An Act of Love Read online

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said.” Owen held up a book. Of pink leather, it was about five inches by eight, with a small leather tab set with a keyhole. “I found Emily’s diary.”

  Linda had not yet had time to assimilate into her mind the very thereness of Owen, stocky, redheaded, dark-eyed, stubborn, sweet-smelling Owen, so physically near, wearing the dark green sweater that made him look somehow medieval, gallant, mythic, a nobleman from a tapestry. As always upon seeing him, Linda was struck by love for him. She wanted to be in his arms, to rub her face against that sweater, to hold him and be healed of the ache of being apart from him.

  But at his words Linda’s body went cold.

  “You found Emily’s diary? Where was it?”

  “At the back of her closet. In a shoe box. Beneath a bunch of shoe boxes.”

  “You searched Emily’s closet?”

  “I searched her entire room.”

  “Owen—without her permission or even her knowledge—that’s so invasive.”

  “So is accusing Bruce of rape.”

  “But Owen, couldn’t you have waited until I was home? So we could have searched together? I mean, this seems, oh, I don’t know, a kind of violation.”

  “Linda. Forget that for a moment. The important thing is what Emily wrote.”

  Shaking her head as if to clear it, Linda said, “I just can’t believe that you did that.”

  Owen put the diary on the table in front of Linda. “I’ve marked the spots. Read them in order, from the beginning.”

  Linda looked at the cover. “Owen, this diary is over a year old.”

  “Read.”

  Troubled, heavy-hearted, Linda picked up the book. Its weight felt almost sacred. Diaries were such private matters. If she opened this book and read, she was betraying Emily. But did she have a choice?

  The first entry read:

  Mom gave me this diary to keep while I’m at Hedden. She says that keeping a diary always helped her through the hard times and made her feel she had a friend waiting for her at night even when there was no one else. When she told me that I thought she was a wuss, but now I know what she means. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay here at Hedden. There are so many cool people here. I don’t know anyone. I don’t know if I’ll be able to fit in.

  The next entries Linda read according to the markers Owen had made with strips of paper.

  My biology teacher, Mrs. Lundgrund, is short, fat, and covered with spots, bigger than freckles! And she belches! All the time! Zodiac and I are lab partners and we can hardly begin to dissect our frog, we can’t even look each other in the eye, we start laughing.

  I went into the dining hall today, not that I was hungry, I thought I was going to vomit, it’s so scary walking into that place, which first of all looks like the Sistine Chapel, not that I’ve ever been there like everyone else has, but it’s so awesome, and plus everyone is there. The seniors get to have all the tables near the windows. Everyone else just sits everywhere, and I don’t know anyone. But I got a tray of food and was looking for a place to sit, and there was this, like, eternity of heads of people I don’t know, then Bruce came up to me with Terry and Lionel and they all said, “Hey, Emily, what’s up?” They asked me how I like it here so far, and stuff, and then they went off, they all looked so cool and then Cordelia was waving at me. “Emily, come eat with us!” So I did, and I met all these girls my age, they were so nice. They all wanted to know about Bruce, of course. He is so handsome. And a junior.

  So Angelica and I were talking and she said so Bruce really isn’t your brother, and I said right, he’s my stepbrother, and she said, well then, you know, you could, like, marry him and stuff, and I said no way, please, that’s so geeky, ’cause I don’t want her to know. Bruce has changed so much since he’s been at Hedden. He’s so tall and, like, masculine, and all the girls have crushes on him, and he’s so nice to me when he sees me.

  “Owen, this is sweet, it’s innocent.”

  “Keep reading.”

  Cordelia and Zodiac both have boyfriends. I wish I did. The seniors don’t know the freshmen exist, and neither do the juniors, really. There aren’t enough cool freshmen and sophomores to go around. I’m lucky Bruce always talks to me, that way at least I don’t seem entirely snubbed by the male species.

  Thanksgiving was really nice. Ming Chu came home and Bruce brought Terry and we played poker until dawn, and Mom and Owen don’t know it but the guys drank beer and we took sips of theirs. We had to keep quiet so we wouldn’t wake Mom and Owen, but we laughed so hard. It was so cool.

