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“Mom! Please! Just shoot him. Please, Mom, kill him!”
“TWO!” she shouts as he reaches the bottom of the staircase.
“I was finished anyway; I was just having fun,” he says, grabbing his keys from the table.
The gun fires and hits a spot on the wall just over the man’s head. She didn’t miss—she wouldn’t. She just didn’t want to hit him.
“THREE!” she yells as she racks the gun again, and this time, he scrambles out the front door.
“Mel…” she says as she turns to me. She sets the gun down and moves toward me. I’m frozen, unable to move or speak. Violated, discarded.
Disgusting.
I was raped. The word plays over and over again in my head. Oh, my god. I was raped.
“Mel, I’m so sorry, baby. Are you okay?”
She reaches out and touches my cheek, and it snaps me out of my haze.
“You did this!” I yell, pushing her hand away and lunging toward her. “You did this to me! This is your fault!”
I swing at her, my fist connecting with her face, but there isn’t much behind it. My muscles ache from the struggle earlier. This is my third fight of the night. I’m drunk, I’m drained, and I have nothing left.
I’m empty.
So I let her go, and she sits up and pulls me into her arms, and I wail into her chest like a baby.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” she says as she holds onto the wasted, bloodied body I’ve dissociated from again and rocks me back and forth in her arms. “You’re right. It is my fault. I’m so sorry.”
“Why didn’t you kill him?” I sob. “Mama…why didn’t you kill him for me?”
“I could have,” she says. “But I couldn’t do that to Emma. Who would take care of her?”
‘Me,’ I think. Me—just like always. I would have taken care of her.
“You don’t love me enough,” I cry. “You have never loved me enough. Ever!”
“I’m sorry,” she says again, calmly. She rocks me for a few more minutes before she says, “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”
She stands and pulls me to my feet, too, and it’s like an out-of-body experience—like I’m watching what is happening from somewhere above us instead of here, in my body, making it move. I’m conscious of the fact that my legs are holding my weight and carrying me to the bathroom, but I don’t feel like I’m the one doing it. As I sit on the toilet lid and my mom starts to run the bathwater, I’m aware that there is something wrong with this picture, too, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Our bathroom is small with an old clawfoot tub and the original hexagonal tiles on the floor. Many of them are missing or cracked, and it’s always messy. Emma leaves towels on the floor and doesn’t wash her toothpaste down the drain. I shed like a mother fucker, and there’s always hair everywhere.
And the walls are painted a faded shade of blue. There’s a small crack running up from the baseboards, bloated around the edges from water damage. And at the top of that crack hangs a wooden sign I’ve barely ever paid attention to. It’s probably been there for a decade, but I don’t know if I ever really noticed what it said before. I read it—over and over again—as my mom fills the tub.
Family. Where life begins and love never ends.
“Okay,” she says, “let’s get you into the tub.”
She pours Epsom salt into the bath and runs her hand over the surface of the water, checking the temperature. Then, she turns back to me and pulls the tattered dress over my head before helping me to my feet and into the tub.
As I lower my aching body into the steaming water, I’m aware that it’s hot enough that it hurts, but I don’t quite feel it. The temperature sears my skin pink and the salt burns the scratches on my arms, and I just sit in it.
“I’m going to clean your nose now,” she says. “This is probably going to hurt.”
Everything and nothing hurts all at the same time. Still, I close my eyes and brace myself for the pain as she brings the rag to my face and begins to wipe the area clean. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m screaming, but out here in the real world—in this tub—I’m just sitting here.
She finishes with my face then scrubs the rest of my body clean and washes my hair, rinsing it with a cup the way she did when I was a little girl—something she stopped long before my dad stopped coming home and she decided I was all grown up. Once she finishes, she says something—I think—but I don’t process what it is, and then she disappears.
