Holly clawed her hair back and dried her face with her hands. She was spent. She sagged against the wooden rail at her back. “I’m sorry,” she said. She sounded as if she’d run a hundred miles. “I didn’t mean to say anything about that. I’m probably wrong. It had to have been an accident.”
“It was an accident,” Kit said through his teeth. He couldn’t look at his sister. His heart had stopped beating. How he continued to live he did not know. He could not move. He had no strength left at all. “It was an accident. It was an accident.”
“It was. I’m sure you’re right.” Holly could see that her brother had to believe this absolutely. “I was upset. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Kit’s heart began to beat again. Slowly. Like an old man’s. And as it did, one last question slipped up out of the place that had flourished in the half-light of his father’s shadow. “If all this is true,” he said once again, “not the part about … about her … but the rest of it. If all of that is true, why didn’t you leave? How could you have stayed here?”
Holly sighed. A part of her, too, wished that she had never come out to this garden, never said any of the things she’d forced herself to say. “At first I was too young, and what he’d done was fairly innocuous. Not in hindsight, but at the time—more confusing than anything. And later, I was too afraid of him to tell anyone. And too embarrassed. If he’d raped me, yes. I know I would have gone for help. Or if he’d tried a second time, I would have told someone. Maybe even you. I don’t know. If he had, maybe I would have gone off on my own. But he didn’t. I was unhappy and scared, but I wasn’t home that often. And once I’d moved into the carriage house, things were better.” She’d spent years scrutinizing her own behavior, coming to understand why she had done what she’d done, and it should have been easy to explain herself to Kit. But it wasn’t.
“Besides, think about what you’re suggesting, Kit. How would I leave? Dad gives you money, but I have none of my own. Certainly not enough to live on. Dad bought you a car, but not me. I suppose I could go out, try to find a job where looks aren’t important, and never come back here again. I suppose I could do that. But why should I? I want to write. That’s all I want to do. I don’t want to have to struggle to make a living. Which sounds spoiled, I know, but I’m not asking for anything more than I’ve been led to expect. So I’m biding my time, Kit. In a few months, we turn twenty-one. Our trust funds will be ours. And then I will go.”
Kit nodded. He was almost through. “I can understand all that, I guess. But you have to forgive me for having my doubts.” He saw her face harden. “Come on, Holly, put yourself in my shoes. Every time I open a newspaper these days I read about some woman making terrible accusations against her father. It’s become the fashion to blame every problem on something that happened in childhood. Except half the time it’s an incident that’s remembered in a dream or in hypnosis or at the hands of a very persuasive therapist. Who’s to say what’s a real memory and what’s not? How is a father supposed to defend himself in a situation like that? I’m sorry, Holly. Too many of these accusations turn out to be false, which is not to say that the women involved don’t honestly believe their own lies. I’m sure some of them do. But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re lying.”
Holly took a deep breath. Her hands clutched each other in her lap as if they belonged to two different people. “I don’t know why I thought you would believe me,” she said. “I should have known better.”
“You yourself said it was natural to believe in my own father, Holly. You yourself said it would be hard for me to accept what you’ve told me.”
“But you saw him!” she cried. “Crawling around in the dark. Spying on me. If you don’t believe my explanation, then give me a better one.”
“For Christ’s sake, Holly, there are a thousand explanations. I won’t know why until I ask him.”
Holly flinched as if her bones had turned to blades. She began to shake her head. “You can’t talk to him about this,” she said. She was trembling.
She doesn’t want to get caught, he said to himself, and a part of him bloomed with satisfaction. She’s been lying.
“Why not?” he said. “Doesn’t he deserve a chance to defend himself?”
“He’ll kill me,” she said, and although he did not believe this, it was clear that she did.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Granted, if he’s guilty of doing what you claim, then I admit he’s cruel or sick or both. But to exaggerate the problem isn’t going to help matters.”
“I’m not exaggerating anything, Kit. But I know him. I know that he’s capable of far more than he’s actually done. Let me ask you this.” She turned on the bench so she faced him straight on. “What if I’d told you that he did rape me that night, that I became pregnant, and that he forced me to have an abortion. Would you consider all that worse than trying to rape me?”
Kit went cold inside. “Of course I would.”
“But why? He didn’t stop himself from raping me. His body did, thank God. But if he’d been able to, he would have raped me, and I might have become pregnant, and we both know I would have had an abortion. I’ve made the mistake in the past of underestimating him.
