Keeper of the Light

She rested her temple against the warm glass of the car window and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She would need a rest room soon. Her bladder seemed perpetually full these days.

“So,” she continued, “Nathaniel pushed my skirt up and took off my underpants and Avery crammed them in my mouth so I couldn’t scream. I felt like I was choking and it was so…humiliating. I was kicking at Nathaniel with all my strength and finally Avery told Clint to help hold me down.” She looked at her hands where they rested in her lap, and an old ache started deep in her chest. “I feel sorry for Clint when I remember this,” she said. She could still see the confusion in her twin’s face as he struggled to figure out to which of his siblings he owed his allegiance. A year earlier, it would have been Olivia for sure, but now, at fourteen, his older brother’s approval meant everything to him. “He was crying himself, but he got down on the floor and held one of my legs while Avery held the other.”

Nathaniel had loomed above her like a giant and she remembered the scene as if it had happened in slow motion, his meaty hand pulling down the zipper of his pants, reaching inside to draw out his huge, dagger-straight penis. She had screamed then, the sound muffled by the cloth in her mouth. “The next thing I knew, all two hundred and fifty pounds of him were on top of me, but he couldn’t get inside.” His body had hammered against her unyielding flesh, his face growing red with frustration. “He said it was like trying to…fuck a brick wall, and I kept praying he’d give up, but he didn’t. I was crying and gagging and I couldn’t use my hands.” She lifted her hand to her throat. “He was so heavy. He was crushing me. I remember Clint saying, ‘Maybe you should stop, Nat,’ but I don’t think Nathaniel even heard him. Finally,” she shrugged, “I felt as though I…split open. The pain was so bad and it took him forever. I passed out, I guess, because when I woke up I was alone in the room. There was blood on my skirt and my legs. There was blood on the doorknob.”

Alec took his right hand from the steering wheel, reaching toward her to slip his fingers into the cup of her palm. His thumb traced the bones in the back of her hand, and she closed her own fingers gratefully over his.

“I ran to Ellen Davison’s house. She was my science teacher. I didn’t tell her what happened. I never did, but she must have known somehow. She acted as though she’d been waiting for me to show up. She had a spare room, the bed made up and everything. I just moved in, and she switched me to a school outside my neighborhood. I never saw anyone in my family again.”

“Good lord, Olivia.”

“I worried about Clint,” she said, “but I only thought of myself after I left home. I learned about my mother’s death during my first year of college, and I knew I should go back to make sure Clint was all right, but I just couldn’t. I was so terrified of Avery, and…” She wrinkled her nose. “I felt as though if I went back after all my hard work to get away from there, I would somehow be stuck there again. That I would become the old, scared Olivia. I know it doesn’t make sense, but…”

“How could you still care about Clint after what he did?” Alec interrupted her.

“He really wasn’t part of it.”

Alec glanced at her sharply. “What do you mean, he wasn’t part of it? He held you down while another man raped you.”

“But he…”

“You said he was only mildly retarded. Didn’t he know the difference between right and wrong?”

“Yes, but… Paul used to say I should give him a chance to redeem himself, that he was just a kid then, and…”

“No.” Alec squeezed her hand hard. “What happened was too big, too much to forgive, ever.”

Olivia bit her lip. “Annie would never have turned her back on her brother,” she said, “no matter what had happened in the past.”

“Annie did many asinine things in the name of charity.”

“Clint needed me, though. Once I was on my feet, once I was established as a physician, I really should have tried to see him. Avery certainly didn’t know how to take care of him. My own mother didn’t know how. We lived in a sewer, Alec. You’d be sick if you could see where I lived, and I just left him there to rot.” She pulled her hand out of Alec’s and brushed her bangs off her forehead. “A couple of years ago, Ellen wrote to tell me she’d heard he had died. Most likely he was an alcoholic, like my mother. No one ever told him it could kill him. If I’d helped him, he’d probably still be alive.” She looked at Alec. “I deserted him.”

“To survive. You had no damn choice.”

She closed her eyes, trying to take in his words, to believe them. Then she sighed. “I could really use a rest room,” she said. She pulled down the visor to look in the mirror, groaning when she saw her face. Her nose was red; her mascara had run onto her cheeks in elongated gray triangles.

“We’ll stop at the next gas station,” Alec said.

He waited for her in the parking lot of the small gas station. He cleaned the windshield of the Bronco and took off his jacket and tie before getting behind the wheel again. There really was something radically wrong with his air conditioner.

He could not scrape the image from his mind of Olivia’s brothers holding her down while the leviathan seventeen-year-old raped her. Only in his mind, it was his daughter he saw on that floor. Maybe Olivia had been right the night before when she’d said that Lacey should be reined in a little more. He had no idea where she was at night, who she was with. He was not being much more help to her than Olivia’s mother had been passed out on the couch.

Olivia got back in the car, her face scrubbed clean of makeup. Her recent sunburn had all but disappeared, and she was once again anemically pale, her green eyes and dark lashes a dramatic contrast to the whiteness of her skin. She was still pretty, though. Perhaps even more so.

“You okay?” he asked, as she buckled her seatbelt.

She nodded. She was perspiring, her bangs damp across her forehead.

“Why don’t you take off your jacket?”

“I can’t. My skirt is pinned together.”

He laughed, and it felt wickedly good—a sudden, welcome release—but Olivia didn’t smile. “Do you think I