Novel: Filling the Cracks—Chapter One

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Welcome to the first installment of my novel, Filling the Cracks, posted exclusively here every Wednesday for the next twenty-five weeks! Check in every week for a new chapter.

Trigger warning: The following story contains topics that may disturb some readers, including child physical and sexual abuse, domestic abuse, substance abuse, violence, and suicide. Although there is no explicit sexuality or language, this is written for an adult audience and may not be suitable for children.

Chapter One

May 1984

Many things fell through the cracks in Coverville, never to be spoken of or acknowledged. Political bribes. Petty crimes. Spousal abuse. Affairs. Beth Clark’s home life was one of many taboos.

It all stunk like the acrid scent of tar that burned her nostrils. A work crew filled cracks in the street outside her house. She draped the strap of her backpack over her shoulder and left her home. It was a bright, chilly May morning, and she waved to the workers before shuffling down the sidewalk toward her friend Lisa’s house, four bungalows down the block and across the street from hers.

Fixing potholes and cracks each spring was one of the only acts of maintenance the village of Coverville performed all year. It was an annual spring ritual. The rest of the year, the home of a little more than six-hundred people ignored street sweeping, fixing crumbling curbs, mowing public spaces regularly, and consistent trash collection. However, the streets were always in good repair. Rumor had it the company’s owner, who won the bid to fix the cracks and potholes around Coverville, was the mayor’s cousin. That’s what Virgie told Gary, anyway. Nepotism, Virgie had called it. Beth didn’t know what that meant.

Coverville was like any other north-central Alberta village, with two intersecting main streets, one of which was an extension of the secondary highway that cut the community in half. They had all the necessary businesses and organizations to serve the residents and the surrounding farming community, including two gas stations, the grain elevator and feed store alongside the railway line that crossed through the village, a grocery store, the post office, two banks, and an Alberta Treasury Branch, a strip mall that housed the medical clinic of three family doctors and a dentist, village council office, and the pharmacy next door to that. There was the Coverville Hotel with its popular tavern on the main floor, the only watering hole in town, the Chinese family restaurant neighboring it in the same building, and eight local churches to preach against the sins that took place in that tavern and hotel. Their village was also home to elementary and secondary schools and welcomed hundreds of youth each weekday to fill them. It was a quiet, peaceful, often dull place to grow up in, where everybody knew about everybody else’s business. Allegedly.

But a lot of secrets were kept in Coverville.

Lisa Jones, Beth’s best friend since Kindergarten, sat on the front steps of her house, waiting for Beth to pass by. She skipped down her walkway to meet up, and they continued the half-kilometer walk through the center of the village to get to their school. In a few weeks, the girls, queens of the jungle at Coverville Elementary, would commence on to Coverville Junior/Senior High in September, having a couple of months to prepare themselves to be at the bottom of the student pecking order again.

“What’s wrong with you?” Lisa asked, shaking her head of long, wild, caramel-colored hair at her friend. “You’re too quiet. Something happened with Gary?”

Gary was Beth’s uncle, her mother’s unmarried mechanic brother. He was twenty-five and lived with Beth, her mom, and her younger brother Otto, to help “pay the bills” after Beth’s “dead-beat dad” left. He often babysat Beth and Otto when their mom, Virgie, worked at the hotel as a server at the family restaurant connected by French doors to the tavern.

“Nothing different than usual,” Beth replied, but she avoided looking Lisa in the eye until the latter stopped them off the sidewalk and lifted Beth’s chin to force her to join their gazes.

“Was he at you again?” Lisa whispered though they were the only two within earshot of each other.

Beth shrugged a shoulder, blinking to keep tears at bay. “What else is new?”

Lisa sighed, wrapped an arm around Beth’s shoulder, and guided her back onto the sidewalk. They’d be late for the first bell if they didn’t keep moving. “You tell your mom yet?”

“You know I can’t. She won’t believe me.”

“Show her your crotch, and she will.”

Beth couldn’t resist snickering at that, despite the severity of the topic. Lisa had no filter, as Virgie called it—she said it as she saw it. It was one of the things Beth liked most about her.

“Your mouth!”

“What about it?” Lisa said, raising her chin. “It’s true. Let me tell my mom if you can’t tell yours.”

“No.”

“Beth, Aurora had the same problem at home. That’s why she lives with us now. Maybe you could come live with us, too.”

Aurora Gold—yes, that was her name—was the Jones family’s foster daughter. She’d lived with Lisa’s family for over a year. Before that, she’d been a prisoner in her own home with an older brother who enjoyed diddling with her while their father videotaped it.

