138

Jolene and Tiffany showed up Saturday morning. After conferring with Hilda, my divorce lawyer, we put together the following:

You may have been unaware of the circumstances, but the young woman you were having sex with in this picture was not a willing participant in this event. She was being coerced in the most heinous way possible. We are not attempting to blackmail you, nor extort you in any way. These pictures are being destroyed and will never be used against you. We hope if you were ignorant of the circumstances or sorry for your participation against the innocent young woman in these pictures, you would consider a tax deductible donation to a charitable organization supporting the victims of human trafficking or sexual or physical abuse. We recommend five percent of your income on your last tax return but let your heart be your guide. Thank you.

It would be signed by Hilda and sent from her law firm and would have a picture of them fucking me with all the sex organs and all the faces but theirs blacked out and addressed as personal and confidential. We sent them to everyone but Geoff and his family members and Richard Wharton. I didn't send one to Mr. Wharton because it appeared he'd already made recompense, and Geoff and his ilk because he knew I was an involuntary participant in all that happened. Something worse needed to happen to him. The other person who received something different was Tanner's boss. I don't know if he knew he was fucking Tanner's wife when he fucked me, or if he was complicit in making it appear Tanner went to Osaka, but he deserved a more dastardly fate.

I informed him that I would retain custody of his pictures and in addition to a sizable donation of ten percent to the aforementioned causes, I expected him to fire Tanner and do his best to blackball him from the architectural community in Atlanta. If Tanner wanted to work in his field, it would have to be far away from me. He responded quickly and Tanner was fired for cause, conduct detrimental to the company, and advised to seek employment outside of Georgia. I received notification from Hilda shortly after it happened.

For a few weeks after my revenge on Tanner, I was relatively happy. We heard charities were receiving substantial donations toward the cause of human trafficking and relieving victim suffering. So many donations, they had enough to share with agencies and charities in adjoining states. I suspected not all the recipients of our letter believed their pictures were destroyed and we wouldn't come back to them. They could believe what they wanted, but it was over.

At some point, the reality of all I'd done and what I'd become sank in and I entered a semi-catatonic funk, where I didn't want to do anything or go anywhere. I sat around in my pajama's, not bothering to shower, dress or hardly to eat. I was so disgusted with myself. Oliver had succeeded in destroying my life and my sense of self-worth and I felt like exactly what he'd tried to make me.

Tiffany tried to pull me out of it, but I was oblivious to her attempts to cheer me up. She'd come by and tell me she heard a seedy strip joint in Gwinnett County had burned to the ground and the sheriff's office was under investigation for malfeasance and I didn't care. She told me an adult toy store had been shuttered for running a glory hole. It didn't matter. Even learning Stan and Kathy had died in a boating accident or Geoff had suffered a beating so bad it had crippled him for life had no meaning for me. I was dead inside and I didn't believe it could ever be fixed. When nothing Tiffany tried worked, she pulled the end around.

There was a knock on my door and I opened it expecting to find either Tiffany or Jolene standing there. Instead, it was my parents.

"Hello, dear. Can we come in?" Dad asked. "Tiffany said you're in a bit of trouble and you needed our help."

I started crying. They both swooped in and wrapped their arms around me.

"Oh dear," Mom said, "it's worse than I thought. She reeks. Smells like she hasn't showered in days, if not weeks. I know we taught you cleanliness is next to Godliness, child. You get right in the bathroom and shower until I don't have to hold my nose to be around you." She turned me to face the bathroom and patted my rump, saying, "Run along, Brooke. We can talk about whatever's troubling you when you're clean."

I went in and took a long, hot shower, shampooing my hair twice. I hadn't shaved anything in weeks and my legs and pits were hairy. I'd started to regrow pubic hair and I washed that twice as well. I put on clean clothes and went back to the living room. Mom had picked up some of the trash lying around and was washing the dirty dishes in the sink.

"You're lucky you don't have bugs, dear. It's filthy in here."

"Where's Dad?" I asked.

"You didn't have any decent food that wasn't expired or dead. He's gone to the grocery store to buy some. He should be back in a few with food. You look like you lost ten pounds and you weren't carrying a lot extra to begin with."

"What did Tiffany say?"

"Only that you needed help and you were getting a divorce. She wasn't specific, said you had a rough patch and couldn't get through it on your own."

"It was bad, Mom."

"Of course it was or you wouldn't need our help. You don't have to bother telling me until your father's home. No point in telling bad news twice. They only thing I need to know is if you'll be okay."

"I don't know," I admitted. "I'm empty inside."

"That's not what I want to hear, Brooke."

"I'm sorry. It's all I've got right now."

"Have you been praying?"

"No. God seems pretty far away right now. I don't know how to speak to him."

"Like you're speaking to me. It doesn't need to be fancy. Just needs to be sincere. Come here. Let me smell you and make sure you did a good job in the shower."

I walked over to her and she wrapped her arms around me and squeezed me, taking a big exaggerated sniff.

"That's better. That's the way my little girl should smell."

"I'm not your little girl anymore."

