Post by Hellokitty on Aug 19, 2006 8:59:04 GMT -5
Falling Book 2: Finding Marlena – Chapter 11
His heart beating faster and faster, blood pressure rising to a dangerously high level, John reached out and grabbed Marlena, pulling her towards him. “Don’t you walk away from me Marlena…You don’t walk away when I’m talking to you…got that,” he yelled as he raised his hand towards her face.
“No,” she screamed as she instinctively raised her hand in front of her face in a defensive posture and waited for his hand to connect with her skin.
“Goddammit,” he screamed as he let go of her and hit his hand on the gnarled wood of an olive tree as hard as he would. “Dammit…Dammit….Dammit.”
Marlena stood still afraid to breathe, trying to minimize her presence.
“Fuck,” he yelled as he hit the tree once again. “Fuck…Fuck…Fuck.”
“John,” Marlena said as she watched him pound his first into the tree over and over again. “Please stop,” she said gently as she placed her soft hand on his. “Please.”
“I can’t do this anymore,” he yelled as he pulled his hand abruptly out of her grasp and brought it up to his lips. Pressing the tender flesh against his lips, the coppery taste of his own blood assuaged his senses, a stark and painful reminder how close he was to tasting her blood, not his. John had almost hit her.
The conflicting emotions racing through his deep blue eyes, Marlena watched timidly and helplessly not know where John was or how to begin to help him.
“I can’t do this Marlena….I can’t.” He still wouldn’t look at her.
“John….”
“No….please don’t say anything…I just need you to listen to what I have to say, nothing more.”
“Alright,” Marlena conceded as she took a step back from him and walked towards the dying bonfire. Sitting down in the soft sand, head on her knees, the poignancy of the moment was not lost. Everything about them as a couple, lover, friends, companions was so wrong and painful at times but when it worked it was magic. How could one relationship be so complicated and emotionally draining, yet at the same time bring emotional clarity, enlightenment and sheer joy?
“I can’t do this anymore…I can’t,” John mumbled more to himself than to her as he paced back and forth in the sand, the path he’d chosen becoming more and more defined with each step that he took.
Feeling horrible for causing the torment that John was currently going through, Marlena felt a sense of responsibility to make things right with them. “It’s okay.”
“No, its not. I almost hit you Marlena.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I wanted to.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to hurt you as much as you hurt me.”
Not expecting his directness, Marlena was unsure of how to respond. She was used to dealing with John on a more intellectual level, he rarely talked about how he was feeling beyond the ‘you made me mad and I’m angry’ level. Most of her male patients were that way and she’d have to work hard to extract anything remotely like this from them. Here John was handing her a fundamental tenant of his psyche on the proverbial silver platter.
Beyond all the bells and whistles of their lives: the fancy cars, expensive clothes and jewelry, luxurious penthouses and island estates, they both were products of their upbringing and environments. “I wanted to hurt you as much as you hurt me.” It wasn’t about violence; it was about John’s need for self preservation at all costs and his need for love.
“Am I still hurting you?”
“Yes…No…Yes,” John replied confused as how to answer her question. He could lie to her and the conversation would quickly come to an end and they’d go back to living their lives and Mr. and Mrs. John Black, or he could be totally honest with her and they could move beyond where they’d been stuck for years and attain a level of happiness and understanding with each other that had been missing for years, if it had ever been there in the first place.
Marlena had to fight her instinct of defensively asking him how. “What are you feeling right now?”
“Absolute rage.”
Marlena whipped her head around, instantly seeing the fire in his eyes. Dropping her head to her chest, she closed her eyes not wanting their emotions to drive the conversation in unhealthy and unproductive ways.
“On a scale of one to ten, ten being you really want to hit me or something else, where are you right now,” she asked as she looked at him out of the corner of her eye pacing back and forth.
“Oh probably at an eight right now,” John admitted and then defensively laughed. “Not pretty is it?”
“What is still causing you so much anger that you feel you need an outlet to dispel it?” ‘That outlet being me’ the unspoken ending of her question.