  I love school and my friends and I don’t think I’m homesick any longer, but sometimes I just can’t wait to get back to my room and take a nap. I don’t sleep, I daydream. I daydream of the day Bruce will come to me and say, “I never could think of you as a sister, and now that we’re both adults, I want you to know how I really think of you,” and then he kisses me. I can just feel his long long eyelashes brushing my cheek.

  Last night I dreamed that Bruce couldn’t wait till we’re adults, and just before graduation from Hedden he asked me to marry him and I accepted and he made a big announcement to the whole school.

  “Owen, these are just daydreams. Just the fantasies of a freshman about an older boy.”

  “Read the rest.”

  Mom came and took us Christmas shopping with Janet. It was fun. I wanted to get Bruce this gorgeous black leather coat, but a) I don’t have the money and b) then everyone would know how I feel about him. My favorite part of the day is going to bed at night, just before I fall asleep, dreaming of him.

  My new favorite dream: Everyone is at assembly. I’m sick with something that doesn’t make me gross, not a cold, not my period, maybe just exhaustion, and the dorm is all quiet, the room dark, there’s a knock on the door. I’m wearing a scarlet satin peignoir from Victoria’s Secret and my hair looks good, and there’s a knock on the door, and it’s Bruce. He comes in, he comes over and sits on my bed and says, “I was too worried about you to watch the play. Are you okay?” And we sit and talk.

  Many pages on:

  Bruce comes in my room. “Oh, Emily, I’ve been so worried about you, my darling.” He gets into bed with me and holds me to him. “You shouldn’t have gone swimming with Terry, I should have warned you he’s not a strong swimmer. I’m so glad you didn’t drown. Emily, I love you.” He holds me against him and I can feel his heart beating. He kisses me first gently, like he’s scared, then hard, passionately, and I kiss him back.

  Mom and Owen have driven to Boston to see a play and spend the night with Janet and Bruce says to me, “This is our time, now and forever. I have to go to college this fall, and we’ll be separated, but tonight I’ll make love to you so beautifully it will be with us for all our life.” I will wear the taupe silk gown with hand embroidery from Victoria’s Secret, and he will lift it off over my head like the duke did in Dangerous Liaisons with Uma Thurman. Bruce says, “Emily, you are more beautiful than I ever dreamed.” He lies next to me and holds me, and we make passionate love. “Oh, Bruce, my darling,” I say.

  “Owen, I can’t read any more of this. It’s—it’s like raping her in another way.”

  “How else will we get at the truth?”

  “But this isn’t the truth. These are the fantasies of a young girl during her first time away from home.”

  “Right. And what are her fantasies? That Bruce makes love to her.”

  Linda took a deep breath. “Owen, first of all, this diary was written a year ago. Look. She stopped writing in February. Obviously by then she was caught up in school activities and with her friends. She stops writing about Bruce. She stops writing about everything.” Flipping to the last few passages Linda saw that Emily had made some entries.

  This cool guy named Jorge sits across from me in English. He’s from Argentina I think, and he’s sooo handsome.

  Jorge smiled at me today. He looks at me a lot. I know, ’cause I’m always
sneaking looks at him.

  Jorge walked me from English to my dorm today. Damn! I wish school wasn’t ending. He has to go home for the summer, so far away. Maybe I can ask him to write me.

  Ming Chu says I should forget about Jorge. He’s so much older than I am and more sophisticated. Well, anyone is more sophisticated. Oh, well, at least I can dream.

  Reading the last entry to Owen, Linda insisted, “You see? ‘At least I can dream’! And that’s all she was doing about Bruce.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Owen, I meant that’s all she was doing the first year she was at Hedden. Not now.”

  “I think we should confront Emily with this diary.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I think we should go back to Basingstoke and have a conference with Emily and Dr. Travis and tell her we read her diary and see what she has to say.”

  “I don’t know, Owen. That would embarrass her terribly.”

