They say there is a time for everything, and the time for me to hang up on my mother this evening was 7:33 p.m.

It was my fault, this time. I shouldn’t have brought up the Kavanaugh hearings. We had spent over an hour arguing over the difference between The Truth and someone’s lived experience as truth, and no matter how many times I invoked the Wife of Bath’s “experience, though noon auctoritee” or tried to explain to her the fundamental concepts of factual relativity, model-dependent realism, or how lived experiences of trauma and privilege affect human understanding of “truth” and “fact,” she wouldn’t budge. It was when she started in on how since Christine Ford did not have any “facts” her story was a lie, and how poor Brett Kavanaugh had been dragged through the mud for nothing because she was used by the liberal media, that I finally snapped.

“Yeah? Well THE truth is that you are a judgy Fox News-swilling bitch, and MY truth is that I’m fucking sick of it! Call me when you decide to be a decent human being instead of a demonic force of evil. Also, your daughter-in-law says “hi,” not that you care!”

I hit the red phone button to hang up on the call with all of the force my index finger could muster. For the thousandth time in my adult life, I wished for one of those phones you see in old films and television shows, the sort that you could slam into its cradle with a satisfying, solid plastic thwunck! that reverberated with a follow-up metallic-sounding thwingthwingthwing that might have come from the ringer or from the electronic components inside, but definitely signaled the end of a call much more satisfactorily than a sore fingertip did. With an inarticulate growl of frustration, I flopped my head onto the back of the couch and closed my eyes, rubbing my temples.

A noise alerted me that I was no longer alone. Opening my eyes, I saw Desiree’s head pop into view at the doorway dividing the common space of our apartment from the bedroom. “You done now?”

I nodded. “And I don’t have to call her again until Christmas. At least there’s that.”

She looked at me sympathetically, then walked across the room and sat down next to me on the couch, drawing my head to her shoulder. I sat there for a moment, taking in her warm, solid strength. Then I let out a shuddering sigh.

“How can anyone be so—wrong?”

“I know.”

“I mean, she just has no understanding at all! None! And she doesn’t even care! She’s happy to be so ignorant! She rolls around in her ignorance like a pig in shit!”

“I know.”

“She’s all, ‘oh, I’m just a small-town Idaho girl, I don’t know anything, I never went to college, I think those liberal professors are trying to brainwash our youth, only Republicans are right about anything, women who come forward like that with sexual assault charges years after the fact are just liars trying to ruin those poor men’s lives.’” I let out another wordless howl of frustration.

“Hey.” Desiree pulled my head off of her shoulder and looked me in the eye. “Hey. Stop this. It won’t do any good, and you know it. She is who she is. You are who you are. You can’t change her, and she surely can’t change you. But you also can’t let her destroy you every time you talk on the phone. Look, she is a thousand miles away,  fifteen-hundred miles away. You don’t have to do this. Don’t beat yourself up for her.”

I sighed gratefully and sank my head back down on her shoulder. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” She stroked my hair gently with one beautiful hand, her other arm wrapped firmly around my shoulders, hand tucking in just where my breast met my armpit, fingers lightly resting on the gentle swell. I wrapped my arms around my middle and huddled into the curve of her side. We sat like that for a while. One of my favorite things about my wife is her ability to sit perfectly still, to be alone or together without a word, sometimes for hours, a silence more intimate than any conversation could ever be.

In the security of her embrace, with no need to speak, I let my eyes roam around the room, reminding myself of my own reality, my own truth, so far from the lonely and painful one  I’d fled from when I left home for college. The first thing Des had done when we moved into this apartment, shortly before our wedding almost three years prior, was head to Home Depot and buy a hundred- and fifty-dollars’ worth of paint. But the deposit! I protested. She just laughed: “Girl, we go and paint them right back again! But if we’re going to live here, we need it to be our space, not this generic white space. I am not a White Space kind of woman.”

I had never in my life painted the walls of my bedroom, much less an entire apartment. My parents wouldn’t have stood for it. They liked a clean, white wall with minimal decor, a holdover from my Navy father’s constantly being redeployed and thus, our constantly having to move, necessitating the prevention of wall damage that had to be dealt with in order not to lose rental deposits. Des, on the other hand, had never met a space she couldn’t or wouldn’t decorate. Her parents had lived in the same house for fifty years, she had carte blanche to decorate her room her way, and I loved looking at photos of her bedroom in all its stages: cotton-candy pink when she was five; a rich purple when she was eleven; sunny yellow, a strange pinkish-red with a black accent wall, and then teal, as she progressed through her teens. I was wildly jealous of her freedom to create a space that was entirely hers.

