Chapter 3: Where The Heart Is
Author's Notes:
I am a first time writer so constructive criticism is welcome. This is definitely a spuffy story but the tale is long and there's ground to cover before any spuffy action is involved. This is not a fluffy spuffy fic, however. Also, there is within the story sexual assault and rape, although not graphically described, so if you do not wish to read about that I will notate it when it appears so that you may skim over that section.
Author's Note #2: The federal, state, and municipal laws referenced in the story are very complex and underwent massive federal and state changes in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and also vary widely from state to state and city to city in how they are enforced or interpreted. It is therefore not possible for me to pin down exact laws, in exact places, at exact times, as they are exactly enforced or not enforced by local law enforcement and social service agencies, there's too much variation. I've researched up the yazoo to be as accurate as possible but there will always be some differences between the law and how any particular law enforcement agency or social service worker decides to interpret or misinterpret it, even within the same local agency. Where a club mentioned in the story is concerned I have chosen to entirely ignore recent California laws that make certain club rules vastly different than the reader would expect and went with what worked best for the story.
[Warning: This chapter contains some discussion of sexual assault/rape. It is not graphic and is only a brief discussion. If you are sensitive to these issues please take this into consideration when reading this particular chapter.]
As Faith drove into Sunnydale via the coastal highway, Buffy was impressed by the beauty of the California coast. Rugged trees overlooking the rocks and sand on the beaches below the cliffs added a wild charm to the breathtaking views of the Pacific Ocean. She could see what Faith saw in her chosen west coast home. As they continued to drive into the city they left the coast behind and entered Sunnydale proper. The ocean views were replaced by the small town charm of little stores, beautifully kept homes, and clean, tree lined streets. Just as Buffy was thinking that she could definitely see herself living here, Faith continued driving east into an area that was less with the charm and more with the run down industrial ambience.
Well, this is depressing, Buffy thought to herself.,
but it's not too far from the other part so that's not too bad…
But Faith continued driving along a winding industrial road about another twenty minutes, past three cemeteries and a large park that had seen better days, until they reached the other side of the industrial area, and entered another older part of town where the run down houses and apartment buildings were interspersed with empty lots, liquor stores, bars, thrift shops, and auto repair and machine shops. It was hard to reconcile this seedy part of town with the charming little burg they entered from the coast highway. Buffy's spirits plummeted when she realized Faith was slowing down in front of an old three story brick building situated between a veterinarian's office and a thrift store, and parked directly in front of a bar.
"Welcome home, B," Faith grinned at her cousin.
Buffy had been staring disconsolately at a homeless man walking drunkenly down the mouth of a nearby alley when Faith's cheerful words penetrated her brain.
Home!Buffy turned toward Faith and frowned, "You live in a bar?"
"No, B! Above the bar, top floor!" Faith laughed. "See the door to the left there? It goes straight up to the second and third floors where the apartments are. No elevator though, that's the one bad thing."
The one bad thing?! Buffy silently cried.
Oh. My. God. That guy is peeing in the alley.
"Let's get your stuff upstairs and unpacked, then you can have that bath and nap you wanted." Faith, completely oblivious to Buffy's internal dialogue, opened her door and got the bags out of the trunk. "You need some help gettin' out?" she called back to Buffy when the latter had still not moved from her seat.
It was at this point that Buffy snapped out of her shock and awkwardly left the car with Katie fast asleep in her arms. She followed Faith up the steep staircase to the third floor, and into a rear-facing apartment. Faith put the bags down and turned to Buffy.
"It ain't much, but it's home. This here's the living room - pretty good size dontcha think? - and to the back left, that's the kitchen. That door way on the right is the hall. The bathroom's down at the left end of the hall, and my room's in the middle, and your room is to the right. There's four apartments on each floor so we get the east and southern sunlight since we're on the southeast corner here." Faith picked up the bags again and motioned Buffy to follow her down the little hallway to the right.
"Well, here's your room. Not much in it right now, but we can pick up some stuff by hitting the garage sales this Saturday, and the thrift store gets new shipments every Monday morning so the best stuff to pick from is there then. We can see what they have first thing Monday mornin'."
