Rosie O'Dell (28 page)

Suzy stayed silent so long I gargled out, “What did she mean by that?”

“I had no idea, but I thought, Jesus Christ, this broad is a dyke like everyone
says, and she thinks I’m one too.” At that, giggles came out of both girls, and
they reached for each other’s hands across the table. I forced a grin to show my
fellow-feeling here, but then when their eyes immediately filled and overflowed
with tears, I knew I was really an alien among them. “Oh God,” sniffed Suzy,
wiping her eyes with a tissue.

“Well, what did you say, then?” I squeaked.

“What I always said when I didn’t understand something. I said,
‘Fuck off.’ And I fired my cigarette into the sink in front of her and walked
out.”

“How did that save your life, Suzy?”

“It was not long after that that Rosie got sick, got depressed. Do you remember
that, Tom—when Rosie went from little Miss Perfect to an adolescent wreck,
skulking and slinking and sidling around the school?”

Did
I? “Yeah, sort of. She seemed to be a bit down for a while.”

Rosie looked at me askance and smiled a little. Suzy went on: “I used to size
her up in class, and suddenly, one day, I understood. I chased after her on one
of those long walks she took after school. Nearly killed me. The girl could
move.”

“Tom followed me sometimes, too,” said Rosie. “He never caught up with me, but
the fact that he did that made me love him a lot when I was thinking straight
again.” I’d followed her once.

Suzy said, “Well, finally, I caught up with her and croaked out, ‘Rosie, stop.’
She turned around and stood there, arms by her sides—she looked like she thought
I intended to beat her up and she was just going to stand there and take it. I
said, ‘Rosie, I know.’ And she stared at me as if she was trying to figure out
if I was mocking her again. I put my arms around her, and said, ‘Yes, me
too.’”

HOW I GOT HOME
alive that evening, crossing intersections
in a trance, I had no idea. I only remember leaving Suzy’s house and arriving at
my own, with no memory of the walk in between. My thoughts were welded to Suzy’s
and Rosie’s narrative.

“No no no, my love,” I’d protested when Rosie wondered if she’d made a mistake
in telling me. “You did the right thing. I love you, and we will decide what you
should do and we’ll get through this together.” Rosie had looked at me with sad
but smiling eyes, showing she knew her faith in my strength was justified.

But now, walking home alone I felt weak and useless and absolutely bereft. When
poor little beautiful Pagan had been found dead, my shock and grief had been
less painful than the sense of shock and grief and
loss
that now invaded
me. I couldn’t have felt more hurt if Rosie had been killed in an accident. At
that thought, I told myself to grow up. It was because I’d professed to love her
and given the impression of manly strength that she’d told me in the first
place, and here I was now, staggering away, wallowing in childish
self-pity.

I made myself rehear the words. “Our friendship,” said Suzy, “changed me from
a self-despising piece of garbage to a self-respecting human female. I found
Rosie with the same inner torment and self-hatred and guilt I had suffered, and
together we were able to gain some of the strength and self-respect I’d never
had but which Rosie used to have before.”

“But why didn’t you go to the police,” I asked Rosie, “and nail the
bastard?”

“Our feelings may have been much the same,” said Rosie, “but
our experiences were very different. When Suzy and I first started talking, the
hatred and rage she was directing at herself was all based on a mistaken idea of
her own guilt. What we were able to make her realize and
believe
was that
she was not in fact guilty of anything at all, even though she strongly felt the
guilt.
He
was the only guilty person and she was not responsible for what
had happened to her as a child any more than if she’d been injured in an
earthquake. I didn’t feel I had that option.”

“Why do you say that, my love?”

“Because I believed my guilt was real, that I
was
in fact responsible
for what happened to me, that I brought it on myself.”

“But you were a
child
. My God, twelve years old!”

Rosie didn’t answer. Suzy turned to me and said, “When I caught up with her
that day after school and said that I knew, she burst into tears and said that
her heart was broken and she was guilty of betraying her own mother because she
never said no and she never said stop. She actually believed she had encouraged
him and that she was therefore responsible herself for his rapes.”

“If he was prepared to abuse a child in his care,” I said, “he wouldn’t have
stopped just because you said no.”

“Till Pagan’s death, I believed he would have. Once, after it was all over
between him and me, I asked Pagan, just to be sure he wasn’t doing the same
thing with her, if he’d ever happened to touch her in an intimate way when they
were roughhousing, say, and she said yes, one time when they were playing he’d
touched her accidentally between the legs, and she told him it made her feel
uncomfortable, and would he please be more careful. He apologized for his
carelessness and he never touched her again. So yes, I believed he would have
stopped if I’d just said no at the beginning. I knew that if I told anyone, the
police or a teacher, say, afterwards, it would come out that I had really
encouraged him and that I actually wanted him to do it.”

