mom’s eyes.”
He stopped, swallowed, sighed. Bennett wanted to touch him, but he didn’t think Jordan needed that right now. Instead, he waited for him to go on with his horror story.
“She kept looking toward the closet where we kept the vacuum and the brooms and mops and such. I didn’t understand at first. Why did she want me to go to the broom closet? She always told me not to play in cupboards because I could get stuck in them. But she kept looking at it, then at me. Then I remembered that we had an emergency plan. If anything ever happened to her, I was to run and hide in the back corner of the broom closet, behind the vacuum cleaner. I don’t know how he didn’t notice her talking to me with her eyes.”
Bennett could almost see the frantic woman trying to get her son to hide like she’d taught him to do.
“I backed away, trying to keep my eyes on her. I saw when he ripped her dress. I saw him slap her in the face when she kept trying to buck him off of her. I heard her crying out then, when she couldn’t see me anymore. He was saying things to her but I couldn’t hear what they were. I made it into the cupboard. A long time passed, with my mom yelling and more thuds and then silence. I wanted to get out, to go find my mom, but she had said I was to wait until Dad got home before I came out of hiding.”
Bennett couldn’t stand it any longer. “So you waited for your dad? How long before he came home?”
“I don’t know. It felt like a long time to a seven-year-old, but it most likely wasn’t. We always had dinner before he got home because of my bedtime. He’d read me my bedtime story and tuck me in.”
A wistful smile stole over Jordan’s features before the shadows returned.
“Anyway, I stayed in that closet waiting for Dad. I could hear other noises, even though I couldn’t hear my mom. Now I realize what I was hearing was the guy ransacking the house, looking for things to steal. But Dad got home before he left. I knew because I heard him when he walked in and Mom didn’t answer when he called her.”
How had it felt for that poor man to find his wife on the kitchen floor? Was she dead when he got there? Why would the guy rape her and kill her? Why wouldn’t he? Jesus! This story just kept getting worse and worse. Bennett returned his attention to Jordan.
“I know when Dad got into the kitchen and saw Mom, and heard when the other guy and he got into a fight. My dad had a gun. I guess he must have unholstered it. Anyway, I heard a shot, then another, then footsteps running. I screamed then and burst out of the closet. I knew what gunshots meant, because my dad had talked to me about gun safety and told me why he had guns in the house.”
Bennett had to touch him then. He got off the couch and went to kneel in front of Jordan, taking the hands he had clasped tightly together into his own and squeezing. What Jordan must have felt when he saw his parents. Was the second shot for his mom? Or had the intruder just wanted to make sure his dad was dead? There was no way he was ever asking those questions. The very fact that Jordan was willingly reliving those hours was enough. He didn’t need to get into those details. Bennett didn’t need to know. No one else did…ever.
“The cops and the ambulance came. I guess our neighbors must have heard the gunshots. Someone took me away to a house…I don’t know where. They wouldn’t let me see my dad. I saw my mom before they herded me out. She was half naked and her head was bleeding.”
“Didn’t you have grandparents, uncles, aunts, anybody?”
Jordan shook his head. “My dad’s parents were already dead, as was my mom’s dad. Her mother was in a nursing home, so she couldn’t help. My dad had one brother who had been killed in a war. My mom was an only child, like me.”
“So that’s how you ended up in foster care.”
Jordan nodded again. “I got shifted around a lot those first three years, because I didn’t speak. At all. Then I figured out that that was