“You honestly want to know?”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”
“It’s you Marlena,” John admitted as he walked over to where she was sitting and knelt down in front of her. She needed to hear and understand what he had to say. As good as she was about analyzing and helping other people, she was incapable of discussing her own feelings and motivations. “I love you so much and I’m not saying this to hurt you, but I can’t take all your secrecy anymore. If I’m going to be a true partner and help you, you need to tell me what’s going on, okay,” John said as he tipped her chin up and gazed deep into her eyes. “I am scared to death right now….I have no fucking idea where we are right now or how we’re going to get off this island or if we get off where we are going to go.”
Marlena sat quietly, forming her defenses to any question, concern or statement he might make about her.
“I can’t help us if I don’t know what I’m up against and I think deep down inside you do know.” Shaking her head in denial, Marlena tried to stand up but John grabbed hold of her shoulders and held them in place. “Don’t run….Please, don’t run.”
“I think you know what’s going on and why all these people are after you…”
“I don’t.”
“I think you do, maybe you don’t have the whole picture, but you certainly know more than you’re telling me.”
Marlena gazed down at the ground unsure of how to respond. She could lie or misdirect him, as was her motus operandi, or she could be honest with him. He’d gone out on a limb for her, trusting her with his innermost feelings and it would be incredibly hypocritical of her not to reciprocate.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“I just need to hear the truth from you Marlena…whatever it is, I just want the truth.”
“I don’t know where to start John…I’m at a loss for what information you need from me to make yourself more secure.”
“It’s not about me and my needs Marlena, don’t you see that? This is about you and what keeping information inside of you is doing to us.”
“I disagree with you John…this is not about me.”
“It’s always been about you and always will be about you until you come clean with me and tell me what you remember. Tell me about Alex North…you can’t can you?”
“I don’t want to talk about him John,” Marlena said sadly as she brushed a few fallen tears out of her eyes.
“I need to understand your relationship and what it is that’s motivating that man…in case you forgot he and Mason are after us….but why?”
“Please drop it.”
“I can’t Marlena….what does Alex have over you?”
“John…please don’t…I don’t want to be analyzed….you’re not my psychiatrist,” Marlena said in frustration and anger. How had this conversation turned from his rage to her secrecy? She’d been played by someone even more skilled in the art of misdirection than she was.
“No, but I am the man that loves you more than anything else in the world and just wants you to be healthy…you’re a mess right now…”
John watched as Marlena furiously shook her head in denial at his statement.
“Marlena, look at you….you weigh less than 100 pounds right now…I can count your ribs through your shirt, you have gashes up and down you arms that aren’t healing because you keep picking at the scabs causing them to bleed….you claim to be seeing your father and Channing….you have nightmares all the time, yet won’t tell me what they are about….You. Need. Help.”
“I’ll be fine,” Marlena said as she laid her head down on her knees and closed her eyes.
“Please tell me about Alex and what happened with him…please,” John said as he got up and sat behind Marlena on the ground, pulling her into his arms.
“I don’t know where to start.”
“How about at the beginning….where did you meet?”
“I met him in middle school…When Sam and I left their house…” Marlena started as she remembered the day the child welfare came and took her and Sam. Ms. Chavez, with her friendly smile and big white clean Ford came and took them away, promising them a life of happiness. It was the first of many times that Marlena lost her faith in the system that Ms. Chavez said would protect them.
“Go on,” John said as he stroked her hair.
“We started a new school…most of the kids there ignored me…. Sam fit right in…I didn’t.” She remembered her jealously at her sister whom instantly was invited to sit at the cool kids table and joined the pep squad. Lost in middle school hell, she was rescued by Alexander North and Mason Jones. “Mason and Alex were my only friends that year.”
“What kinds of things did you do with them?” John asked trying to get her to open up about her past.
“I don’t remember…it was more of how they made me feel…for once in my life they made me feel like I was a person that was normal…do you know what I mean?”
“I do…my cousin Matthew was like that with me…Enough about me… Were they your friends for long?”
“For a couple of years…When we went back to live at his house, they kept in contact with me.”
“So you went to the same school?”
“I wasn’t allowed to go to school.”
“What?”
“I was home schooled…he distrusted the US government and they were the ones paying for and providing public education…the only time I attended school was when I was in foster care and when I left his house for good.” You mean after you killed him, being the unspoken response.
