Too Much

No names were changed.

There’s no innocence to protect.

A short story by
Tina Wexler
224-515-0570
me@tinawexler.com

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 Love Sex
Trust Fear
Intimacy Manipulation

It wasn’t an inability to decipher the difference between sex and love, it was that I didn’t
even know there was a difference. I do know how truly broken I am and I’m trying to
understand why it happened.

Chapter one - Ray

I must have been about six at the time. We lived in a subdivision where every fifth house
looked alike. It was new suburbia in 1965. Julie lived kiddy-corner across the street. I
had a lot of friends on my block, but over fifty years later, it’s Julie that I think of most.
The Bowse’s had four kids and Julie was the youngest, just like me. She had two
brothers and a sister, just like me. There was nothing else we had in common.

I’m Jewish. The Bowse kids attended a private parochial school. I remember seeing
Julie and her sister on their way to school in their white blouses and plaid skirts. I felt as
though their family must be closer to God than mine.

One day Julie, I, and two other girls from my block relaxed on a front lawn running our
fingers through the grass in search of four-leaf-clovers. The grass felt cool and the sun
felt warm. Our conversation had evolved to rules within our houses, and eventually to
punishment. I remember Mary told us about ‘getting the paddle.’ Her father was a career
army man. His choice of disciplinary tactics seemed fitting.

Then Julie told us about getting a whipping with the buckle of her father’s belt. As she
turned away and lifted her shirt I was stunned and captivated. There were three long
slashes running up her back and two short ones flanking each side. In spots you could
see that the lines had bled and were still puffy, as though this hadn’t happened long ago.
She didn’t cry. It was all very matter-of-fact. At that moment she became the strongest,
bravest person I had ever known.

One night I was sent to the Bowse’s house for a sleepover. My parents had plans and
were unable to find a sitter. This was my very first sleepover. I was excited at the
prospect of viewing another family’s routine. I imagined what it would be like to eat
dinner with them. Would the pray and cross themselves? I thought I’d like to try that.

I remember their house had a smell. Not a bad smell. Not good either, just distinct. It
smelled like burnt toast and the cooked fat of a steak. When you walked into the house to
the right was the living room, left was the dining room, and straight ahead were the stairs
running next to a hall that went to the kitchen. It wasn’t a large kitchen. There was a

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rectangle table protruding from the wall just ahead. To the left of the table was a
bathroom in the hall that led into the family room.

Mrs. Bowse was over the kitchen sink doing mom things when Ray came in from the
family room. Ray was Julie’s oldest brother. Maybe he was in high school. He tugged
gently on my ponytail and said “Hi Blondie,” then winked at me. I had liked Ray. He
had been nice and always told me how pretty I was.

Mrs. Bowse never paused, turned, or spoke to acknowledge us. I remember Ray glancing
in her direction as though to verify her indifference to our presence. With that he took
three steps into the bathroom doorway. He looked toward me and put his index finger to
his lips in the universal gesture for quiet. Julie moved toward the bathroom and waved
for me to follow. It had never occurred to me that something bad was about to happen.
Mrs. Bowse was just a few feet from us.

I followed Julie into the bathroom. Ray closed and locked the door. He unzipped his
pants and began to urinate in the toilet. I was stunned, and couldn’t help myself from
staring at the pink shaft with the big hat. I’m not sure if I had ever imagined what a penis
looked like, but I definitely had not imagined anything like that. When he finished
peeing he undid his jeans and pulled them down to just above his knees. He closed the
lid to the toilet and guided Julie to sit down. He held the back of her head and guided his
penis into her mouth. She moved her head up and down his shaft. Ray moaned while he
rubbed her head. What was Mrs. Bowse doing? The bathroom was only feet from the
kitchen sink. Why didn’t she knock?

He held Julies’ head still and took his penis from her mouth. He turned to me and said,
“Okay Blondie, it’s your turn.” Fear covered my entire body. Julie smiled and said, “Go
ahead. Just pretend it’s a Popsicle.” Why didn’t Mrs. Bowse come? What would
happen if I screamed? God, please make this end now. Why doesn’t it end now?

