Butterfly (17 page)

I guess since I was not raised with my biological father, we did not have that family connection. And because we did not have that family connection, he did not think that touching his daughter in a sexual manner was inappropriate.

“Hey, Keisha,” Dad patted the cushion next to him, “Come sit beside your daddy.”

I sat next to my father on the couch. And he tried to hand me a beer.

“Oh, I'm too young to drink.”

“It's okay. You're with your daddy.”

“I don't think my stepdad would like for me to drink alcohol.” I knew that would piss my dad off if I pitted him against my stepdad, but that is what I was trying to do: piss him off!

“Your stepdad? I don't care what that niggah think. If I say you can drink, you can drink, gotdammit!” Dad shoved the beer in my hand. “Here!”

I took a sip and it tasted horrible. I spat it out and my dad smacked me on the back of the head.

“What the hell you doing? That beer cost money!” Dad yelled.

“I'm sorry, Daddy.”

“Lick it up!”

My dad grabbed my neck and lowered my head to the table and made me lick up the beer I had just spat out.

“Now, finish drinking the rest of that beer.”

My dad handed me the beer can again and watched me drink, swallow after swallow. I was sick! I threw up and he laughed at me. He made me brush my teeth and then sit next to him again on the couch.

“Come here,” Dad wrapped his arm around me and kissed me on the cheek. He rubbed his forehead against mine and then closed his eyes. He kissed me on the lips once, and then again and again. I tried to keep my arms between me and him, but he pushed them down to my side.

“I want to go home,” I cried.

“You at home!”

“Uh-uhn! I don't want to, Daddy.”

I pushed him away and then he pulled me back to him. “We ain't doing nothing. This ain't nothing!”

“But I don't want to, Daddy!”

My father grabbed my hand and placed it inside of his pants. He made me squeeze his hard penis. I turned my head away and squeezed. My father laid his head on the back of the couch and sighed. “See, we ain't doing nothing. This ain't nothing.”

He put his hand on mine and made me slide my hand up and down his hard stick. It felt disgusting. I was thirteen freaking years old and that man made me jack him off. I did not know what to do, so I kept holding his stick until it shrank in my hand.

“See, we didn't do nothing, did we?”

I didn't answer. I just sat there and held his stick in my hand and waited for instructions.

“Pass me that napkin.” I picked up a napkin from off of the table in front of us and handed it to him. “Now go wash your hands.”

I did what he said and washed my hands. He went to his bedroom and washed himself off. I went to the hallway bathroom and washed my hands over and over again. When I went to bed that night, I locked the door to keep him away from me. My mother picked me up the next morning, but I was too afraid to tell her what happened.

I hoped that was a one-time thing because my father was drunk that night. But almost every time I went to his house, he did something to me. Even when he got married, he still did something to me.

When I got a little older and I could stay home all by myself, I rarely spent the night over my dad's. Although I did not want to go at all, my mother still made me. He left me alone most of the time because my little sister and brother were getting old enough to know what was going on when he laid his nasty ass on top of me.

About four months ago, my stepdad went to Tennessee to visit his mother, so my mother took that opportunity to spend the night out, too. She would not let me stay at home alone and made me go to my dad's house. I begged her not to make me go, but all that she cared about was getting out of the house herself.

All of the bedrooms were full, so I ended up sleeping on the living room floor. I thought since I was in an open area, I would be safe, but in the middle of the night, I felt my dad sliding beneath the cover with me. He grabbed me around my waist and pulled me backward and then he started grinding on my butt.

“No, Dad!” I whispered. “Please don't.”

“Shh! Be quiet!” Dad whispered back.

He tried to pull my pajamas down, but I kept pulling them back up. He rolled me on my stomach and held both of my arms behind me with just one of his big chubby hands. He was so big and heavy that he almost smothered me. He opened my legs with his legs and that's all that I remember because I blacked out. I don't know if it was from the anxiety of being raped by my father, or the pressure of his big nasty-ass body smothering me. Either way, I passed out.

I woke up with my comforter on top of me and my pajamas around my ankles, but my underwear was nowhere to be found. I slowly stood up and wrapped my comforter around me. On my way to the bathroom, I met my father.

“Nothing happened! You hear me?”

I did not answer I kept going to the bathroom. My father followed me into the bathroom and stood in the doorway. “Did you hear me? I said nothing happened.”

I looked at him through the mirror and answered, “Naw, nothing happened.”

I took a shower, put on my clothes and then walked all the way home from the West End to Decatur. It took me seven hours, but I made it. When my mother got home, she whooped me for disobeying her and not staying at my dad's until she got home. I wanted to tell her what had happened, but I felt like it would only create more problems. I could not tell my stepdad because my mother did not want him to know that we had been away from the house for the night. Had he found out, he probably would have killed my father with his bare hands! My father thought he was tough and always looked for trouble. He would have loved for my stepdad to step to him, so he could get some of his thugs to hurt him. My stepdad never started trouble, but he sure as hell never ran away from it, either!

Two months after that happened, I got sick and I had a pregnancy test. Sure enough, it was positive. I was not a virgin, but I had not been with a boy in about a year, so I knew he had to be the father. Instead of telling anybody that I was pregnant, I secretly had an abortion and everything went away.

The Monday after that, I was walking down the hall during my lunch period and the secretary called me into the office. She asked me why I was not in the conference my mother was having with Mr. Wilson, my science teacher. Shit, I did not know we were having a conference. She immediately made me go to Mr. Wilson's class. I should have known by
the closed door that something was up, but I thought he just wanted privacy for our conference. I opened the door and caught Mr. Wilson having sex with my mother from behind.

