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And the words they say
Which we won’t understand
Don’t accept that what’s happening
Is just a case of others suffering
Or you’ll find that you’re joining in
The turning away.
Pink Floyd

In a series of emails over the course of two days, my friend disclosed her history of sexual abuse to me.

My memory has blurred out how we found ourselves in this conversation and why we didn’t adjourn to the telephone. Instead we emailed back and forth, overlapping many times, while she told me about her experience.

It had happened twenty years earlier, when she was under ten. His wife was the friend of her mother; my friend was occasionally left her at their house while her mother worked or traveled. The husband was a nice guy whose career choice raised no red flags. He worked with children.

What could go wrong?

What went wrong was that at night, he’d come into her room after she was sleeping. He’d set his gun down on the nightstand. He’d leave his German Sheppard right outside the door. And then he’d deprive her of the illusion that adults are meant to take care of children. The abuse continued on undetected for a couple of years, until she was old enough to be left alone at her own home for longer stretches.

I never knew her abuser’s name, only his career. Her family had lost touch with his family years before.

______

Two years after she first told me of the abuse, I volunteered to host a party that would involve several disparate groups of friends, none of whom knew each other–so I thought. In planning the party, I sent out an email to everyone invited.

My friend idly looked through the long list of invitees. That’s when she saw her abuser’s last name and first initial.

She called me in a panic to confirm his identity. Was his first name really xxxxxx? Was he married to xxxx? Did he have short dark hair? Was he well over six feet tall? Did he work in the field of xxxxxx? Yes, yes to all. It was the same person.

He was a friend of a friend who was on the fringe of one of my groups of friends. I knew him as a polite dude who couldn’t play Scattegories worth a damn. That was all.

Immediately I offered to dis-invite him to the party, but my friend said no. She wanted the chance to see him now that she was no longer a powerless child. She wanted to look him in the eye and say, “Remember me? I’m xxxxxxx. You and my mom used to be friends? I used to stay at your house? Remember?”

She wanted to see the fear blossom across his face as he realized who she was. She wanted to see him squirm in a room full of her friends. She wanted to see him try to neutralize his terror in front of his wife.

Perhaps you can imagine how that idea struck me. I wanted nothing to do with him. I didn’t want tension during the party. I didn’t want my friend to have to face him.

Most of all, I didn’t want to have to police my children around him. I didn’t want to have to follow him to the bathroom so that he wouldn’t sneak up the stairs to where my little ones were sleeping.

With many misgivings, I allowed him to come to my house. My friend did indeed introduce herself to him, with all of us around her. We all watched the recognition dawn on his face.

He ate his dinner in another room, alone but for me. I sat down and tried to make civil conversation with him while he ate. I was the host, after all. The moment dinner was through, he made an excuse and left.

Did my friend gain some sense of closure? She claims that she did.

______

All this happened years ago.

Since then, the abuser has remarried. His new wife is considerably younger. She has a child from a previous relationship–a daughter who is about the same age as my friend was when the abuse happened to her.

My friend knows of his new wife and his new child, but given the amount of time that has passed since her own abuse, she is reluctant to interfere. She makes excuses for him: He was younger. He was an alcoholic then. His job was very stressful. It only happened a few times.

Maybe it never happened. Maybe she just dreamed it, or embellished it, or mis-remembered it. I suppose these excuses give her some comfort.

I worry about the little girl, just as I worried about other people my abuser might have victimized, and I wonder if I shouldn’t do something.

But what? Call the authorities and tell them a second-hand story–one that my friend has no desire to corroborate? Call his new wife, who doesn’t know me?

This is the painful thing about knowing. What do you do with what you know?

.