“But you married Alex, right?” John suspected that her marriage to Alex was one of the secrets that she’d been hiding all along. When Shane had told him, he was initially angry at Marlena for not telling him but soon got over it. She had to have had a good reason for never mentioning him.
“I guess so,” Marlena said, surprised that he knew about the marriage. “A lot of that time is really fuzzy in my mind…I’m not trying to evasive….I just don’t remember.”
“That’s okay honey,” John said as he tenderly kissed the top of her head. “When you went to live with the Evans’s did you stay in contact with Alex?”
“No…we weren’t allowed to…we had to change everything, including our names,” Marlena said thinking back to the confusion that the name change brought about in the household.
“I’m curious as to why Samantha didn’t,” John stated, puzzled by the fact that she was always referred to as Samantha.
“Oh that….her given name as a child was Suzanne Samantha, named after our Aunt Suzanne who’d we’d never met but heard horrible things about from our mother. Apparently our father insisted that she be named after her…Since my mom didn’t like Suzanne, she insisted that her daughter be called Samantha. My mom didn’t know that she was going to have twins, so when I came out unexpectedly, they didn’t have a name picked out for me so I was named after a character in a Harlequin romance novel that my mom was reading…. Not terribly exciting is it?”
“So, since her given name wasn’t Samantha she was allowed to take it as her new name?”
“Exactly, on paper she was Suzanne Samantha…guess they figured it was safe.”
“Back to Alex…. You never saw him until medical school?” Marlena resigned herself to John’s questioning, knowing that he wasn’t going to stop until he had all the answers that he needed to know.
“Nope…I wasn’t allowed contact with anyone from my past…and there is a lot of stuff that I still don’t remember….Anyway, he and Mason were so great growing up but something in him changed between when I left and when I found him again…he was different, but I didn’t find that out until I married him and he beat the crap out of me,” Marlena admitted wistfully as one memory after another of Alex hitting and kicking her popped into her mind.
“So how did you get away?” John asked angered at the fact that anyone had laid a hand on Marlena, even though minutes earlier he was about to do the same.
“My father came and got me…some of his cop friends roughed up Alex and told him to stay away from me. I don’t remember a lot after that…I do remember seeing Alex again when I was with Roman, but not much else until he came back recently.”
“Does it bother you that you have gaps in your memory? I know it bothers me.”
“Sometimes, but maybe its just my minds way of protecting me from the memories…I try not to psychoanalyze myself…. Makes things too complicated…”
“Probably a good thing Dr. Evans,” John joked. “So, when he came back did he say what he wanted?”
“In not so many words…me.”
“What?” John asked as his mind flashed back to a conversation he’d had with Marlena right before she tried to kill herself. He’d walked into the penthouse to find Marlena’s clothes disheveled, bed unmade and her general attitude disconcerting. Something was wrong and she wasn’t telling him.
“You’d tell me if something was wrong, would you?” John asked.
Marlena reached for the bar of soap, avoiding the question. She didn’t want to lie to John. She could avoid his questions, but she never wanted to be a liar. Good girls didn’t lie, they always told the truth. She was good wasn’t she?
“Marlena?” John asked as he moved closer to her. He lack of a response was worrying him and only confirmed what he had been feeling; something was wrong. He had a sickening feeling in his gut that something was very wrong with the picture of domestic bliss that Marlena tried so hard to present.
As soon as her hand grasped the bar of soap, John saw the bruises on her upper forearm. Bruises that had not been there last night. “What the fuck,” he thought to himself.
“Marlena,” he said as he grabbed her arm. She pulled her arm out of his grasp and turned her head. “Who did this to you,” he demanded.
“Its nothing,” she said as she turned her head to the side, unable to look him in the eyes and lie. She was going to lie. She wasn’t a good girl, never was. As much as she tried to pretend that she was, she would never be good enough.
“Its something, don’t lie to me either. Who did this to you?” He reached into the water, shirtsleeves becoming soaked in the process. He roughly grabbed her other arm which was hidden underneath the bubbles and lifted it up.
“Marlena,” John said as tears formed in his eyes. Matching bruises dotted her other arm, the clear imprints of another person’s fingers visible.
