In the Dark

By Lee and Sophia

Another morning waking up from a dead sleep to what seems
to be turning into a daily ritual: vomiting into the wastebasket I have learned to keep at my bedside. Waking up from the horrible dreams I cant seem to control. Nightmares of the face of the man I was married to for twenty-seven years, never aware of the total evilness inside of the person I trusted not only as a husband but also as a father to our six children. Unable to control during sleep, the pictures
brought to mind match the stories recently told and confessed. This cant be happening to me or my family!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465365910

Lee

Sophia was born in a small town in upstate New York. The only girl in a large Italian family, she was protected, in many ways, from the things that other children may have learned or heard of as they were growing up. She attended a Christian school for most of her life and dreamt of becoming a nurse as her grandmother had been. This dream eventually came to fruition many years later. Blessed with children and grandchildren, she now lives happily in Florida with her beloved husband. Lee also lives in Florida with her husband and two children, where they run their own family business.

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In The Dark

Sophia And Lee

Copyright © 2011 by Sophia And Lee.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011917159

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4653-6590-3

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4653-6589-7

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4653-6591-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Foreword

Another morning waking up from a dead sleep to what seems to be turning into a daily ritual: vomiting into the wastebasket I have learned to keep at my bedside. Waking up from the horrible dreams I can’t seem to control. Nightmares with the face of the man I was married to for twenty-seven years, never aware of the total evilness inside of the person I trusted not only as a husband but also as a father to our six children. Unable to control during sleep, the pictures brought to the mind match the stories recently told and confessed. This can’t be happening to my family or me. These stories are only seen on TV shows like Sally Jessy Raphael or Jerry Springer. Our family life has been changed forever. Two parents, six children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and other unknown children have been affected, like an evil virus radiating across the span of many miles and lives. Secrets kept that have compounded and condoned the actions have adversely affected so many innocent and naive people. This is a story that I am compelled to tell in one way, hoping to rid myself of the dark memories and shadows that lurk in keeping the secret, and in another way to hope that, in the telling, others will be able to escape from this same evil and realize that it can only continue by keeping the secret and protecting the ones who use innocence to control and abuse us.

Chapter 1

My stepdaughter Annie and her family were visiting us in early July. Annie was a sweet, gentle, and softhearted child. As she grew into a teenager, she had chosen a path that was heartbreaking to a parent and would bring to herself some really tough times in her relationships with men. As we usually raise our children in the same manner we ourselves were raised, I had attempted to teach our children morals and values that follow the Ten Commandments as well as a sense of holding themselves responsible for their actions, including the importance of self-respect and honesty and the ability to expect these things from others in return. Annie and I argued a lot during her late teens over what I considered were promiscuous behaviors. I did not seem to be getting any help in these areas from her father, which I really could not understand at the time. He was always busy with his work and gone a lot. When he was home, it was as if he condoned these behaviors, so the disagreements just became a vicious circle of discontent in the family. In any case, Annie was grown now with two children of her own and seemed happy in her new marriage.

She and I had been grocery shopping in town; we had just gotten back into the car and were discussing some of these past feelings and actions. I apologized for any of the times that I may have made her feel as if I did not love or care about her, but at the same time, I asked her what she would do if her daughter was choosing the same path she had chosen and if she would not fight with everything she had to attempt to protect her from herself or others that may harm her. I also mentioned the fact that I felt that I had not received a lot of help in these areas from her father and that I always seemed to be the one that had to be the disciplinarian. All of a sudden, Annie started crying and yelling hysterically, saying, Do you know what that son of a bitch did? He had sexual relations and molested Mary (my other stepdaughter) for years! I sat in the car in sudden disbelief and shock. As Annie continued to tell me things that Mary—now grown with a family of her own—had told her, I knew in the pit of my churning stomach that all this was true. Slowly flashes of the past, with instances of actions that I just could not understand, became clear to me. I knew without a shadow of doubt that this had really happened and my life would never be the same again. I seemed to be in a time warp, and I was consoling Annie while, at the same time, trying to let my brain focus on what I should do now. She had promised Mary never to let me know about the molestation, but Annie just couldn’t hold that kind of information in. On top of this, she was afraid of her father’s reaction if he found out that she had told me. Apparently, he was unaware that Mary had shared this information with her sister. The problem was that this information was given to me on July 1, and Annie and her family were due to stay until about midnight of July 3. This meant that in order to protect her fear of her father, I would have to live with this man for the next three days as if I knew nothing. I did not know if this would be possible for me to do, but with her begging me to not do anything until she had left, I promised her that I would try to behave as if I knew nothing of what had happened to her sister.

I have to say that the next three days were probably the most difficult days to live through in my life. After attempting to compose ourselves to some kind of degree, we headed toward home, such as it was. Looking back, I really don’t remember a lot of the next three days. For the most part, I couldn’t focus on anything except making it through until Annie left with her family. What should I do? How would I handle this? If I thought about it too much, bile would rise in my throat and I would have to head to the bathroom. I couldn’t eat or sleep well. I made excuses about sleeping on the couch so that I would not have to sleep in the same bed with my husband of twenty-seven years. The grandchildren were sleeping on the sofas, and I told my husband that I did not want them to wake up and be frightened in a new environment or fall off the sofa and not have an adult in the room with them.