Buffy nodded her understanding as she looked around her new room, which had two fairly large old sash windows, sans curtains, on the far side of the room. It had a strangely patterned dark brown linoleum floor with no carpet. A fairly decent although hideous orangey/brown patterned futon sofa was against the right wall, and a little dresser stood next to it with the ugliest white ceramic table lamp Buffy had ever seen gracing it's top. A very small closet was on the near left side, and there were a couple of cardboard boxes with someone's stuff in them against the same wall.
Faith noticed Buffy looking toward the boxes. "Those are my ex's things he didn't come back for when he left coupla months ago." There was a sadness in her voice as she said this, and Buffy had the impression that the breakup was a source of real pain to her cousin. "He was an artist. Can you believe it? Me with an artist?! Man, shoulda known that wasn't gonna work out, huh?" Faith attempted to make light of a situation that had clearly broken her heart.
Buffy didn't know what to say to that, so she settled for a smile and a nod which she hoped conveyed her sympathy and understanding. Faith wasn't known for over-sharing her emotional traumas, and Buffy didn't want to seem too inquisitive until Faith was in a more sharing mode. She assumed alcohol would be involved at that point, if past experience was any indicator.
"I know it isn't much right now, no one actually lived in this room before, you know? Greg used to paint in here....But we'll get it fixed up more homey for you in no time." Faith smiled as she opened the closet up. "There're hangars in here, and the sheets and pillows for the bed over there are on the shelf here. Don't worry, they're all clean and stuff, and there's two blankets here too. Besides Greg painting in here, we sometimes had friends spend the night in here so it was kinda a guest room, you know?" Faith started making up the futon bed for Buffy. "You wanna go sit down a minute in the livin' room while I get the bed ready? Put the kid down? You must be wiped."
"Yeah, I really am. Thanks Faith." Buffy smiled at her cousin and wandered back to the living room sofa and sat down carefully.
Nope, that won't work, Buffy thought as her soreness from giving birth combined with her long sitting during travel finally overwhelmed her.
Must. Lay. Down. Now.Buffy carefully placed the sleeping baby on the seat of a faux leather-like recliner and then lay down slowly on the hard dark green sofa, using a throw pillow under her head. Another upholstered chair - in a strange blue-green fabric with seahorses all over it - sat in the opposite corner, and a coffee table and end table along with the mate of the ugly white lamp in the bedroom completed the living room furniture. There was also a large round shaggy green rug that covered most of the floor here, which was the same dark brown linoleum as the bedroom. It appeared the entire apartment had the same strange flooring.
God, it must get cold in here at night. Buffy shivered.
Actually, it's kinda cold now. She reached up and pulled a brown and yellow granny-square afghan from the back of the sofa over herself and got to thinking about the differences between her life and Faith's.
Buffy's mother Joyce was her Aunt Darlene's younger sister. Where Joyce's entire life revolved around status and money and appearances, Darlene had been a wild child with an insatiable thirst for life, who dropped out of high school to live with her boyfriend. While Darlene went through husbands and boyfriends and tended bar for a living, Joyce graduated from college with a degree in art history and married Hank Summers, who would become a very successful attorney practicing international law. Darlene had one daughter, Faith, who she raised in ratty houses and apartments and exposed her to the seamier side of life and men; Joyce had two daughters, Buffy and her thirteen year old sister Dawn, and raised them in a beautiful suburban home in Westchester County New York and sent them to the finest private schools. Darlene was down to earth and friendly, but with a quick temper, a foul mouth, and a tendency to turn to drink more and more as the years rolled on. Joyce was cultured and polite and presented the picture of the perfect calm and collected society woman, with a tight smile that could cut steel when she felt one of her daughters had wandered too far afield from their perfect manicured life. Joyce's dirty little secret was that she too was turning to a bottle a little more than was good for her as her life carried on it's carefully planned course.
