There is a sound a door makes when a knob turns or a hinge creaks or when it shuts behind you.
If you are 8 years old, it makes no sense when that noise means a man is entering your bedroom late at night.
It's even less comprehensible when it's your father.
Dixie Gillaspie was aware of that sound for six years of her childhood. She grew up in a small town in southeast Kansas. Her parents belonged to a secretive, evangelical Christian community that met in people's homes. Her upbringing was very conservative and strict, with harsh physical punishment, but it also had an idyllic veneer.
"It's like you're watching all these fairy tales and someone slips a horror story in the middle of it," she said. "I assumed that as long as I didn't talk about the horror movies, I could go back to the fairy tales, and that's what kept me safe."
Gillaspie, a popular speaker, business coach and author in St. Louis, had never spoken publicly about this part of her childhood until Maya Angelou died recently. The poet and author had also been raped as a young child a few miles from where Gillaspie, 50, now lives.
Gillaspie, whose father died decades ago, wrote a blog post for The Good Men Project the day after Angelou's death (goodmenproject.com/featured-content/song-maya-angelou-taught-us-choice-dg/). In it, she says: "It's here in that same city that I sit with my silence. And feel her strong north wind of a voice. And know that strings are moving, and I can be silent no longer."
She refuses to be seen as a victim, although she says she had been physically and sexually abused by her father for years. She knows about black eyes, bruises on her body, blisters on her legs, welts on her back and visits at night. For years, she blocked out the worst of those memories, struggled with depression and survived a couple suicide attempts.
In her early 20s, her father was dying of cancer. She went back home with her then-boyfriend and future husband, Tom Gillaspie, and nursed him in his final months. She decided to put what had happened to her before in a separate box of a previous life.
"I could have a family and pretend it didn't happen. Or I could hold on to my story, and not have a family. It wasn't a matter of forgiveness; I wanted a family," she said. "It's how I survived. It's not going to be everyone's choice."
Most days during that time, she and Tom didn't leave her parents' home. They slept on a makeshift pallet on the laundry room floor, and she was up several times a night to care for her father.
One day, they went to visit Tom's family a couple of hours away. They stayed later than they intended. When she rushed in to check on her father, he started with, "Where have you been? You said you'd be back to help ..."
Suddenly, he stopped and said, "I'm sorry."
She went through the motions of turning him in the bed, and says she must have given him his medicine and food, though she doesn't remember those details. All she could hear was, "I'm sorry."
It was the first time she could remember hearing those words from her father.
She sat on the back step of the house and bawled.
She was 23 when he died.
In her late 20s, the memories of abuse became an avalanche that refused to be ignored. She has been in therapy, written a fictionalized book of her story and confided in a few close friends over the years. She had to confront it internally and admit to herself the extent of the abuse. She had to believe that she did not deserve it, that she didn't ask for it. Eventually, Dixie began asking herself: What do I have to do in order for my story to do any good?
She wanted to share her story without any desire for pity or anger on her behalf. She has stopped keeping track of who knew and didn't know about her past. She says that forgiveness is for your own sake, and that compassion doesn't mean you don't condemn what was wrong or punish what needs to be punished.
She needed to realize it was OK to let go of bitterness, anger and hate.
The months she cared for the man who she says attacked her repeatedly for years brought its own healing to her.
"I had those months to get to know the man my father wanted to be. And I still miss that man."