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Those Hands
By S. A. Barton
Copyright 2012 S. A. Barton
Smashwords Edition
Find other stories by S.A. Barton on his Smashwords profile.
I never saw the face of my rapist. I was playing alone in a patch of woods behind my suburban home; my action figures were engaged in deadly battle for the very fate of the universe, and so I heard nothing until I was shoved forward into the snow. My face ground into the icy crystals, they melted up my nose and sent a shock of pain through my front teeth. A massive weight on my back pinned me. Knobby, pale teenage hands pulled my stocking cap down roughly over my face, the ragged edges of bitten nails dragging my cheeks. I have never forgotten those hands, or the cold shock of winter wind on my buttocks, or the short and painful violation that followed. He never said a word, but suddenly the weight was gone, and the crunch of boots in snow retreated behind me, leaving me alone. I did not turn to look, or try to get to my feet until I could hear them no longer. Only I and the violation remained, alone. I never said a word either, not then, not ever. I just didn't know I was supposed to until it was-- I thought-- too late. I was eight.
My parents mistook my sudden interest in spending long hours in the library for the cause of my withdrawal from social life, but it was the other way around. My peers were not safe to be around. Too many of them had older brothers, knew kids who had older brothers, or were bigger than I was. Libraries always had adults in them. Adults were safe; adults had never attacked me. It was not rational; some of those adults had teenage sons. Some of those adults might be sinister themselves. But perhaps more important than logic, a library was not a hidden place in the woods and I was not alone with any of those adults or the children they sometimes brought with them.
Reading my solitary way into adolescence, I grew to love science, both fiction and fact. I especially loved the safe surprises of mathematics, physics, and engineering. For a time I entertained the childish notion of building a time machine, of preventing my trauma by boldly confronting my attacker in the person of an older, stronger me, just like those action figure heroes. I gradually forgot the fantasy as grade school gave way to high school and high school gave way to college. Even the cause of the fantasy simply slipped away from me. Why think about it, I asked myself. Eventually, I did stop thinking about it and the fact of what had happened to the eight year old me simply lay dormant, buried somewhere under my constant study. I had escaped… sort of.
After earning my doctorate, I did poorly climbing the academic ladder. Publishing was not my problem, but the personal aspect was. I had no desire to teach, to deliver papers to an audience, or especially to play the interpersonal politics that the climbers did. It didn't take me long to realize that research was my place, always an associate, never a leader.
The gray was creeping back through my hair from my temples and the interdisciplinary team I was a part of had already built something very like a time machine by the time I recalled the daydreams I had once entertained. The evening when I remembered, I sat nursing a cup of coffee in my tiny office staring at columns of numeric data, and suddenly the image of those pale hands snaking out from behind to grip the stretchy wool of my cap came to me for the first time in years. I had never told anyone, not even my wife, I suddenly realized. I pushed the memory away from my conscious mind and tried to cover it with work as I had uncounted times before, but it kept peeking out around the edges. Asking where I had been, why it wasn't important enough to give a little thought to. I had no answer for it, and for once it would not go away.
That night I kissed my beautiful Angela goodnight and told her as I too seldom did, “I love you”. I meant to say more, but my voice caught. She noticed and said, “I know, Richard, and I love you too. Are you OK?”
“I just realized how long it's been since I said that, and how unfair that is to you. I love you all the time and I should say so.”
“I know how you are. You say it without words every day. But I do like to hear it, if you say it more often I won't complain.” I smiled, and excused myself to head to the lab for another midnight observation as I had many times before in our life together.
Only of course there was no observation. There was just a terrible, terrible chance I meant to take. I stopped at the girls' room on the way out, stood in the shadows and watched them sleep. Most days, that was all the time I spent with them. They didn't really have a father, they had a guest they might see two or three hours a week. “I'm sorry Angelina, Danielle... I...” I turned away, closed the door and went out to the car. I didn't even know what to say to my own daughters, even when there was no chance they would hear or answer. I haven't given this, this neglect of my family a single thought before, I thought as I turned the key. Not one thought. But now, I had to do anything I could to fix it. It had to be fixed. And it had to start with those hands. Those hands I hadn't thought about in years. Those hands that I couldn't stop thinking about.
I put my hands on the steering wheel and stared at them. I didn't like looking at them; my eyes kept sliding off them to look at the dash, out the window, at the radio, anywhere else. I realized I didn't know what my own wife's hands looked like after fourteen years of marriage. I could describe every freckle on her breasts, but when her hands came into view I always looked away.
I twisted the headlight switch on and pulled out into the dark. I put it in drive, mind roiling with thoughts of hands and pulled into my parking spot at the lab instantly. The twelve miles in between did not exist. I sat in the car staring at the cinderblock wall of the building. The car was already off, the engine ticking as it cooled the only sound. Suddenly I was afraid to open the door, my heart pounding. What was out there in the dark? What was out there in the lab? If I could forget twelve miles, drive them like a robot, in a blackout, what else was I forgetting? Was there even a chance this could work, or was this a fancy way to commit suicide? We were experimenting with mice and the results weren't even through basic analysis. There was nothing concrete yet, just theory. The only thing we really knew is the subjects didn't die . If the theory was right, what I was thinking would work. If it wasn't, who knew?