Marlena jerked her hands out of John’s grasp and put them beneath the bubbles, in embarrassment. She was disgusted with herself. She’d been so preoccupied with seeing what John was doing in the bedroom that she’d failed to hide the evidence. Her father would be so disappointed in her. The one thing that he’d always taught her and Sam was how to hide the evidence so that no one knew. The less people knew, the less questions they asked, the less trouble they got into later. It was easier that way.
“Marlena,” John said again as he lifted her face tenderly with his fingers. She wouldn’t open her eyes to look at him. John tenderly stroked her face with his fingers trying to provide some measure of comfort. He could see her bottom lip and chin start to tremble.
“Talk to me…did someone hurt you?” Was she mugged or robbed and was to scared to tell him?
“No,” she said weakly, as the tears that she had been trying desperately to hold back finally fell.
“Marlena, I have to know…. Please tell me what happened…how did you get these bruises?”
“I can’t,” Marlena cried out, starting to sob.
“Can’t or won’t? If someone did this to you they need to be punished.”
“It’s nothing, just a little misunderstanding, that’s all,” she said, ashamed that he had seen her bruises. She was incapable of telling him the truth. Talking about it would make it real. Besides, she was strong enough to handle this on her own, telling John would only bring up elements of the past that she never wanted John to know. Telling wouldn’t change things; it would only make them worse.
“Marlena, who did this to you?” John asked again, still not comprehending the full scope of the situation.
“No one, I’m fine, forget about it,” Marlena said as she sat up in the tub and grabbed the sides for support as she lifted her body out of the water. John watched her helplessly, silently inspecting her body for other bruises. She was much too thin still. As much as he encouraged her to eat more, she always claimed that she wasn’t hungry.
Marlena grabbed another maroon towel off the rack and wrapped it around her body. John followed her as she went into the bedroom.
“Why won’t you talk to me about this?” John said as he sat down on the disheveled bed. John felt the bile slowly rise in his throat as he analyzed that conversation in his mind. In retrospect everything made sense; Marlena had been hiding the painful truth.
“Marlena honey, did Alex rape you?”
His heart beating faster and faster, blood pressure rising to a dangerously high level, John reached out and grabbed Marlena, pulling her towards him. “Don’t you walk away from me Marlena…You don’t walk away when I’m talking to you…got that,” he yelled as he raised his hand towards her face.
“No,” she screamed as she instinctively raised her hand in front of her face in a defensive posture and waited for his hand to connect with her skin.
“Goddammit,” he screamed as he let go of her and hit his hand on the gnarled wood of an olive tree as hard as he would. “Dammit…Dammit….Dammit.”
Marlena stood still afraid to breathe, trying to minimize her presence.
“Fuck,” he yelled as he hit the tree once again. “Fuck…Fuck…Fuck.”
“John,” Marlena said as she watched him pound his first into the tree over and over again. “Please stop,” she said gently as she placed her soft hand on his. “Please.”
“I can’t do this anymore,” he yelled as he pulled his hand abruptly out of her grasp and brought it up to his lips. Pressing the tender flesh against his lips, the coppery taste of his own blood assuaged his senses, a stark and painful reminder how close he was to tasting her blood, not his. John had almost hit her.
The conflicting emotions racing through his deep blue eyes, Marlena watched timidly and helplessly not know where John was or how to begin to help him.
“I can’t do this Marlena….I can’t.” He still wouldn’t look at her.
“John….”
“No….please don’t say anything…I just need you to listen to what I have to say, nothing more.”
“Alright,” Marlena conceded as she took a step back from him and walked towards the dying bonfire. Sitting down in the soft sand, head on her knees, the poignancy of the moment was not lost. Everything about them as a couple, lover, friends, companions was so wrong and painful at times but when it worked it was magic. How could one relationship be so complicated and emotionally draining, yet at the same time bring emotional clarity, enlightenment and sheer joy?
“I can’t do this anymore…I can’t,” John mumbled more to himself than to her as he paced back and forth in the sand, the path he’d chosen becoming more and more defined with each step that he took.
