In the Woods When First We Met

61. Truth Continued

Without any emotion at all, she said, "He kept calling me Fido."

In the past, this had made her angry, hurt, and embarrassed. And it still did, but...It was funny how everything had changed for her in only a matter of days. Fido once seemed like the worst thing in the world, second only to carrots, giving her a gaping wound in her heart...Now, Fido was a tiny scratch.

"He said..."

She stopped, shaking her head, trying to control the influx of emotion that suddenly hit her.

"He said he had to teach me a lesson."

Gilbert's face looked pained.

"That's when he grabbed my arm. Before, when you asked when he grabbed my arm? Well, that's when it was."

Anne looked up at his face, suddenly, saying "I can stop. You don't want to hear this. You shouldn't have to hear this."

Gilbert shook his head. "You handled living it, I can handle hearing about it."

There was a beat, and then- "He called me trash."

After that, she looked as if she wasn't sure how to go on. Finally she said,

"And then I tried to get away."

She stopped talking, looking down, and Gilbert wondered whether she would continue, or if that was all she was going to say.

Finally he said, "'You don't have to tell me, Anne, if it's too hard. But I hope you know you can. I can take it. Ok? And I know you're strong enough to do this. If you're worried about my reaction, you don't need to be."

Anne nodded, taking a shaky breath, and continued:

"Suddenly I was on the ground, the wind knocked out of me. I couldn't breathe. It just happened so fast."

Gilbert nodded.

"I didn't know what was about to happen. I'd never heard of anything like that before, so I didn't...I didn't know. I thought he was going to hit me. I was expecting him to hit me. But he didn't."

Gilbert just waited.

"The first....sign, I guess, was...he...he pushed his knee between my legs. I didn't realize it at the time, but...now I see that he did that because he had to make sure I couldn't keep my...my legs-" She stopped, almost choking. "He was making sure I wouldn't be able to...prevent him."

Gilbert's instinct was to reach out to her, but didn't want to scare her.

"He kept talking. All this time. But I...I don't remember everything...I can't remember what he said."

Gilbert nodded. "I can understand that. When things happen so suddenly, memory can go kind of blurry."

"And it's weird, because..." -she rubbed her shoulders; her neck was tightening up- "Because it's like...it feels like everything happened so fast, but at the same time it also felt like it was in slow motion...I can't reconcile the two. There are moments that stick out to me like we were frozen in time, and others that I can't remember at all."

She screwed her eyes shut when an image of Billy's face- just inches away from her own- made its way into her mind. She tried to remind herself that it was a memory, it wasn't real, it wasn't now- but that was hard to do when she could actually almost feel his sweat and his breath on her face. She opened her eyes again, shivering.

"I heard my petticoat rip, but even then it didn't occur to me...I thought he was just, you know, being mean, messing up my clothes. It wasn't until my, um, underwear got ripped that I...I was so scared the whole time, but it wasn't till then that I realized this wasn't what I thought it was going to be."

She bit her lip. "That's kind of everything before."

Gilbert nodded slowly.

She realized she'd been twisting her hair around her fingers. She stopped now, and Gilbert noticed her hands were shaking.

"The pain hit me before I even understood what was happening."

She was quiet for a couple of minutes, and then everything came out in a rush: "He was still talking, and I don't know what he was saying, he just kept talking, and I was trying to breathe and I felt like I was suffocating and when I cried he covered my mouth and his elbow hit my head and I kept pushing against his chest because I was trying to stop him but I couldn't and..." She had to stop, unable to breathe.

Gilbert's head tilted, looking at her, wishing there was something he could do to make this easier.

"It hurt." Anne said shakily. "It still hurts."

"It still hurts?" Gilbert repeated. He hadn't realized that, and it hit him straight in the heart.

"Maybe I'm imagining pain that isn't there anymore," she said. "Because it's whenever I think about it. Whenever I remember. Then it hurts."

She looked down, whispering. "I tried to tell him I was sorry but that didn't do anything."

He nodded.

"I tried to stop him," she said, looking at Gilbert as if pleading with him to believe her.

"I know."

"I tried to get away."

"I know," he repeated. "Anne, there was nothing you could have done. You did what you could."

"It wasn't enough. I should have been able to stop him."

"How, exactly? He's bigger than you, and stronger, and you were alone in the woods, and you didn't have anyone there or anything to protect yourself. What else could you have done?"

"I don't know," she said with a shuddery breath. "But something."

Gilbert shook his head. "There wasn't anything you could have done. Don't keep thinking that, don't keep thinking you messed up. You didn't."

"But...if I'd never said anything about Prissy in the first place, it wouldn't have happened."

"Maybe, maybe not. Maybe something else would have set him off. You don't know. People say things they shouldn't say all the time, it doesn't give him..."

Gilbert stopped and started over. "Someone doing something wrong doesn't then give the other person permission to do something wrong. It's like...it's like if you were at the mercantile and you saw a kid taking a peppermint without paying for it. Does that make it okay for you to steal a peppermint too?"

"Of course not," Anne said.

"Exactly. He can't say, 'she did this, and it was wrong, so now I'm going to do something wrong because she did.' It doesn't work that way. No matter what you did, he's still responsible for his own decisions. Saying something bad about Prissy didn't force him to do that to you. He chose to do that."

Anne bit her lip. Finally she nodded. It was logical, but it would be a long time before she would look back on the encounter and not feel some sense of responsibility for what had happened.

"Afterward, he, um, he got his pants back up without me seeing anything...I'm glad for that, at least...he didn't look at me, either...it...it would have been even worse, if he had...but...I thought he was going to leave and he didn't, and I started to get scared about what else he might do. He still wouldn't let me go, he was sitting on my arm, his knees were on my arm, I mean, and..." She had begun rubbing her arm while talking, without realizing it, the bruises there still fresh. "And then you came."

Gilbert wished he'd been there sooner.

Anne was glad he'd been there at all.