Page 57 of Judas

Catherine Arthur had died in a car accident when Eliza was five years old and every memory of her was foggy. She wasn’t even sure the memories were all truly hers or just her mind's retelling of stories she had been told over the years. She used to cling to any possible way to know her mother and spent many afternoons in her mother’s space. Paul had kept it exactly as Catherine left it and it was the only room in the house that’dnever felt like him. It was warm and full of rich fabrics. The sun shone brightly through the large bay windows. The entire space was light and airy. As Eliza grew older the space became just a reminder that she would never know the woman that created it and being inside only made her heart ache. Shaking her head, Eliza realized that it might make the perfect room for Paul to hide any indiscretions.

Eliza made her way through the desk first, carefully running her fingers over the pens and pencils tucked inside. Being here and seeing these things for the first time in so many years felt otherworldly. It was like going back in time only to realize you still can't change what once was. The pain of heartbreak was somehow both a new stab and an old friend all at once. Tears stung her eyes, but with a deep breath, she continued anyway.

Eliza tore through the room with care, being sure to leave it just as she found it while still leaving no stone unturned. Eventually, she reaches the closet. Taking a seat on the floor, legs crisscross like the young schoolgirl she was the last time she’d held her mother's hand, Eliza began unpacking boxes tucked away inside. Most of the paperwork littering the boxes was nothing more than day to day monotony. Long ago paid bills from now closed accounts, shopping lists carefully checked off through a trip to the store, appointment reminders scrawled across faded receipts. But then, resting beneath all the years of paper clutter, something else.

Eliza reached into the box to pull out a stack of leatherbound notebooks with worn pages and wear and tear of use. Laying the stack in front of her, she gently opened the cover to find line after line of delicate, handwritten journal entries. Glancing through each one, she could see the dates going back all the way to the year her parents married and carrying through to the year she lost her mother. She never even knew her mother had kept journals.

Her heart soared as she realized that her mother's entire life story was written out on these pages in her own words. Then, thumbing through the most recent journal, she came across the last entry. It was written the day of her mother's death. A chill slid down her spine and her lungs seized shut, leaving Eliza unable to breathe as the words on the page came into sharp focus before her.

Catherine Arthur may very well have been the first to discover Paul Arthur's dirty little secrets.

Chapter forty-one

April 17th, 1995

Ilearned today that my entire life is a lie.

My husband is among the lowest forms of human life.

I have never been so naive to believe that my marriage or my husband are perfect. I have known for too many years that he has had other women. I was heartbroken at first, as I watched all my childhood dreams of what marriage should be swept away by his need to be the center of attention even in some other women’s beds.

Eventually, though, I became numb to it. He provided for my life, wore me on his arm at societal functions, and gave me my darling Eliza. It was truly a perfectly suitable arrangement for these last several years. He stayed busy at work and out doing who knows what with who knows who while I got to be home with our girl. I got to be her mother without any interference from his archaic ways. I got to raise her on my own however I saw fit and he was gone too much to realize I was raising her tobe the kind of woman that would never fall for a man like him. I got to raise her to be the kind of woman I so wish I was.

This morning that entire arrangement got blown to shit.

I woke this morning at my own leisure, no alarm to pierce my dreams, and drank my morning tea from the window seat in my office. That’s my favorite place to be, after all, and Eliza wasn’t home. She’s staying the weekend with a friend and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that now.

Around 9 am, as I wandered my bookshelves looking for a new read to fill my afternoon, I heard the distinct whine of sirens through the neighborhood. Living where we do, that’s not a common occurrence so of course it drew my attention immediately. I raced to the front door and flung it open wide to see what all the commotion was about. When the door opened, a lonely white envelope fell at my feet. There was no stamp or address written across it. It simply said, Mrs. Arthur.

Forgetting all about whatever neighborhood disturbance had caused the sirens, I picked up the letter and carried it inside. It was my own little mystery to unravel and the thought delighted me to my core.

Inside the envelope was a handwritten letter. I don’t know why, but I felt instant melancholy as I sat in the kitchen to read it. Once the words took hold of me, the distant sadness became the greatest devastation of my life.

In a small neighborhood like ours, you come to know your neighbors well. Just around the corner, in a house just like mine, lives a family with a seemingly perfect life. A mother, a father, a teenage son, and a teenage daughter. I have spent afternoons at the club with the mother. I have sat across the table from the father at fundraising galas. I have watched the son play in their yard and the daughter travel the neighborhood selling Girl Scout cookies. I have watched them both grow up, but they are still children.

The letter in my hands was written by the daughter. Her name is Margaret and she goes by Maggie. She is poised and athletic. She is a member of her school’s honor society. She has plans for her life that go far beyond this community.

Or, rather, she had plans.

Today, she left this letter at my door to let me know that my husband had been grooming her for a sexual relationship for the last year, since she was fifteen. He had manipulated her and taken advantage of her youth in order to have her under him. He had taken no care to preserve her innocence. He had gotten her pregnant and she was full of shame.

She wrote me this letter to tell me that she had thought he loved her, that they had something that would stand the test of time. He had convinced her of this until the consequences became real. It was at that point that he made it clear she was just one of many and that he would never be a part of her life. He had given her no option but abortion or a shattered life as a single mother. She chose her own option. The sirens I heard while retrieving her letter had been for her.

As I sat in my kitchen reading her words, the paramedics were carrying her body out of her home as her mother wailed on her knees in the front yard. She had taken her own life as a result of the shame and guilt buried in her and tended to by the monster I married.

He, a man of influence and with a position of power in our community, took advantage of and raped a child.

There is no return from this moment. He cost that girl her life and her future. I cannot spend another second in any kind of arrangement with someone who could do that.

I’ll admit, I have drank away my day. Tears have poured down my face and into my vodka, as I have wandered aimlessly through my home for hours contemplating my next move. I think now, as the effects of the liquor have begun tofade, I will go for a drive and maybe visit Reba. She is good in a crisis and I think she can help me plan my escape with Eliza.

That is my only priority now. I want Eliza safely away from that man. I will take her into hiding if I have to, I just never want her to be exposed to someone as vile as her father ever again. By the time I pick her up on Sunday, I hope to have at least a place to go that isn’t here. If we have to live in a tiny apartment somewhere we’ve never been, it will be worth it to never have to be here again. I have lived my whole life with privilege and, it turns out, when faced with a situation as dire as this one, I don’t care about it in the slightest.

I don’t want things anymore.

I just want freedom and to save my daughter’s life from heartbreak at the hands of her own father.

Chapter forty-two

---