Ray guided me to sit on the toilet. He held my head on either side and moved himself
into my mouth. The skin felt soft, softer than any skin I had ever felt. “Ooww, that’s
good Blondie. Just suck. Just like that.” I felt myself gagging as he moved himself in
and out of my mouth. It seemed to go on forever. I could feel his excitement increase
until he suddenly grabbed his penis from my mouth. He pushed me off the toilet, opened
the lid and came with a moan that I was certain could be heard in the kitchen. He
shivered all over. He stood very still with his eyes shut for a moment. Then he did his
pants and just before he opened the bathroom door he said, “Now remember, this is our
secret.”

We all exited the bathroom. Mrs. Bowse never turned from the sink.

No one prayed or crossed themselves at dinner. It was a quiet, uncomfortable dinner.

Mr. Bowse was gruff. He never acknowledged my presence. At one point when I looked
up, Ray caught my eye and winked. I quickly looked down. I tried not to look up again.
I felt sick and couldn’t eat.

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There were three bedrooms upstairs. Julie and Margaret shared the room at the top of the
stairs. The room to the left was where Ray and Mike slept. Then there was a bathroom
just before you came to Mr. and Mrs. Bowse’s room.

I was in a cot that had been set between Julie and Margaret’s beds. I was relieved it was
night. When I woke up I could go home. It was quiet. The only light came from the
hall, and shined through the bedroom doorway. I was lying facing the doorway with my
eyes open when, so quietly and suddenly Ray appeared there. Again he put his index
finger to his lips. I squelched a scream from deep inside. I held my breath for fear of
crying with loud sobs. To my utter relief he walked past my cot to Margaret’s bed. I saw
him crawl in next to her and I listened to her begging protest. He told her to be quiet and
it would be over soon. I didn’t understand what I was witnessing, but I could hear the
familiar moans from Ray and I listened to Margaret’s sobs.

I spent one night in that house. Julie grew up enduring ongoing physically abused by her
father, sexually abused by her brother, and denial from her mother. There was no God in
the Bowse’s house. I wonder what happened to Julie. I wonder if Ray had children.

Chapter 2 – Trying to Understand the Chaos That Became Me

Now I look straight at the angst, striving to see where it comes from. I know that it’s a
combination of apologies that I’ll never receive and forgiveness that I was never given, of
things no one ever told me and of things I never told.
When you keep secrets so well for so long they fade from your reality and seep into your
subconscious. And later, if you evoke those memories in an effort to get better, it’s nearly
impossible to change the reality that everyone around you has always known. You
realize that you are the secrets you have kept and they keep you alone because they’re too
big to share.
You’ve altered the precise path of your life’s timeline by removing the most offensive
memories, subconsciously believing that is the path to becoming good again, but all my
post-trauma memories are compartmentalized and disorganized, like odd fitting puzzle
pieces leaving holes in my mind. For years I’ve struggled to reassemble the fragmented
pieces of my damaged timeline, the fear of my personal rejection and other’s disbelief
has kept me writing in circles, avoiding the point and never getting to my center.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was aptly named describing war veterans that returned
home, some seemingly intact with their bodies whole, yet suffering immense pain. Today
heroic public servants and victims of catastrophic events are known to suffer from PTSD.
An overt cataclysmic event, bombs, explosions, fire, bullets, natural disasters, precede
PTSD. It would be callously dramatic to associate PTSD to any less overtly cataclysmic
event or string of events.

