mother’s hair dryer whirred to life on the floor next to the sofa. I heard things: footsteps in the night, a muffled voice down in the unfinished basement. I felt tiny fingers on my neck, riding up into my hair. Once, I stopped at the threshold between the dining room and kitchen to ask my mother a question while she stood at the stove frying something. Above her head were shelves upon which she displayed kitschy, mid-century salt and pepper shakers. As she opened her mouth to answer, one of the ceramic shakers flew off the shelf and smashed into the opposing wall. A second later, its pair followed. I ran to them. Both lay unbroken on the linoleum floor.

What just happened? I yelled.

Get out of here, my mother hissed. I thought she was talking to me at first but then she turned, her back to me, and stared down an empty room.

Did you hear me? She squared shoulders. Get out of here—I won’t tell you again, little girl!

*

Parentification: “a type of role reversal, boundary distortion, and inverted hierarchy . . . in which children or adolescents assume developmentally inappropriate levels of responsibility in the family of origin . . . . It is often clinically observed and empirically examined along two dimensions: instrumental parentification and emotional parentification.

• Instrumental parentification involves completing physical tasks for the family such as taking care of relatives with serious medical conditions, grocery shopping, paying bills, or ensuring that a younger sibling attends and does well in school.

• Emotional parentification often involves a child or adolescent taking on the role and responsibilities of confidant, secret keeper, or emotional healer for family members.

Parentification is often observed in families where the parent or caregiver has experienced a serious medical condition or mental health disorder.” (Dr. Lisa M. Hooper, University of Louisville)

*

In the summers I sometimes cleaned the house during the day when my mother was at work. If I tried to clean the house when she was at home, she would feel guilty and tell me to stop. My action revealed her inaction, I guess. I never wanted to make her upset, to cause her to think she wasn’t a good mother. You’re your mommy’s whole life, baby girl. I used a ShopVac to suck up Riley’s skin and hair. I’d wipe down the baseboards, filthy with animal dander and dirt. Once, I scrubbed with bleach the yellow grease and nicotine stains from the kitchen wallpaper, its once-white patterned with blue forget-me-nots. I’d rummage the pantry cabinet, open old flour sacks to a cloud of moths. One weekend, while she napped, I washed and cleaned out her car for her. When I pulled back the aluminum foil on a round pie plate I pulled out from under the front passenger seat, I dropped it in surprise. A maggot casserole.

Years before, when my father still came to the house, they fought screaming over the state of the house after he had tucked me into bed and saw flea dirt speckling my sheets. My dog Pete slept with me every night, and none of our animals had flea treatment anymore. It was too expensive for four dogs and two cats.

Your father’s not allowed in here anymore, she told me later, sitting on the edge of my bed. Don’t tell him anything about the house, got it?

When Gibson, the black dog I named after a kind of guitar, bit my hand on my fifteenth birthday after I startled him awake, my mother begged me not to tell my father. Don’t say anything, Emily. It’s not his business. It’s ours.

He picked me up later that day to take me to a family birthday party at my grandmother's. I tried to lie when he asked me what happened, but I was always bad at lying, especially to him. A vein protruded in his forehead, a snake in a pillowcase.

*

My memories of my angry father have no dialogue, no words at all, although I know he raged through questions he wouldn’t give me time to answer. Usually, however, he resorted to telling me how irresponsible my mother was, how she was manipulative and deceitful, and then he’d tell me all the ways I was like her, how I should look to him as an example instead. Something of him was in me, he was sure. If only I could find it.

*

Nothing physical happened with Reese until I was seventeen, a few months before my eighteenth birthday, late spring of my senior year of high school. I’m a summer baby. July, July, July. But I couldn’t wait until then, I couldn’t wait on anything then—to go to college, to get out of my mother’s house, to fuck a man and not a boy.

*

In the dark of the music room, where he stands against the wall, I take him in my mouth. His jeans unzipped, boxers bunched behind his balls. He tastes something like cider vinegar, sour fish oil. He can’t get hard. This is what he told me he wanted most. Me on my knees, his hands cat’s-cradling my hair. I pull him down to the floor, grind slick against him until I grow bored, my knees raw-hot from the industrial carpet. He’s rigid, unmoving beneath me. For the first time, I see the uneven shave line of his goatee, just under his chin. His eyes are soft, unfocused. He hasn’t even taken off his glasses. There’s a faint grease on the lenses. He’s scared, I notice. Of me. Himself.