Faith and Buffy saw each other frequently over their short lives, as Darlene lived close by, although in a seedier area of the county, and they had bonded over their shared irritation at the women who mothered them. At two and a half years older than Buffy, Faith was seventeen when she decided she couldn't live with her mom's latest boyfriend, so she dropped out of school and ran off to California to get as far away as possible and start her own hopefully better life. Buffy missed Faith like crazy, but secretly the girls kept in close touch by letter and phone, and Buffy respected her cousin's wish to keep her actual location unknown to the rest of the family.
As for Buffy, when she turned fourteen she felt she couldn't take one more day of that perfectly planned and circumscribed life her mother had plotted out for her. She started hanging with a rowdier group of girls at school and soon was climbing out her bedroom window to sneak off to clubs and dances that she was really too young to be going to. A fake ID and a winning smile - along with a very sexy outfit - was usually enough to get Buffy and her friends into any club they wished to enter. Joyce eventually caught on to what Buffy was doing and there were some fantastic screaming matches between the two during that year. Hank was rarely home anymore, as he was traveling overseas for work frequently, and from what Buffy could hear of her parents too frequent fights, he was cheating on her mom with regularity.
And so it was that one day, in May of her freshman year of high school, that Buffy found herself pregnant. A couple of months later, her parents discovered the fact, and after the screaming died down, her father flew off to Europe again and her mother found a maternity home in the city in which she could stash Buffy so that with any luck none of her society friends would be the wiser about the 'embarrassment'. At this point Dawn just sniffed disapprovingly at Buffy and refused to speak to her any longer. Buffy often thought that Dawn was the perfect Stepford daughter for Joyce, and that Buffy was a huge disappointment to her. She rather thought all three of them were a disappointment to her father.
As Buffy drifted off to sleep, she was stricken with the thought that she was going down the same path her Aunt Darlene had so many years before. She loved Faith so much, but she did not want to raise her daughter the way Faith had been raised, nor did she want for her the life that Faith was now living. On the other hand, her mother's sterile existence of garden parties and club meetings was out of the question too. There must be a middle way, Buffy pondered, another way to live and raise my daughter so that she can be both free and happy, without ending up in a ratty apartment like this one someday. Another way......
About an hour later Buffy woke to the smell of spaghetti and garlic bread wafting from the little kitchen. She glanced over to the recliner and saw that Katie had been changed into a new jumper and blanket and was asleep again.
Thanks Faith, Buffy silently sent out to her cousin. The new clothes must mean a diaper change too, Buffy thought. She looked at the clock and quickly figured she had about one hour before hunger would waken the sleeping infant again, so she got heavily to her feet and found Faith in the kitchen.
Food. God, yes!Faith smiled brightly. "Just in time! Late lunch/early dinner. I changed the kid but the blanket and pajamas were all wet too so I dumped 'em in the laundry basket and put new ones on her. Then she just went back to sleep. You were so out of it you didn't even twitch the whole time she was cryin'," she laughed. "Sit down, let's eat!"
Buffy was famished, and tucked into her food hungrily. After most of the food was gone, Buffy noticed that Faith was eyeing her inquisitively as she ate.
"What?"
"Nothin'," Faith drawled. But then she seemed to think better of it and continued, "I was just wonderin' about the baby and all. Last I talked to you, you were still all virginal and didn't have a boyfriend or anything. Then - bam! Baby. So what happened, B? And where's the daddy in all this? If you don't mind talking about it, that is. I don't wanna upset you or nothin'." Faith seemed genuinely concerned, and Buffy hadn't really told anyone the truth before. Maybe she should tell someone. So Buffy began to trust Faith with her story.
"Nine months ago, my friend Amy and I snuck out to go to a party at an NYU dorm in the city. It was a good party, and we were having a good time at first, but then Amy's mom called her cell phone and so Amy had to leave to go home right away. I was stupid and told Amy that I'd go home in a bit since I was talking to this really cute guy and I didn't want to leave yet. Amy didn't want to leave me there but I had had some drinks and insisted on staying. So I really can't blame anyone else for what happened that night." Buffy stopped and stared down at her hands in her lap.
