Nothing Sacred

How was she going to get through these next minutes when what she needed to do was crawl under the blankets and cry until there were no tears left?

Shelley didn’t ask what had happened. The kids all knew what Martha had known when she’d received the call from David Marks earlier that evening. There was some sort of emergency with Ellen. Martha had called from the hospital to tell them she’d be home soon—bringing Ellen—and that they’d talk when she got there.

Rape wasn’t something she could talk to her daughters about over the phone.

And then she was in the living room with her two younger girls, sitting on the floor with them, one under each arm, their backs against the couch. She’d pushed the coffee table away, turned on a fire in the gas fireplace. And tried to take comfort from the familiarity around her. The books on the bookshelf, just as they’d been for so many years. Books filled with wisdom.

And escape.

Tim had disappeared. She had Pastor David Marks to thank for that. And knew, somehow, that her son would be told what he needed to know.

“She was bruised.” Shelley was the first to speak.

“I didn’t get to see her.” Rebecca’s long, gangly legs were pulled up to her chest. “She was in a car accident, wasn’t she?”

Martha swallowed.

“Did someone die?” Rebecca’s sweetness tore at Martha’s heart. She smoothed a hand down the side of her daughter’s head, gaining what strength she could from the feel of her silky black hair.

“Is the car totaled?” Shelley asked without any inflection at all. The sixteen-year-old knew a car was not the problem. “Was it Ellen’s fault?”

Martha took a deep breath, lowered her hands, taking a young hand in each of hers.

“Girls, Ellen was—” Her throat closed. She couldn’t do it. Didn’t want her daughters to see the tears she couldn’t seem to control now that she was home.

“What, Mama?” Rebecca’s reversion to the name she hadn’t called her mother since she was six told the whole story.

Shelley didn’t say a word. Martha had a feeling she knew.

How did she say this delicately? Disguise something so ugly to make it palatable for fifteen-year-old ears?

“She was raped tonight.”

Not at all how she wanted to say it. Not at all what she wanted to say. Not to them. Not ever. Not to anyone.

She didn’t mean them to, but tears slid slowly down her cheeks, unchecked by hands that were still holding tightly to her daughters’. She’d talked to doctors, to the sheriff. She’d talked to David Marks. But hearing the words in the presence of her children made them suddenly real.

“HOW ARE THEY DOING?”

The pastor was waiting for her in the kitchen when Martha pushed her way wearily inside an hour later.

“Okay for now,” she said. “I gave them each one of the sleeping pills I got from Dr. Anderson.”

“Sounded like Rebecca took it hard.”

The girl, in her childhood innocence, had done the things Martha had denied herself. She’d yelled. Denying Martha’s words. She’d paced. She’d spat words that Martha hadn’t even known she knew. She’d wished a man dead, over and over again. And, eventually, she’d sobbed her heart out.

“I’m more worried about Shelley,” Martha confessed, sliding into a chair at the kitchen table. The same chair Keith Nielson had sat in almost a year before, after they’d returned from a trip to the same hospital in Phoenix.

Tim had broken his leg. And Martha’s boss had taken over, helping her through the crisis. In spite of the fact that, with his wife thinking about leaving him, he’d been in a crisis of his own. Keith and Martha had kissed that night.

“I was impressed with her sensitivity and maturity,” David Marks was saying.

“She’s scared to death.”

“That’s understandable,” he said, bringing Martha a cup of coffee and sitting down opposite her. It had to be at least two in the morning. “It’ll pass.”

Martha shook her head and took a sip, hoping it was decaffeinated. “Life scares her. That’s why she always acts so tough.”