But as it turned out, it wasn’t.
Holly’s father had never raped her. He had stopped short of that. She never said the word incest or abuse as she told Kit the story, although she might have. Her father had been more subtle than that, at least in the beginning, when Holly was only eleven, and on top of that small for her age. He had often walked in on her in the bathroom, as if by accident, especially when she had just stepped out of the shower. She had sometimes woken up in the night to find him sitting on the edge of her bed, his hands resting on her hips or her legs, but before she’d come fully awake he would walk out of her room without saying a word and in the morning she would wonder if she had dreamed the whole thing. And then she would feel unclean for dreaming such a dream.
For years she had felt nervous and confused around him, for no matter how hard she tried to stay out of his way, to do nothing that would draw his attention, he always found a way to cross her path, to stand too close, to collide with her and then reach out as if to save her from a fall, grabbing her around the middle one time, by the shoulders the next. “Clumsy girl,” he would say, and then as she left he would touch her with his eyes. If anything, it was this impalpable touch that left bruises.
Much as she had hated boarding school in the beginning—still small, her mother newly dead—Holly had eventually come to love her exile and to dread the approach of every holiday, every summer home. Over time, she became more self-assured and was strengthened by her association with a stern, resourceful headmistress, the daughters of other important people, and the world at large. And by her fifteenth birthday she had outgrown the insecurity and confusion that had prevented her from knowing how to behave in the face of her father’s strange interest—whether to be alarmed, how to deflect his advances. She expected her father to notice the change in her, when she went home again: to look at the way she kept her head up, her shoulders back, and her eyes steady, and be intimidated. She expected him to see, in her, a challenge. But she did not expect him to take it.
When he did, when he walked straight into her bedroom the first night she was home again, a day earlier than Kit, when he shut the door behind him and stood glaring at her as she lay absolutely still in her bed, when he suddenly rushed toward her and pulled away the covers and opened his robe, Holly knew that she was completely alone. There was no one to hear her scream. There was no one to protect her. There was no one to stop her father from wrenching away her nightgown and pinning her with all his weight in the bed where her mother had once brought her picnics and read her books and polished her heart until it shone.
Chad Barrows would have raped his fifteen-year-old daughter that night, and he did try. But, whether he had drunk too much or failed to completely disarm his conscience, he was unable to do what he’d intended. His body seemed to have greater scruples than his soul.
After that, Holly went home only when she had to. Christmas, Easter, summer vacations were all spent in odd maneuvers. Because Kit was usually home, too, Chad was more careful, but Holly still made sure never to be caught alone. She locked all doors behind her. She accepted every invitation to spend time away from home. And, when her father approached her one morning in the woods behind their house, she stood her ground and said, as loudly as she could without screaming, “If you touch me, I will tell Kit.”
Had she known how effective this threat would be, she would have issued it much sooner. Her father’s eyes had widened with fury and alarm. He panted like a wild man. He took one more step toward her and stopped, his hands slowly clenching, and said, “If you tell him, I will break your fucking face.”
“My face!” She had actually laughed. “Go ahead! Maybe you’ll improve it.”
This time, the strength she’d gained from years of unhappiness made some impression on him. Either that, or he felt he had no choice but to let her be. Whatever the reason, Chad backed off. Although he still watched her and seemed always to be holding himself in check, he never touched her again. He did not try to stop her when she eventually moved her things into the carriage house. And when she finally brought a man home with her for the first time, her father stood among the magnolia trees with a bottle of whiskey in his hand and showed her that she was even stronger than she’d thought.
Kit sat in the gazebo beside his sister and felt that a large part of him had slipped free of its bones and now hovered somewhere nearby, listening, waiting for the remaining parts of him to rise and follow. He felt light-headed and was sure that if he stood up too quickly, he would collapse, maybe die. He could only imagine one cure for what he was feeling, and that was to prove Holly wrong.
“If all this is true,” he began, “I would think you’d have told me a long time ago.”
Holly looked at him curiously. “If all this is true,” she said. “Didn’t I say you wouldn’t want to believe it? I don’t blame you.” She laced her fingers behind her neck and worked her head cautiously from side to side. “You were only a kid when all of this was happening. What could you have done?”
Kit tried to remember what it was like