I was working as a licensed practical nurse in a local hospital and, unfortunately, had the next two days off. I found it almost impossible to look at my husband without having immense waves of nausea overwhelm me. Looking back, I really don’t know how I managed to live in the same house with this man without bursting out in anger and disbelief at what I had learned. My mind was constantly working and thinking about what I was going to do and how I would handle this when Annie left with her family. My youngest son was nineteen and was still living with me and my husband. He had always had a tumultuous and strained relationship with his father as my husband was very controlling and demanding over the simplest of things. They argued a lot, and although I knew that Alan loved his father, I was really afraid of my son’s reaction to his dad when he learned of what his dad had done. In addition, my daughter Lee and my other son Bryan lived fairly close, and we had very often kept their young children overnight and for days at a time; and I began to wonder if my husband had done anything to these precious little beings while in our or his care. The following months were bad, but I have to say that these first few days of having to hide my feelings and emotions to protect Annie with her fears of violent reaction from her father were probably the worse three days of my forty-nine years of life!

I learned later on from Annie that, at one point over these three days, Vincent had asked her if she had told me anything that he should know about as I was acting kind of funny. She told him that she didn’t know what he meant and that she had not said anything that would upset me. Annie was to leave at midnight on July 3 so that her two children could sleep on the drive back to Virginia. I worked at the hospital on the late shift from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. When I went to work, I hugged and kissed her good-bye and knew that our lives were never going to be the same again.

Chapter 2

I married my first husband when I was eighteen years old. I had always wanted to be a nurse someday and took the courses in high school that would lead to a nursing career. Then I met Brody, fell in love as many young girls do, and chose marriage and a family over a career. My parents were not exactly happy with this decision as they had hoped that I would go to college and obtain my dream of becoming a nurse as my grandmother had. In any case, I was married the fall of the year that I graduated from high school, and fifteen months later, Brody and I had a new baby girl we named Lee. I was in love with my new baby, and luckily, she was the perfect first baby anyone could ask for. Brody worked for an insurance company, and I have to say, in his defense, that there must have been an awful lot of pressure on this young twenty-two-year-old man to provide for this young family. To top it off, I found myself pregnant again three months after our first was born. Bryan was born a month early, which put my two young infants at eleven months apart. Now we had two little babies to care for, and times were hard for us financially. I mean we were making it okay, but there was not enough money or time for a young married couple to do a lot of extra activities. This did not bother me too much as family life was the most important thing to me at the time. Obviously, it was not the most important thing in or on Brody’s mind!

Bryan was three months old when Brody told me that he wasn’t happy and just did not want to be married anymore. He told me that he would take care of the children financially, but he wanted to move out and get a divorce. I was absolutely devastated! I loved him so much, and I never thought of divorce. No one in my family had ever been divorced except for my older brother, and it was just not something that was even considered a possibility for me. Brody had been raised Catholic; I had been raised Lutheran. We were married in the Lutheran church that I grew up in as Brody said he was not a strict Catholic and it didn’t matter to him. We talked to a priest at one time prior to marrying as his family would have liked to have the blessing of the Catholic Church. We were told that I would have to sign a paper promising to raise any children we had together as Catholics. I could not promise to do this as I knew that most of the religious upbringing of children generally fell on the mother in a family. It did not seem to be a great issue at the time, so we were married in the Lutheran church without the blessing of the Catholic faith. As it turned out, Brody said that in all actuality, in the eyes of his Catholic faith, we were not really married. I remember the priest mentioning that Brody may someday feel this way, and whether he was using this statement as a way to rationalize to himself his desire to leave the children and me, I will probably never know.

I lived by myself in the house that we had bought from my uncle, which had once belonged to my Italian grandfather. I obtained a job at a local department store and hired my cousin to babysit for my children. I can remember, during this time, begging Brody on numerous occasions to come back home. My despair was almost inconsolable, but I was busy taking care of Lee and Bryan and working as much as I could. I can remember one night, when I came home from work, Brody called me to say that he had left some papers on the back porch for me to fill out. When I asked him what they were, he told me that I could read them and that they were self-explanatory. I told him that I wanted him to tell me what they were for, and he said that he had gone to check on obtaining public or state financial assistance for me and the children, but that the welfare people told him that I was considered the head of the household and that I would have to be the one to apply for assistance. I was outraged at this attempt to what I considered Brody trying to dump me and the children off on the state, and I told him that as long as I had two arms and two legs, I would work to provide for myself and the children and that I expected him to also be responsible for them. I don’t think he expected the response that he received, and he did not push this issue again. He left us just before Easter, and our divorce was final in September. By then, my parents had talked me into moving back in with them to help with the children. During this time, all I did was work and care for my children. I found out shortly after Brody left that he was dating a young girl that worked in the insurance office and had been for a long time. We