All at once I feel both triumphant and sad—this power I have, this powerlessness.

He swears he doesn’t normally struggle, that he’s just nervous (okay, a little afraid) because I’m underage (but only for another month).

(Maybe we can try again after your birthday?)

When I pull on my polka-dot panties and jeans, there’s a finality to the moment, an unspoken never again I use to brace my spine and stand up straight. I walk out, leaving him inside the music store to lock up, turn off the lights, and set the alarm. The sky outside’s a queasy green with a coming thunderstorm.

*

I debated for a long time whether I would describe sex with Reese. I didn’t know if I could stand knowing that it might turn some readers on, that it could sustain their fantasies about underage girls. Some of you have come to this essay for the sex, whether you’d admit to it or not. Some of you have even slept with underage girls. Some of you have called a girl jailbait, dangerous morsel on a hook. Some of you don’t feel guilty. Some of you tell yourselves you don’t have anything to feel bad about. Some of you are looking for absolution. Some of you may have asked questions like i thought she was 18, do i need a lawyer? and Is it really statutory rape if she consented? on internet forums. Some of you would never sleep with an underage girl, but before I thank you, let me ask: How much do you feed your tidy voyeurism, how did you react to the scene in which I took him into my mouth? Some of you are here to support, to witness. Thank you. Some of you may have been a girl with whom a man had sex. Whom a man touched. Whom a man said things to that he shouldn’t have said. You may have even told him he could. You may hate me for saying that your wants, your permission wasn’t/isn’t valid. Some of you were a girl with whom a man had sex and for years you have both hated yourself and hated him even as it made you feel powerful, even as, after all these years, you wonder how he is doing. You may have regretted your actions even as you reveled in them. Some of you may say it was no big deal. Some of you have moved on. Some of you may never be able to. Some of you are like me and you’ve spent years, well after the age of consent, seduced by narratives of older men with young women. You may have even seen yourselves in them.

*

(Some of you will feel attacked. You may have even left this because I have refused to make you comfortable. I have held a mirror to the possibilities of you. Maybe you didn’t like what you saw there. Or maybe you didn’t like that I saw too.)

*

Paisley Rekdal’s lyric essay “Nightingale: A Gloss” recounts a sexual assault, a violence the author experienced in 1992 while hiking in Scotland. The essay also discusses her poem “Philomena,” which uses Ovid’s character, also a sexual assault victim, to approach the violence Rekdal survived. Rekdal quotes George Pettite: “Ovid says it is imagination that makes possible the rape” of Philomena. Rekdal takes it one step further and makes the imagination complicit in reeanacting sexual violence:

In my poem “Philomela,” the rape isn’t described. It takes place off stage, recorded years after the event by the character who experienced it.

*

When I left out the rape, I thought I was refusing to indulge a reader’s voyeurism. But the reader knows what is left out: My silence, then, is not a revision but an invitation to imagine this violence for yourself.

The reader becomes complicit in the rape, imagining it for herself in all its violence and intrigue, imprinting it with her touches, a unique version, a new violence made. It seems Rekdal regrets not describing the rape in her poem because she has given the reader authorship and agency to render the violence anew in her imagination.

This is why I have described sex with Reese. I will not allow you to have a hand in it, on me. You will not make me kneel in front of him.

*

All my memories from that time seem to be of summer, that hot-mouth gasp. The season lasts so long in the Tennessee Valley, it soaks in. Moving through the heat and the humidity make me more aware of my body—me, a clot in the cream. Everything and nothing happened in those months, tumult and tedium.

Sometimes I can tell you about one thing and know that it was happening at the same time as something else, recognize that they may have even contextualized and influenced one another, how I coped, how I acted. When I tell the story of my guitar teacher after a couple of gins or beers or sleepless hours, however, it cannot be placed in the same time, life, or narrative as the girl who tried to talk to a ghost in her house, who made herself throw up when boys barked “cottage cheese” after seeing her in shorts, whose doped-up stepfather shot their dog in the dining room. Each narrative denies the others. Denies me completion.

*

My stepfather Ken had an opiod problem. Some time in the early ’90s, he dislocated his shoulder and broke a collarbone while chasing a suspect. That’s when he got his first prescription. I don’t know if my father—also named Ken—was still his partner at the time or if they were already in separate units by then, but dad later liked to tell me that he saw Ken #2, as my mom liked to call him, go on duty on enough hydrocodone to kill a horse.

