Chapter 2: Interlude Of A Promise

HH

She was awakened by the sound of the phone ringing. Her bleary eyes focused on the clock on her night stand. It was past two o'clock in the morning. Who could be calling at this hour? Aileen thought she knew. She picked up the phone and answered, "Hello?"

"Aileen, it's me." Why did I have to give him my phone number? she thought.

"Ben, what do you want?"

"I want to explain..."

"Are you really married?"

"Yes."

"Are you really forty-three?"

"Yes."

"Then what is there to explain? You lied to me."

"I'm sorry, I never meant to hurt you, I was going to tell you the truth, I never meant for you to find out this way, I'm so sorry. My wife caught me while I was talking to you and saw what we were writing..." Aileen thought she was going to be sick again, a total stranger had been reading her most intimate thoughts. But wasn't Ben a stranger too? He might as well have been for all she thought she knew him. Anger was burning in her now.

"When were you going to tell me? After I had told you every deepest darkest secret I have and you were still pretending to be twenty-two years old and single?"

"I was going to tell you, I swear I was!

"Why did you lie to me, Ben? I was totally honest with you."

"We had something special, you and me, I was afraid to lose you. I thought I would if you knew the truth. Things aren't working out well between me and my wife... I'm going to leave her."

"Why couldn't you have been upfront from the beginning?"

"I'm sorry, sometimes I like to pretend I'm a young guy online, then we met and things were going so well and I just thought it would be better for you to accept the fantasy if you thought I was younger..."

"You preyed on me from the start, didn't you? You had it in you're head to find some lonely old woman, befriend her, then slowly get her involved with your sick fantasies! You played me for a fool!"

"Aileen, you enjoyed it too..."

"Your wife wasn't into that kind of stuff; was she? Or maybe you just can't satisfy a woman in real life? So you found me, and I trusted you, you bastard! You know how hard it was for me to do that! I trusted you and you betrayed me!"

"Now wait a god-damned fucking minute! I have to take this shit from my wife, but I'm not going to take it from both..."

"Fuck you, Ben!" Aileen hung up on him. Her eyes, sore from her previous crying, began to burn as tears started to swell in them anew. There was a knock on her bedroom door.

"Mom, are you okay?" Colin's voice came from the other side of the door. Aileen swallowed a couple times to steady her voice before answering him.

"Yes, Sweetie, I'm fine." She called to him. "Did you just get in?"

"Yeah, about twenty minutes ago. I was just having a bowl of cereal before bed when the phone rang. Who was calling at two in the morning?"

"Just a wrong number,"

"You sure you are okay Mom? I thought I heard you yelling at someone?"

"It was an obscene caller, don't worry about it Honey, I took care of it."

"Maybe we should report him Mom?"

"Don't worry. He's not going to bother us again. Go to sleep Dear." Aileen almost managed not to sound choked up when she said that, and it was true, Ben would not be bothering her ever again!

"Okay Ma, good night then," Colin said through the door.

"Good night Honey."

Aileen thought Colin had left, but then she heard him say, "Mom?"

"Yes, Dear?"

"I love you."

Oh thank God for you, my precious, darling boy! Aileen thought to herself as tears coursed down her face. She didn't realize how desperately she needed to hear those words until this moment.

Once again she swallowed to gain some control of her voice, then answered him, "I love you too sweet baby."

"Night Ma,"

"Night Honey." Once she was sure Colin had actually gone to bed this time, Aileen flung herself back down on the bed. Oh, Colin, I pray you never find out what a fool I was! She thought to herself. She didn't know if she would be able to stand it if her son knew she had gotten into another bad relationship. What was wrong with her that she kept falling in love with men who hurt her? She knew there were good men in the world, Colin was proof of that. Look at tonight, if there was any night where he could possibly think he had an excuse to get into some trouble, it was tonight, but here he was home safe and sound, just like he promised he would be. She could always trust him. Aileen had no delusions either that it was due to her parenting that made Colin that way. She tried her best to raise her child right but she knew she made mistakes, but still Colin had grown naturally into the kind of man that gave her faith in the decency of the human race.

Why couldn't she find a man like Colin, someone who was kind, gentle, and trustworthy? She was just beginning to come to a place where she thought she could trust a man in her life again, her old wounds felt like they had finally healed, but Ben had deceived her and ripped them open again. Now it hurt worse than ever and she didn't think she could ever trust another man again. Aileen wept silently as memories of her past resurfaced from the depths of her mind, her new pain clearing a pathway for her old pain to return.

It began with her parents. Her father beat her severely when she was growing up; sometimes for no reason she could understand at all. Her mother never confronted her father about it, even when her father was in the worst of his rages she would still stand by and do nothing to stop him. Sometimes it felt as if her mother's noninterference hurt more than her father's beatings. She grew up in constant fear that she would be assaulted at anytime, and in emotional turmoil that maybe somehow she deserved it. Why else would she be beat like that, if it wasn't for doing something wrong? Her father beat her and her mom let him because they loved her; that had to be it. It scared her that sometimes she didn't even know what it was she had done wrong to deserve a beating, she had thought if she couldn't tell right for wrong, she must indeed be a bad person.