This had left me unable to speak. A wretched self-pity rose in me at my
naïveté. The period she was talking about was when I’d still been constantly
loving her and waiting for her interest in me to revive, when I’d believed,
despite her callous neglect of me, that really we were sweethearts destined to
be married someday. She’d said she’d betrayed her mother. It was
me
— that
was who she’d fucking well betrayed.

Suzy must have sensed my emotional turbulence and jumped in. “But,
Rosie, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Yes or no doesn’t
enter into it at the age you were. Consent or encouragement was absolutely
irrelevant. That’s why it’s automatically rape under the law. You see now that
he was a charming opportunist who used your infatuation with him to victimize
you.”

“Now I do see that as the true situation. I did not think for one moment back
then that he preyed on me as a child. I thought he was acting completely under
the sway of love, our love, hopelessly, desperately in love as I was, and that
it was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence for him that would never have happened at
all if I hadn’t initiated it and encouraged it. In my egotism, my vanity, I
thought that the reality of the situation was that his love for me and mine for
him had brought it on and that I knew exactly what I was doing then as well as I
would today with someone I loved.”

As the girls spoke, I deflected my negative thoughts from what Rosie said she’d
initiated, to the man himself, to the odiousness of the man’s actions, and I
managed to find my tongue. “But you didn’t know what the consequences of it
would be on you. Look at what it did to you. In grade seven, when you went into
that awful slump Suzy mentioned—that was when all this was happening,
right?”

“No, it was already all over by then. He had already ended it because he was
afraid people were becoming suspicious. What you saw was when my heart was
broken and I realized my guilt and I was so depressed I just wanted to
die.”

“But when you bounced back from that bad period, did you and Suzy do that by
yourselves?”

“Mostly. But he told me that, because of my behaviour, some teachers and
friends of the family were talking and that I’d better gain control of myself or
there’d be charges laid and a big court case, and everything I’d done would come
out in public, and my mother would know her daughter had stabbed her in the
back, everyone would despise me, and he’d end up in prison where the other
inmates murdered men who’d done what he’d done.”

“Crafty, sleazy son of a bitch,” said Suzy.

My memory flashed back to the air of mystery in my own house at the time, the
constant whispering between Mom and Dad, the rupture of the long friendship
between Mom and Nina, my father’s rage and anxiety and bellowing behind closed
doors. I mentioned some of that now.

Rosie replied, “That’s who he must have meant by friends of the family talking.
‘So you have to buck up, my darling, ’ he said, ‘for both our sakes.’
So I bucked up. I buried it all inside and I bucked up.
Anything to avoid having what I had done come out. I would rather have been
tortured than have anyone find out. Right up to the time of Pagan’s death I
could not stand the thought of anyone else but Suzy knowing. Even now, telling
you, Tom, the person I love, is the most painful thing I’ve ever done. But what
I’m hoping is that our love, my love for you and your love for me, emotionally
and physically, will, over time, supersede the awful feelings you must have and
that I have again now about that nightmare. I mean, everyone has nightmarish
love affairs in their lives, don’t they, for heaven’s sake, and still manage to
get on with other loves, relegating the past horrible ones to the trash can?
That’s what I’m hoping for, if you are willing, and no one but us three, and
perhaps a police officer, will ever know.”

“What do you mean—perhaps a police officer? Surely you are going to expose the
bastard and have him sent to jail where, if there’s any justice, he’ll be
murdered just like he fears.”

“I’m going to do something, that’s for sure. I wasn’t going to until Pagan
died, when it became clear, at least to me, that he was doing the same to her as
he did to me. And when I got wind of his secret plan to move to BC, I became
more determined than ever to make sure that police forces everywhere are alerted
to him, so that they can keep him under surveillance. That’s why I decided to
tell you about it now, so that you wouldn’t learn about it from rumours, and
also to get your advice, as well as Suzy’s, on how to tell the police. But
laying charges against him and going to court and having a big trial and all
that, I don’t think so. In fact, at this point, I know so. It would be my word
against his. The police are pretty clear that there’s absolutely no evidence he
was doing anything to Pagan. So it would be a case of he said–she said. Suzy was
telling me what an ordeal she had before her grandfather pleaded guilty, and
even afterwards. I don’t want to ruin my life and everyone’s around me.”