Going to live with Lisa’s family was more like a dream to Beth than anything. Two parents who didn’t get drunk or fight or beat on each other, showing love and respect to Lisa and now Aurora. Listening to and having time and attention spent on her would be too good to be true. Good things like that didn’t happen to Beth.

“You need to tell someone,” Lisa insisted. They climbed through the hole in the chain-link fence surrounding the schoolyard—the shortcut—and crossed the field of knee-high grass toward the playground and school building. “Keeping it bottled up only will kill you.”

It was true. Once again, Lisa was far too observant for Beth’s comfort.

The first bell rang, and the girls had to run to make it through the side doors of their school before the teacher on supervision shut it. Anyone arriving after that was marked as late for the first bell. The second bell was ten minutes later, after which students were presumably in their classrooms and seated at their desks, waiting for their homeroom teacher to take attendance. Being too chatty if placed in the same row, Lisa and Beth had been separated to opposite sides of the classroom by their teacher, Mr. Montague.

The first two blocks were Math, followed by Language Arts. Beth enjoyed all the academic subjects—she was scary-bright, getting As on all her homework assignments, quizzes, and tests. Some of her peers bullied her, calling her teacher’s pet and nerd, but Lisa was always there to stand up for her when they tried anything at recess. They had each other’s backs. Their peers ridiculed Lisa for her lisp, and Beth wouldn’t stand for that either, putting people in their places when and where necessary. Beth had even engaged in a couple of schoolyard fights in defense of her best friend—the opposite was true, too.

Beth hated non-academic subjects like Art and Health. She excelled at them but preferred anything that engaged her brain over her imagination. Her imagination often took her to dark places she found difficult to escape.

Health class was right before lunch break. Usually, the genders were combined for the course but for the next couple of weeks, the topic was sex education, so boys were separated from girls. The boys remained in the homeroom and were instructed by Mr. Montague while the girls went with the school counselor, Mrs. Nestor, to her office, where chairs and tables had been set up for them.

Beth and Lisa made sure they sat next to each other at one of those tables. They had no idea what they were about to learn, only that special permission forms had been sent home to their parents concerning the subject matter. If a student’s parent didn’t consent to their child receiving instruction, that student had to spend the period in the main office reading a book. Only one girl and two boys from Beth’s class of twenty-two students had to go to the office.

“It’s the nineteen eighties, and people still don’t let their kids know about sex,” Lisa whispered into Beth’s ear before the lesson. “Mom gave me ‘the talk’ a year ago.”

Beth smirked, refraining from commenting that no one had given her the talk. Once Gary had begun making his regular nightly visitations to her bedroom, Beth had researched in the encyclopedias in the school library what had happened to her.

Mrs. Nestor was in her fifties, with tightly permed hair that turned from brown to steel gray and smiling eyes of gold and green hues. She was friendly and gentle with the students in her school, and her office door was always open at lunchtime if students wanted to stop by to ‘chat.’ Beth frequently stopped, finding it a comfort to have an adult to talk to who gave her more than thirty seconds of attention and wouldn’t criticize her or get angry at her for the questions she asked or the thoughts and feelings she shared. Beth trusted her, and that was a rare thing. But she hadn’t trusted her with everything.

Mrs. Nestor pinned two large posters to a corkboard that showed labeled diagrams of two young, headless nude bodies, one male and one female. A couple of girls tittered nervously at the poster of the male body. Neither Beth nor Lisa was one of those girls. It was nothing new to them. For Lisa, her mother had purchased a book about human sexuality and gone through it page by page with her, explaining everything without guilt or embarrassment. For Beth, she viewed the real thing regularly in the dim illumination of her night light. Mrs. Nestor went over the diagrams and labels with the class, speaking in strictly scientific terms before asking if there were any questions.

“Yeah,” Lisa said after casting Beth a quick sideways glance. “Why don’t you show it when the guy has a woody?”

Nervous laughter erupted from the twelve girls present, including Beth. But under her laughter, Beth squirmed in her seat and blinked against the moisture that gathered in her eyes. It was warm in Mrs. Nestor’s office, and she couldn’t breathe well.

“It’s called an erection, Lisa. I will be dealing with that in our next class,” Mrs. Nestor said, unruffled by the question. “Today, we’re simply studying the human anatomy—our parts—and next class, we will discuss what happens when humans engage in sexual intercourse.”

“When they do it,” Lisa said in a stage whisper, wanting to be heard.

Mrs. Nestor cast her a look that indicated Lisa was stepping over the line and she should be quiet. Not that that had stopped her in the past.

