Fifteen Years (20 page)

Manipulating the hand that he used to caress her back while she wept, Josiah slowly slid the ponytail holder from her hair and ran his fingers through her long waves. He’d been wondering what that would feel like ever since they came face-to-face at the Smith home yesterday. Josiah knew that in a sense, he was taking advantage of a situation, but he couldn’t help himself. This might be the only chance he’d get to experience what it felt like without her knowing his true intentions.

“Did you ever tell Dad about what was going on?” Josiah couldn’t imagine that Thomas Smith knew about this and Bogart was still alive and well.

“No,” she said through a sniffle. “When I left for college—and especially when I left Auburn and went to LaSalle—I thought I wasn’t supposed to bother them anymore. They were my foster parents, not my biological ones, and they had fulfilled their obligation when they provided for me until I turned eighteen. I remember when I said bye to all of you on the day that I was leaving for Alabama. Mom and Dad both told me to call them if I ever needed anything, but I remember the social worker telling me that their job was done, and that I was an adult now and had to learn to be independent.”

“So when you went off to college, you never contacted them again?” Josiah said it as if he hadn’t been guilty of the same thing.

“When I first got there, I called all the time. When I got involved with Bo, he became my world. I called and told Mom and Dad that I was getting married. At first they congratulated me, but then Daddy asked me if Bo was saved. When I told him that he wasn’t, but that he was still a great guy, Daddy immediately advised
me not to do it. He said that no matter what other great qualities a man had, if he didn’t have Christ at the forefront of his life, then he couldn’t be the one God had for me.”

Josiah immediately thought about Ana. And he remembered Thomas teaching him the same thing as a young teenager. Although he hadn’t made the connection at the time, Josiah was sure that Thomas’s words of wisdom were the reason that he so easily passed over Ana, in spite of how smart and beautiful she was.

“I wish I had listened,” Patrice mumbled.

“I wish you had too, Peaches.” Josiah kissed the top of her head. After a brief silence, he said, “So you actually stayed for ten years?”

“We weren’t together that long, but we were legally married for that long. Bo and I had only been married for about two years the first time I left. I’d finally had enough of being treated like a beck-and-call girl, so while he was out with some friends, I got the courage to pack whatever I could get into the car, and I fled. I had been planning it for some time—close to a year. I opened a bank account in my name, and every time he gave me a little money, I’d put it away.

“Our neighbors were selling a little Toyota Corolla for eight hundred dollars, but they let me buy it for five hundred cash. Bo always hung out with some friends of his on Friday nights after he got off from work. When he left for work on Friday morning, I never saw him again until Saturday morning; usually around three o’clock. I bought the car on that Friday afternoon, and by the time he got home, I was long gone.”

“Good for you.” Josiah gave her a tight squeeze.

“Don’t pat me on the back just yet,” Patrice forewarned. “I went back.”

Josiah felt himself stop breathing. “You went back? Why?

“I didn’t have anywhere to go.” Her voice broke, and the moistness
that he felt coming through his shirt told him that tears were flowing again. “I’d been an orphan practically my whole life. I know you can relate to an extent, JT, but at least your mother came back for you at some point. She may have failed, but at least she tried. My mother killed my dad when I was eight. He was dead, and she was sent to jail for life. I didn’t have anybody to come back for me. My Asian grandparents on my mom’s side were mad that she went and had a baby with a black man, so they didn’t want anything to do with me. My African-American grandparents on my dad’s side were mad that my mom killed their son, so they didn’t want anything to do with me either. I look just like my mom. I would be a constant reminder to them of the woman who murdered their son.”

Josiah closed his eyes and held her tighter. He couldn’t recall ever hearing her story before. He couldn’t remember ever asking her how she ended up sharing the same temporary home as he. If he had, fifteen years of separation had erased it from his memory. Josiah could feel Patrice’s pain in her words, and he wished he could say or do something to make it better.

“I stayed in an efficiency hotel for a week,” she said, “but then I went back home. I never even left the city of Philadelphia.”

