Caged Eyes by Lynn K. Hall

Author:Lynn K. Hall [Hall, Lynn K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-8934-7
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2017-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

PART III

Dark Ages

CHAPTER 12

Half the women in the military have been sexually assaulted in their pasts, most often as children, so if you add that to the one-third who are sexually attacked in the service, a high percentage will be experiencing abuse for the second, third, or umpteenth time.

—Helen Benedict, The Lonely Soldier:

The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq

At the end of Christmas leave, I labored four flights of stairs to my dorm room. I had been sick with meningitis for more than two weeks, and my headache persisted in squeezing my skull. My body was shaky, and I clung to the metal railings.

Dr. Creech and the neurologist had released me from the ICU after five days. Roger and Mom took turns staying with me, their presence suffocating, the small hospital room growing stagnant with body odor. After each rotation with Roger sitting in the recliner by my bed, I wished he would disappear, only to be more disturbed when my mother took his place. By the time I recovered enough to take a brief shower, I insisted to Dr. Creech that I preferred to recuperate at home on Christmas leave, and they released me. At least there I could shut my bedroom door. When Roger drove Mom and me back to Missouri, he stopped for the night in a tiny Kansas town. The three of us shared the hotel room where Roger slept on the floor, though that didn’t prevent his hands from finding my body in the middle of the night. I turned on the light to stop him, sure he wouldn’t take a risk with my mother in the room. Roger did stop, but in the morning, my mother scolded me for ruining her sleep without asking why I had switched on the lamp. They were the same problems, only with different details. Except this time, I wasn’t surprised. I even understood why Angry Mom called me a selfish bitch for wanting to fly back to Colorado at the end of leave rather than accept Roger’s invitation to drive me. Though she didn’t say it, I understood she felt afraid to drop me off at an airport, by myself, while I remained so ill, and she also felt she couldn’t drive me on her own. She would rather entrust me with this man, despite my protests, than deal with her own feelings of fear and powerlessness.

Standing at the top of the stairs on my first day back, I turned to look out the floor-to-ceiling window, even though I was supposed to cage my eyes straight ahead. Four stories below, Roger waved a childish wave, flapping his fingers against his palm. Roger resembled my mother. He would never put my needs first, only his agenda. And his agenda, the entire year I had known him, was to have sex with me. It was the reason he recognized that Thomas was molesting me when not a single other person did. It was the reason he wrote card after card to me when I was in Basic Cadet Training.

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