I’m ten. My stepdad, Bill, was fired from Adam’s High School as a music teacher. The band director and other teachers built a conspiracy around him. Several teenage girls accused Bill of touching them inappropriately. Bill stood too close, rubbed their shoulders and backs, and other insignificant things. The school insisted on having a teacher shadow him through his lessons. During the shadowing, Bill behaved. After the shadowing, the complaints returned. A new person shadowed Bill, and this one reported that most of the female students looked uncomfortable. Bill’s dismissal came as a complete surprise. Bill’s actions were blameless. Heartbroken, Bill was devastated. He has a great passion for teaching music. He’s innocent. Sure, Bill gives off that creepy vibe, but creepy isn’t a crime. Is it? He’ll try again! Bill finally gets to be a music teacher again, this time at Washington High School. He’s learned his lesson; he just needs to be more careful. Several teenage girls accused Bill of touching them in the same way. Bill has rubbed their shoulders and their backs and stood too close. The school insisted on having a teacher shadow Bill. The shadow saw the discomfort, even from girls he passes in the hallway. Poor Bill didn’t even get a second chance! The school fired him. The firing shocked Bill; it came without warning. No one could have foreseen this happening. It’s not like being creepy is a crime.
Bill wants you to believe him.
I’m twelve. Bill now can’t get a job in the school system, now that he has “a record”, so instead he’ll do private lessons instead. Over a few short years, no one wants to continue receiving his services. Bill still needs a job. Oh! He could sell insurance! Bill tries door-to-door, offers his services to family and friends. No one wants to be his client. Oh, no! Bill needs a job! Look, there’s Amway! Bill will make so much money from Amway our family can go to Disney World! We’ll be in the big hotels and eat out every meal, and we’ll have a week to do every single theme park. Unfortunately, Amway is a pyramid scheme, and Bill can’t sell what he bought, and he can’t get anyone else to join. Maybe this other pyramid scheme will work. No, unfortunately, he can’t sell what he bought, and he can’t get anyone to join. Oh no, Bill still needs a job. He’ll do insurance. Bill’s insurance earnings will fund a Disney World trip for our family. We’ll stay in a smaller hotel and only eat out for dinner, and we’ll be there for four days and… Oh no, Bill still needs a job. Bill will work at Pizza Hut and do insurance on the side. He quits Pizza Hut. Bill will work at McDonalds… he quits McDonalds. I guess Bill works at Pizza Hut again. He quits Pizza Hut… again. Bill does Insurance! Bill does Amway! Bill does Insurance. Our family will go to Disney World and stay at a campsite. We’ll be there a weekend, or something. I guess we’ll bring our own food.
Bill wants you to feel bad for him.
The doorbell rings. I trample down the stairs, opening the front door to see Cady, a petite blonde with shy blue eyes. With her is Lucky, her little white dog.
“Lucky and I are going on a walk, do you want to come?” she asks.
“Yeah, let me grab my shoes.” I spin on my heels and rush up the stairs.
Bill comes around from the kitchen, and fills the doorway, giving her one of his big smiles that makes Cady uncomfortable. I’m fifteen, and Cady is two years younger than me. Stepping aside to let her enter, he positions himself so that Cady is trapped between him and the door. He slips his arms around her waist and tells her how much he misses her. It’s the first time in weeks that Cady came without her mom as an escort. I apologize to Cady telepathically as she looks up at Bill, anxiety tightening her smile. Mom only scolds Bill. Bill has only been the victim of these accusations. As Cady and I walk out the front door, I hear mom and Bill leaving from the back, heading to Martin’s supermarket. With shoes on, we walk around the block, talking, laughing, being girls. Soon, I’m standing outside Cady’s red house. Through the screen door, I can hear Cady talking to her mom, Linsey.
“Is it okay if I hang out with Michelle in her room?”
“Is Bill there?” Linsey asks, her quick, raspy voice full of animosity. Linsey’s mid-length bob and her boney frame swings in and out of view.
“No! He’s not!” Cady answers with insistent. “He left with her mom to the grocery store.”