  “Linda, she’s going to embarrass Bruce. How will people treat Bruce at school if this gets out? And you know how rumors get around. It might even affect his admission to college.”

  “Yes,” Linda agreed, thinking aloud. “Yes, I can see that. Still … all right, then. Let’s ask Dr. Travis what she thinks. If she thinks we should confront Emily with the diary, we will. All right?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll call her first thing tomorrow.” Linda rose. “I’m exhausted. I’m going to take a hot bath. I’ll deal with those”—she gestured toward the shopping bags—“later.”

  As she climbed the stairs, her legs were like lead. She didn’t know when she’d ever felt so discouraged. At the top of the stairs she turned toward Emily’s bedroom, and when she entered her daughter’s room, it was if the floor collapsed beneath her feet, sending her staggering to grasp the door frame.

  Owen had absolutely ravished Emily’s room. He’d torn the sheets and covers off the bed and tossed them in a heap on top of her mattress, her good old mattress that glared nakedly in the daylight, exposing the brown-red stain of blood from some period that flowed too heavily in the night. He’d pulled her drawers from her chest and emptied them in a pile on the floor. He’d cleaned out her closet, and piles of shoes and shoe boxes of old letters cluttered the floor. The contents of Emily’s vanity drawers littered the top of her vanity: old nail polish bottles and emery boards, hair scrunchies, hair pins, powder compacts, lipstick, and eye-liner.

  On top of the pile of cosmetics, stationed there strategically, was a small orange box of condoms.

  Owen was right behind Linda. “I found those condoms in her drawer.”

  Whirling on him, Linda hissed, “Of course you did! I gave Emily those condoms! Don’t you remember why? Janet insisted that I give the children each a box of condoms the summer before Bruce went away to Hedden! So that they could look at them in the privacy of their rooms, feel them, get used to them, so that if they ever needed them they would have them, wouldn’t feel too embarrassed by the whole issue! You and I discussed the matter, and you agreed that it was the right thing to do!”

  “You’re right,” Owen admitted. “I’d forgotten that.”

  “Owen, look at her room! How could you do that to her room?”

  “I’ll clean it up.”

  “No. No, I will.”

  “Linda, we’ve got to find the truth about all this somehow.”

  “And what is the truth here?” Linda asked, gesturing toward the disordered room.

  “I’m sorry,” Owen said miserably. “I didn’t do this to upset you. Let me help—” He moved into the room.

  “No,” Linda said. “Don’t. Please. I’d rather take care of it myself.”

  Owen looked at his wife.

  “I need to be alone now,” Linda told him.

  Owen turned and left the room. His footsteps sounded like hammer blows as he went down the stairs.

  Linda bunched her daughter’s disheveled linens into a clothes hamper and found clean sheets in the hall closet and made Emily’s bed. First, a clean mattress pad, then fresh sheets, an old set, so worn that the cotton had the texture and transparency of petals, covered with tiny pink rosebuds. The hard tight knot of pink, with its sheltering border of green leaves, summoned up before Linda a vision of Emily as an innocent girl.

  Once, when Emily was about eight, at another child’s birthday party the parents had hired a musician, a thin, artistic-looking man who played the recorder. He tootled merry tunes while twelve children squealed and raced and giggled, playing musical chairs. He played “Happy Birthday to You,” and the children sang along. While they sat eating cake, he serenaded them with less effervescent songs, trying to calm the children as they stuffed themselves with sugar. When he played “Greensleeves,” the ancient music so suddenly sweet and melancholy and romantic, Emily looked up from her cake and announced to the table, “I think that music sounds how it feels when boys kiss girls.” The boys at the table made vomit noises, the girls giggled and tittered, and the parents flashed smiles at one another.

  Now the music of “Greensleeves” played in Linda’s mind. She sank onto the bed with her hands full of bedsheets and rosebuds. If Emily was not lying, it was here that she was raped. Linda had seen so little violence in her life. Had she ever had violence used against her? Not really. The closest she could come was the remembrance of childbirth. There was a point when she realized she could not escape, could not get up and walk away, could not reason or beg away the pain, could not leave the bed where the agony was holding her.

