Colin Harrison - Afterburn

He checked the time. It was late, after midnight. He needed to sleep, he knew, but he was enjoying his precipitous plunge into Christina's identity. She had told him a great deal, but he couldn't quite connect everything. "But, going back," he said, "why put the money in the old Mustang anyway? It seems like a vulnerable place."

"Oh, that was-" Christina paused. "The car just meant a lot to me."

"What do you mean?"

She stood up and walked around in his shirt. "You know almost everything else… I guess I can tell you this."

"What?"

She sat in the chair and straightened her legs, feet together like a gymnast. She looked back at him, then looked away.

"You don't have to tell me," he said.

She dropped her feet to the floor, stared at the blank television. "When I was sixteen, Charlie, this guy followed me from a job I had as a waitress, and he knew which car was mine because he parked his van next to it. He hit me really hard in the mouth and then in the nose. He broke it, in fact." Her voice held a far remembrance of the moment of terror, a weariness of this long burden. "I was almost unconscious, and he tied me up and started to drive along the highway… It was night. You could hide a van anywhere."

Which, from her expression, Charlie understood the man had done.

"He had me for three or four hours, and it was not so much the rape that was bad-I mean, that was horrible, I'd never had sex before, either-it was he hit me so much. For no reason. I couldn't resist anymore. I could barely breathe. My nose and face were swollen up. He kept trying to make me say I loved him."

"Did you say it?" Charlie asked, sickened by the idea.

"No."

"He kept hitting you?"

"He said, Say you love me, say you love me. And I'd shake my head and he'd hit me again."

"You were a strong kid." He rubbed his forehead in sadness, picturing Julia as a sixteen-year-old. Long legs, still wore bangs. Chewed gum all the time. You have a daughter and you cry for all the daughters, he thought. She's telling me this for some reason. "Jesus, I'm sorry," he finally said.

"He left me on the highway. He threw me out of the car. He just opened the back door and threw me out. I think he thought I was going to die. I didn't have any clothes. I didn't care, I just walked along the road until I came to a little house. I remember standing on the porch ringing the doorbell. With no clothes on. The lady who answered the door was so surprised. But she understood, she was so great. Her husband understood right away and took this big hunting jacket off a peg and put it around me. They did everything. They called the police and my family. I loved them so much, you know, they just got it."

"Did they catch the guy?"

She nodded. "Someone at the restaurant knew who he was. He totally confessed. Or they beat it out of him, I don't know."

"He go to prison?"

"Six years. I used to worry about what would happen when he got out. It bothered me to think that he was around somewhere. I was anxious a lot of the time. I'd think I was having a heart attack… I was scared, especially when the day came around each year. You always remember the date. Because you're changed after it. Just different. You have a hard time trusting anything, trusting the universe, if you know what I mean. I was a total virgin before, barely kissed a guy. When I started to see Rick I told him. Turns out the guy was about to be released. The guy was on parole, had to report in. But I was still kind of nervous. He might have tried to call me once. Rick went away for a couple of days, and when he came back, he told me not to worry about the guy. He'd found him in Pennsylvania. I don't think Rick killed him-that wasn't like him. But he did something. You have to understand that Rick was a big guy. He scared people. He always wanted to protect me. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes I didn't. You like knowing you have a friend, right? But it got all messed up. He visited my mother, which I didn't want him to do, and they talked a lot about the rape, and my mother told him things he wasn't supposed to know."

"Like what?"

She tucked her feet under her, still looking at the empty television. "The guy made me pregnant. I'd never had sex before, and here I was raped and pregnant. I know this sounds strange… but I wanted to keep the baby. It was like all this painful stuff had happened but I was going to get a baby out of it. It seemed-you have to remember I wasn't even sixteen, I didn't know anything-it seemed like maybe, if all this bad stuff had happened, then I was getting this good thing, this baby. It didn't really matter where it had come from, it was mine. The baby was innocent, the baby didn't know anything, so why should the baby's life be destroyed? That's the way I thought about it. Also, I think the idea of an abortion sounded like more violence, and I just couldn't deal with that.

"I had tried to go back to school, but people were talking about me, my face was all smashed up. They sent my schoolwork home. I couldn't really go yet. But my mother kept saying, You have to get rid of this thing, it's not a baby yet, it's not anything, and it will slow you down, it will mess up your whole life. There'll be a better time to have a baby, later. I sort of knew she was right, but I–I couldn't say I wanted to do it. My father stayed out of it. I think he was ambivalent. My mother got nervous, because some time went by, weeks and weeks. They didn't know I was pregnant for a long time. I hadn't gotten my period, but that could have been because of the trauma. Also, sixteen-year-olds are not totally regular yet. So finally my mother took me to the doctor and said it was just for an examination, but as soon as the nurse put this IV in my arm and I looked at their faces, I knew. I fought them. They had to hold me down. They-"

She stopped. She was not crying. "They were forcing my legs open. It was terrible. I tore out the tube, I bit my mother's hand. I was wild. When I woke up, it was over. We had a hard time after that. She did what she thought was right, she meant well. I understand that. But it was forced on me, it never got talked about." Christina went to the window. "My father didn't know until afterward. My mother tricked him, too. So we went for a lot of drives. I needed somebody to help me, and he said he was going to teach me to drive his Mustang, and he did. We went for a lot of long drives-I mean like two hundred miles-and he'd let me drive and smoke cigarettes, anything I wanted. He understood. He understood I had to work this out. He'd talk to me, he was very understanding. He'd say that I was strong and I'd get past this and I was going to be okay. After a few months, I was allowed to drive the Mustang by myself. It made my mother upset. She wasn't allowed to drive it. My father knew I would be careful with it and I was. I paid for the gas. The driving calmed me down. I got through like two years that way, and then I was fine. I had sex, real sex I mean, in that car for the first time, and I told my dad, maybe a little defiantly, like, Look what I did. And he was very sweet. He asked, Was the guy gentle? And I said yes. He was treating me like an adult, unlike my mother.

"So I guess that was why I put the money in the car. I wanted my father to find those boxes and not have to worry. It was stupid, Charlie, it was so incredibly stupid. I loved him so much, you know? I just wanted to-I don't know, I wanted-"

"Redemption," Charlie said, in a voice far from himself. "You wanted redemption." He was tired now, but he asked, "I don't understand why you didn't just head down to Florida as soon as you got out of prison."

"Because I don't want my mother caught in this." She lit a new cigarette. "I think Tony got me out of prison, Charlie. My sentence wasn't over yet. I think he did something with the police, paid somebody, and they just released me."