"What happened, B?" Faith was becoming very worried about the direction this story was going, and reached over and grabbed one of Buffy's hands and held on. Buffy continued, grateful for the support.
"I'd had some drinks, and later on I thought maybe someone put something in my drink too, because suddenly I was really dizzy and sleepy and needed to lay down. This guy I was talking to helped me into a dorm room and two other guys were in there too but that's the last thing I remember for a few hours. When I woke up I was on the bed...alone...and my dress was on me all twisted up....and....I was really sore...and you know....sticky...there... and I figured out that something must've happened to me with those guys when I passed out..." Tears were rolling down her cheeks now, and Faith moved her chair over next to her and put her arms around her shoulders as Buffy cried.
"I'm so sorry, B."
"Yeah," Buffy sniffed, and wiped her eyes and nose with a napkin. "I went home right away - this girl who lived there took me home - but I was just too scared and embarrassed to tell anyone what happened that night. I just wanted to forget it ever happened and just call it a learning experience and go on with my life, you know?" Faith nodded. "And that was working out okay, you know, I just decided to forget about it. Until a couple months went by and my period didn't come and I started getting sick and...and..." Buffy stopped again to blow her nose, "then I couldn't pretend anymore, couldn't forget...I took three home tests and they were all positive. God, I was sooo scared, Faith. You know my mom! She'd freak out, and I was fifteen! So I kept putting it off, telling her, you know, until one day she walked in on me undressing for bed and saw that I was starting to show and it was kinda obvious at that point and my mom just stared at me for the longest time. I mean, no words, no sound, nothing. We just kept looking at each other. Then she walked really slow, over to me and slapped my face really hard..."
**Flashback**
Buffy stood in her room and brought her hand up to her cheek where her mother had slapped her and started to cry.
"Don't!" Joyce bit out. "Don't you dare cry, Buffy. Don't. You. Dare."
But Buffy just cried harder as she saw her mother's cold glare directed toward her. She wanted so much to throw herself in Joyce's arms and cry and beg forgiveness and have her mom hold her and tell her everything was going to be okay, she'd make it all okay. But it wasn't that mom that was staring icily at her right now. The mom looking back at her now was a cold stony woman with hate in her eyes. For the first time in her life Buffy was truly frightened of her mother.
"Slut." There it was. The word that stopped Buffy's heart. Such an ugly word and it came from her mother, the thing that deep down inside Buffy feared she had become. And suddenly there was no pain, just a cold icy numbness that centered itself in her heart and expanded outward until it became all that Buffy could feel. And yet the tears didn't stop, but Buffy hardly noticed them coursing down her cheeks any longer. She just watched her mother turn around and walk out of her bedroom and away from her forever. That was the beginning of the new terms of the relationship between mother and daughter.
Buffy slowly finished dressing in her pajamas, and then went to the top of the stairs to see what was happening down in the living room where she could see her mom standing talking animatedly with her father. Sharp angry words from her mother, punctuated with low angry growls from her father. She couldn't hear the words, but the body language told her that this did not look good for her. Suddenly her father looked up right at her. The angry cold expression on his face made Buffy back up a step in unconscious self-preservation. Her mother followed his line of vision, and called to her to get down there now.
Regretting her decision not to lock herself in her room sooner, Buffy made her way down the stairs toward her unhappy parents.
**End Flashback**
"That was a long night," Buffy shivered. "Dad left for another conference in South Africa, and mom made arrangements for me to go to a home for pregnant teenagers in the city. She said she wanted me away so no one would find out what I'd done and they could get rid of the baby as soon as it was born." Buffy looked quickly at Faith, "Get rid of to an adoptive family, not, you know, dead or anything."
Faith nodded and asked, "God B, that's horrible. Didn't she even consider not giving the baby away?"