  Also there had been many times when she had sex with Simon even though she did not want it, and did not enjoy it, but took part in it rather than admit the truth. At those times she discovered a wonderful talent in her deepest core, an ability to shut off sensations. She would split away from her body and leave the hapless shell to be manipulated at Simon’s fancy, while the essential Linda, her true soul and self, retreated into her mind, pulling up a kind of bridge and shutting off the physical. Had Simon been aware of this? Certainly he never seemed to notice.

  Could Emily have done this? Everyone had that power. But Linda feared that Emily must have been too new to the situation to protect herself in this way. It was painful, remembering her words, envisioning the act that took place on this bed.

  Emily was held down. She struggled, and her stepbrother hit her. He called her a fucking bitch. He stuck his penis inside her. That must have hurt. She would have been dry and tight with fear; it would have been like a rope burn on one’s hands, but more extreme. Like burns on her sensitive, intimate flesh. Emily would have continued to feel the inflammation in her vagina, over the tender skin of her labia, long after Bruce had left her. She would not have known how to soothe herself, with Vaseline or unguents, and when he raped her again the next night, in the barn, it would have been doubly painful, like drawing sandpaper over sunburned skin. So there would have been the physical pain, and there would have been the humiliation and rage of being forced against her will. Of being assaulted. That would have been the worst of it.

  No matter how hard Linda worked, she would never be able to make this room clean and pure again. Emily no longer had a refuge here. This room held ugliness.

  Linda had always said that she would throw herself under a train or in front of a bus to save Emily’s life. She would give her daughter her kidneys, liver, eyes. She would give Emily her heart. Linda had lived her life considering her child’s safety and happiness. And she had not been able to keep her daughter safe.

  But how could Bruce, whom Linda had watched and lived with for seven years, whom she had taken into her heart and loved as if he were her own, how could Bruce have changed so entirely, and have hated so deeply, so furiously? So destructively.

  Linda had thought of Emily as her angel, her sunshine, her beauty, her darling, her joy. Linda had wanted Emily to enjoy the anticipation and delight of first kisses, first embraces, the tremendous pleasure of early love with all the newness, the gentle trepid
ation that is aligned to awe and is not really fear, the discovery of physical pleasure so powerful that you can not believe other mortals have ever felt such a thing, the overwhelming love that borders on a kind of reverence. She had wanted her daughter to be with a boy who thought she was beautiful and precious and splendid, who would call her his angel, his joy, his beauty, his darling, his sunshine, his love.

  Chapter Twenty

  Friday afternoon they met in a small conference room: Dr. Travis, Emily, Linda, and Owen. Dr. Travis sat next to Emily on the dark green sofa.

  Dr. Travis turned toward Owen. “Mr. McFarland, would you like to begin?”

  “Yes.” Owen looked at Emily but did not lean forward, not wanting to seem intimidating. “Emily, I want you to know that I’m terribly concerned about you. I think of you as my own child. I want you to get well, I want you to be healthy and happy, and I’ll do whatever I can to help you. But I’m having a tough time believing … what you’ve said about Bruce.”

  He took a deep breath. Emily watched him guardedly.

  “A few days ago I searched your room. I found the diary you kept during your first year at Hedden.”

  Emily’s face went red. “That is just so gross!” She looked at Linda. “Mo-om!”

  Linda dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands. “We have to discuss this, Em.”

  Owen continued. “Emily, there are several passages in that diary—”

  Emily’s hands clenched and the veins stood out on her neck. “You pervert! You sick, disgusting pervert! You’re as gross as your son!”

  “Emily, please,” Linda said.

  She was dying of shame; it was like bugs burrowing into her skin, into her organs. Her skin was writhing on her bones. “I hate you, Owen! I’ll hate you until I die!”

  “Emily,” Linda said again.

  “What?” her daughter snarled, snapping her head toward her mother. “What do you want to say to me? What can you say? You want to defend your precious husband, right?”