Monsters in the House

Lynne was lying on her bed doodling in a notebook when Susan walked in. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing your homework?”
“Yes, but I don’t understand the math problems.” Lynne quickly answered.
“Do you want me to help you?”
“Umm, okay. I have to give them to the teacher in the morning.” She sounded unhappy.
“Well then you better let me look at them.”
“Okay. Let me get them. Here.” She handed Susan the papers.
Susan looked at the pages. She is three years older than her eleven year old sister. “I’ve done these before. I still get math problems like these. I can show you how to do them.”
“I can’t do them. Can’t you just give me the answers?” her sister pleaded.
“How about I tell you the answers and you write them down? I’ll get ready for bed and come back. We have about an hour before we have to turn the lights out.”
“Okay, thank you.”
Susan went to her room and came back to her sister’s to spend the night in the pull out trundle bed. She’d been sleeping in that bed a lot lately. In the morning Susan went to her own room and got ready for school.
“How come you slept in your sister’s room on a school night?” Her mother asked her when she went to the kitchen for breakfast.
One recent night they giggled and laughed until well after midnight and were late for school. After that their mother told them they could only sleep in each other’s room on the weekends or when they didn’t have school the next day.
“She needed help with her homework. When we were done we went to sleep. We weren’t up late.”
“Alright, just make sure that you aren’t.” Her mother turned back to her cooking.
“We turned the lights out at nine.”
Susan didn’t want her mother to stop her from sleeping in her sister’s room. She felt safe when she slept there.
Lynne’s friend, Trina, came home with her on the school bus to visit and spend the night on Friday. Trina and Lynne liked to flirt with the boys that lived across the street. The boys were a couple years older and went to a different school. The girls would go to bed and talk about the boys until her mom had to yell at them to go to sleep.
Susan and her friend Mary Lou had horses that they kept in a pasture behind their houses. Susan liked to do stuff with her horse on the weekends and after school. Susan used to spend the night at Mary Lou’s but she was one year older than her and she started high school this year so she had new friends and new things to do. The only things they still did together were with the horses.
Since Trina was staying with Lynne, Susan spent the evening in her room. She was in bed reading a book and her two cats were sleeping at the bottom of the bed. She finished her book and turned out the light. A little while later she heard the door open. She lay in bed with her eyes tightly closed and pretended to be asleep.
She could hear him walk over to her bed. She lay perfectly still. He slipped his hand under the covers and ran his hand over the top of her waist. She tried to not even breathe. He touched her all over before he got up and left the room. The cats knew him and stayed where they were on the bed.
Susan had been waiting for her mother to stop her husband from coming in her room but she didn’t. Susan’s bedroom was right next to her mother and stepfather’s room with the only bathroom in the house in between them. Susan felt she had to know where he was yet she didn’t rescue her daughter.
Susan discouraged him the only way she knew how, by not cooperating. She slept with her younger sister as much as possible. She hadn’t said anything to Lynne. She didn’t want to get her little sister involved.
Before he started coming in her room he had invited her to go with him in his truck when went to a job. She went with him because her mother told her to because she had somewhere to go. He trapped her in the cab of the truck. She never went anywhere with him again. Susan thought her mother must be scared of him, why else wouldn’t she stop him?
The next weekend Susan was once again taking refuge in Lynne’s bedroom. Lynne told her that their stepfather had come in to her bedroom. Susan told Lynne about her experiences.
Susan had always been her little sister’s protector. The next morning when their stepfather went to work Susan confronted her mother. She told her about him coming in to her and Lynne’s bedrooms.
Susan’s mother never questioned whether what she had been told was true. She never asked her husband about what her daughters said he did. She put locks on her daughters’ bedroom doors and he stopped coming in. No one ever talked about what happened. Susan was haunted for the rest of her life about who to blame, the monster that did the actual damage or the monster who allowed it to happen.