Love and Sorrow (Small Town Secrets Book 5), стр. 54
Oh, God. What the fuck might have happened to my child that she would be afraid to tell me? Had Mike hit her? Had she gotten into drugs or something? I leaned over, lowering my voice. “Honey, you have no reason to be afraid of me.”
Sarah nodded but still refused to look at me, so I shifted my gaze to Rebecca, my eyes pleading with the woman.
“It’s nothing you’ve done, Randi, but it is common for children to be apprehensive about telling their parents something of this nature.” After taking a deep breath, she said, “Sarah has been sexually abused.”
Chapter Nineteen
Oh, my God. Never before had I felt this sensation, one of the earth falling out from underneath me as I plunged headlong into darkness. As if I were on a ship in choppy waves, my stomach lurched while saliva rushed to fill my mouth. Swallowing and trying to get my bearings, I forced words past my teeth. “I don’t understand. What…how?” The question in the back of my head, even more horrific, was who, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
“It happened over the course of the last school year. Sarah, are you ready to share this with your mom?”
Although my daughter nodded, she still didn’t look at me. As though my maternal instincts finally got a fucking clue, I wrapped my arm around Sarah’s shoulders, holding her as close as I could without crushing her, and I wondered why the hell I hadn’t realized the severity of her behavior. And I blamed myself. Was it my fault that Sarah hadn’t told me?
I couldn’t question, though. For now, it was my job to listen.
Rebecca’s voice, soft and kind, cut through the air. “Sarah, you can begin speaking whenever you’re ready.”
Although she started talking, she kept her eyes down, so I focused on her hands that appeared to be folded almost daintily—but the knuckles were white. “The, um, beginning of fifth grade, Mr. Buckley seemed nice.”
Oh, fucking hell. Please don’t tell me that man had anything to do with what was going on. He’d been kind of a weird guy but that alone wouldn’t make him a bad teacher. Already, my stomach knotted as I asked myself why I hadn’t listened to my instincts.
Sarah’s voice sliced through my guilt. “Some of us girls in class were the special helpers. It was Ashley first. She got to pass out papers, do the calendar, stuff like that.” My gut roiled again, sending acid up my esophagus, as I remembered sweet little Ashley, one of Sarah’s old friends, and I wondered if this was the reason they’d stopped talking to each other. “And then, for Thanksgiving, I became Mr. Buckley’s assistant.”
I had to strain to hear my daughter’s voice, and I fought back tears, already understanding where all this was going.
“It was so cool at first. I was the special one. At Christmas, I got to hand out all the presents during our party and pass out cookies. But then…”
Sarah gulped, and it took everything in me to not scream, to not cry, to not question the fucking universe. I listened as my child calmly explained how her fifth-grade homeroom teacher, the man hired to instruct and protect my daughter, had gradually, slowly and methodically, groomed her to be sexually molested by him. It started with touching that slowly moved from innocent to uncomfortable to completely inappropriate. Soon, she was sitting on his lap and looking at his naked upper body to “check” him for disease.
“He asked me to feel a spot on his back, to see if there were knots or anything weird. And so when I was rubbing his back, he made a sound like it hurt, and when I asked, he told me I had the hands of a nurse.” I couldn’t see her eyes, but a tear dropped, making a tiny dark blue dot on her jeans.
Of course, things progressed, and soon she was examining him from top to bottom, continuing to “release” him from pain—and, as I listened, I wondered how the fuck he’d been able to do this with other kids and teachers around. More than that, though, I wondered how the hell I hadn’t had a clue. But I couldn’t interrupt my daughter or begin grilling her. As it was, she already acted like this was her fault.
“I knew I shouldn’t be touching him there, but he said I was helping him—and that I should become a doctor when I grow up.” As more tears fell, she continued telling me about how the year had progressed and, soon, she was touching his penis and he was showing her how it could magically change shape and firmness. “And I was helping him get the bad stuff out.”
I fought like hell to keep my own sobs inside my chest, but all I wanted to do was take this shit away from her. But I couldn’t. There was no removing this from her. How the fuck had I allowed this to happen?
Sarah continued with her story, pausing at points, and Rebecca would ask if she needed to take a break, but then she’d continue. Mr. Buckley gave her treats as her friends ostracized her. He continued escalating, and I just knew this would end with penetration—and how the hell had I missed all of this? What the fuck did this say about me as a mother?
“Then…do you remember we had that class, mom? Sex education?” I swallowed and nodded my head when Sarah looked my way—but she still didn’t make eye contact. “I figured out that the bad stuff I was helping him get out was called semen.” But that wasn’t all. Then he made her touch herself. At that point, Sarah stopped talking, burying her face in her hands.
“Sarah, if you like, we can continue this later. You don’t have to tell your mother all of this.”
I wanted to