After Annie

Ali stood still and watched as Jenny’s father, backlit, wearing just boxer shorts, came in and closed the door. She could barely make out his outline, dark in the dark room, and for some reason he seemed enormous, more like a shape or a shadow than a man, and then as he came closer, into a divot of moonlight knifing through the bottom panes of the French doors, she saw only his bare feet, and they seemed monstrous, misshapen. […]

She ran up the driveway wishing she had her inhaler, and retraced her steps, running and thinking to herself, I have nowhere to go, where can I go? and thinking when she pushed through the line of trees to her backyard that she had never longed for her mother more. “What happened, what was it?” her mother would say, holding her close so she could feel her mother’s beating hear through her scrubs, and, “I don’t know,” Ali would say, pleading, “Mommy, tell me, please, I need to know, tell me what it was.”

All the adults acted like if you’d been told about something you understood what it was, what it was like. It was like someone saying if you described what mustard was you’d know how it would taste on your hot dog. See something, say something. Good touch, bad touch. But no one told you what to do if you weren’t sure what you’d seen, whether you’d seen the good touch, the kind that her father did when he was tucking her in at night, or the other kind, the kind that the adults all pretended they were telling you about without really telling you what it consisted of.