Ken was forced to retire on disability in 1994, at the age of forty.

My father reminded me once that Ken regularly came to the house for supper when I was small, but I don’t remember it. Most evenings there was at least one mustachioed cop there for my mother’s famous cooking—fried chicken or pork chops with mashed potatoes made with heavy cream and a stick of butter, green beans boiled in bacon fat and sugar, and sweet tea.

Dad suspects an affair still, even after all these years. Maybe there was one, maybe not. My mother swears nothing happened until she and my father separated, but for my mother the truth sometimes bends like light to rainbows.

At some point after the separation, my mother began to take care of Ken. She’d wake me up in the middle of the night and we’d drive from our house in Hixson across the river to Missionary Ridge where his apartment was. He was living on his pension, eating mostly Hamburger Helper so he could afford the exotic fish he stocked in an enormous aquarium that spanned nearly the length of one wall. He would call her at all hours, asking her to pick up his prescriptions or wash his clothes. Some nights we’d eat Steak-Out, tough cuts of flank and baked russet potatoes, from steamy styrofoam containers on his sectional sofa, a Braves game on, until he passed out and we’d feed his Ragdoll Persian Pierre canned morsels in gravy and make our exit, only to be called back in the middle of the night. 1 a.m. 2. 3. My mother would carry me wrapped in my duvet out to the backseat of her car she’d named Vicky Volvo, a pillow already back there, and off we’d go. Sometimes I would sleep, but other times I only pretended to, counting the orange lamps on the Ridge Cut until we got to his exit. Most of the time, she’d leave me in the car while she went in. They were probably having sex. Then, however, I didn’t—couldn’t—know. I’d wake and stare out the car window through the ridge’s trees and into the dark space I knew to be the valley below.

After my mother and Ken started to get serious but hadn’t yet told me, she invited him to have supper at our house one night. It was strange to see him there, in his pleated khakis, loafers, and a polo shirt rather than loose shorts and an undershirt. Before he left, he went into the bathroom and, I know now, took several hydrocodone. On his way home, he fell asleep behind the wheel and crashed head-on into a concrete barrier. But he survived.

*

One night I lay awake staring at the dark wall next to my twin bed. On the side table, my fan whirred on low. I could hear my mother’s hair dryer in the living room, Riley in the hallway. My mother had taken to shutting the hall door at night so the dog had more room to roam outside the spare room. His nails hadn’t been clipped in a while because he snarled when anyone touched his raw, furless paw. He click-clicked on the hardwood and then went quiet for a minute, maybe two. I started to think about other things, to fantasize about someone, until I heard Riley running toward my room, his body slamming into my closed door. He snorted at the crack at the floor, growled. The fan kicked up, motoring high. I turned over and looked at it, wobbling its cage before it died back. I shut my eyes then. The covers slid over my ankles, drawn tight, as a pressure fell on the mattress at the end of the bed, as if someone was sitting down. A hand fell on my calf. I refused to open my eyes, to see what had walked into my bedroom through the closed door, and sat on the end of my bed, watching me pretend to sleep.

*

What of my life can I call trauma? To what actions can I assign violence? Sex with my consent? Before my consent was valid? What about my daily life at home, with all its filth and reckless sadness? No one ever hit me, no one sneaked into my room to touch me. And still, are these less obvious violences any less violent, violating?

*

Home alone one night, I held Ken’s .357 revolver against my chest beneath the window. I’d heard some male voices outside. I peeked over the sill and pointed the barrel down at the two shadows. I hesitated at the trigger. They were coming inside to rape me. Kidnap. My father had told me this might happen. You’ve got to learn how to defend yourself.

Then I saw them for who they were: two teenage boys cutting through our yard, kicking up old leaves, on their way home.

*

Reese bought me my first pregnancy test after my boyfriend Greg refused a condom and didn’t pull out in time. I was late, and I didn’t want to ask my mother, to admit a mistake. To be a daughter, subordinate. To have her be again my mother. I peed on the stick in the bathroom at the new storefront where Reese and another guy had gone into business together. A place to take music lessons. They’d given me a part-time job answering phones and scheduling lessons too. All music lessons, all kinds of instruments. Reese waited on me. “Are you okay in there?” he asked.

