“I didn’t leave. I just took a walk to cool off.” His voice was tired and raw. “I promise I will always come back to you. Always.” He lifted my hair off my neck and kissed my bare shoulder. “It’s time for you to share your final secret with me, Abby.”
“Now?” I didn’t know if I could.
“Yes, now.” It was a demand, but a gentle one. “It’s the only thing left between us. I’m not going to push you for anything but your words. The rest is up to you.”
Words.
They’d sat heavy on my tongue for almost nine years. They’d never gone any further than that. It was time. I knew it was. I wanted to be unburdened of it now, and I let that feeling lead the way. It felt right to have Jake know all of me.
I was as unsure of his reaction as I was of myself.
Darkness quickly freed me of my fear.
The words surprised me when they started to flow out of my mouth and into the shadows. I closed my eyes as I told him about the last night I’d spent in my mother’s house before I was put in foster care. He listened as I told him how I’d eaten the neighbor’s dog’s food, though only when I’d been hungry enough not to think about feeling bad for stealing it from the dog. I even told him about running from the constant open-door orgies and endless parade of vile “aunts” and “uncles” who came and went with the same frequency as their highs and jail sentences.
I described in detail how I’d used the shard of mirror to stab the man in the eye who’d come into my room. “I might have killed him... there was so much blood.” My eyes spilled with hot tears, but I wiped at them before they had a chance to fall. “I asked the social worker who picked me up if he was dead. I don’t think they tell nine-year-olds if they’ve killed someone, though.”
Jake was quiet as he listened, but he continued to trace around my upper thigh with his fingers, blazing a trail of fire on my skin everywhere he touched. But, it wasn’t like the fire of a few weeks ago.
This fire was built out of want, not fear.
“That’s not all.” I braced myself as I began to tell him the rest.
Suddenly, I am nine again. I am naked and crouching in the field. The winds have died down, and now, it’s just the cold rain pummeling my skin.
I am free. I am free of the jail I never committed any crime to be in.
The home that held me prison would soon be a memory. I will work my way through starvation. I will never eat dog food again. I will find a family who will love me.
I am still worth loving.
A strong hand is on my arm, hoisting me up from the ground. A bitter voice in my ear: “Now you’re really going to find out what happens to bad girls, you little shit.”
With one hand wrapped in my hair, she is dragging me through the tall grass, sand spurs clinging to my legs. “You think you can defy me? You think you can say no? I own you and that scrawny, little body. If you don’t want to give it up to who I fucking tell you to give it up to, I’m going to make it so no one will ever want you again.”
Back in the house. Handcuffed to the radiator. Each burn of her cigarette. Each stab of her knife. Every time she slowly drags the rusted blade across my body, I jump back against the steaming radiator she’s purposely set on high.
I am waking up.
I am passing out.
I am waking up.
I am passing out.
I wake, and my mother is no longer over me. She’s across the room on the couch, tying a tube around her arm and shooting the needle into a vein by her elbow.
“Abby has been a bad girl, Vinnie. She screams when I punish her.”
My mother nods to a man sitting on the floor, leering at me. He isn’t wearing a shirt. He smiles and his front teeth are missing, the rest of them a mixture of yellow and black.
“She needs to learn how to shut that mouth of hers. Think you can help?”
The man stands and throws me onto my back, my hand still cuffed to the burning radiator, blood drips down my arm. “Come here, darlin’,” he says. He smells like the bottom of the trash can behind the Chinese restaurant. The one where I’ve looked for food.
He slowly unzips his jeans, and before I can wonder what he is doing, he shoves himself into my mouth, pressing his hands against the back of my head. He holds a knife at my throat. My screams are muffled. I choke once, twice, three times. Then, I’m throwing up, but he won’t pull out of my mouth. He just laughs. The vomit spills out the sides of my mouth and splashes down his legs.
Suddenly, I don’t care what happens to me. A feeling of not being meant for this world washes over me.
I bite down. I bite down so hard my teeth meet in the middle. The man jumps back and screams. Blood and vomit coat his lap. My mother is passed out, her chin on her chest.