"You'll always be my little girl. Your age has nothing to do with it. You can be sixty and you'll still be my little girl." She stroked my head. "Whatever it is can be fixed, Brooke and you're never in this world alone. You've got your family, your friends, your faith. Between those three, everything can be fixed."

"I hope you're right."

She held my face in her wrinkled, calloused hands, staring into my face, and said, "Of course I'm right. I'm your mother. I'm always right. You haven't forgotten already, have you?"

"Apparently so."

There was a knock on the door. "That will be your father. Open the door and help him with the groceries. We're going to have steak and baked potatoes tonight and you can make the salad."

So, I helped bring in groceries and make dinner and we ate and the whole time, Mom and Dad talked about inconsequential things that made me laugh. After we finished, we scrubbed the kitchen to a faretheewell, then retired to the couch in the living room.

"Now, tell us all about your troubles, sweetie, and we can figure out how to make it better," Dad said.

"I don't know if I can. I'm so ashamed of myself. I feel like you'll hate me if I tell you. It's so disgusting and vile."

"Darling, we're your parents," Dad said. "There's no way we can ever hate you. You're the best thing that ever happened to us. You are one of the best, most kind-hearted persons we know. We will always love you, no matter what."

"Did you kill someone, dear?" Mom asked.

I started to say, 'No way. Why would you think that?' And remembered people were dead and perhaps I was the reason for it. Oliver was dead and I would have killed him given half a chance. Mr. Wharton had done it, for his own reasons, but I'd wanted to. Kathy and Stan were dead. A boating accident Tiffany said. Was it really a boating accident? That was the way Jolene's rapist died and though she'd never claimed to kill him, I suspected she had. Geoff was crippled for life. Maybe, a worse fate than death. I doubted it was a total coincidence. I sighed.

"I was blackmailed into doing the most horrible things you can imagine," I said. "In fact. I doubt you could imagine it. Imagine the worst, most vile, most perverted things you can think of, then the reality is probably ten times worse. It started when I sucked another man's cock on my wedding day."

They looked at each other and they remembered my wedding day. My Dad pounding on the music room's door because I was late to the ceremony, my hysterics, the fainting, the puking. They both held a hand and I went through the whole sordid mess. Their hands gripped me tighter and tighter to the point it hurt, but I wanted the pain. I needed the pain. Mom and Dad started crying, and I cried with them. Dad looked ready to explode when he found out Tanner's role in my abasement. I revealed everything, held nothing of my own back, unburdening my soul. The only things I didn't say was that I suspected Jolene and Jackson might have had something to do with the deaths of Oliver, Stan and Kathy, and Geoff's crippling. I even told the last little bit; how I'd willingly fucked nine men in front of Tanner to get back at him. I even explained the deepest part of my shame; how much I orgasmed as I was exploited.

"On some level," I said, "I must have enjoyed it. I can't imagine hating it so much and loving it so much at the same time. So you see. It's why I know you must despise me now. I might have stopped it, but I didn't. I could have ended it at the beginning, refusing to do what Oliver wanted at my wedding, putting an end to it, right from the start. I was so afraid of what it might mean to my marriage, that Tanner wouldn't marry me. When I found out he was in on it; it broke my heart. It's why I did what I did at the last. I had nothing left."

"Did you never suspect him, Brooke?" Mom asked.

"I think I must have wondered about him on some subconscious level. There were some things I didn't understand; the desire to have sex with me in public, his willingness to let me be nude in front of others. They weren't the sort of things I expected from a husband, based upon your marriage, but I knew nothing about sex. My friends were all sexually active and I knew they did things I wouldn't have considered doing, but I had no concept of what was normal. I was so naive."

"The sins of the father are visited tenfold upon the children," Daddy said. "It's my fault. It's all my fault." Mom put her hand on Dad's arm and patted him, clucking softly.

"What the hell are you talking about?" I asked. "How could any of this be your fault?"

"Perhaps it's time I told you a little more about your birth, dear," Mom said, "the reason I was an unwed mother."

I stared at her uncomprehendingly. I thought I knew the story. She'd had sex before marriage and had me. What more was there?

"I was engaged to a nice young man from a good family. We were being good and waiting for marriage before we had sex. One day about eight weeks before the wedding, I was raped by two young men. I was walking along a country road and they stopped and offered me a ride. I accepted because it was a long walk and a hot day. We started talking and I told them about my upcoming wedding and how happy I was. At some point, they left the road and drove into the woods. They stripped me naked in their car, practically ripping my clothes off. I was used, horribly, anally, orally and vaginally. For over three hours they had sex with me. I hated it, everything I'd been saving for my future husband, they took from me. Like you, I orgasmed during sex. They were skilled. They'd had sex before, learned how to pleasure a woman. When they were done, they dropped me off outside my fiancé's house. My clothes were torn, their seed was all over me, I had no choice but to tell him what happened. I told him everything, even how I'd climaxed while they used me. He tried to forgive me and to forget, but he couldn't, especially when he found out I was pregnant. I understood. It's a hard thing for someone to raise a child not his own. He gave me up and broke our engagement and I was left to raise you alone."

"And then Daddy came along and married you. He was able to raise another man's child."

"It wasn't as simple as that, honey," Dad explained. "I was one of the rapists."