She dangled that carrot in front of me that afternoon at Home Depot: “Come on, Abbie, now’s your chance. Whatever wall color you want. I will live with whatever you pick, except white. Go for it!” Hesitantly, I pointed. She cackled with glee: “Yass, Girl! I knew you had it in you!”

The color I had selected for the common space of our apartment was a warm terra cotta that changed tone throughout the day with the pattern of the sun: bright, rich orange in the early morning, melting to a comfortable orangey-brown in the mid-afternoon, and then fading further into a gentle brown-orange in the evening. We paired it with a cream trim, and I thrilled at how these choices complemented the heart pine color of the wooden floor. The couch and loveseat were a rich, dark brown leather with blue and cream-colored accent pillows, and we had added a blue-and-cream area rug and blue curtains. Desiree’s friends’ art hung on the walls, and our photographs—of college, of trips, of our wedding, of just us—mingled companionably with my books and her signed toe shoes on the wall of built-in shelves to one side of the room. On the other side of the room, I looked through the window at the night sky—we were lucky to be on the unimpeded side of the apartment building, and five floors up. A bright harvest moon peeked in through the glass at us, observing, reminding: See? Everything actually is okay.

I broke the silence when I was ready. “Des?”

“Hmmn?”

“She’s never even met you.”

“Umm-hmmn.” I could feel her nod.

“She’s never seen this apartment.”

Desiree nodded again and pulled me closer into her warm.

“How is that loving your child? How does she pretend to herself she cares about me? She doesn’t know anything! She doesn’t know!”

I felt her shrug. “Abbie, you’re doing it again.”

I nodded, and felt the tears come. “I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize. I know it hurts.”

The tears slipped down my cheeks and I let them and so did she. It was our way. Desiree was a big believer that you felt your feelings, and you released them. Like a thousand other things she brought into my life, this post-phone call ritual enabled me to feel sane, to feel like I wasn’t broken, to feel like I did have a place in this world.

When this wave of feelings subsided a bit and the tears stopped leaking from my eyes, I took a deep breath. Desiree, feeling the muscles in my body preparing to move, released me on cue. I shifted my position, so I was looking at her, and pulled one of the pillows into my stomach, hugging it against the hollow ache that replaced her arms around me.

“I love you,” I said, my voice small in the giant space between us.

Her warm, sad eyes softened. “I know. I love you, too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

She let me look at her, with a dancer’s understanding of audience admiration, the need humans have to gaze at the beautiful thing in front of us, to take it all in. Even off-stage, even in the security of home, her poise was innate, her confidence breathtaking. I traced her face with my eyes—the long, angular cheeks, the high cheekbones, the wide forehead, down between the almond-shaped, golden-flecked amber eyes, the impertinent slope of her nose with its upturned tip, the freckle next to the wide and generous mouth with its slightly off-center smirk, always just a second away from flashing a toothy grin. My eyes raised back to meet hers. Only then, when she saw I was done, when she saw I was full, did she speak.

“Do you want to know The Truth?”

I swallowed and nodded.

“The Truth is, you are the thing I love most in this world, and My Truth is, I miss you and I want you back.”

I sobbed. “Oh, God. Oh, God.”

She reached for me again, pulling me in to her, my head on the pillow between us. Cradled across her lap, I gave voice to grief and pain and frustration, a torrential outpouring of the feelings that threatened to destroy everything, the feelings I couldn’t hold in and couldn’t let go of and couldn’t share. I lost myself in my senseless, wordless primal response. I don’t know how long it lasted—an hour? Two hours? More?

When I came to my senses again, I felt Desiree’s tears dripping onto my bowed head. I wiped my snotty nose onto the pillow, leaving a streak of slime, and sat up to look at her. Her tear-stained face was pale, lined with grief—for herself, for me. She wiped the remaining wetness from her cheeks and looked at me, waiting for me with her infinite patience and grace.

“I have to tell someone,” I said finally.

She nodded.

“But, I – but, I – but—”

“Sssh.” She held a finger to my lips, demanding I look at her. “You know what happened. I know what happened.”