“You better come home if he’s there. I don’t want you near him.” Linsey asserts.
I wish I could tell her I wouldn’t let anything happen, but I couldn’t. Bill acts swiftly, fulfilling his desires unseen. Bill would go for a hug, and then his hands would travel below the waist, but move his hands back up. If you weren’t staring at his hands, or weren’t the person he was hugging, you wouldn’t notice. But he hugged Cady below the waist, and Linsey. He hugged my cousins, Cassie and Lilith, their mom Kimberly below the waist. Bill hugged my friends, Julia, Amber, Alya, and even my brothers’ girlfriends. It wasn’t his fault. Bill would steam. It was an accident; one Bill would repeat. It was just a slip; my mom would finally concede. It was just sick; the other mothers would scream. It was almost pedophilic, it seemed. But when it’s limited to a slip of the finger, eyes that linger, and kisses not on the cheek… then I guess it’s just creepy.
I’m seventeen. The words I yell are muffled in my memory. Agitation mingles with my tears. Bill is standing in the kitchen; mom is behind him. I’m crying. Bill opens his arms, preparing to hug me. He believes a hug would comfort me. Bill is mistaken as he moves from the distance of five feet away from me.
“Don’t touch me.” I say through my tears. I take two steps back. He pursues, taking twice as many steps forward as I retreat. Four feet. I take another step back, hitting the bottom stair leading to my room. He continues weaving his body around the kitchen table.
“Don’t. Touch. Me.” I repeat, more firmly. I gripped the railing ascending a step. Three feet. I travel up another step. Two feet. His hugs have never been comforting. Not the way he hugged. It was not only creepy, but his wide frame was suffocating.
One foot. His arms closing in, his hand just brushing the fabric on my shoulder.
“I said don’t fucking touch me!” the words a scream. I twist away from him. Bill takes a step back. Disbelief was washing over his face, and I glimpse his flapping lower lip, pouting in confusion, turning to my mom for some kind of explanation. I reach the doorway to my bedroom in seconds.
“She did say not to touch her.” My mom says, her tone begrudging. Like him trying to touch me after I explicitly told him no was a mere technicality. Like mom only acknowledged my autonomy after I screamed it.
In my room, I sit on my bed, cover my face and cry. This will be stuck with me forever. Why is this so important? He only wanted to hug me. Because I understood more now. I understood why my brother Matt punched Bill. I finally knew why that was the first time I supported violence. I envied it. Matt knocked Bill out so hard he broke his own hand. I remember the sound of Bill’s head thumping against the laminated tile. I was prouder than I should have been, seeing my brother’s hand in a cast. Bill ruined our lives and pouted through it, like he was the victim.
Bill wants you to feel sorry for him.
It’s the end of August, and I stand outside of my home. I’m twenty-two. Mom carries fifteen years of our lives into the Honda van. Once, it was the primary mode of transportation, carrying my mom, my brothers and myself, but it has since turned into Bill’s secret junk food van. Boxes and boxes of empty pizza boxes, countless fast-food bags thrown from the driver’s side to the backseats left to rot. We discovered it as we prepared to move. The bank foreclosed on our home. Bill never paid the bills. Bill convinced my mom that they could use my disability while I was at a school of misfit toys. The School of Misfit Toys is my unusual way of describing the place that operated as a school that doubled as a psych-ward rehabilitation center. To qualify to attend, you had to have a mental and physical disability, and a contentious relationship with the law. We were the school version of being trains with square wheels. Regardless, my mom gave Bill the money. This was breaking the rules around disability, and I owed whatever Bill spent back. Bill still didn’t pay the bills.
I go into my house, one last look. My room is bare. It feels wrong. I picked up the last box. I wandered into my brother’s room next to mine, empty. Wrong. Mom’s room, the bathroom, the kitchen, the basement, the laundry room. My home. Wrong. Pain builds in my stomach, like acid sinking into me. I swallow the tears; I swallow my screams. The front room, the last one, holds my attention. The dining table, even on moving day, covered in unopen envelopes, unopened bills. I walk out the front door. My brother Matt is double checking the house before getting the refrigerator. My brother Jeremy, carrying another two trash bag’s worth of papers, mom stopping to clear off the dining table. Grandpa carrying chairs, Grandma making sure everything is going to fit in the vans. Bill sits in a lawn chair, arms folded across his chest, looking like a child after his parent took away his favorite toy.