Just a minute, I called back, pulling up my jeans with the ripped knees and capping the test.

As I walked out of the bathroom, I could see through the glass storefront my mother walking to the door. She was on her way home from work and saw my car there, thought she’d stop in. I wonder now if she suspected something going on between me and Reese. Nothing had yet happened between us, except conversation. (Which, now I know, was something.)

I slid the pregnancy test under the office microwave. Reese seemed nervous, more talkative than usual to my mother. Mom told me she thought he was very attractive once, and I became so embarrassed that I had to turn to look out the window of the car. I could barely speak while she was there, knowing that the pregnancy test either showed a + or - underneath the microwave, in its shadow. Finally, my mother said, Okay, baby girl, as she kissed me on the lips, her mauve lipstick leaving a faint smudge. Don’t be too long, I’ll have dinner on soon.

When she left, I pushed the microwave to the side and grabbed the pregnancy test.

Negative.

Reese bought me condoms after that.

*

Some will know who he is, maybe even know his ex-wife and his wife, his two young daughters. My parents will know, if they ever read this. I worry my father will blame me, even though—no, because—I was the girl.

Reese wasn’t—isn’t—his real name. I spent a long time debating whether I would use his name in this essay. Yes, I think he should be held accountable, like all men who sleep with girls, but I’m not sure I know what I want that accountability to look like or if I can be the agent that enacts it. After going through it all, I’m not sure I want to be the one that has to put the emotional energy and effort into holding his hand to the iron, which is why I have never written about him. Until now.

I spent years after the fact feeling guilty, in part because the man that would eventually become my husband told me I wasn’t the girl he thought I was when I told him about what happened. I had to convince the man who would be my husband to stay with me after I told him—or I thought I had to. Now, if someone did that to me, I would end it with them right then and there. I needed to tell someone, and needed someone to tell me that what Reese did was more than inappropriate, it was abuse. No one ever told me this until this year, thirteen years after. My friend Erin.

The reason I decided to change his name is that I don’t want to conjure him except as a character.

He quit teaching guitar lessons after what happened between us because, he said, he was too tempted by teenaged girls. At the time, I thought I was the only one, but now I can’t be sure. If someone came to me today and said they were investigating him, I would tell my story. I would corroborate. I would offer testimony. But, then again, what if there are others who have never spoken? What if there’s another teenaged girl now, who thinks she knows what she wants, and he’s only happy to help?

Abusers victimize their victims more than once; it happens again and again and again in memory, muscle and brain. I have been victimized by my own shame, victimized again by my agony over whether I should tell. I am not protecting him, I am protecting myself, I reason, but, yes, by protecting myself, I am protecting him, which is how abusers retain their positions, their power, their access—their victims’ fear or their sense of self-preservation.

*

I have worried about using the word victim here. First, I have imposter syndrome about the word (irrational, I know). Was I a victim if I wanted it at the time? Second, many prefer the word survivor so as to return power and agency to the one who has been abused. If I say that I survived something, however, does this imply that there was a possibility one wouldn’t survive? But there are many kinds of deaths, I remind myself. Some aren’t mourned by anyone but yourself.

*

My stepfather overdosed and died in a shitty apartment, alone, in September 2007. My mother divorced him earlier that year, and I had no contact with him. He was found by Father Paden, our priest with whom he had been close. I found out while I was working my shift at Starbucks. I felt nothing at first, then pity.

*

Some time in 2005, I come home from school, my backpack slung loose over one shoulder, keys in hand. My stepfather’s gold Camry isn’t in the driveway as usual. My mother, still at work.

I know something is wrong when I open the door—there’s a faint odor, sharp like pennies and fireworks, just under the smell of dogs.

None of them run to me to greet me.

I shut the front door and move into the living room that makes an L with the dining room.

On the door that leads from the dining room to the deck, bright red teardrops shine, backlit by sun. Stained glass. Two of the dogs stand on the other side, outside looking in, panting.

I move to let them in but as I pass the recliner, I see it—blood, a lake of it on the hardwood—triangulated by the La-Z-Boy, pie cabinet, and dining table. The pie cabinet’s wood is darkened by several arcs of blood. The tablecloth blotted, soaked in a crescent on one edge. The wooden chairs. Even on the far wall, there’s a fine mist.