Feeling horrible for causing the torment that John was currently going through, Marlena felt a sense of responsibility to make things right with them. “It’s okay.”
“No, its not. I almost hit you Marlena.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I wanted to.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to hurt you as much as you hurt me.”
Not expecting his directness, Marlena was unsure of how to respond. She was used to dealing with John on a more intellectual level, he rarely talked about how he was feeling beyond the ‘you made me mad and I’m angry’ level. Most of her male patients were that way and she’d have to work hard to extract anything remotely like this from them. Here John was handing her a fundamental tenant of his psyche on the proverbial silver platter.
Beyond all the bells and whistles of their lives: the fancy cars, expensive clothes and jewelry, luxurious penthouses and island estates, they both were products of their upbringing and environments. “I wanted to hurt you as much as you hurt me.” It wasn’t about violence; it was about John’s need for self preservation at all costs and his need for love.
“Am I still hurting you?”
“Yes…No…Yes,” John replied confused as how to answer her question. He could lie to her and the conversation would quickly come to an end and they’d go back to living their lives and Mr. and Mrs. John Black, or he could be totally honest with her and they could move beyond where they’d been stuck for years and attain a level of happiness and understanding with each other that had been missing for years, if it had ever been there in the first place.
Marlena had to fight her instinct of defensively asking him how. “What are you feeling right now?”
“Absolute rage.”
Marlena whipped her head around, instantly seeing the fire in his eyes. Dropping her head to her chest, she closed her eyes not wanting their emotions to drive the conversation in unhealthy and unproductive ways.
“On a scale of one to ten, ten being you really want to hit me or something else, where are you right now,” she asked as she looked at him out of the corner of her eye pacing back and forth.
“Oh probably at an eight right now,” John admitted and then defensively laughed. “Not pretty is it?”
“What is still causing you so much anger that you feel you need an outlet to dispel it?” ‘That outlet being me’ the unspoken ending of her question.
“You honestly want to know?”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”
“It’s you Marlena,” John admitted as he walked over to where she was sitting and knelt down in front of her. She needed to hear and understand what he had to say. As good as she was about analyzing and helping other people, she was incapable of discussing her own feelings and motivations. “I love you so much and I’m not saying this to hurt you, but I can’t take all your secrecy anymore. If I’m going to be a true partner and help you, you need to tell me what’s going on, okay,” John said as he tipped her chin up and gazed deep into her eyes. “I am scared to death right now….I have no fucking idea where we are right now or how we’re going to get off this island or if we get off where we are going to go.”
Marlena sat quietly, forming her defenses to any question, concern or statement he might make about her.
“I can’t help us if I don’t know what I’m up against and I think deep down inside you do know.” Shaking her head in denial, Marlena tried to stand up but John grabbed hold of her shoulders and held them in place. “Don’t run….Please, don’t run.”
“I think you know what’s going on and why all these people are after you…”
“I don’t.”
“I think you do, maybe you don’t have the whole picture, but you certainly know more than you’re telling me.”
Marlena gazed down at the ground unsure of how to respond. She could lie or misdirect him, as was her motus operandi, or she could be honest with him. He’d gone out on a limb for her, trusting her with his innermost feelings and it would be incredibly hypocritical of her not to reciprocate.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“I just need to hear the truth from you Marlena…whatever it is, I just want the truth.”
“I don’t know where to start John…I’m at a loss for what information you need from me to make yourself more secure.”
“It’s not about me and my needs Marlena, don’t you see that? This is about you and what keeping information inside of you is doing to us.”
“I disagree with you John…this is not about me.”
“It’s always been about you and always will be about you until you come clean with me and tell me what you remember. Tell me about Alex North…you can’t can you?”
“I don’t want to talk about him John,” Marlena said sadly as she brushed a few fallen tears out of her eyes.
“I need to understand your relationship and what it is that’s motivating that man…in case you forgot he and Mason are after us….but why?”
“Please drop it.”
“I can’t Marlena….what does Alex have over you?”
“John…please don’t…I don’t want to be analyzed….you’re not my psychiatrist,” Marlena said in frustration and anger. How had this conversation turned from his rage to her secrecy? She’d been played by someone even more skilled in the art of misdirection than she was.