Beth breathed silently in relief when the lunch bell rang. The girls rejoined the boys in the classroom long enough to grab their lunch bags and head to the gymnasium to eat their lunches under supervision before being forced to go outside to play until afternoon classes began again. Beth ate silently, listening to Lisa and the other girls joke about what they’d just learned about health. She didn’t have much appetite, and instead of jumping Double-Dutch with Lisa and the others outside, Beth told the supervising teacher that she wanted to go to Mrs. Nestor’s office.

When Beth knocked on her open door, Mrs. Nestor had removed the folding tables from her office and sat behind her desk, reading a book and munching on a sandwich. Her reading glasses were perched on the end of her nose. She looked up, set the book down, smiled, and waved for Beth to come in and sit opposite the desk.

“What would you like to talk about today, Beth?” the school counselor asked.

Beth avoided Mrs. Nestor’s gaze, biting hard on her cheek to keep herself from crying. She didn’t want to appear weak or foolish when she said what was on her heart. It was too important to blubber her way through.

“I have to tell you something,” Beth whispered. “Something that happens all the time. I can’t make it stop. I need help.”

#

Gary Tremblay had come to live with Beth and her broken family after her dad packed a suitcase and left without looking back. That was when Beth had been nine and Gary had been twenty-two. He worked as an auto mechanic apprentice at the only repair shop in the village and made a modest living doing so. He helped his sister Virgie keep a roof over the family’s heads and the lights on. He had a place to live for cheap, and in exchange, he babysat his niece and nephew when Virgie worked overtime at the tavern once her service shift at the Chinese restaurant was over each night.

He'd visited Beth's bedroom from the first night after moving in. At first, it had been only once or twice a month. But once Gary had gained confidence that Beth feared him and believed his threats if she told anyone about the visits, their frequency had increased until now he visited her twice or thrice a week.

“At first, he touched me under my underwear,” Beth said softly, keeping her eyes from meeting the school counselor. “But eventually, he put his thing inside me and pushed it in and out until I got wet. He told me it was pee. He told me he’s teaching me how to be a good wife to a man someday.”

What he did to her wasn’t ‘education.’ She was bright enough to recognize abuse, but that meant she was also smart enough to know that the violent spark in Gary’s eye wasn’t fake; he would do to her all the awful things he promised to do if she told anyone what went on behind the closed door to her bedroom—like she was now.

In three years, Beth had only dared to violate the secret she shared with her uncle with one other person. During a weekend camping trip with Lisa’s family to Lac St. Anne, under cover of night, when she and Lisa were alone in their pup tent, Beth revealed the violations she suffered. She’d sworn Lisa to secrecy. They were blood-sisters—had co-mingled their blood via cuts they’d made on their thumbs—and as such, they would never break a promise made under that oath. That hadn’t meant that Lisa didn’t constantly urge Beth to tell someone in authority who could help make these visitations stop once and for all. But Beth was too afraid. She understood how adults behaved, especially in her family. They covered each others’ backs. No one would help Beth if she told anyone—and Gary would find out and punish her as he promised he would.

So, sitting in Mrs. Nestor’s office and describing to the counselor every disgusting thing Gary had ever done to her was a daunting act that caused Beth to tremble from head to toe as she revealed her secret.  The shaking continued for hours afterward, throughout the rest of the school day.

But right before Beth and Lisa had left the school that afternoon for their walk to their homes, Mrs. Nestor had caught them in the hallway and said to Beth, “Don’t worry. I’ve taken care of everything. You’ll be all right from now on.”

On the walk home, when they were alone, Lisa asked, “What was she talking about?”

Beth couldn’t repress the smile that came from her soul for the first time she could in a long time. “I did it. I told her.”

“You did?” Lisa’s face lit up, brighter than the sun. “I’m so proud of you! So it’s over, right? You’re safe?”

Beth allowed a nervous giggle to escape from her. “I guess so. I think I’m free.”

At the walkway that led to Lisa’s house, the friends hugged before Lisa hurried into her home.

Taking a deep breath, Beth skipped to her house, through the rusty gate with its squeaky hinges, in the dilapidated picket fence, up the crumbling concrete walkway to the side door. She opened it and stepped into the house.

To her surprise, Virgie stood in the kitchen waiting for her instead of sitting in the living room watching her soap operas.

“Hi, Mom!” Beth squealed before seeing that her mother didn’t smile back. “What’s wrong?”

Virgie held one of her cork-heeled wedge shoes in her right hand. “You and me are gonna talk.”

#

Thanks for reading! Chapter Two will be posted next Wednesday here on my blog, so be sure to return next week. If you have any comments or questions, please leave them in the comment section below. Also, remember to subscribe to my newsletter and share this blog with your family and friends. Check out my other blog posts, also found here at paulinejgrabia.com. God bless and have a great week!

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