“Okay, well I had just gotten home from work when he came out of the shadows and forced me inside my apartment.”
Closing her eyes she pictured the whole scene in her mind as she recounted everything that happened.
Ever since that day Olivia hasn’t gone back to that apartment. Daddy had sent movers over there not long after they got back home and they cleaned it out for her.
They threw out all the things that David had destroyed and brought her the handful of items that were salvageable. It wasn’t much, but they were the things that were important to her.
“What do you remember following the attack and waking up in the hospital?”
Wow, Auntie C wasn’t holding back on her today. Olivia figured it was better to just rip the bandaid off quickly.
“I remember waking up and Daddy being there. I remember him telling me that David was dead. I then remember the horrible news that the doctor told me before the memories blur into one another.”
“What did the doctor tell you, Olivia?”
She didn’t want to utter the words out loud. Saying them out loud made them real to her and she didn’t know if she was ready to face that.
Instead, Olivia leaned forward and plucked another cupcake from the tray before ripping the bottom off of it and creating a sandwich with the icing in the middle.
Daddy always laughed at her when she did that, but Olivia knew that it was the best way to eat a cupcake.
Every bite that you took had the perfect ratio of cake to icing and she would continue to argue her way until he saw the light.
He eats cupcakes like a caveman. Just biting into them all willy-nilly.
“I can never have kids.” Olivia spoke so softly that she didn’t think that Auntie C had even caught the words that she said.
“I’m so sorry that you have to face that at your age. We never think that something like that can happen to us, until it does.”
Olivia caught the ‘us’ that Auntie C stated and whipped her head up ready to ask the question that was on the tip of her tongue.
“When I was sixteen, I was in a car accident with a group of my friends. I was a cheerleader and one of the older girls was driving me home from practice that day. A drunk driver swerved and hit our car head on. Waking up in the hospital three weeks later, I found out that I, too, would never have kids. A piece of the dash had broken off and I had a penetrating wound to my abdomen similar to yours.”
Tears welled up in Olivia’s eyes as she listened to Auntie C recount her own memories. Losing the ability to have children at twenty-two was hard enough for Liv to comprehend, but losing that ability at the age of sixteen was unfathomable.
“So, I know a little bit of what you are going through right now, Olivia. The hatred of the world, the questioning of why it had to be you, and the uncertainty of what your new future was going to hold. I get it and relate. What I can tell you is that while the pain of it all will never go away, it does fade. It becomes easier to handle. There are days where it will hit you like a dump truck and you will find yourself reliving those first few weeks following the attack, but even those will become less and less. They will be easier to face.”
“How did you do it?”
“Do what Liv?”
“How did you move on? How did you keep pushing through and living?”
“I had help from the people around me, both in my personal life, as well as professional help. That’s actually how I ended up choosing my career. The therapist I worked with during that time made a huge impact on my life and I knew that I wanted to be able to do the same for others.”
“I had a similar thought and then brushed it off, thinking it was stupid.”
“No thought of yours will ever be stupid and I know that if your Daddy heard you speaking like that he wouldn’t be happy.”
Olivia’s bottom clenched at the thought of what Daddy would have done if he heard her speak such words.
Her old Daddy was back and in full force after a conversation with Auntie C about how Olivia needed him to be the stern Daddy that he was before.
She helped remind him that while something bad had happened to her, she wasn’t a doll that would break at the wrong moment.
Daddy had told her that he was afraid that Olivia would associate the punishments that he gave her with the ones that David did.
Olivia had to remind him that what David did wasn’t a punishment, it was abuse. Abuse that she didn’t agree to.
