She could never go back. So she had to go on.
“What happened next?” Suzanne asked, not wanting but needing to know. “How did it end?”
“Father, of course. Mother and Father were gone for a month in Europe on his business affairs. I think he’d wanted to take me with them, but Mother…she must have started to catch on to his interest in me. She insisted they go alone. A second honeymoon. Meanwhile my brother and I engaged in acts so depraved that I can’t even remember participating in them. I see them happening—” Elizabeth closed her eyes and raised her hand “—out there. As if someone else did them, and I merely watched. You should know I was as guilty as he. More so, really. I started it. He was the virgin until me. But even at that young age, he did have an impressive imagination.”
Suzanne swallowed the bile in the back of her throat as Elizabeth opened her eyes and lowered her hand.
“We were together in father’s library. One of our favorite spots. Mother and Father came home from their trip a day earlier than we’d expected. Mother went straight to bed in exhaustion. Father went to his office to work. He found us…together.”
Elizabeth stopped talking for a moment. Gazing through the glass walls of the greenhouse, she studied the sinking sun. Suzanne couldn’t begin to guess at her thoughts, and prayed she’d never know what Father Stearns’s sister saw in her memory.
“I’ve never seen such fury,” Elizabeth finally spoke. “Such rage. Father didn’t even look human. My brother and I call him a monster. We don’t do so lightly. He became a bestial thing that day. He pulled my brother off of me and threw him into the wall. I’ll never forget the blood on the wallpaper—red on yellow. And he pushed me to the floor onto my stomach. He was speaking, but for the life of me I can’t remember what he said. I don’t want to remember.”
“I’m glad you don’t,” Suzanne whispered.
“He started to rape me, to re-mark his territory I suppose. I think he thought he’d knocked my brother unconscious. But then I heard a thud. Most beautiful sound I’d ever heard in my life.”
“What was it?”
“My brother hitting my father with a fireplace poker. Didn’t knock him out, unfortunately. But it did stop him long enough for me to pull myself out from underneath him. Father’s rage then went even beyond what I’d seen before. He grabbed my brother and threw him to the ground. With the poker he broke my brother’s forearm. I heard it snap.”
Suzanne covered her face with a hand. She found a lone bench and sat on it, unable to stand anymore.
“Father grabbed my brother by his broken arm and dragged him up into a sitting position. Tied him to a chair. My brother’s arm…it just dangled…so lifelessly. I remember thinking—it’s stupid—but I actually thought, ‘Oh, no. He’ll never play piano again.’ Madness, the things that come to mind in moments like that. Never play piano again? Father was going to kill him.”
“Kill him?” Suzanne knew she sounded like an idiot, parroting questions back at Elizabeth. But the shock and sickness had taken away her powers of speech, rendering her nearly mute with horror.
“I remember him saying that. ‘You’re dead, Marcus. You’re dead…’ Once he had my brother tied to the chair, he came after me again. Wanted my brother to watch while he raped me. But I couldn’t let that happen. The rape, fine. Of course. Happened before. But I couldn’t let him kill my brother. I loved him. In a sick, damaged, broken way…I did love him. We were all we each other had. So I picked up the fireplace poker, and with everything in me, I slammed it into my father’s head. And, my God, he went down hard. So hard and so fast, I laughed. I think it was the laugh that got my mother’s attention. I just couldn’t stop laughing....”
“Your mother, she found you?”
Elizabeth nodded. “She burst into the library, saw her daughter nearly naked and bleeding, my brother barely breathing and tied to a chair, and Father a pile of bloody monster on the floor. She couldn’t deny anymore what had been going on under her nose. She got me and my brother out of the house. Took him to the hospital and dropped him off—”
“Dropped him off? She just dropped him off?”
“He wasn’t her son. She’d always hated him a little. She could have turned a blind eye to an affair, even one that produced a bastard. But to force her to treat him like a son? She never forgave Father for that. If only that had been the worst of his sins.”
“If only…”
“So she dropped off my brother at the hospital and fled with me. She divorced Father after. That was the sixties. She couldn’t bear to let our dirty laundry out in public. So no charges were pressed and they divided the assets up equally. And the assets were and are considerable. Even after dividing everything in half, they both were extremely wealthy people.”
“What happened to your brother?” Suzanne asked, although she knew part of the answer. “He was sent to school, right?”
Elizabeth nodded. “I suppose once Father came to, he remembered my brother was his only son and heir. But he refused to have my brother around, so it was off to school. St. Ignatius Academy, I think it was called. Some Jesuit boarding school for boys up in Maine. Middle of nowhere. Barely accessible even in good weather.”
“Sounds like a prison.”
“Something like that. I think Father was afraid of my brother, afraid of possible retribution. He was wrong to be, of course. My brother is no murderer. My father feared the wrong child.”