“How dare he.” Grandma mumbles at me as I reach her red van.
“I know.” I answer.
“This whole time, all day, he’s sat there, pouting.” Grandma shakes her head.
“I know, Grandma.”
“He put you in this position. He knows it. The least he could do is help.”
“That’s what he does, Grandma. He sits, and he pouts, and he does nothing.”
When the time finally comes, I climb into Grandma’s van. I’m not moving in with Mom and Bill into the trailer they bought together. I’m moving in with my grandparents. I refuse to live with Mom or Bill ever again. Only when the Honda left the driveway, and Grandma started the engine, did reality shift. I lost my childhood home.
“He took it from me. He took it from us.” I repeat it over and over. Tears flowing.
“I know, I know,” Grandma repeated from the driver’s seat. Grandpa swung his arm back, clasping my hand, comforting me the best he could.
Don’t you dare feel sorry for him.
I’m twenty-four. Grandma and I go see the movie Tomorrowland, the one with George Clooney. It was midday, on the weekend. A little half-way through the movie, Grandma tells me to scoot myself lower into my chair.
“What?” I ask, confused.
“Bill is right there.” Grandma whispers.
“What?” I still didn’t understand.
“I’ll tell you in a minute, hide!” and we get as low into our seats as possible. Then, I see him. His distinct silhouette walks up the black aisle with an empty tub of popcorn. Moments later, he passes us back to his seat, his popcorn refilled and oblivious to the weird women scrunching into themselves. We leave five minutes before the movie ends, rushing to her van.
Inside the car, Grandma pulls her phone out of her purse and begins dialing.
“Bill told your mom that he was two hours away from here, meeting with a potential client.” Grandma explains in a rush. Mom’s been on the fence about her marriage, trying to make it work. Bill seemed to do better until this. As Grandma retold the day’s events to Mom, I knew this was about to be the final nail in the coffin. Bill was not supposed to be out of town for only one day, but for the entire weekend. After multiple phone calls, Grandma and Mom stitched together a plan. Before Bill “returned” from “out of town,” Grandma and Mom removed all of Mom’s belongings from the trailer. Within twenty-four hours, Mom had moved in with me and my grandparents. The marriage is over. It’s finally over.
It was not over. Though she had emotionally left Bill, she had to unwrap herself from him. Mom had to fight for Bill to be responsible for his college and other financial dept. Mom discovered credit cards Bill accumulated in her name and fought him to be responsible for his financial fraud. Moreso, she had to coddle Bill into accepting that his marriage with the woman he emotionally and financially abused for thirteen years was over.
I woke up. Sweat coats my body. I suck in the air. It happened again. Bill’s bloody face is on the kitchen floor. The knife stuck in his chest, the stab wounds perforating his abdomen. It’s not real. It’s not real. I ball my blanket into my fists. Tears pool in my eyes as I force myself to contend with my nightmares.
I don’t want this. Why is this happening? What is this inside me? I want it to stop. This should be over now. I’m twenty-six. I hate him, but I don’t want to kill him.
Bella, my dog, nuzzles my hand. She trembles as she presses wet kisses into my mouth, licking away the tears, the noise of me crying. She knows. I tell myself. I gently push her away, toss off the covers, and walk out into the living room. Grandma sat in the living room, in her blue lazy-boy. I round the corner, our eyes meeting, and I search for concern.
“Was I yelling?” I ask. I’ve always talked in my sleep. Grandma’s eyebrows pinch together.
“No, why?”
“I had another one.” I confess. The shame seeps into my words.
