Chapter 1
Locked up
I pressed my head to the window and gazed at the scenery sweeping by me. Normally, I would have been excited at the thought of spending a week or two with the Morgans. It was a chance to get away from everything that was happening at home and blow off some steam for a change. But today? No. Today I would have given anything to turn the car around and go back home and pretend that none of this had ever happened.
But if I was going to pull off something like that, I was going to need to go back, way back. This had all started, after all, with my father.
He and my mother, I had been told, had met when they were at a youth church camp together. They had fallen in love, gotten married and had me. And, as my mother moved away from her family, she found she was less engaged with the intense religiosity they had foisted on her. She assumed my father would go the same way, but instead, it became even more intense.
She had wondered to me a few times, my mother, if things would have been different had I been a boy.
"It’s just that ..." She sighed, her fingers wrapped around a glass of white wine as she reclined on the couch. She always got to playing the amateur psychologist when she’d had one too many, but I was always curious to hear what she had to say about it all. It was my past, after all, my history. It was the reason I was currently as screwed-up as I was.
"Maybe he wouldn’t have felt such an urge to protect you," she explained, "if you had been a boy. Maybe then he would have been able to let go a little … I don’t know. I wish I could go back in time and undo all of it."
"All of it?” I had asked her, my little fourteen-year-old self in her gawky, gangly body suddenly feeling worried about just how welcome I was in the house.
She reached over and tousled my hair, smiling at me. "Not all of it," she promised me. "Not you, Cindy, I promise."
It was enough to salve some of my worst fears, but there wasn’t much she could do to help with everything that had happened when we had been living with my father. He had never been abusive to her, she had always made that very clear--she had changed so much and he had remained sullenly and stubbornly the same.
Sometimes I wondered if she was just being nice, not admitting the truth of how miserable things had been because it was easier to breeze past it than to go over it all in years of meticulous therapy. Either way, she had sworn over and over again that he had been a better man before I was born before all of this had started. That he hadn’t been the hardcore religious monster I remembered him as when I thought back to him, which I tried to do as little as humanly possible.
I knew why she believed what she did about me being a boy. I was pretty sure she was right, too. My father had always been so keen to point out how important it was that I hung on to my chastity, my decency. I couldn’t imagine he would have pushed the same thing on a son with such a passion.
"It’s everything you have as a wife," he explained to me one day, while I was doing the washing-up--he got me doing chores every day, even as schoolwork and extra-curriculars stacked up. I barely had time to go out and see any of the people I would have called friends, and I was sure that he intended it that way. If I couldn’t go out and see other people, then I wouldn’t get all those nasty ideas in my head about what I could be doing with my life beyond just bowing down and letting him tell me how my life was going to be.
"You have to keep it safe," he continued, taking a swig of his beer. "You have to make sure you are still pure when you find the man who’ll take you on. It’s like chewing gum that’s been used up--nobody wants to eat that. It’s got no taste, it’s disgusting ..."
I could have reeled off a hundred of the euphemisms he had given me over the years for what I would become if I dared to have sex before marriage. Honestly, it got to the point where I was pretty sure he didn’t want me having sex at all. I couldn’t imagine a man who would live up to his standards for me, and frankly, I was already fearful for the ones who would dare try it. My father would beat them back like they were the devil himself come to find me. I knew that getting out from under his thumb was going to be near-impossible.
I suppose, at some point, while I was still in single-digits, I just accepted that. I couldn’t imagine a future in which my mother would dare to leave him. That meant his rules were going to be the ones that governed my existence for the rest of my life. It was almost a relief, knowing I was never going to have to step out into the world and be my own person. I knew that’s what other people wanted, but without the opportunity, I was assured I wasn’t going to make any mistakes, right? His firm hand would guide me until he eventually found a husband he felt lived up to his standards and was happy handing me off to.
I learned to wear long dresses, keep my hair pretty, and cross my legs when I sat down. I had chaste fantasies about holding hands with boys in my class, but even that felt far too close to sin for my liking. Even as I started approaching puberty, and the people around me started talking about boyfriends and kissing and other things, that part of my brain seemed to have been cut off, tamped down to the point where I wasn’t sure that it existed anymore. I was proud of the fact that I didn’t seem to have any of these urges, and couldn’t help but think about how disappointed the fathers of these girls must have been. How angry. If my own had found out I was so much as thinking some of the things they were saying out loud, he would lock me in my room and wouldn’t let me out for a week.
So, the day my mother told him she was leaving him, it was like my entire world had fallen apart. I mean, I had lived my life under such strict rules for so long that it was hard for me to believe there was anything else out there in the world for me. I supposed my mother still recalled something before that--a life where she had been allowed to call the shots. She packed up her stuff, bid for custody of me, and calmly told him she wasn’t going to be with him anymore. She felt like what he was doing to my brain was dangerous.
"I’m protecting her!” he spat back at her furiously, his face so red it looked like he was going to pop.
I was cowering in the doorway of the kitchen as this conversation took place, not sure whose side I was on.
"You really think any man is going to want her if she’s all used up?” he demanded, gesturing to me. He knew I was his last-ditch attempt at proving his point, but my mother shook her head.
"She doesn’t need anyone but herself," she replied, and she held out her hand to me. For a split second, I saw the glimmering future laid out in the front of the little twelve-year-old me, the life I could live without having to answer to all of his rules, without having to play his games to make sure I didn’t land myself in trouble. It was … it was so free. I could do anything I wanted and nobody would stop me or judge me. I took her hand, and with that, we were free.
Well, that’s what I thought.
I supposed she had imagined it that way, too. The two of us walking off into the sunset together and starting a whole new life away from him. And yeah, to some extent, we did find that freedom together. It was incredible, being away from him at first. We could eat what we wanted and stay up as long as we wanted and wear what we wanted. At first, I wanted to take advantage of all of these rules. But every time I did, I heard his voice in the back of my mind, do you really think that’s an appropriate way to act? You’re going to be someone’s wife one day, how do you think they would feel about you wearing that? Don’t you want to keep your figure looking trim?