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The similarities of the symptoms reflected in myself and those describing PTSD caused
me to chastise the overindulgent audacity that I could compare myself to those so worthy
of such a disorder until I was left with only feelings of guilt. An almost laughable
phenomenon ensued: No matter the context, and even though my mind would know
exactly what I meant to say, my lips, my breath could never say PTSD or Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder. For years I’d say, “… Toxic Shock Syndrome…” when I meant to say
PTSD and although I knew what I meant to say I just couldn’t find the words.
I often woke during the night filled with anxiety and bathed in sweat although I never
remembered dreaming. Each morning brought feelings of dread and anxiety, manifesting
as a knot in my gut and nausea in the pit of my stomach. It’s source so vague and
sketchy, disturbing subconscious thoughts from my previous night. I feared it would
bring a wave of bad things into my life, so I breathe deeply and try to pull positive energy
out of the air that surrounds me, until I could no longer hear the disquiet.
I’d go through my day teetering an edge of such volatility ready to venomously strike out
at the slightest offense brought by an unexpecting victim. Other symptoms; fear of a
sudden noise, being in a crowd, or the pace of the city plagued me.
Don’t put a Band-Aid on an infected, oozing wound. It won’t go away. Rip off the
bandage and get the pus out. Dig and squeeze as it oozes puss tinted in green. Pick at it
causing unbearable pain until you’ve drawn fresh red blood. Now let it be. The irritation
will subside and it will finally begin to heal. I now believe this must be right.

Chapter 3 - David

There’s a collection of fuzzy black and white snapshots faded to sepia with white
scalloped borders. Images that predate my memory. Photos of my father and brothers:
dad wrestling with my brothers during a game of ball in the yard, road trips that resulted
in poses with cigar store Indians, the little league photo with my dad as coach tacked to a
bedroom cork board. These were not my memories. I was too young to have gathered
such eloquent memories of my father before his priorities shifted from family to business,
so I never suffered that loss of his affection. My brothers however never recovered from
their loss. They never understood what they had done wrong that made him become so
distant and angry. They blamed themselves for falling short of his every expectation,
when actually the fault wasn’t theirs to own. It wasn’t personal, it was just business.

With a lighthearted wave of her hand my mother used to say, “kids are resilient.”

Children are not resilient. Resiliency implies an impenetrability.

Children are actually more like sponges:

Every roll of your eyes and exasperated huff,

Every irritated snap and impatient glance,

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Each word that suppresses, puts down, or ignores,
This is the manure that cultivates a child’s vision of self.

A child is born without a sense of worth,

That comes from the world around them
And the reflection they see in your eyes.

So always look at a child through loving eyes,

Filled with endless belief in all the possibilities
And in their absolute potential.

It was just before my sixteen birthday and I sat at the kitchen table across from my
parents. My usual arsenal of war, shrill tones and abundant tears tucked away for use as
needed. I declared my intention to drop out of high school in a controlled voice, held my
breath and clenched my fists beneath the table, waiting for the blast…. which never
came. It was quiet for what felt like minutes before my father said, “School’s probably
not for everyone.”

It was a punch to my gut and a loss of breath. I always believed that college was a fact,
not an option for us. I needed them to tell me that I was worth more than a high school
dropout and that college was an important part of my future, but they didn’t. I think
parenting had exhausted them. Maybe my siblings worn them down, but I broke them and
they had given up on me.

My brother David was a foundering young man that should have been less altruistic when
it came to other people. I don’t know why he took note of me, but he respected and loved
me unconditionally. He made me special when I was totally unlovable. I adored him,
cherished his love, and knew exactly what he meant to me long before he died, but I
never understood why I meant so much to him.

His death devastated me. At twenty-five he died in his sleep and his death remains
undetermined to this day. That is what the death certificate says, “undetermined” repeated
multiple times on the single page. The absolute lunacy is that he went to sleep and never
woke and no one else has ever wanted to find out why. His death was completely
accepted and never questioned as though it somehow made sense. Almost thirty-eight
years later I struggle with this.

According to the Medical Examiner’s office when a person dies in Cook County by either
suspicious or an unobvious reason the remains are transferred to the Cook County
Medical Examiner’s Office for further investigation. Six weeks following his burial my
brother’s death certificate arrived reading “Death Undetermined.”

Many people assume that my brother died of a drug overdose. David had previously
struggled with drug abuse which he and his best friend overcame together. What I know
with certainty is that he did NOT die of a drug overdose, as supported by information
provided to me by the examiner’s office.

