Pretty, Dark and Dirty

My stomach plummeted twelve stories.

“It was harder than I thought it would be,” she said. “I couldn’t stand crowds and I couldn’t hold down a job. But Mason took care of us—all of us. He swore he would never let his child starve, and he kept that promise.”

“Mom, are you saying... Is Mason my real father?”

She turned to look at me. “Would it be so terrible if he was?”

I had to brace my hands on the table to stop my knees from buckling.

“But you said he wasn’t.” I clamped my mouth shut. I couldn’t let her see how much the possibility that Mason was in fact my father had rattled me—and was still rattling me.

“Honestly, I wish I hadn’t said anything. Maybe if I’d gone on letting you believe he was your real father, you wouldn’t have let him get close enough to abuse you now.”

“He’s not abusing me.” I was so fucking confused. “Mom, for once in your life, please just tell the truth. Is Mason my real father, or isn’t he?”

She gazed down at her hands, which had begun to shake. I rounded the table to take her hands in mine.

“Please Mom,” I begged. “I need to know.”

My mother’s throat shifted as she swallowed. “I was seven years old the first time my father raped me. When I told my mother what had happened, she said I was just having a bad dream. I tried to tell her again and she slapped me. She knew what he’d done, and she did nothing to stop it.”

“Oh... Mom.” My stomach revolted at the thought of my mother being violated by the man who was supposed to protect her—

Her father. My grandfather. My mother’s rapist.

Bile washed the back of my throat. I dropped the sketchbook and ran to the sink just in time to vomit into the steel basin.

My thoughts ran in circles. It can’t be true. How can it be true? But I knew in my heart that it was. Acid burned my throat. My mother gathered my hair into a makeshift plait, stroking my back the way she used to when I got sick to my stomach after eating too much candy. When the nausea subsided, I rinsed my mouth and the sink, then turned to face her.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

She took my hands in hers. This was the most forthcoming she had ever been with me, and I could tell it was taking everything she had not to crumple in on herself like a dying spider.

“It didn’t happen all at once,” she said. “It started when I was little, the slow chipping away at my boundaries. We were so isolated... I thought it was normal. By the time I met Mason, my father was raping me almost every night. I wanted to tell him, but I was scared he wouldn’t believe me.” Her voice cracked. “You believe me, right, Jett?”

“Of course I do.” I pulled her into a tight hug. She felt like a sprite in my arms, like she could sprout fairy wings and fly away.

“Don’t you see?” She left my grasp, coming to stand before the pile of sketchbooks. “When I found these, I realized what I’d thought was a healthy fascination was actually the makings of a sick obsession. I was so scared for you. I told Mason to leave immediately and cut off all contact with you, or I would take these sketches to the police.”

Glancing back at the very last drawing, I tried to see it as anything other than a charcoal study of a sleeping figure. But I could find nothing sinister in the portrait, nor in any of the others, nothing to differentiate them from the kind of drawings I’d be making in art school. It had to be the sheer volume of them—pages upon pages of sprawled limbs tangled in rumpled bedsheets—that had struck a nerve with my mother.

To the untrained eye, these drawings could look criminal. But I knew better. What my mother had gone through wasn’t the same as me and Mason. For one thing, he’d never forced himself on me. For another, I wasn’t a child. I was old enough to make my own decisions.

“Mason told me I was insane to think he’d ever hurt you,” she said. “But even if he hadn’t touched you, that didn’t guarantee he wouldn’t someday. Turns out I was right.”

My thoughts swirled like water circling a drain. As far as I could recall, Mason had never abused me. But my mother wanted me to believe that the p

ossibility had always been there, lurking in the shadows at my bedside. That had to be what she’d hoped to convince me of by showing me these drawings.

I picked up the sketchbook I’d dropped on my way to the sink and joined her at the workbench.

“You’re wrong, Mom. I am so, so sorry for what happened to you. But Mason isn’t like that. He never abused me.”

“Then how do you explain that?” She pointed at the painting. “What person, in their right mind, would let their child pose for them like that? What child would feel comfortable masturbating for their parent?”

“It’s art, Mom. It doesn’t have to make sense to make a statement. And I’m not his child.”

“But you were.” She took a deep breath to steady herself. “If I hadn’t kept him away from you all these years, would you have let him paint you like that?”