"No, she wouldn't even have a conversation about it. She just wanted everything to go back to 'normal' again. 'Normal, normal, normal'. It's all I ever heard from mom the whole time I was pregnant. 'Get back to normal life and go on as if nothing happened.' The people at the home were big on adoption too, and kept telling me how I was young and needed to give Katie up to people who 'could give her everything she deserves.'" Buffy added sarcastically, "Everything but her own mother." She sighed as her tears slowed and she became calmer. "So I just thought, okay, I'll just be the baby machine here and when she's born I'll just hand her to these people - the Andersons - and get back into my own life and go on. I kinda kept going that way until she was born, and then....it was too much, Faith. She was so beautiful - in an ugly red wrinkly troll doll kinda way - and I just loved her right from the start. I made them let me hold her and mom freaked on me then. But then a nurse said something about having faith, and I thought of you, and well you know the rest...."
"And you never told your mom what happened to you?"
"No! That would have been even worse! I just told her I had an older boyfriend she didn't know and that he left me when I told him I was pregnant and she bought it completely. God, I couldn't tell her that I didn't even know who the father was! She probably woulda beat me to death or my dad would've."
"Yeah, but you were raped, B."
"So? It was still my fault for going there and drinking, and....they would've never forgiven me then, Faith. God, they won't really forgive me now....Anyway, I begged mom to let me keep her but she just refused, said I couldn't come home and that I was too young to live on my own and that the authorities wouldn't let me keep Katie unless I lived at home so I had no choice and had to sign the papers. I overheard them saying they were keeping me in the hospital for three days partly to recover and partly cuz there's a 72 hour rule about signing the adoption papers or something, so I had a lot of time to lay there and think about it and finally I decided to call you and ask you to help me keep Katie. If it wasn't for you, Faith, I don't know what I could have done. I love you so much!"
Buffy hugged Faith hard and kissed her cheek, then drew back and continued, "But you know the worst part now?" Faith shook her head, she couldn't really think of anything worse than what she'd already been told so far. "The worst part is that I had sex." Faith frowned quizzically. "I mean, I had sex for the first time. I lost my virginity Faith, and I don't even remember it. I'm not a virgin, but I don't even know what sex is like. It's so weird. I feel dirty and used and..."
"Shit." Faith's jaw dropped. This was worse than she thought. Imagine... "B, I can't say for sure what I would have done if that had happened to me, but I'm pretty sure it would have ended with me in jail for killing someone. Fuck!" Faith got up and started pacing the small kitchen. She turned to Buffy suddenly and forcefully declared, "But you have no reason to feel dirty Buffy! And that wasn't sex! That wasn't your first time!" Faith sat down and grabbed both of Buffy's hands in hers, "Hear me now, B. That. Wasn't. Your. First. Time. That. Was. Assault. Not. Sex." Faith pumped both her hands to emphasize her point. "Your first time hasn't happened yet, B. And it's gonna be just as special as it is for any girl, you got me? I'm serious, B. I'm pissed that you can't remember and that those jackoffs got away scott free, but in a way it's a good thing you can't remember. You shouldn't ever have to remember something like that. Ever!...Ever..."
Buffy was trembling by this time with the effort of self-control, but then the dam burst for real and she began to sob uncontrollably in Faith's arms. Faith held Buffy as her cries wound down, and there came a moment when Buffy felt safe and at peace for the first time in a very long while.
Katie's wakeful cries interrupted the quiet between the two cousins, and Faith called out, "Hang on a minute, Katie. Auntie Faith'll be right there." She turned to Buffy. "Why don't you go in the bathroom and wash up and get in your pajamas and I'll bring Katie in to you so you can nurse her in bed and go to sleep for a while. You look like you could use the rest now."
Buffy nodded and did as she was told, falling into sleep with her daughter by her side. A little later on, Faith came into her room with a dresser drawer lined with sheets and a small blanket and placed the now sleeping baby in it by her young mother's bedside. Faith watched them both sleeping peacefully for a few minutes, then closed the door and went to wash up the dishes.
There were a lot of decisions that would have to be made and life was going to be hard for them for awhile, perhaps for always. But for now, some peace and quiet was just what was needed. Faith vowed they would at least get that for now.
Tomorrow would take care of itself.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please leave a review and let me know what you think so far. Don't worry, Spuffy is coming, this is a long tale.....