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For years I also accepted his undetermined death without question. I now see how your
mind can bury the obvious details if they threaten your immediate well-being, instead
initiating an inadequate protection mode. If reality would be unfathomable in the light of
day, it’s easy to remain in the dark.

When puzzled people would question me about his undetermined death I would simple
reply “David just laid down and died.” My mind was not only satisfied with that, it
romanticized that after years of self-doubt and depression his broken heart just give up.

Chapter 4 – Bill, part 1

When I was in high school a girl I knew was brutally raped. She lived alone with her
alcoholic mother. The rapist broke through her bedroom window while she slept. He
forced her out of bed and through her window, out of her home while she screamed. He
raped her and beat her with Chinese nun chucks. He mercilessly pounded every inch of
her body until she laid still, entirely bruised, bleeding, and completely broken.
She was raped. I was not raped. In 1976 rape was determined by the level of brutality as
it directly related to the innocence of the victim. In 1976 there was no such thing as “date
rape.” That very phrase implied culpability by the woman. Even if I was held down and
sodomized and relentlessly stalked and threatened for years to follow, I was wearing a
pencil skirt and stilettos on the day I spent with a man I believed was my friend. And as
his friend I went with him to his neighborhood and his apartment, therefore I certainly
was never raped and had every reason to feel shame and hold myself responsible.
I had dropped out of high school and worked at The Chicago Mercantile Exchange where
my brother David also worked. I loved it. It was a drug induced social environment that I
was too young for. At that time the Merc sat directly above Chicago’s Union Station. It
was 1976 and there were no cell phones or personal computers. Just ticker tapes,
telegraphs, and runners. The trading floor was a large room about the size of a football
field. Every commodity traded from a designated area referred to as a pit. The pits were
surrounded by banks of desks with phone and telegraph operators. Orders to buy or sell a
particular commodity were received at the desks and delivered to a specific broker
standing within the appropriate pit. This delivery system was facilitated by runners. As
the name implies, the job of the runner was the time-effective delivery of orders from the
desks to the pits. I was a runner for about three months before thankfully accepting a job
with a trader and giving my stilettoes a break.
I took the train into the city at six a.m. and back home at four-thirty p.m. There was about
forty-five minutes between the time I ended work and before the train home. Bill kept
me company. I was seventeen and he was seven years older than me. He was tall,

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handsome, and quiet. Bill was from Chicago’s south side and I was from the north shore.
The dichotomy in our backgrounds captivated me.
Our conversations while sitting in the train station went on for months. We never strolled
while we talked or went anywhere else. We never talked on the phone. We just sat by the
tracks and waited for my train. He never asked anything of me. Until one day when I was
not looking forward to going home. My parents were out of town and I hated spending
time alone in the house. Bill asked if I wanted to spend the afternoon in his neighborhood
and the explorer in me thought that might be a great adventure. I had the opportunity to
experience the south side… with a south-sider. I was all in.
We boarded a backwards train and I watched a mirror image of familiar skyscrapers
reducing into an unfamiliar landscape of worn out three-flats and graffiti. Like an
enthusiastic tour guide Bill pointing out Bridgeport, where all the city’s “big wigs” lived,
but all I could see were the elevated tracks running past bedroom windows, wooden stairs
zig-zagging up tenement backs to screened ingresses, and alleyway walls lined in graffiti.
Bill lived on South Archer Avenue in the third floor apartment of an old brick three-flat.
The narrow hall was dank and dusty. It smelled of smoke and beer.
The apartment door opened a quarter way along a long wall revealing a rectangle room.
The narrowness of the room was exaggerated by the very high ceiling. There was ornate
crown molding and a textured tin ceiling. The walls, ceiling, and molding were a dull
beige layered with grime, handprints smeared on the wall. The short wall furthest from
me had a large bay of windows. The opposite small wall had an open doorway and
directly across the room from where I stood was an arched doorway through what
appeared to be a short hallway. There was only an old sofa and a television in this room. I
was surprised by a man on the sofa that appeared to have been watching television before
we entered and I was immediately uncomfortable by the smirk he shared with Bill when
we entered the apartment.
As I’m writing this it first occurs to me that I was too young and insecure to trust my gut
or maybe I would have turned and run, and that’s when I recognize that I still find ways
of holding myself responsible. My being in that apartment entirely exculpated him in my
mind. How could anyone ever believe I was rape.
Bill made no introductions. He leads me through the doorway on the short wall. Maybe
his bedroom. The grimy beige flowed from the front room throughout this room and
covered the dirty sheet that covered a mattress on the floor. There was nothing else in the
room. Bill stepped behind me and when he pushed me face first into the dirty mattress I
knew what was going to happen.
I wish I could say that I fought and I screamed. That is what I want to believe I would
do. That’s what women do. But I didn’t. I was limp and quiet and as small as possible. I
just wanted it to end. I was afraid of making him angry. I didn’t want to die. I just
wanted him to be done.