She was bent over his desk with her skirt wrapped around her ankles. Their backs were turned to the door, so they could not see me when I walked in. I was completely in shock. I took a few steps toward them calling out to my mother. They were so into it, they did not even notice that I was standing right behind them.

“Mama,” I kept walking closer and then I screamed,
“Mama!”

My mother and Mr. Wilson looked over their shoulders and finally saw me. My mother reached for her skirt and tried to pull it up. “What are you doing in here?”

“I go to school here, Mama!”

“Keisha, I know this looks bad, but your mother and I are in love.” Mr. Wilson bent down behind his desk and hid himself to pull up his clothes.

“How could you do this, Mama?”

I ran out of the classroom and then all the way home. My mother came home and explained to me that she and Mr. Wilson were in love. Mr. Wilson was the mystery man from the Internet. My father was a rapist and my mother was a cheater, and I was the child those evil people produced. Every single night I dream to be a part of a normal family...”

END KEISHA'S STORY

•   •   •

“...But I wake up to the nightmare of the disgusting face I see in my mirror every single morning.”

“Oh my God, Keisha! I don't know what to say about your mother, but you have to tell somebody about what your father did to you.”

“Tell who, Butterfly?”

“Tell your stepdad.”

“If I tell my stepdad, he'll put his hands on my Dad and then he'll be in jail.”

“Then tell the police.”

“I don't want my daddy to go to jail, either.”

“He's not your daddy, Keisha! Your stepdad is your daddy! That man is a rapist!”

“See, that's why I didn't want to tell anybody 'cause people are going to want me to do what they want me to do.”

“Well, what do you want to do, Keisha?”

“I just want to forget about it.”

“But what if he tries to do it again?”

“He's not going to get a chance to do it again.”

“But he raped you, Keisha. He has to pay for what he did to you.”

“God will punish him.”

“Yeah, but the police need to punish him, too.”

“I just want to forget it ever happened and go on with my life.”

“Listen to me, Keisha. Bri's stepdad works for the Atlanta Police Department. He can help you.”

“I don't want anybody's help. What I want is to be left alone so that I can put this behind me and move forward with my life.”

“You're my best friend, Keisha. How can I leave you alone? I care about you.”

“If you really care about me, Butterfly, you'll let this go because if this comes out, it's going to hurt a lot of people, especially me. I don't want all of our friends to know that my dad raped me. I don't want people to look and say, ‘That girl had sex with her father.' I just want to have a normal life.”

“Your life will be normal in time, but you have to deal with what happened in order to get past it.”

“You mean like how you're dealing with your mother abandoning you?”

“My situation is totally different from yours.”

“What's the difference?”

“I have to deal with my situation in an unresolved manner because I can't deal with my mother directly. But your father is on the other side of town, and you can make him pay for what he did to you.”

“We're two different people, Butterfly. You're mad at your mother and you want her to pay for hurting you. You want an explanation! I don't! I don't want to know why my father raped me. I don't want him to pay for anything. I'm not mad at him; I'm afraid of him! I want him away from me...
Forever!”
Keisha yelled and then calmed down quickly. “I'm sorry.”

I realized there was nothing I could do to convince Keisha to press charges against her father. She was too afraid that she would be put on trial in the court of public opinion.

“Don't worry about it. They can't hear you in this big old house.”

“I just want to have a normal life with a normal family.”

“The older I get, the more I'm starting to realize that every family has some type of dysfunctional behavior, Keisha.”

“Let me ask you a question, Butterfly.”

“Go ahead.”

“How are you learning to talk so good?”

“You mean, talk so
well
.”

“Yeah, how are you learning to talk so well?”

“It's an environmental thing, Keisha. I'm being pushed to speak properly and it's okay to say a word or sentence the correct way without being criticized by your friends. You know, it's okay to be intelligent.”

“It's like you just got smart all of a sudden.”

“No, that's not it. I got to a school now where communication is important through dialogue and not through action. And the
Forresters, even Pa-Pa, make sure I'm speaking proper grammar.”

“Damn, all that I learn from my house is how to speak biblical terms from my stepdad.”

“Wait a minute, don't get it twisted, Pastor Powell is responsible for me having the patience to sit down and listen when someone is trying to tell me some useful information. And he used the Bible to get through to me.”

“Oh, I didn't mean it like that. I love the fact that my stepdad tries to teach me about the Bible, but I want to be smart like you.”

“I'm no smarter than you, Keisha. It's just that I have a lot of support behind me to excel. I know how you feel. Until I moved in with the Powells, I never had a sense of family. My father did all that he could as a father, but he knew nothing about being a mother. He knew how to survive. He knew how to love me. But he did not know how to teach me how to love myself like a woman should.”

“Do you like have resentment, for your father for not being there for you the past eight years?”

“Uh-uhn! Nope! What happened that night was self-defense. He did not go over there to hurt anybody. He went over there to see his kids that he loved. They started it and my father finished it.”

“But you don't think that if he would have just walked away, he could have still been in your life?”

“No, I think he did what he had to do.”

“What? Are you saying you think he had to murder those people?”

All of a sudden, I had a vivid flashback to that night when the incident occurred. It was in slow motion and my recollection was more synchronized than I had ever remembered. I could see my father on top of the man, but he was not swinging as I had always remembered. He was only trying to restrain the man from hitting him.