“No, but I am the man that loves you more than anything else in the world and just wants you to be healthy…you’re a mess right now…”
John watched as Marlena furiously shook her head in denial at his statement.
“Marlena, look at you….you weigh less than 100 pounds right now…I can count your ribs through your shirt, you have gashes up and down you arms that aren’t healing because you keep picking at the scabs causing them to bleed….you claim to be seeing your father and Channing….you have nightmares all the time, yet won’t tell me what they are about….You. Need. Help.”
“I’ll be fine,” Marlena said as she laid her head down on her knees and closed her eyes.
“Please tell me about Alex and what happened with him…please,” John said as he got up and sat behind Marlena on the ground, pulling her into his arms.
“I don’t know where to start.”
“How about at the beginning….where did you meet?”
“I met him in middle school…When Sam and I left their house…” Marlena started as she remembered the day the child welfare came and took her and Sam. Ms. Chavez, with her friendly smile and big white clean Ford came and took them away, promising them a life of happiness. It was the first of many times that Marlena lost her faith in the system that Ms. Chavez said would protect them.
“Go on,” John said as he stroked her hair.
“We started a new school…most of the kids there ignored me…. Sam fit right in…I didn’t.” She remembered her jealously at her sister whom instantly was invited to sit at the cool kids table and joined the pep squad. Lost in middle school hell, she was rescued by Alexander North and Mason Jones. “Mason and Alex were my only friends that year.”
“What kinds of things did you do with them?” John asked trying to get her to open up about her past.
“I don’t remember…it was more of how they made me feel…for once in my life they made me feel like I was a person that was normal…do you know what I mean?”
“I do…my cousin Matthew was like that with me…Enough about me… Were they your friends for long?”
“For a couple of years…When we went back to live at his house, they kept in contact with me.”
“So you went to the same school?”
“I wasn’t allowed to go to school.”
“What?”
“I was home schooled…he distrusted the US government and they were the ones paying for and providing public education…the only time I attended school was when I was in foster care and when I left his house for good.” You mean after you killed him, being the unspoken response.
“But you married Alex, right?” John suspected that her marriage to Alex was one of the secrets that she’d been hiding all along. When Shane had told him, he was initially angry at Marlena for not telling him but soon got over it. She had to have had a good reason for never mentioning him.
“I guess so,” Marlena said, surprised that he knew about the marriage. “A lot of that time is really fuzzy in my mind…I’m not trying to evasive….I just don’t remember.”
“That’s okay honey,” John said as he tenderly kissed the top of her head. “When you went to live with the Evans’s did you stay in contact with Alex?”
“No…we weren’t allowed to…we had to change everything, including our names,” Marlena said thinking back to the confusion that the name change brought about in the household.
“I’m curious as to why Samantha didn’t,” John stated, puzzled by the fact that she was always referred to as Samantha.
“Oh that….her given name as a child was Suzanne Samantha, named after our Aunt Suzanne who’d we’d never met but heard horrible things about from our mother. Apparently our father insisted that she be named after her…Since my mom didn’t like Suzanne, she insisted that her daughter be called Samantha. My mom didn’t know that she was going to have twins, so when I came out unexpectedly, they didn’t have a name picked out for me so I was named after a character in a Harlequin romance novel that my mom was reading…. Not terribly exciting is it?”
“So, since her given name wasn’t Samantha she was allowed to take it as her new name?”
“Exactly, on paper she was Suzanne Samantha…guess they figured it was safe.”
“Back to Alex…. You never saw him until medical school?” Marlena resigned herself to John’s questioning, knowing that he wasn’t going to stop until he had all the answers that he needed to know.
“Nope…I wasn’t allowed contact with anyone from my past…and there is a lot of stuff that I still don’t remember….Anyway, he and Mason were so great growing up but something in him changed between when I left and when I found him again…he was different, but I didn’t find that out until I married him and he beat the crap out of me,” Marlena admitted wistfully as one memory after another of Alex hitting and kicking her popped into her mind.
“So how did you get away?” John asked angered at the fact that anyone had laid a hand on Marlena, even though minutes earlier he was about to do the same.