The man lunges at me, knife raised and sinks it into my shoulder so deep he hits carpet before standing and running outside.
It takes me a few minutes before I am able to calm myself from the nauseating pain enough to wiggle my hand out from the cuff and remove the blade from my shoulder. Strings of flesh and thick carpet fibers cling to the rusty blade.
I look over at my mother, and for a moment, I contemplate shoving it deep into the back of her neck while she sleeps.
Instead, I run. As fast as I can I run into the night, down the road, three miles to the fire station. Naked, covered in blood and vomit, I knock on the door, and when it opens, I fall into the arms of a large black man wearing a blue t-shirt and red suspenders.
I went for help.
I was hoping for death.
Jake needed to know all of it. He needed to see. I sucked as much air into my lungs as I could. “Can you turn on the lamp, please?” I asked. While Jake leaned behind him to do as I asked, I lifted my shirt over my head and tossed it to the floor. I wasn’t wearing a bra, so he could clearly see all of me. I sat on my knees on the bed and waited for him to see who I really was and what I really looked like.
No more hiding.
When he turned back from the lamp, his eyes went wide. Matching slashes covered the tops of both of my breasts. The redness of the injuries never truly faded to white as I had hoped they would. Burn marks, patches of uneven and stretched looking skin—from cigarettes, from cigars, from lighters and the steaming radiator my mother had once handcuffed me to—ran down the length of my right arm and my upper back. In contrast, my left arm was virtually mark-free. The worst damage was a jagged, red scar that ran from below my left breast down to the top of my right thigh, traveling through the inside of my legs, only a half an inch or so away from doing real damage.
My injuries hadn’t been inflicted to cause me to not function physically. They’d been meant to scar my body.
I held my breath.
“These are my punishments,” I said. A hot tear ran from the corner of my eye. Jake leaned into me and licked the line it left on my face. He was trying to take on my pain, consume it.
He sat up on his knees and reached out for me. Slowly, he ran his hand over each of the scars on my right arm. He bent his head and kissed along the lines marring the tops of my breasts above each nipple. They weren’t kisses meant to titillate.
They were meant to heal.
“Mom’s in prison. She got life for what she did to me and for the drugs they found on her. She had a ton of priors so they threw the book at her, no parole.” I exhaled and closed my eyes.
I was done. Exhausted and done.
Jake cupped my face in his hands. He looked me right in my eyes when he finally spoke. “You are so fucking beautiful,” he whispered.
It wasn’t what I expected him to say. I expected him to run.
“Just the way you are, Bee. These scars don’t make you ugly. You don’t need to hide them from anyone. Fuck anyone who thinks anything on someone like you could ever be anything but beautiful. You should be proud of them, baby.”
“Proud?” How could I be proud of the ugliness on my body, left on me courtesy of the ugliness in people?
“Yes, proud. They make you powerful. Each line is a road traveled, an experience you had, whether it was good or bad. Each mark is proof of pain in the past, not the present. You are a survivor, you are a warrior. These are the scalps hanging from your fucking belt. You took the beatings and here you are, in front of me.” He kissed me softly on my lips and my mouth opened to him before he pulled away again. “You are fucking amazing.”
What?
“How can you not see how fucking beautiful you are? He lifted my right arm to his mouth and trailed kisses and caresses from my shoulder to my hand, like he needed to experience with his lips each and every mark, dent, line, and poorly-healed patch of skin on my body. My mind reeled from bringing to the surface the memories I had pushed deep inside since the very night it happened.
Jake didn’t hesitate. He pulled me into an untamed embrace. “She should die for what she did,” he said.
I nodded. She should have. I wished I would’ve killed her then. I wished it every day.
Jake held me tighter, but we weren’t close enough. He raised himself up, just enough for him to remove his shirt before pulling me into him again, with my back to his chest. He leaned into me and pulled the tip of my ear into his mouth. He gently sucked and licked, working his mouth and tongue down to the sensitive spot right behind my ear. I closed my eyes, relishing the feeling of his mouth.