“You weren’t there.”

“I don’t have to have been there. I saw you after. I know you. I believe you.”

“They won’t believe me.”

“We’ll make them.”

“But it’s been too long.”

“No.”

“They’ll say I’m just trying to ruin his life. Or that it couldn’t happen because I’m a lesbian.”

“No.”

“They’ll ask me why I didn’t report it right away.”

“And you’ll tell them why. You’ll tell them it’s because you were afraid no one would believe you, because you’re afraid everyone will judge you the way your mother judges you, because this world, this society, is so damned unfair to us. Because you had just found the life you wanted and you were terrified it would be taken away from you.”

The tears came dangerously close to the surface again. “It was.”

She shook her head. “No.”

I looked to the window, gazing past the glass pane at the world and considering all of the pains and hopes and desires it contained. Desiree stared at the bookshelf that held our shared life in suspension. I joined her eventually, looking over the photos, the books, the toe shoes. Des had a tradition of displaying the final pair of shoes she wore on stage from each ballet she was in. There were five new pairs since the last phone call to my mother, the last time I was here, the last time my need for Desiree’s supporting presence outweighed my inability to forgive myself for being hurt and hurting in return. Five productions; five, six-week preparations and eighteen performances, five finales. Almost another year. I let my eyes linger on the books, the ones I hadn’t taken with me, the place-markers for my return, when I was ready to return.

Desiree noted the direction of my gaze. “What are you teaching next semester?”

“Intro to Gender Studies. Advanced Research Methods. An independent study.”

“And then?”

“A sabbatical. I’ll be working on my book.”

She unfolded her long, slender body from the couch and walked over to the window, looking out at the moon. Impulsively, I stood to join her, wrapping my arms around her, drawn to her in the indescribable way I had always been drawn to her. She reached up and cupped my face with one hand, the other curling over my arms.

“Can you stay, this time?” She asked finally.

I shook my head, tears welling in my eyes again. “No. not yet.”

After a beat, I felt the tension in her body as she took a deep breath. “Will you ever?”

She wasn’t asking me if I would ever stay. She was asking me if I would ever tell. If I would ever let go of the things that stood between us. I wanted to say “yes.” I wanted to promise her that I’d go to the police tomorrow to file a report, that I’d call my mother and tell her the truth, that I’d been raped, by that neighbor’s boy, that nice, wealthy Christian conservative boy she hoped I’d end up with, that he’d done it after I had married my wife, after I had moved away, after I had thought I’d put that world and its people behind me, that the entire time, he’d gloated: “Think you’re a lesbian? You don’t seem so gay to me right now! Admit it, you want this! You want dick!” That he’d laughed, and actually spit on me when he was done, and tucked his shirt back into his pants with so much smug satisfaction I wanted to kill him then and there, and gone downstairs to join the Christmas party-in-progress. That I had dragged myself into the bathroom, sore and with his sperm leaking down the insides of my legs, and washed up as best I could, and gotten into my car and driven away without speaking to anyone—to anyone—because what could I—the rebel, the liberal, the lesbian—say, that any of them would believe? That I’d driven the two days back to this apartment with the stink of him still on me, and stumbled in, terrifying Des, who wasn’t expecting me home for another three days. That she had begged me to go to the hospital, to call the police, but I had refused, believing I had already waited too long, that no one would believe me, that I had fucked everything up, like I always did, like my mother expected of me. That everything since then had been wrong—except for her.

“We only had a year, here.” I said finally. “Just one year.”

“We have as many years here as you want. I’m not going anywhere. You can come back, you can stay, I’m here for you, this is here for you.”

“Not until I tell.”

“You will. When you can.”

I closed my eyes, willing the violent memories away, willing myself back into the present, to my lived experience, to the reality of this woman I love and who loves me so wisely and so well. Standing there in the light of the moon, in the space we carved out for us, in the truth we made that was more true than anything in my old life, I thought again, for the hundredth time, the thousandth time, maybe I can tell.

Melissa Ridley Elmes is the author of Arthurian Things: A Collection of Poems (Dark Myth Publishing, 2020) and her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Spillwords, The World of Myth Magazine, The Blotter, Ink Quarterly and the Sweetbay Review, as well as in several anthologies. She holds a PhD in English and an MFA in Writing and is an Assistant Professor of English at Lindenwood University.