At my feet, the blood’s smeared. Something dragged out of the pool. Short black hairs are suspended on its surface. They look almost white in the sunlight.

(Perhaps someone will tell me this cannot be inaccurate, not the pattern of blood splatter or the amount on the floor. Maybe it will even be my father, who knows these sorts of things. But this is how I remember it, the room suddenly defined by proximity, speed, and distance. Variables in a ballistics equation, not a home.)

Ken, I call out, my voice rippling like water. I turn and walk down the hall. My stepfather’s bed is unoccupied, except for a stack of medical books in the space where my mother used to sleep, a box of Froot Loops half-eaten dry beside them. There’s a single chocolate-covered cherry, his favorite, on the dingy quilt, a bite taken out of it, its ooze like semen. I walk back down the hall. Bloody gauze and medical tape on the bathroom sink. I arrive back to the scene, toe the blood with my New Balance.

The speed of my heart, my body’s panic is not recorded. I will not remember what I felt in the body.

My stepfather throws open the front door and sees me seeing. His mouth is open, his face vaguely yellow, dark circles under his eyes. His hand is bandaged.

He must have told me what happened. That the black dog Gibson bit him and he shot the dog right here, with his .357. Three hollow points to the head. I had to make sure. He must have told me he wrapped the dog’s body in black yardwork bags and carried it out to the trunk of his car, driven it to St. Peter’s to heave it into the church dumpster. He must have told me that he cannot clean up the blood because of his hand, how it hurts and swells, but I must have known it’s because the dope’s kicking in, that he’s got to go lie down. I must have called my mother. She must have asked what’s going on. I must have told her. (I must tell her.) I must have screamed and cried until my nose was gluey with snot. I don’t want to remember all this, I must have told myself, and so I will not.

All I will take in, all I’ll let myself have later is a numb curiosity, near amusement, at how thick the blood seems when I mop it with a paper towel, how it’s as warm as my own body so that it feels like I am not touching anything when it soaks through to my hand. It seems impossible it could have been in the dog earlier that day, when I walked past him to go to school. That it ever moved inside him—a miracle. I will hold up my hand and stare at it in amazement, at the mess I could make if I was broken into like that. I’m shaking, and I notice I haven’t allowed myself to notice this until now. It takes a long time to soak up all the blood on the floor. Mostly I feel I am just making a bigger mess, spreading it around a wider area, but the bigger task will be finding and cleaning the splatter, which is everywhere, tiny, and ignorable, and drying fast. Later, when I spray it with cleaner, it loosens, becomes almost-blood again. For weeks, months, we will find it, dry and brown, on the walls, picture frames, dining chairs, the ficus, fridge, chandelier, and baseboards.

I think of my father, the forensic scientist, as I clean, and how a blacklight in his hand would reveal where the blood had been, no matter how hard I scrub, no matter how hard I try to erase.

*

I felt powerful for a long time because I knew Reese wanted me. After he had me and I ended things, I felt guilty. I had done something wrong. I could have ruined his life. I could destroyed his marriage, his family. The irony of believing I had power over him is that I removed in my mind his culpability. I gave him an out. Our culture no doubt might be willing to do the same.

Some of you will balk when I call Reese an abuser. You wanted it, you might say. You pursued him. You were a little slut. You put him in an impossible position. Except I didn’t. He could have—no, should have—said no. He should not have talked to me online late on Friday and Saturday nights, drunk, while his wife slept. He should not have asked me to do a little twirl in my uniform skirt. Some of you have yet to understand I was an underage girl. Some of you don’t see that my maturity and sexual escapism arose, in part, because the hierarchy of my home had been inappropriately reversed. Just because I had adult responsibilities and concerns did not make me an adult. Reese once told me he had a hard time thinking of me as a teenager because I was so mature, because he could really talk to me. At the time I was flattered—I didn’t want to be seen as young and stupid. My boyfriend had told me I was dumb for two years. Now I see Reese’s connection with me as only a reflection on his emotional maturity. And he meant to flatter, to endear me to him. And if he made me into more of an adult then I could share the burden of responsibility.