“But, if not for yourself, don’t you feel that you have to do something for the
sake of Pagan? And what about if he is a real child molester as he seems to be,
a peddo…”

“A pedophile,” said Suzy.

“Right. Rosie, you can’t just set him loose on unsuspecting children thousands
of miles away. Would just telling the police do the trick?”

“I don’t think he’s a pedophile,” said Rosie. “I did some research, and he
seems to be just an opportunistic sexual predator who, in the absence of
satisfactory sexual relations with his partner, in this case, his wife, he used
his wiles to prey on the nearest available females at hand,
me and Pagan. My God, he’s a doctor. How could he have become that, if he was
stalking little girls the whole time he was in university? And he’s so busy
practising medicine and running for office and investing in this, that, and the
other thing and making a ton of money, he doesn’t have the time to put in to set
up his victims like the true pedophiles I read about in the literature.”

I looked at Suzy. She shrugged. “Well, I’ve already told Rosie that she’s still
in denial. But what the hell do I know? I don’t have much experience with
pedophiles—I was only acquainted with one—but I do have this gut-feeling that I
would recognize one if I knew he’s been screwing children. But actually laying
charges? That’s another kettle of fish.”

I looked at Rosie, expecting her to be a bit offended by Suzy’s harshness, but
she seemed to accept her criticism even if she didn’t agree with it. She said,
“We’ve kept you at this dismal stuff long enough, Tom. Will you think over what
you believe my next step should be?”

My mind in turmoil, my eyes smarting as I kept back tears, I forced myself home
along the sidewalk. I focused my thoughts on Dr. Heathcliff Godolphin Rothesay,
the adult in a position of power and trust who had preyed upon Rosie and Pagan,
the vulnerable child victims. All the rest of the way home I allowed my loathing
for Dr. Rothesay to grow more immense and, to keep my rage from feeling as
impotent as it was, I visualized ways, each more gruesome than the last, of
killing the child rapist.

Entering my house, I called out hi, replied I wasn’t hungry when my mother said
my supper was in the oven, and double-stepped the stairs to my bedroom, where I
closed the door and lay on the bed. Less than a minute later, she knocked. When
I said, “Yes?” she didn’t answer but opened the door.

“Mind if I come in?” She came in. “Are you feeling ill?”

“No, I’ll eat later. Mom, I was going to have a little nap. I was up early for
practice this morning and I have a lot of studying to do tonight.”

“How’s Rosie?”

“What are you asking about Rosie for?”

“Well, Nina said she’s been staying with Suzy, and she also told me she
wouldn’t be surprised if Heathcliff flew the coop in the aftermath of—”

“Rosie’s fine,” I said impatiently. And I burst into tears.

Not since I was nine had I sobbed my heart out in front of my mother. She came
over and put her arms around my head and held it to her breast and rocked back
and forth and kissed my hair in many places, just like
when I
was nine. I stopped and muttered, “Okay, Mom, please…” freeing my head from her
arms.

She stepped back one pace as I dried my eyes on my shirt sleeves, and she
murmured, “I could tell as soon as I saw you that you were in some kind of
trouble. Whatever it is, it’s not the end of the world. We can deal with it. Is
Rosie pregnant?”

I nearly laughed at the irrelevance of her earnest question out of the blue.
“No, it’s got nothing to do with anything like that.”

A shout came from Dad downstairs: “Port time.” Every night he and Mom had a
glass of port after supper. It was one of the things that irritated me about
them, how set they were in their little routines. But tonight it was a small
flame of mutual love that made me see how dark the gulf was surrounding my own
heart.

Mom went out into the hall and called down, “Joe, there’s something I have to
finish first. You go ahead and have your port. I’ll be there in a little
while.”

“Okay, but when I turn into an alcoholic, it’ll be all your fault. Drinking
alone is the first step.”

She came back into my room, her grin from her husband’s silly response replaced
by a frown of concentration. She sat on my bed and looked at me. “What is it,
then?”

“There’s nothing wrong, Mom.” I wanted to ask her what she’d seen or known of
Rosie’s condition back in grade seven. But of course I couldn’t. I was sworn to
secrecy. “I wish you’d go on down and have your drink with Dad.”

“There is something wrong, Tom, that’s blindingly obvious, but I won’t try to
coerce you. Just remember, I’m a professional nurse, used to dealing with
serious personal matters on a completely confidential basis. And your father, of
course—confidentiality is the hallmark of his profession. So think about it
tonight and let me know if we can help.”