“Bo never tried to call you or anything during that time?”

“He couldn’t have even if he had wanted to,” Patrice answered. “The day after we got married, he took my cell phone and smashed it with the heels of his size-fourteen boots. I was never allowed to have one after that. I couldn’t call any of the friends I’d made during my stint at LaSalle, and they couldn’t call me. His goal was to totally cut me off from the outside world. Bo said that all I needed was the home phone, and the only time I needed to answer it was when I saw his number on the caller ID. He told me that there had better never be a time when he called that I didn’t answer. The house was the
only place that I should be, so whenever he called, I needed to be in place to answer.

“I couldn’t even go to church on Sunday. Bo said church was nothing but a brainwashing tank. He claimed that preachers tricked people into gathering into one building, and once they got them there, they pounded nonsense in their heads, and then convinced them to pray to and give all of their money to some unknown being that they called ‘Lord.’” Patrice sighed. “I can’t believe I was so stupid.”

“You weren’t stupid, Peaches. You were naïve. You were probably looking for a father figure when you were drawn to this cat in the first place. If you’d been raised by both your natural parents, you probably would have never ended up with him.”

Patrice was quiet for a little while, and Josiah wondered if she were considering his suggestion for the first time. Then she said, “I recently saw an interview on Christian television, and during it the minister said that a girl should never label a guy her boyfriend before she sees him in worship. She said that if we start dating men before ever knowing for ourselves how they interact with God, then we are making a terrible mistake. She said the first thing we need to consider before anything else is his relationship with God.” Patrice wiped her tears. “I wish I’d seen that program before I married Bo. Not that Daddy and Mama hadn’t warned me, but maybe hearing from a total outsider would have made a difference. I was fully aware that he wasn’t a churchgoer long before I married him, but I had no idea that he was practically an atheist.”

Josiah was beginning to hate a man he’d never met. “It’s hard to believe that a man as wicked as Bo would just let you come back in the house when you returned. I’m surprised he didn’t make you live in your car for a few days just for kicks.”

“He more than let me back in, JT. When he opened the door and saw me, he pulled me in and hugged me like he’d missed me more
than anything in the world. That was on a Saturday evening. As soon as we got my bags back in the house, he told me to get dressed because he was taking me out to dinner. I was stunned. Bo hadn’t taken me out to dinner since before we got married. Seafood is my favorite, so he took me to this really upscale restaurant called Capital Grille. They have some of the best seafood money can buy After dinner, he brought me back home, and we had the most passionate night ever. I remember thinking that I had definitely done the right thing by leaving. I’d been gone just long enough for him to miss me and realize what his life would be without me. It had been just the jolt of reality that he needed in order for him to know that he had to treat me like the queen I was if he didn’t want to risk losing me forever.”

Josiah could hear a ‘but’ coming, and it didn’t take long for her to reveal it.

“The next morning, I woke up gasping for breath,” Patrice said. “Just like that, he went from loving me the night before to choking me the day after. He had his hands around my throat so tight that I couldn’t speak or yell. Before I blacked out, the last thing I remember him telling me was that if I ever left him again, he’d finish the job.”

Josiah’s teeth were clinched. “I hope you had him arrested.”

“No.” Patrice whispered the word, but Josiah heard it loud and clear.

“Peaches.” He sat up and pulled her into a seated position with him. “We’re talking about something that happened eight years before your marriage ended. Are you telling me that even after he literally choked the breath out of you, you still remained there?”

She hung her head shamefully and nodded. “For two more years, I did. I was scared, JT. He proved to me that he was capable of killing me with his bare hands. I didn’t know what to do or where to go.”

“You had Daddy’s number, sweetie. Why didn’t you call home?”

She wiped away new tears. “Scared, stupid, ashamed … maybe all of the above. He had told me not to marry Bo, and I did it anyway. I wanted him to think that he’d been wrong and that I’d been right. I didn’t want to hear him say, ‘I told you so.’”

“Dad never would have said that to you, Peaches. You have to know that.”