Her brother, Patrick, wasn't much better when they were growing up. He received his fair share of beatings too. You would think that having a common fear would have made them closer, but Patrick hadn't been there for her. He never paid her much notice except when he wanted to tease her, and when he did that it wasn't a playful teasing, it was cruel and relentless. She recalled one incident when her brother found her secret stash of romance magazines. Patrick gleefully reported to their father that she had "dirty magazines" in her room. They weren't really even dirty magazines; they just had stories in them about people falling in love. But that didn't stop her father from giving her one of the worst beatings of her life and then throwing out the magazines afterward.

He had taken his belt and whipped her repeatedly using the buckle. She was stung and cut and battered, she thought the pain would never end. Aileen cried and screamed until her voice was ragged and her tear ducts were depleted and still the lashes came. She was sore for weeks after that. She had welts and black and blue marks all down her backside and whenever someone made a sudden move, especially her father, she flinched, thinking another blow was about to come.

Whenever Patrick saw her flinch, he snickered. He actually thought what had happened to her was funny. Adding further insult to injury, she had known for a while that her brother had magazines like Playboy and Penthouse hidden in his room, but she had never told on him and still wouldn't. What good would it have done if she told on Patrick? It would have just made him angry and want to get back at her for getting him in trouble, which would just result in her being hurt again. For Aileen, life was about surviving, she couldn't afford revenge.

By the time she was seventeen Patrick had left home and gotten married. Even if they were never that close as brother and sister, at least when Patrick was living at home he would sometimes draw some of their father's ire, but when it became just Aileen all his attention focused on her. It was a bad situation that kept on deteriorating and she had had enough of it. She had to get out of there. That was when she met Fred. He was tall, strong, and good looking and she was flattered that he was interested in her. They began going out. He was so powerful he even intimidated her father, which completely awed Aileen. She felt she had found a protector and that was part of the reason she fell in love with him. In Fred she had thought she found her salvation.

Fred asked her to marry him and the day after she turned eighteen they were wed. Eight months later, Colin Martin was born. Fred had taken her away from her parents and finally she felt she had freedom, but then she soon realized she had only traded one abusive captor for another.

Fred liked to drink and when he got drunk he turned mean. The first time he struck her they had only been married a few weeks. They were having an argument and she said something flippant and he backhanded her across the face so hard he cut her lip and made it bleed. Then he apologized profusely and promised never to do it again and she forgave him. That began a familiar pattern for them, he would hit her and then apologize and she would always forgive him. He always blamed it on the drinking and always promised to quit and never hurt her again, but he never kept his promises and his beatings steadily grew worse and worse.

Life with Fred would have been just as miserable as it had been with her parents if it wasn't for one thing: Colin. Now she had her son, and he was the sole reason she had any happiness in life. He was so sweet and gentle hearted, it made her own heart swell with pride and love every time she looked at him. He was her reason for living.

Colin was also part of the reason she stayed with Fred. She thought her boy needed his father. The other part of the reason she stayed with him was that she had accepted that this was just what love was. After all, her father had beaten her pretty bad and her mother had let him. Weren't parents supposed to love their kids? Fred said he loved her and he beat her as well. Aileen came to understand that the ones who loved you would hurt you sometimes. She took the abuse during those years because she thought she didn't deserve any better.

The thing that triggered Aileen to leave Fred was when he started his abuse on Colin. There had been times when Fred hit Colin before, but Aileen had convinced herself that he was only being a strong disciplinarian. Then the day came when he took things way too far.

It was when Colin was eight years old. One day he was running around the house playing with a plastic water gun. He had squirted Aileen a few times and she reprimanded him for it but she could never get truly mad with Colin, he was just caught up in his play and Aileen had to admit it always gave her joy to see Colin in a happy mood, so she hadn't been too stern with him. That had been a mistake.

Colin eventually found his father in the den watching a baseball game. Fred was drunk and his team was losing. Aileen arrived in the den just in time to see what Colin was about to do, but too late to stop him. In a playful manner Colin squirted his dad with the water gun. Fred was totally stunned for a moment when he felt the cool jet of water hit him. When he saw Colin with the water gun pointed at him, an impish grin on his face, Fred completely lost his temper. He shot out of his chair and charged toward his son. Colin, seeing the rage in his father's face, quickly switched from an expression of amusement to one of pure terror. Aileen understood what the look in her husband's eyes meant and she screamed at him to take a moment to calm down, that she would punish the boy, but Fred had lost control of his senses and he was too focused on Colin to even register that she was saying anything.

Aileen stepped in front of Colin but Fred just shoved her aside hard like she was nothing, so hard she fell to the floor. She lifted her head from the floor to get her son back into view and she saw that he had backed up all the way against the far wall. He was futilely looking for a way to escape, but he had no where to run. Colin still had the water gun in his hand as his dad closed in on him, he brought the gun up and pointed it at his dad and resumed shooting him with water. It didn't look like Colin even knew what he was doing at that point, like it was some reflex making him do it. The water pistol was all he had to defend himself with and his finger locked on the trigger out of instinct not of his own volition. A continuous stream of water struck his father until the gun emptied of ammunition. All he had done was add more fuel to his father's rage.

Fred got to Colin, stripped the toy gun from his hand, and used it to hit Colin over the head. Fred struck his son hard and repeatedly. Colin tried to apologize through his screaming and crying, but Fred was furious and paid it no heed. Aileen rushed from the floor to once again try to rescue her child. She tried to pull Fred away from Colin but Fred turned and struck her forcefully right in the jaw with a closed fist. Aileen fell back to the floor and Fred continued laying massive wallops on Colin.