Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [148]
It all started on the night of October 12, 2005—Lamont’s twenty-sixth birthday. I wanted to do something extra special for him, and he was out of town on a job, which gave me plenty of time to set up for the big birthday bash I’d been planning. I’d invited a bunch of his friends, and we intended to surprise him when he came home that evening. T.R. had donated the use of his enormous living room and cleared an area to serve as a giant dance floor. We covered the furnishings and the floors in plastic, and I painstakingly decorated the space with balloons, streamers, and tons of lights.
I was so excited when Lamont finally arrived and we all shouted, “Surprise!” But not long into the party, one of the guests found me chatting with some girls.
“There’s a guy outside who wants to see you,” she told me.
Alarmed, I asked, “Oh yeah, who is it?”
“He says his name is Allen.”
I could feel the blood rushing from my face, and I must have looked awful because within seconds Lamont was by my side.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Allen’s here,” I stammered.
That’s when Lamont took over the situation. “I’ll take care of this.”
Over recent weeks, Lamont and I had become aware that Allen had taken it upon himself to play detective. He had started to trail me and had also put his brothers on shifts to follow me around. By this point, I no longer felt that I needed to hide what I was doing. I was not at all ashamed of the choice I’d made. Part of me wanted to make a clear statement to Allen that I was no longer under his control, but I also didn’t want to make it public that I had defied him as a wife and cut myself off from my mothers and sisters.
Lamont rounded up of a bunch of his friends to go outside and confront Allen. For months Lamont had been holding in his aggression toward Allen at my request for secrecy but finally Allen had gone too far.
“How many are they?” I heard Lamont asking one of the people who’d seen Allen in the driveway.
“Four guys,” he was told.
I stayed inside as Lamont and his posse made their way to the driveway. Allen sat behind the steering wheel, his window barely cracked, when Lamont and his eleven friends approached the vehicle.
“What can I do for you?” Lamont asked.
“I’m here to get my wife,” Allen replied meekly.
“Your wife,” Lamont repeated coolly, a surge of anger rising in him as he confronted the man who’d been abusing me since I was fourteen. “Are you talking about the one that you masturbated in front of? The wife you raped and beat up? You mean that wife?”
Allen shrunk down in the driver’s seat. Nobody, including Allen’s friends in the car, had been aware of what he had been doing to me all this time. But even with this public humiliation, Allen did not back down. He and Lamont stared at each other without saying a word. “Well, I want to at least get my car,” Allen finally uttered.
“She’ll bring that to you at a later date,” Lamont said crisply. “Now you put your truck in gear and you leave.”
I could hear the crunch of tires backing up over the tiny pebbles that dotted T.R.’s driveway. It was a relief to see Lamont walk through the door, but I knew that the problem was far from over.
When my mom contacted me that November. I sensed that something was wrong the moment I answered the phone.
“Lesie, they’ve found a picture of you and another man,” she said, breathless. “William wants to talk to you about it.”
There was a long pause and I held off on saying anything. Allen had returned to the trailer that night after confronting Lamont and gone through all of my belongings. Until that night, I’d been keeping my stuff locked up