SOAP
I often wonder where both of them are.
I wonder if the boy who babysat me feels guilty. If he still likes little girls.
I wonder about the neighbor boy, too. If he will change. If he will become like his father.
Mama sits outside with the family. The sunlight is warm and intoxicating. They are laughing and drinking and talking about grown-up things that I couldn't understand. Later, I will think there is something magic in not knowing. Mama tells me to bring her a soda from the basement. She warns me to take off my shoes, to keep the new carpet from getting dirty. Mama hates dirty.
But my shoes are not dirty. Not yet.
I leave them on.
I soar down the stairs into the basement. It’s cold down there. The pull switch for the bulb is too high for me to reach, but it doesn’t matter. I am five years old and boundless. I’ve stopped seeing monsters in the shadows.
I approach the single step into a deeper darkness. Carpet becomes concrete. Ahead of me is the old yellow fridge, but I can only make out the shape. When I was fifteen, I would steal my first drink from it. Fireball. Like the sun in July. The red candy in my grandmother’s dish.
I step down and something foreign rolls beneath me. I hear a hiss like air released from a balloon. And before I think another thought, I am breathless at the top of the stairs.
It was a gardener snake. Harmless, said my Uncle Gary. He’s one to talk.
Gary was a real trucker type. He had married my aunt when I was young, and he tickled me so much that he had to be given a talking to. Twice. He smelled like cigarette smoke and motor oil, and his beard would prick me on my cheeks. Once, he told me that he was good in bed.
I doubted it.
Last year, someone on Facebook recognized him from a family birthday party post. She said that he had exchanged naked pictures with her twelve-year-old daughter. More allegations arose.
His sins simply bobbed to the surface like apples he’d been trying to hold underwater, too many for him to grasp.
He failed two polygraphs. I stayed afloat.
My aunt is still with him. She works in a daycare. He is changing, she says.
Alcoholics Anonymous but for pedophiles - something like that.
I wonder if it works in the same way I wonder about the boys.
The neighbor boy lived only a wall away. Often, he would crawl into our kitchen through the doggy door. He liked breaking the rules. Once, I asked him to stop cheating in Candyland. He threw the game board at the wall and locked me in my room, swearing to never speak to me again. Once was enough.
Sometimes, we would break the rules together. His father let us ride to Dairy Queen in the cargo bed of his truck. We giggled as we ducked to stay hidden from other cars, licking melted ice cream from our palms.
One night, close to the Fourth of July, I watched his father beat him after he had thrown a Bocce ball into the darkness, beyond the light of the glowsticks we wore around our necks. I turned around, but I could still hear his father’s belt cracking like the poppers we used to throw on the pavement.
He left without a goodbye. So many people do.
I washed my own mouth out with soap when I said my first cuss word. I still remember the taste, the burning in my throat.
The soap was inside of me, but so was the snake in the basement. The babysitter’s fingers. The ice cream. The guilt of my mother.
Sometimes soap isn’t enough.
I am not angry, but I do not forgive them.
How can I forgive something that is bigger than me? Bigger than my body? Bigger than themselves even. Forgiveness is a virtue, but I am no saint.
Before Fireball, I mistook white wine for apple juice at Thanksgiving. I spit the wine into the sink, wiping my mouth.
Laughing, Mama asked me what I thought it tasted like.
Soap.
Evangeline, 17, Denver, Colorado - USA ✯