Hold Tight

She nodded.

Blood, she thought. Blood doesn’t matter because Dante was Lucas’s true father.

She fiddled with the gold cross around her neck. She should tell him the truth. But the lie had been there for so long. After the rape she had quickly slept with Dante as often as possible. Why? Did she know? When Lucas was born, she was certain it was Dante’s. Those were the odds. The rape had been once. She had made love to her husband many times that month. Looks-wise, Lucas had favored her, not either man, so she made herself forget.

But of course she hadn’t forgotten. She had never moved past it, despite what her mother had promised her.

“This is best. You’ll go forward. You protect your family. . . .”

She hoped Ilene Goldfarb would keep her secret. Nobody else knew the truth anymore. Her parents had, but they were both dead now—Dad from heart disease, Mom from cancer. While they were alive, they never spoke of what happened. Not once. They never pulled her aside and gave her a hug, never called to ask how she was doing or if she was coping. There was not even an eye twitch when, three months after the rape, she and Dante told them that they were going to be grandparents.

Ilene Goldfarb wanted to find the rapist and see if he would help. But that wasn’t possible.

Dante had been away on a trip to Las Vegas with some friends. She hadn’t been happy about that. Their relationship was going through an awkward stage, and just as Susan was questioning if she’d gotten married too young, her husband decides to run off with the boys and gamble and probably hit some strip clubs.

Before that night, Susan Loriman had not been a religious person. Growing up, her parents had taken her to church every Sunday, but it never stuck. When she began to blossom into what many considered a beauty, her parents kept a stern eye. Eventually Susan rebelled, of course, but that horrible night sent her back to the fold.

She had gone with three girlfriends to a bar in West Orange. The other girls were single and for one night, with her husband running off to Vegas, she wanted to be too. Not all the way single, of course. She was married, mostly happily, but a little flirting couldn’t hurt. So she drank and acted like the other girls. But she drank way too much. The bar seemed to grow darker, the music louder. She danced. Her head spun.

As the night wore on, her girlfriends hooked up with different guys, disappearing one by one, thinning the herd.

Later she would read about roofies or date-rape drugs and she wondered if that was part of it. She remembered very little. Suddenly she was in a man’s car. She was crying and wanted to get out and he wouldn’t let her. At some point he took out a knife and dragged her to a motel room. He called her horrible names and raped her. When she struggled, he hit her.

The horror seemed to go on for a very long time. She remembered hoping that he would kill her when this was over. That was how bad it was. She didn’t think about survival. She longed for death.

The next part was a blur too. She remembered reading somewhere that you should relax and not fight—get your rapist to think he’s won or something like that. So Susan did that. When his guard was down, she got a hand free and grabbed his testicles as hard as she could. She held on and twisted and he screamed and pulled away.

Susan rolled off the bed and found the knife.

Her rapist was down and rolling on the ground. There was no more fight in him. She could have opened the door and run out of the room and screamed for help. That would have been the smart move. But she didn’t do that.

Instead Susan plunged the knife deep into his chest.

His body went rigid. There was this horrible convulsion as the blade pierced the heart.

And then her rapist was dead.

“You feel tense, hon,” Dante said to her now, eleven years later.

Dante began to knead her shoulders. She let him, though it offered no comfort.

With the knife still in the rapist’s chest, Susan ran from that motel room.

She ran for a very long time. Her head began to clear. She found a pay phone and called her parents. Her father picked her up. They talked. Her father drove past the motel. There were red lights flashing. The cops were already there. So her father took her to her childhood home.

“Who will believe you now?” her mother said to her.

She wondered.

“What will Dante think?”

Another good question.

“A mother needs to protect her family. This is what a woman does. We are stronger than the men this way. We can take this blow and go on. If you tell him, your husband will never look at you the same. No man will. You like the way he looks at you, yes? He will always wonder why you went out. He will wonder how you ended up in that man’s room. He may believe you, but it will never be right. Do you understand?”

So she waited for the police to come to her. But they never did. She read about the dead man in the papers—saw his name even—but those stories only lasted a day or two. The police suspected that her rapist died in a robbery or drug deal gone wrong. The man had a record.

So Susan went on, just like her mother said. Dante came home. She made love to him. She did not like it. She still did not like it. But she loved him and wanted him happy. Dante wondered why his beautiful bride was more sullen, but he somehow knew better than to ask.

Susan started going to church again. Her mother had been right. The truth would have destroyed her family. So she carried the secret and protected Dante and their children. Time did indeed make it better. Sometimes she went whole days without thinking about that night. If Dante realized that she no longer liked sex, he didn’t show it. Where Susan used to like the admiring looks from men, now they made her stomach hurt.

That was what she couldn’t tell Ilene Goldfarb. There was no point in asking the rapist for help.

He was dead.

“You’re skin is so cold,” Dante said.

“I’m fine.”

“Let me get you a blanket.”

“No, I’m okay.”

He could see that she just wanted to be alone. Those moments never happened before that night. But they happened now. He never asked either, never pushed it, always giving her exactly the space she needed.

“We will save him,” he said.

He walked back into the house. She stayed out there and sipped her drink. Her finger still toyed with the gold cross. It had been her mother’s. She had given it to her only child on her deathbed.

“You pay for your sins,” her mother had told her.

That she could accept. Susan would pay gladly for her sins. But God should leave her son the hell alone.