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With a knee in my back, Bill held me down on my stomach and tore my pantyhose off.
He gripped my hips and sodomized me and when he was done he just stopped and got up.
I was unable to move. It took some segment of time for me to get my senses. I didn’t
know what kind of mess I was, or if I was bleeding, but I knew I had to get away from
here. I tried to stand slowly on wobbly legs. Bill just watched me. I lowered and
smoothed my raised skirt. I had been wearing pantyhose that were now destroyed, so I
had no underwear. My previously beloved stilettos were now whorish paraphernalia as
Bill watched me put them on. He said he’d take me to the train, but I think I may have
left alone.
I don’t know why, but getting from Bill’s apartment to the train is an absolute black void
to me. I can’t remember getting there, but I remember boarding the train. The forgiving
darkness of the evening gave way to the abrasive light inside the coach. Every seat was
facing me as I entered the car and the seats seemed mostly filled. I was too afraid to look
down and I had no idea what was happened below my waist. There could have been
blood trickling down my legs for all I knew. I quickly took the open seat in the first row
of the car… which meant it faced the other way… towards all the faces in the glaring
light. It seemed to me that no one was talking or playing cards, or reading the paper. I
felt as though they were all staring at me. Maybe I was so disheveled that it was
disturbingly obvious that something had happened to me. Maybe there were tears
running down my face. Maybe I only imagined their gaping. I don’t know, but I felt
eternally dirty and so ashamed.

Bill, part 2

I honestly thought I could move past this. I imagined Bill would avoid me, fearing my
accusations and I believed that my discomfort, both physical and mental would subside.
It’s so hard to find words to explain what happened next because, my being sane has
prevented me from explaining any of Bill’s behavior; neither his total obsession with me
or his uncanny ability to persuasively lie about me. He became an altering darkness
terrorizing me and bringing me to the nadir of life.
It began the very next day, Saturday with a taunting phone call while I was home alone
telling me that yesterday he had stolen my mother’s car keys from my purse and I would
have to meet him to get them back. The implication of his words were immediately
shocking and frightening; even yesterday he had intended to pursue additional assault
against me beyond his initial attack and must have had an idea of how I would react.
God, has he done this before?
I surrounded myself with uninformed friends and got the keys back, but that was only the
beginning of Bill’s bombardment.

