The Beat of My Own Drum by Sheila E. Read Free Book Online

bad dream?”
    It had never occurred to me until that moment that they didn’t believe me or that I couldn’t tell them the truth.
    “This is serious, Sheila. Talk to us!”
    I began to panic.
    They didn’t know what to think.
    “Maybe you had a nightmare?” Moms pleaded again.
    I half nodded, afraid to say any more. I couldn’t speak the words I wanted to say, and she wasn’t able to hear them. I’m sure her mind blanked them out, as the truth was simply too painful to face—for all of us.
    The more she asked, the more I clammed up, until the silence seemed for the best.
    Not long afterward, my attacker cornered me in the hallway, pulling me to one side. His fingers pinched my arms, and his eyes glinted as he lowered his voice to a growl. “I’ll be back,” he told me between gritted teeth. “Shut your mouth, or next time I’ll hurt you even more.”
    His threats worked, because I decided never to say anything about it again.
    Incredible as it may seem now, because of my silence nothing was ever done about it. The young man who raped a five-year-old girl in what should have been her safe haven got away scot-free. He remained part of the family and was even an occasional guest at reunions and celebrations.
    That’s the part that kills my parents to this day.
    That’s what my mother especially still holds on to.
    She feels that she let me down.
    The truth is, I couldn’t talk about it then, and I wasn’t able to speak about it properly for more than thirty years. It was my dirtylittle secret, and I locked it away in the dark where no one else could see it.
    My ordeal might have ended there but for the fact that I developed a morbid dread of going to the bathroom. In my child’s-eye view, everything distilled down to the blood—the blood between my legs. My blood on him. The blood he’d wiped from my parents’ sheets.
    Blood had come to symbolize the intense and unhappy time we had in that house. I’d had terrible nosebleeds there. My aunt upstairs had blood all over her hands. I’d bled after the dog bit me. Moms had lost a baby there and bled. Juan had spurted blood after falling onto the glass. The president and his assassin had all been covered in blood on our TV screen.
    Blood stained everything there.
    I bled for a few more days, and every time I saw it, I felt even more afraid and ashamed and dirty and bad. Those feelings poisoned both my mind and my body. For the next few nights I waited until daylight to go to sleep because I was convinced the babysitter would come back.
    I went from being a carefree little girl from a happy, loving home to someone who felt scared and anxious all the time.
    Our bathroom became the center of my universe. Part of me wanted to lock myself away in there, but the other part was frightened to, in case I saw blood on the toilet paper again.
    Whenever I did enter that scary place, everything around me seemed to come into much sharper focus. That little space became all I knew, and I saw every detail with dazzling clarity—the tiled white floor, the sink on the right, the toilet to the side of that, the shower to the left. There was opaque glass in the window so you could see people walking by, or—worse—standing outside waiting.
    And all the time I was sitting and rocking and holding everything in, hyperventilating with the pain.
    I was still so sore, it was uncomfortable even to sit. I couldn’t allow myself to strain in any way. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t function. I stopped eating and drinking so that I wouldn’t have to go. After a while my stomach began to bloat and I became feverish and sick.
    When I wasn’t in the bathroom, I shuffled around with my head lowered. My entire focus was down—down to where it all happened. Moment to moment, I was just trying to exist and breathe through my fear.
    What am I going to do?
    How can I not go to the toilet?
    What if I can never go again?
    Everything hurt. It was getting worse. I lived in secret horror