*

Statutory rape is defined in Cornell University’s Wex Legal Dictionary as “sexual intercourse with a person who has not yet reached the age of consent (determined by state law), whether ot not the sexual act is against that person’s will.” Tennessee’s age of consent is eighteen, like most states. Online I read TN Code § 39-13-506 (2017) that defines mitigated statutory rape as:

the unlawful sexual penetration of a victim by the defendant, or of the defendant by the victim when the victim is at least fifteen (15) but less than eighteen (18) years of age and the defendant is at least four (4) but not more than five (5) years older than the victim.

I don’t know why reading this law brings me comfort, except that it confirms that Reese is legally responsible for what happened between us, that it’s legally defined as rape, even if I gave my consent.

But then I start to feel that statutory rape is less rape than rape, if such a thing were possible. This is textbook imposter syndrome influenced by internalized misogyny, I recognize, but I still can’t shake the feeling so I go to the Oxford English Dictionary and look up statutory, find the appropriate definition, 2b:

Of a crime: established or regulated by statute, as opposed to common or natural law

As if statutory rape is only rape under the law. As if what Reese did wouldn’t be wrong in a land where there was no such thing as an age of consent, a manmade threshold.

*

I didn’t feel like I became a different person between early June 2005 after what happened with Reese and July 17, 2005, when I turned eighteen. At the time, eighteen seemed so arbitrary; I was just as much of an adult at seventeen as I was on my next birthday. If we had waited until my birthday, could I still say what he did was wrong, that he abused his position of power? Abused me?

*

I left home as soon as possible. In the weeks after I turned eighteen, I moved in with my new boyfriend, the man I eventually married. My stepfather’s behavior had grown increasingly erratic, and my mother had become more and more depressed. The house, already filthy, had fallen into disrepair. My grandfather, my mother’s father, owned it but she refused to tell him when anything went wrong, insisting he would be critical of her. She could not stand criticism. She asked me to keep secrets about the house from him—the ruined hardwood, the ripped up linoleum over which she kept a rug, the mangy dog, the food in my stepfather’s bed, the mice and insects.

*

During my freshman year of college, I started staying at my mom’s house again, two nights every week. My boyfriend was going to music school in metro Atlanta, so I lived there and worked at a coffee shop Thursday through Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday nights I stayed with my mom back in Tennessee so I could attend my classes at UT–Chattanooga.

My baby girl’s back home, my mother would say. Your mommy’s so happy. Still, I felt as if she resented me for leaving every week, for having a life that didn’t include her, two hours away. Her lips were often drawn, and she didn’t talk to me as much, so I reciprocated her silences.

I got back from campus one afternoon and found my stepfather sitting on the sofa, wearing only boxers and a white undershirt. He was the color of turning yogurt, his black hair so greasy it shined like a vinyl record.

The television was off, but he stared at it as if engrossed. The room with him in it was dim and warped on the convex surface.

All the lights were off, the cords noosed around the lamps. Get out, he said, with sudden urgency. I don’t want them to see you.

When I asked him what was going on, his voice went suddenly inhuman, metallic, as if he were an alarm warning: This is the recording.

I approached the couch, but his head slumped, chin against chest, like an unwound wind-up doll. His eyes closed.

Ken?

He made a ratchet noise with his mouth, raising his head again. This is the recording this is the recording this is the recording.

I needed time to think, so I offered him a root beer and went to the kitchen. I slipped a steak knife into the sleeve of my jacket and grabbed a soda can from the fridge, which he hadn’t unplugged, at least. When I got back into the living room, I called 911.

That was his first overdose. At the time, he was on twelve different prescription meds. Opiods, benzos, antidepressants, a blood thinner, who knows what else.

The second time, police found him wandering on the side of the road after dark, half-dressed. That’s when my mother told him to get out.

The third time, he died.

*

Reese’s birthday is August 25th. I was at work that day in 2007, two years after things had happened and then ended between us. By that point, we weren’t speaking, but my thoughts kept circling back around to him. I felt sick about it all, like I’d drank bad milk. I was thinking about him when I went on break and saw a voicemail from my mother. Ken had died the day before.

*

We told people about the ghost. It’s a little girl, we said. She’s not a mean ghost, just mischievous. Some nights my mother and I would pretend to talk to her instead of talking to one another. We haven’t heard from you in a while, I’d holler down the hall. How was your day, little ghostie? my mother would ask the air. Sometimes it seemed she was speaking to me. Sometimes I’d answer. Sometimes I believed the ghost was me, little girl ghost throwing things against the wall. And still, no matter how strong I was, no matter how hard I threw, they would not break.

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