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I started hanging with coworkers after work that took the same train I did, but as soon as I
arrived home the phone calls would begin. My parents were frustrated and upset by the
ridiculous obsession of this perpetual caller, begging me to make it stop and angry with
me when I couldn’t. At night we had to take the phones off the hook. The barrage of
mail was also unrelenting. Three and four letters a day some describing what he would do
to me, others written as though it was for someone else’s benefit, explaining that I needed
to leave him alone and move on, and others with just a crude drawing of him on top of
me. In time my mother would just take the letters from the box and throw them out. I
don’t know if she ever read them, but I’m sure my parents hadn’t yet considered that this
pervasive battering might be occurring beyond the house, but it was.
Every day I took the train to work and as the train pulled into Union station, there on the
platform waiting for me was Bill. Moving with a crowd of vacating commuters he would
walk very close behind me, just at my ear saying things like, “You’re going to come with
me. I’m going to take you away. You’re going to be with me.” Every day I tried to
ignore him heading first to the office where I retrieved my required jacket and my list of
morning out-trades to be resolved. On and on he’d talk, through the station, up the
escalator, in the elevator, down the hall to my office’s door and there he would wait for
me to come out. Then he would continue his verbal assault down the elevator and to the
doors of the trading floor where, to anyone taking note a more professional persona
would emerge, but not really.
Bill managed a teletype machine. His job, requiring him to give paper teletype orders to
runners for delivery meant he could expand his abuse to include sending me explicit
drawings and messages scribbled on teletype paper and delivered by smirking or giggling
runners.
For weeks this continued becoming a routine. I consistently ignored him as my fear
started to subside replaced by unmitigated annoyance at the endless perverse spectacle of
him.
Everything abruptly changed one morning when I exited the train with the usual
commuter crush, where Bill fell in line spewing his endless rhetoric into my ear until we
flowed through the ingress into the bowels of Union Station. In a single continuous
motion Bill moved to face me then lifting me over his shoulder. He heading toward the
escalator that rose to street level doors for exiting the building while I kicked, screamed,
and fought hanging like a rag doll over his shoulder unable to see ahead. Maybe people
thought we were playing or maybe they were too afraid to get involved. He stepped off
the escalator and moved through the doors to the outside, where he suddenly dropped me.
I landed upright and fled back into the building. I didn’t even take a second to look back
and see who had stopped him.
No one ever said a thing to me about the incident, but David showed up at work with a
black eye. I don’t think my brother stopped Bill that morning, but I think he heard about
what had happened and believed he could handle this without any further involvement

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from me. David and I never talked about any of this. He never asked and I never offered
anything.
The next morning everything changed. When I existed the train Bill fell in line, but his
tone was different. He was angry and he had new words “I could kill your brother you
know. I will too, so you should take me seriously.” On and on, through the station, up
the escalator, in the elevator, down the hall to my office’s door. I walked into my office
and quit my job, effective immediately and waited in the office until Bill left for work. I
took the next train home.

Bill – part 3

About a week before I quit the Merc my parents, primarily focusing on the bombardment
of phone calls and mail, acquired what was referred to as a peace bond, similar to what
we now call a restraining order. There were no stalking laws at that time. The mail and
phone calls stopped.
With a fake id I worked serving drinks at a popular local bar where my friends were
patrons, fellow employees, and management. I provided a copy of the peace bond to my
manager. For months my life was quiet and even peaceful.
I was in the bathroom at work when an entirely unfamiliar girl walked in, greeted me in
an overtly condescending tenor using my name and announced she was meeting Bill here
shortly. Immediate alarm coursed through me as I admonished her for betraying my
location. She smirked and illuminated that she was prepared for my response because he
told her what a liar I was. She said they were in love and he wanted to confront me so I
would finally leave him alone. She provided him with directions to the bar.
My manager immediately updated the two bouncers at the door, both friends of mine and
friends of my friends, which was the perfect catalyst to making a matter I had managed to
kept reasonably private for a long time an immediate topic for barroom consumption and
gossip. A past boyfriend showed up at the bar with a handgun, planning to defend me. I
left the bar before Bill showed up. He was stopped at the door and I was told he showed
little bravado before leaving.
I went home and told my parents that I needed to move away and soon after that I left for
Denver.

Denver

I lived in a questionable Denver neighborhood mostly comprised of black and native

American people that generally did not seem to like one another. I glowed white.

