She jumps up, hands against her head. "Stop it!" she screeches. Her hands drop to her sides. Her head falls forward. "Just . . . stop it." As suddenly as she has reacted, she deflates. It's like watching an air balloon sink to earth. She sits back down. Patricia sighs, a long exhalation that seems to signal the letting go of something older than this moment. "You think you know what you're here about," she says, looking at me, "but you don't. You think you're here about those poor women." She looks at Don Rawlings. "Or about that poor young lady from twenty-some years ago. They are part of it. But you're here about something a lot older than both of those things."
I could interrupt her, tell her about the cow flesh in the jar and Jack Jr., but something tells me to let her speak at her own pace.
"It's funny how you miss the most important things in people sometimes. Even in people you love. Doesn't seem fair. If a man is cruel inside, someone who's going to turn into a wife beater or worse, there should be something you can see that would tell you that. Don't you think?"
"I've thought the same thing many times, ma'am," I reply. "Doing what I do."
"I suppose you would," she says as she regards me. "Then you also know that's not how it works. Not at all. In fact, many times it's just the opposite. The ugliest people can be the most decent. The charmer can be a killer." She shrugs. "Appearance is no index, no index at all.
"Of course, when you're young, you don't worry about things like that. I met my husband Keith when I was eighteen years old. He was twenty-five and he was one of the most handsome men I had ever seen. And that's no exaggeration. Six feet tall, dark hair, face of an actor. When he took his shirt off . . . well, let's just say he had the body to go with the face." She smiles. A sad smile. "When he showed an interest in me, I was bowled over from the word go. Like many young people, I was convinced my life was boring. He was handsome and exciting. Just what the doctor ordered." She pauses her narrative, looking at all of us. "This was down in Texas, by the way. I'm not native to California." Her eyes look faraway. "Texas. Flat and hot and boring.
"Keith pursued me, though it wasn't a marathon pursuit. More of a sprint. I made him run just far enough to let him know I wasn't completely pliable. I didn't know it at the time, but he saw through me like I was made from glass. He always knew he had me. He just put up with it, went through the motions, because it amused him. He could have grabbed me and told me to come with him right away, and I would have said yes. He knew it, but he took me on the requisite few dates anyway.
"He was good at what he did. Good at pretending not to be a monster. He was a perfect gentleman and as romantic as anything I'd ever seen in the movies or read in the books. Kind, romantic, handsome--I thought I had found my perfect man. The one every young woman is certain they deserve and are destined to find." Her voice and smile are both bitter.
"Now, you have to understand, my home life was difficult. My daddy had a short temper. It's not as if he beat on my mother every day, or even every week. But it happened every month. I'd been watching him backhand her or punch her for as long as I could remember. He never laid a hand on me, but in later years I understood that this wasn't because he didn't want to hit me. It was because he knew if he touched me, it would be for a reason other than violence." She raises her eyebrows. "You understand?"
Unfortunately, I do. "Yes," I say.
"I think Keith understood too. I'm sure of it. One night, just a month after he met me, he asked me to marry him."
She sighs, remembering. "He picked the perfect night to do it. There was a full moon, the air was cool without being cold. Beautiful. He brought me a rose and told me he was going to California. He wanted me to come with him, to marry him. He said he knew I needed to get away from my daddy, and he loved me, and this was our chance. Of course I said yes."
She closes her eyes and is silent for a span of moments. I get the idea she is remembering that as the point where she took a wrong turn and plunged into darkness, forever.
"We left four days later, in secret. I didn't say good-bye to my parents. I packed up what little I had and snuck off in the middle of the night. I never saw either of them again.
"That was an exciting time. I felt free. Like life had gone my way. I had a handsome man who wanted to marry me, I'd escaped the dead end that I'd been born to, I was young and headed toward the future."
Her voice drops to a monotone. "It took us five days to get to California. We got married two days later. And the night of our honeymoon is when I found out that the future I had headed into was a place made in hell."
Her face has gone expressionless. "It was like the opposite of Halloween. Instead of being a human wearing a monster mask, Keith was a monster wearing a human mask." She shivers. "I was a virgin when I married him. He stayed sweet, right up to the point he carried me across the threshold of that cheap hotel room. Once the door closed, the mask came off.
"I'll never forget that smile. Hitler might have smiled like that when he thought about Jews dying in one of his horrible camps. Keith smiled and then he backhanded me across the face. Hard. It spun me around; blood flew out of my nose. I landed facedown on the bed. I was seeing stars and was still trying to convince myself that I was dreaming." She purses her lips, grim. "No dream. A nightmare, maybe. 'Let's get a few things straight,' he said to me while he started tearing my clothes off.
'You're my property. A breeder. That's all you are to me.' I think it was his voice, more than what he was doing, that scared me. It was calm and flat and--normal. It didn't fit with what he was doing, not at all. He put me on my knees and . . . you couldn't say he had sex with me. No. I don't care that we were husband and wife. He raped me. Tied a gag around my mouth to cover up my screams while he raped me.
"The whole time, he kept talking in that calm voice. 'We're going to spend a few days in here teaching you your place, breeder. You're going to learn to do what I say without hesitation or question. The penalty for disobedience, no matter how minor, is going to be more pain than you can bear.' "
She is quiet for a long time. We wait out her silence, respecting it. I'm in no immediate rush. There's no longer any doubt she's leading us toward what we need to know.
When she begins to speak again, her voice is almost a whisper.
"It took him three days to break me. He cut on me. Burned me with cigarettes. Beat me. By the end of it, I would do anything he said, no matter how disgusting or degrading." Her mouth twists in selfloathing. "Then, the final lie was exposed. He took me from that hotel room to this house." She nods. "That's right. He had this home all along. He hadn't lived in Texas. He'd been out hunting. Hunting for someone to bear him a child."
"Peter." I say it as a statement.
"Yes," she says. "My sweet little boy." She gives the "sweet" a sardonic twang. "Keith kept me tied up at night to keep me from running away from him. Beat me, used me. Made me do things. Then I got pregnant. That was the only peaceful time I had. While I was pregnant he didn't lay a hand on me. I was important to him, I was carrying his child." She puts a hand to her forehead. "I used to thank God it wasn't a daughter. He would have killed her at birth. Now I know that having a son was just as bad, in its own way."