“My father came and got me…some of his cop friends roughed up Alex and told him to stay away from me. I don’t remember a lot after that…I do remember seeing Alex again when I was with Roman, but not much else until he came back recently.”
“Does it bother you that you have gaps in your memory? I know it bothers me.”
“Sometimes, but maybe its just my minds way of protecting me from the memories…I try not to psychoanalyze myself…. Makes things too complicated…”
“Probably a good thing Dr. Evans,” John joked. “So, when he came back did he say what he wanted?”
“In not so many words…me.”
“What?” John asked as his mind flashed back to a conversation he’d had with Marlena right before she tried to kill herself. He’d walked into the penthouse to find Marlena’s clothes disheveled, bed unmade and her general attitude disconcerting. Something was wrong and she wasn’t telling him.
“You’d tell me if something was wrong, would you?” John asked.
Marlena reached for the bar of soap, avoiding the question. She didn’t want to lie to John. She could avoid his questions, but she never wanted to be a liar. Good girls didn’t lie, they always told the truth. She was good wasn’t she?
“Marlena?” John asked as he moved closer to her. He lack of a response was worrying him and only confirmed what he had been feeling; something was wrong. He had a sickening feeling in his gut that something was very wrong with the picture of domestic bliss that Marlena tried so hard to present.
As soon as her hand grasped the bar of soap, John saw the bruises on her upper forearm. Bruises that had not been there last night. “What the fuck,” he thought to himself.
“Marlena,” he said as he grabbed her arm. She pulled her arm out of his grasp and turned her head. “Who did this to you,” he demanded.
“Its nothing,” she said as she turned her head to the side, unable to look him in the eyes and lie. She was going to lie. She wasn’t a good girl, never was. As much as she tried to pretend that she was, she would never be good enough.
“Its something, don’t lie to me either. Who did this to you?” He reached into the water, shirtsleeves becoming soaked in the process. He roughly grabbed her other arm which was hidden underneath the bubbles and lifted it up.
“Marlena,” John said as tears formed in his eyes. Matching bruises dotted her other arm, the clear imprints of another person’s fingers visible.
Marlena jerked her hands out of John’s grasp and put them beneath the bubbles, in embarrassment. She was disgusted with herself. She’d been so preoccupied with seeing what John was doing in the bedroom that she’d failed to hide the evidence. Her father would be so disappointed in her. The one thing that he’d always taught her and Sam was how to hide the evidence so that no one knew. The less people knew, the less questions they asked, the less trouble they got into later. It was easier that way.
“Marlena,” John said again as he lifted her face tenderly with his fingers. She wouldn’t open her eyes to look at him. John tenderly stroked her face with his fingers trying to provide some measure of comfort. He could see her bottom lip and chin start to tremble.
“Talk to me…did someone hurt you?” Was she mugged or robbed and was to scared to tell him?
“No,” she said weakly, as the tears that she had been trying desperately to hold back finally fell.
“Marlena, I have to know…. Please tell me what happened…how did you get these bruises?”
“I can’t,” Marlena cried out, starting to sob.
“Can’t or won’t? If someone did this to you they need to be punished.”
“It’s nothing, just a little misunderstanding, that’s all,” she said, ashamed that he had seen her bruises. She was incapable of telling him the truth. Talking about it would make it real. Besides, she was strong enough to handle this on her own, telling John would only bring up elements of the past that she never wanted John to know. Telling wouldn’t change things; it would only make them worse.
“Marlena, who did this to you?” John asked again, still not comprehending the full scope of the situation.
“No one, I’m fine, forget about it,” Marlena said as she sat up in the tub and grabbed the sides for support as she lifted her body out of the water. John watched her helplessly, silently inspecting her body for other bruises. She was much too thin still. As much as he encouraged her to eat more, she always claimed that she wasn’t hungry.
Marlena grabbed another maroon towel off the rack and wrapped it around her body. John followed her as she went into the bedroom.
“Why won’t you talk to me about this?” John said as he sat down on the disheveled bed. John felt the bile slowly rise in his throat as he analyzed that conversation in his mind. In retrospect everything made sense; Marlena had been hiding the painful truth.
“Marlena honey, did Alex rape you?”