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Aside from my family and a very small handful of people, no one really knew where I
was. I had been in Denver over a year and had never heard from Bill, but I still felt like
fugitive with good reason not to resurface. I attended a trade school during the day where
I made some friends. When I wasn’t at school or with my friends I was a mess.
Sleep was always an accident. I never purposely went to sleep. My bed was pushed into a
corner of my room so there was wall along two sides. There was a large window on the
wall along the side of the bed that I kept open at night regardless of the temperature in
case I needed to yell for help. I would sit at the end of my bed with my back against the
wall and my small black and white television in my lap. I held a large kitchen knife in my
hand. I would will myself to stay awake but usually passed out with the TV in my lap and
the knife in my hand. This was as close as I came to feeling safe alone at night.
It was March when I answered the phone and heard his voice. He gloated about how easy
it was for to convince my best friend to provide him with my number. He kept repeating
“My trigger fingers happy and I’m coming to get you.”
Normally, in the past I would have just hung up, but obviously that solved nothing. I was
exhausted of being so scared and realized he could not make me more scared than I have
been. I just started talking. I told him it was enough now and he needed to stop. I said
more, but I don’t remember exactly what. Bill hung up. I felt triumphant. It had always
been me that hung up. This felt different, as though I said the magic words and it ended.
He never called back.

David – part 2

There is a difference between a dream and a visit and I have had both.
He came to tell me that he was leaving, but I cannot swear it was on the night that he died
because I did not know he would be dead the following day or I would have paid closer
attention when he told me he was leaving. When they told me he had died I did not think
about the visit that may have been the night before. I wanted to go with him, but he said
that I could not now and promised to come back for me some day.
Valentine’s Day, 1954 to July 25, 1979

Emergence

Do you see it?

Is it glaringly obvious or do you need to think about it?
Because I didn’t see it at all.
It never crossed my mind.

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How is that possible? I loved my brother.
It seems so completely callous.
It is hard to live with.
I don’t know how to make people listen
to the possibility of another truth.

Thirty years later my two daughters were in high school and the world had not yet been
infiltrated by social media. Being invited to participate in any component of my
children’s life was always a great privilege to me, so it was with my kid’s encouragement
that I joined Facebook.
My girls were at school when I clicked to launch my page with no knowhow regarding
Facebook security controls or search capabilities. I immediately felt a connectivity
beyond my house, my town, even my state, to the whole world, and that felt okay… for
about forty-five minutes. That’s how long it took for Bill to message me.
Sheer panic consumed me. Was he lurking for thirty years waiting for me to surface,
pouncing in minutes? My fear was different now; It had no restraint and was laced with
rage. My daughters were about the age I was when I met Bill.
I sat in the police station and for the first time in my life I told my story, including the
rape which I had never told anyone. The whole story came out in disorganized segmented
torrents wrapped in heaving sobs while I shivered wildly. I never mentioned my brother
because a connection had never occurred to me.
Once I completed recounting my long buried nightmare the police helped me to realize
that I hadn’t posted my town or any photos yet, nor had I linked or mentioned my
children. I currently lived with a different last name and few people in my town even
knew me as Wexler. Bill was probably a long way from finding me.
A detective printed a recent photo of Bill from a police record for me to id. He looked
exactly the same, but older. I was calmer now. I sat dazed alongside the detective’s desk
with the photo in my hand. Sitting in front of his computer the detective clicked his
tongue once on the roof of his mouth while his head motioned negatively and he said,
“He’s a real sicko, huh?” I didn’t respond and he kept reading the screen. Seconds past
before he said, “so this is your rape here,” referring to the screen. He was not asking, it
was a statement and I went dumb. I never reported a rape. I don’t know what he was
looking at but it was absolutely not my rape. I was so spent and couldn’t imagine exuding
the necessary effort to clarify this confusion. I didn’t say a word. I left confident that the
police knew Bill was a sick rapist and at that moment, it was enough for me. I digested
the new information; I wasn’t his only victim.
I stopped sleeping. There was chaos among the previously dark and still segmented
boxes of my damaged timeline. It’s as though bursting memories were now fighting for
attention, completely disorganized, making no cohesive sense at all.

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 … And so It Goes

The previous page was completed five years ago. There is so much more to this story.
both in depth and length, more characters, and dark corners. It is still a work in progress,
my continuing therapy.

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