I was in Cincinnati visiting my dad in his new house and was probably talking about Patrick Swayze having horses when Susan interrupted me.
“You know,” she said, “I grew up with horses.”
“What?” I said. It was like she told me she was part fairy. She got out her scrapbook from when she was a kid in Palos Verdes, California. The best part was that she had clippings from her horse’s mane in it. I touched it, thinking of Prissy Puddin’, the horse I rode with Miss Nicky when I was two. The hair was still silky, but so strong.
“Her name was Tasine,” Susan said. “We had her mother, Taffy, and the dad’s name was Jacine.” She showed me pictures of her riding English, so formal in her flat saddle with both hands on the reins. She had the breeches and boots, and a huge smile under her equestrian helmet. Seeing the photos, I realized that not only did I love horses, I loved that type of riding.
Susan was the first person sympathetic to that need to ride. Horse people can spot each other. The following year, when I was nine, she took me for my very first official English horseback riding lesson at Derbyshire Stables in Cincinnati. I rode a horse named Kiowa, and Susan bought me my first pair of riding boots. When I put them on, it was my Cinderella moment. I felt hot and powerful. They weren’t even nice ones and looked cheap, but I didn’t care. I was a horseback rider. After that, I pushed for more and more visits because I knew she would take me for lessons.
Back home, I rode my bike like I was on Kiowa, my territory extending around the horseshoe-shaped development of our neighborhood. One day I was out riding when I met a girl named Vanessa the way kids do, pausing to stare at each other until one says, “Do you wanna play?”
I dropped my bike as an answer, and we pretended we were horses in the pasture. I became best friends with Vanessa, whom I am still so protective of that I want to be up front with you and say that’s not her real name. She was a year and a half younger than me, and sometimes the age difference showed enough that I felt like a big sister. Vanessa sometimes seemed even younger because she had a problem with wetting her pants. It happened every time she laughed, even when she had just gone to the bathroom. She was ashamed about it, and I would try to make it less of a big deal, pressing Pause on the playtime and helping her inside to change before her mom saw.
“You’re okay,” I would say, partly because I often felt responsible for the problem because I had made her laugh. It was easy to slip by her mom, since she had a bunch of kids crammed into a tiny house the same size as mine. In the summer she watched older kids, too. My mother had me go over there for the day, and I’m not sure if she paid Vanessa’s mom anything or if she just figured I would be hanging out with Vanessa anyway.
One day when I was nine I rode my bike over and I couldn’t find Vanessa. By then I could just walk into the house. Her mom was changing a diaper. “She’s next door watching a movie,” she said.
It was weird, because I didn’t know a kid lived there. I’d only ever seen a guy in his forties, always home because he didn’t seem to have a job. I walked over and knocked on the door, anxious to see this new boy or girl who was stealing my friend. Then I heard a man’s voice yell, “Just a minute!”
He was at the door, opening it just a crack, then more when he saw me. It was the guy I always saw there. “Come in!” he said, too much excitement in his voice. “We were just watching a movie.”
Vanessa stood in the hall between the living room and the back bedroom, alternating between looking down and then at me, again and again. He was also looking back and forth at us, I guess trying to tell what we were saying to each other without words. Top Gun was on, Goose and Maverick turning and looping through the air. The movie just kept playing, none of us looking at the TV. I had interrupted something.
“Do you want juice?” he asked, moving to the kitchen to get it before waiting for an answer. “Vanessa, sit and watch the movie,” he said, and then to me, “Have you seen Top Gun? I have a lot of movies to watch.” He pointed to the room that in our house was the junk room left to the rats. Here, the room was floor-to-ceiling shelves of VHS tapes, the names of films taped off the TV scrawled on the side. Every eighties film you can imagine, he had.
He was suddenly behind me. “Come sit,” he said. “Watch the movie.” Vanessa was on the couch, still not talking. I sat next to her, and he seemed flustered, as if he wanted to sit between us. Vanessa and I watched the movie, but he kept looking at us. Onscreen, Goose ejected during a firefight, hit the cockpit glass, and fell dead into the ocean. Maverick was cradling him in the water.
“Vanessa,” he said, “I have to tell you something.”
She ignored him, so I answered. “What?”
“Come on, Vanessa,” he said. “Come in the back and talk to me.”
I made a decision. Whatever was back there, I needed to know about. “No,” I said. “I wanna go in the back and talk to you.”
He got up quickly and walked down the hall. “It’s a secret,” he said. When I entered, he closed the door behind me.
I was wearing the hot pink cotton bicycle shorts that were so big in the eighties and a huge shirt my mom got at Kmart. It was white and had three girls on it holding surfboards with raised puffy paint designs. I looked down at my clear jelly sandals, the ones I loved so much even though they made everyone’s feet smell so bad. He took off my clothes, and the feeling I most remember is shock at what was happening.
I was nine. I was a child, and then I wasn’t.
It was the start of two years of this man sexually assaulting me. He was raping Vanessa, so I put myself between them, continually offering myself up so he would leave her alone. She was fragile and younger, I thought in my kid logic, and I was not. I would bike to her home, and when I realized she was inside his house, I would bang on the door until he let me in. There would be the pretense of watching a movie, which would lead to him making a move on Vanessa and me demanding that he “talk” to me instead. Everything would be finished by four thirty, when his wife would come home from work.
In summer, the assault was near daily. Vanessa’s mom watched a boy my age, Randy, who tried to get in to watch movies. “He’s a boy,” the man told us, “so he can’t come in.” You’re asking why Vanessa went over there so much. I know, I did, too. I can’t guess what hold he had on her. I don’t blame her, because she was a child doing what an adult told her she was supposed to do. I blame the adults in our lives. How did her mom let her be there every day for hours, feet from her house, and not know? Vanessa’s mom was deeply religious and very traditional, way more protective of her daughter than my disappearing-act mom. Why was this such a blind spot?
A year into the abuse, when I was ten, I slept over at Vanessa’s house. We were up playing past lights-out, just these two normal kids feeling naughty for staying up. When I started to get tired, I figured I should go pee. The hallway was dark, but there was light in the living room. Her parents had people over, a man and a woman. As I crept to the bathroom, I noticed they were using the hushed whispers that grown-ups talk in when they’re trying not to be overheard. The voice that automatically lets you know they’re talking about something that you’re not supposed to hear. Which of course just makes you want to hear it. I crept just a little farther down.