“I know it now, but I honestly wasn’t sure at the time. Plus I loved Bo, and I wanted to make it work. I kept wondering what it was that I’d done that turned him from the loving man he’d been during the year that we dated to the monster he became after we married.”

Josiah held both her hands in his. He’d always wondered why abused women often blamed themselves for their husbands’ problems. “He was probably like that all along. You just didn’t see it until you began living in the same house with him.”

Patrice nodded like he was right. “I found out later on that he had been married previously …
twice
previously.” She let out a dry laugh. “Imagine that. I was his third wife and didn’t even know it. The first wife lived in France. When they got married, she was eighteen and he was twenty-four. The rumor I heard later was that he wasn’t even divorced from her before he got married again. He left her and their two children behind when he decided to move to the United States. The second wife was a Scandinavian woman who lives in Denver. She was fifteen years his junior. Bo used to live there too, and met her when he worked at the University of Colorado-Denver. He moved after his divorce from her. I found out that she’d had to file a restraining order against him because of his violent tendencies.”

“When did you find out about his past?”

“After I was forced to get a restraining order against him too.”

Josiah shook his head slowly. “So I assume he attacked you again at some point.”

“Yes.” Patrice’s eyes looked like watery graves, but to Josiah, she was still beautiful. “It happened two years after the choking incident.”

“What happened?” he asked.

“Bo came home from work one Wednesday afternoon and said that he smelled the scent of another man. I had no idea what he was talking about. The only thing I smelled was the lemon pepper baked chicken, wild rice, and sweet potato pie that I had spent much of the afternoon cooking for him. I’d been in the house all day by myself, cleaning and cooking, and there hadn’t been anyone there other than me. But he swore that I’d had another man in the house while he was at work. When I tried to convince him differently, he became enraged. Said I was taking him for a fool.”

Patrice squeezed her eyelids together like the rehashed memories were just as painful as the experience had been on the day it all happened. Josiah didn’t know what he was about to hear, but he braced himself while he held fast to the grasp he had on her hands.

“It was the worst experience of my life.” Her closed eyes didn’t stop the tears from flowing. “Bo said that apparently my needs weren’t being met since I was calling on other men in his absence. He grabbed me by the arm, hauled me in the bedroom and stripped me of every article of clothing that I had on. Bo said that nobody would ever accuse him of not being able to satisfy his woman. He dared me to scream while he tied me to the bed, and for the next several hours, he raped me over and over and over again.”

Patrice choked on her words, and Josiah released her hands and pulled her into his chest, allowing her to weep heavily. Exercisers who were using Stone Mountain Park’s walking trail shot questioning
glances in their direction as they jogged or walked by the picnic area that only Patrice and Josiah shared. Her sobs were heavy, and Josiah fought not to cry along with her. Had he released his tears, they would have been propelled by anger more than sadness. Hatred didn’t begin to describe what he now felt for
Bogart Marseille.
Just the thought of his name left the taste of bile in his mouth.

“Please tell me that you had him arrested after this.” Josiah’s plea was met with more sobs. Without her saying a word, he knew the answer. “I can’t believe Dad and Mom didn’t force you to have him locked
under
the jail once they knew what happened.”

Patrice pulled away from him and tried to regain some sense of composure. “They never knew about the rape.”

“What?” Josiah was flabbergasted. He reached over and pulled a napkin from the picnic basket and handed it to her. “Why?”

“Nobody knows. You’re the first person I’ve told,” she whispered. “I told them that he was abusive, but I never told them about the rape.” Patrice blew her nose into the napkin, and her body jerked as she gasped from the hard cry she’d just had. “He untied me before he left to go to work that next morning, because I couldn’t do my daily chores if I was bound to the bedposts. An hour after he left—when I was sure that he was good and gone—I called Mama and told her that he’d beaten me. She told Dad, and they immediately wired me the money to fly back to Atlanta. I came back here with only as much as I could fit into a carry-on bag.”

Josiah used his fingers to wipe away eyeliner that had been smudged during her spell. “So even to this day they don’t know?”