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says quietly. “When you were a child, you were sexually abused by a man,
no?”
    Fuck.

Chapter 6.
    “Friendship is
born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought
I was the only one.’
    — C.S. Lewis
    ~~~
    I now know what it
means when people talk about pulling the rug out from under you. If I wasn’t
sitting down, I doubt my legs would hold me.
    Dammit.
    My face is
burning, yet I feel both hot and cold. It’s as if I’m sick and I have a fever.
André asks me that question so casually, as if inquiring what I’d like to eat
for lunch.
    A fear I’ve known
since I was a child slams into me, choking me into silence. Despite an outside
temperature in the 90’s, my body beads in an icy, anxious sweat.
    Shit, shit,
shit, shit!
    My stomach
twists. I feel ill. Desperately, I try to comfort myself with the thought that
it was going to come out anyway. I’d planned to tell him everything eventually,
so what the hell.
    Unluckily for me,
I’d rather eat a plate full of barbed wire than talk about this hideously
painful subject.
    André waits
patiently for me to speak.
    I try to deal
with all of the images and emotions that well up from deep inside, covering me
over like a fast rising tide. I feel as if I’m drowning in childhood memories—a
profoundly shameful past I’ve tried to conceal and forget.
    At least he
guessed. I didn’t have to go through the agony of telling him. I don’t know how
I would've ever broached this conversation otherwise. I mean, how the hell
would anyone come out with such a filthy secret?
    “How did you
know?” I eventually manage to say, in an unsteady whisper.
    He shrugs and his
expression is matter of fact. “You feel perhaps you are the only one who has
experienced this. I am sorry to inform you, this problem is most common, n'est-ce
pas? You were shown a man’s penis as a child—you were made to look
oh, many, many times. These early memories are still very much with you, I
think.”
    “Yes.”
    Moments from my
past clamor for attention. So often, complete strangers would tell me, “Your
father is a great man.”
    What could I say
to them? No, he’s not?
    I wanted him to
be, but every time someone praised my father, I had to subdue a tsunami wave of
shame and guilt. I loved him and I hated him. He was very good to me. He was
very bad to me.
    It’s no wonder
I’m all mixed up to hell and gone.
    We sit
together—me tense and rigid, while André’s perfectly relaxed. How can he bring
up a subject like this and then sit there with such equanimity?
    Calm and
supportive, André waits patiently for me to explain. It’s strange, but somehow,
once I start telling him a little, it’s easier to talk about it.
    I go into detail
about how much I idolized my father, how he taught me to shoot and celebrated
my skill and achievements. I explain my dad’s easy manner of winning friends,
his natural charisma and good looks—and how people looked up to him and admired
him.
    I was my father’s favorite child. Everyone in our family knew it. Now, when I look back to
the “special” place I held, I feel sick.
    When I came into
my teens and began to understand that my dad had been abusing me, my world fell
apart. I couldn’t deal with it. I made excuses for him and blamed myself. I
loved my dad and I wanted to believe the myth of his perfection.
    André shakes his
head. “If your father was physically grotesque, an ugly man, who beat you,
sexually abused you and was at all times cruel—you would have had an easier
childhood, I think.”
    “What? Why?”
    “On pardonne tant que l’on aime,” he tells me. “It means, ‘we
pardon to the extent that we love.’ François de La Rochefoucauld, a very wise
man, said it centuries ago.”
    I consider the quote and swallow with a very dry throat. Throughout my
childhood, I wanted to please my dad and I hated his disapproval. As a child,
it’s natural to assume it’s you that screwed up. He was always so