The Woman in the Trunk

On the steps.

Because she didn't want me to find the body.

In fact, she was found just ten minutes after it was too late.

I didn't wake up for ten hours.

Then, finally, there my father was.

Face grim.

Eyes strangely hard. And in the aftermath, I had attributed that to his way of grieving.

"Mom killed herself," he told me, not bothering to sugar-coat it, ease me into this new, harsh reality.

Mom was dead.

And the only person who truly loved me was gone.

The only person who could possibly understand how I felt after the attack was done.

And nothing, absolutely nothing would ever feel the same again.

I spent my sixteenth birthday in a therapist's office, curled up in the chair, hugging my legs, putting a wall up between us, as the kind woman said things about how some people process trauma, about how my mother's way of processing didn't have to be mine, about how there was always someone to help, about how there were medications if I needed them, that I had people there for me, people who loved me.

I knew the grim truth, though.

There wasn't anyone who loved me left.

I was alone in the world.

I didn't think medications would help me process that.

I didn't think therapy would either, so I stubbornly refused to go after a month of sessions.

Instead, I went back to school. I worked in the bakery. I slept on the couch. And I rather obsessively drew that birthmark on lined pages of my school notebook.

Dozens, hundreds of times.

They scattered around the apartment.

My father picked them up and threw them away.

"He knew about that birthmark. He'd seen it every day for months," I told Lorenzo. "There was no way he didn't know it when he saw it. He looked right down at it upstairs. And he wasn't surprised to see it there."

The reality of that still made it feel like someone had a hand around my throat, like they were cutting off air.

It all came tumbling back as I sat there while my father shook hands with my rapist.

My mom staring at the door.

That hadn't been kicked in.

The police said the locks hadn't been tampered with, that we must have left it unlocked.

We hadn't.

I knew we hadn't.

I had locked it myself, slid the knob on both the deadbolts my mother insisted we install when there had been a slew of burglaries in the building several months before.

The door had been locked.

And no one had tampered with it.

And my mom sat there staring at it for hours when we got home.

Because she knew.

She knew someone had unlocked it.

And it wasn't either of us.

Maybe she knew more than that too. Maybe she recognized the man who had attacked her. Maybe she knew about the birth-marked man. Maybe she had met him, had shaken hands with him in the past.

Other things came back too.

Like how that month, magically, the cable didn't get shut off. The phone didn't ring off the hook with creditors looking for their minimum payments so they would leave us alone for three weeks.

My father ordered in dinner almost every other night.

He bought a fancy new watch.

He got a new wardrobe full of suits like his mafia friends.

"I wonder how much I was worth," I said to Lorenzo, shaking my head, too numb to feel shocked by the revelation. "I wonder how much he thought my mom's life was worth. I bet it wasn't much," I added, taking a shaky breath. "I always knew I meant little to him. But I guess just... not how little. He'd let someone take something important from me for a full stomach, for a new watch, for fucking chicken parmesan and lobster rolls."

"Gigi—"

"My mom knew. And she just... she couldn't live with that reality. Christ," I said, scoffing. "I don't blame her. I think if I had known too, I would have been out on the steps with her."

"You're not going to kill yourself, Gigi." There was so much conviction in his voice. Like he would take the knife out of my hand if I reached for one. Me. Someone who meant very little to him in the grand scheme of things.

"Oh, why not? Your father is going to have me killed anyway."

"You don't know that. We don't know how this changes things. I can fix this."

"You don't know that."

"I do. I know that. I've been fixing messes with this family for over a decade. I will figure it out. You're not getting killed for this. I'll fucking fix it, Gigi," he added, voice firmer, sensing my disbelief.

My gaze dropped for a second, looking down at my hands, picturing how easily I had reached for that gun, had aimed it, had shot.

"I killed my father."

"The son of a bitch fucking deserved it," Lorenzo said, making my head lift, finding anger simmering in his eyes. For me. For what had been done to me.