“Haylee, what can I say? I walked out of here one day when you two were little girls and unfortunately had to return for a terrible reason, but I’ve found you’re a beautiful young woman. Your mother was right about how you two would be.”
“Thank you, Daddy, but I probably shouldn’t even be going to this party, much less getting so dressed up for it.”
“Nonsense. I want you to have a good time. We’ve got quite a difficult road to travel ahead of us, I’m afraid.”
We heard the doorbell. It was Ryan. He had no idea about the changes in my appearance. When I opened the door, his mouth fell open, making him look dumb.
Daddy came up behind me. “Yes, this is the same girl, Ryan,” he said.
“Hi, Mr. Fitzgerald. Yes, she’s . . . beautiful,” he said.
“And I wasn’t before?”
“Huh?”
Daddy laughed. “Okay, you two. Have a good time, but I want her back here by midnight at the latest, and I mean latest, Ryan.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t you want a jacket, Haylee?” Daddy asked.
“I won’t be outside long, Daddy. I’m sure Ryan has his car warmed up.”
“Yes, sir, I do,” Ryan said.
It was cold, but I didn’t feel like wearing anything over my dress. Ryan reached for my hand. I looked back at Daddy. Despite all the nice things he had said, his face was full of worry.
Midnight, I thought. Who am I, Cinderella?
Not tonight.
20
Kaylee
His mother’s sanitary napkins were quite old. The box was damp. I was afraid they might crumble or come apart in my fingers, but of course, it didn’t matter. I went into the bathroom and put the first one on. I didn’t expect that he would check every day, but just to be sure, I asked him to bring me a separate garbage bag. The whole subject appeared to embarrass him, and he quickly did what I asked, and he took my nightgown to wash for me. I put on the robe he had bought me, and the next day, he went out and got me three new nightgowns.
Eventually, I flushed the dead mouse down the toilet. I promised I would tell him when I was ready to make our first child, and he left it at that. I tried to buy more time by explaining when a woman ovulates and when she doesn’t, stressing that it would be a waste of time to try too soon. He listened, but I had the sense that he already knew everything about it. I was glad I didn’t have to lie about any of it.
He didn’t want to talk about it very much anyway. I found it ironic that after all the other things he had done to me, this one thing, a woman’s monthly period, was difficult for him to discuss without showing embarrassment or disgust.
I took as much advantage of it as possible, moaning about severe cramps and sending him out to get me some over-the-counter medication designed to ease the side effects. Every morning, I would lie scrunched up and make him get me glasses of water, cold compresses, another soft pillow, another blanket. I had him running up and down the stairs before he had a chance to have a cup of coffee.
In fact, I complained so much every morning that he was eager to leave for work.
“This should end soon,” he told me in an ominous tone.
“Oh, how I wish,” I said. “Usually, my menstrual bleeding lasts a full week, but sometimes it’s lasted a day or more longer than that.”
It was actually Haylee who had done research about it, always afraid she might get pregnant because she got “too hot and heavy” on a date. She knew most of the facts before we were twelve.
He accepted everything I told him and always tried to change the subject. When he came home from work, I made sure to be in bed moaning and groaning. He looked a little suspicious until I told him I had missed school many times because of a severe reaction to my monthlies.
To avoid me and my talking any more about it, he went right to preparing our dinner, which I usually asked to be brought to me in bed, and then he cleaned up and dove himself right into laying our new carpet. He didn’t ask me to help him, not even to hand him a tool. I thought his behavior was even weirder than most of what he had done already. He looked like he didn’t even want to look at me while I was supposedly bleeding. He avoided touching me, and a few nights, he didn’t sleep with me, either. Of course, I wondered how long I could stretch it out and what I could come up with once this was supposedly over.
In the meantime, I studied ways to escape. He was careful to take his tools with him when he left, and he always locked the door behind him. I again debated the idea of forcing the lock open with a kitchen knife. The frightening thing was that if I did manage to get it open, what would I do if the door upstairs was locked? Could I get them both open before he returned? I kept track of when he came home from work the best I could, not having a watch or a clock, but I thought I had a fairly good estimate of how much time I’d have.
On the sixth day of my supposed period, I decided I had to try. I could think of no other way to put him off after my period ended. It was ironic that I was really due to have my period, but it hadn’t come yet. The girls in my class had spent a unit of health education with our school nurse when I was in the eighth grade. Most had gotten their first periods by then, but there were at least half a dozen who hadn’t. One girl had been having hers for almost two years already, and there were stories about girls who had gotten theirs when they were in the fifth grade. A few girls in our class were quite irregular at the start. There were some months when they didn’t have their periods at all.