It always starts the same. Bill and I are in the kitchen, Bill standing where Matt punched him so hard Matt broke his hand. Something comes up, always with more truth than my imagination can manifest. Bill took money from us, lied about money, insulting us, degraded us, touched us without our consent, undressed my friends and brothers’ girlfriends, even me. Maybe he was forcing himself on mom or caught ogling barely legal porn on the family computer, or the countless other things I could mention. It didn’t matter. I was always yelling. He would always pretend to play the victim. Everything I saw or witnessed was my fault for paying attention. Then Bill would make a fist, purse his lips, stomp his foot like a giant child. Eventually, he did the worse thing he could. Smile. In the nightmare, it took little time for me to turn volatile. I would always do the same thing. Attack. Punch. Kick. Stab. Punch. Stab. Kick. Kick. Stab. Until he was dead. Then I would wake up. Guilt consumed me, the nightmares themselves haunted me. Then I would deflect. Make a joke about Kill Bill and hope someone laughed. No one did.
“Should I tell mom?” I would always ask.
“No, she’s been through enough.” Grandma always answered. Mom didn’t need to be reminded that the man she wasted fifteen years on, who gaslighted her and abused her, caused irrevocable trauma to her children. I was more callous. Especially when that trauma manifests in one of her children having murder nightmares. I wanted my mom to know about every single nightmare. Perhaps her anger would equal mine. I wanted mom to be the one to punch Bill.
Bill is no one to feel sorry for.
“So, I’ve been learning more about what gaslighting is.” I tell mom as we walk the dogs around the block. I’m twenty-seven, and we’re both living with my grandparents. I was watching a new therapist on YouTube. I found behavioral psychology fascinating and reassuring. If I could understand my own behaviors, and the behaviors of others, I could heal.
“Gaslighting? What’s that?”
“It’s manipulation where a person tries to convince you that what you experienced didn’t happen. The person would manipulate you into thinking that you didn’t remember something correctly, or try to rewrite your experiences, like saying you wanted something you didn’t. Often, it ends with them calling you crazy or irrational. Did dad or Bill do that to you?”
“Your dad? Yes. Bill, I’m not sure. I remember our first kiss. We were on the doorstep, and he took my face in his hands and kissed me. We were just starting to date, so it surprised me, and I wasn’t ready for that yet. When I mentioned it, he told me I wanted to kiss him. He just kept telling me I wanted it. I don’t know any more if I did or not.”
“That sounds like gaslighting.”
In hindsight, it makes sense my mom couldn’t tell if my stepdad gaslighted her but could identify that behavior in my dad. With Dad, she had a turbulent marriage and an ugly divorce. My dad was dealing with his own chaos, from his collapsing business and struggling with his mental health. Bill was quiet and pretended not to understand. Bill cycled between depression and indifference.
Don’t you feel sorry for him?
I’m thirty years old. I walk into my mom’s room at eleven-thirty. She looks over her glasses at me and closes the library book she’s reading. I know I’m interrupting her sacred reading time, but after writing for three hours and getting nowhere, I stand there, asking her about Bill, trying to chisel through the blockages my mind built to protect me.
“I don’t remember much. I think I blocked a lot of it out. But, at the same time, it’s hard to pick out what’s worth writing about. My life is like, I don’t know, some tree of trauma, and it has an abundance of fruit. What do you remember?” I ask.
“So, you’re picking my brain for information?” Mom asks, squeezing her eyes shut before continuing. “I honestly don’t know anymore. There was so much happening, I don’t know what was going on.”
She was right. Both of my brothers and I, all simultaneously self-destructing in different ways. Even if life gave a dictation, it would be impossible to unravel it. It was utterly chaotic.
“I remember Bill being manipulative, and him always being a victim. Like, with the high school controversy. But now, I don’t remember how he did it, only that he did.”
“Well, some of that was how competitive being a high school music teacher was.”
“Do you seriously believe he was innocent?” I ask, incredulous.
“Bill was very good at convincing people he was innocent. I guess that’s why I’m still defending him, even after all this time.”
“That’s what manipulators do mom; it’s not your fault.”
“I think I’m going to end with that one line, though.”
“Which one?”
“My life is a tree of trauma, and it has an abundance of fruit.”
Names have been altered to protect affected individuals, except for Bill. Full name, Willliam Kyder.
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