Six months later, they were married. We sold everything except my dad’s paintings and moved into Tanner’s cramped New York apartment. The first evening, Tanner took us up to the roof, holding hands with my mom and grinning as we looked out over the city, but I remember feeling sick. Not just from the drop—I hate heights—but from the endless gray blocks around me. I couldn’t see any green anywhere.
I hated my new school: I was the weird country kid. The only nature was a tiny neighborhood garden where the grass was yellow and crunchy, as if the city was making it ill, and all the kids stared at me when I took my shoes off.
Pretty soon, we realized that Tanner was into some bad stuff. He dealt some drugs and the apartment was full of stolen stuff he was trying to sell. He wasn’t good at it, though, losing more money than he made. My mom opened a dress shop and somehow made it work, even in that lousy neighborhood, but there was still barely enough money to pay the rent. Then she got ill and the doctors diagnosed her with lupus. When it was bad, she couldn’t work and money became even tighter. Tanner turned sour and resentful: his four nightly beers turned into six and then eight. He’d get wasted and yell at her.
And then the yelling turned to hitting. Black eyes she tried to hide with make-up. Cracked ribs that made it painful to breathe or talk. I hid in my room and looked up at the magazine pictures I’d used to paper the walls, far-off places like Colorado and Alaska, full of green and blue, and I tried to dream myself there.
When I was ten, my mom tried to leave him and run back to Wisconsin. Tanner caught us halfway and put my mom in the hospital, and told her he’d kill both of us if she tried to leave him again. He’d failed at being a criminal, failed at being a provider. He didn’t want anyone to know he’d failed at being a husband, too.
A few weeks after that, Tanner rolled in drunk and collapsed into his armchair. He yelled for my mom to bring him a beer but she was in bed with a bad flare-up of the lupus, barely able to walk. I was in their bedroom, looking after her, and I saw her struggle to try to get up, gritting her teeth in pain—
“No,” I told her, tears in my eyes. “No.” And I pushed her back into bed and went out into the hallway, ignoring her protests. I went to the refrigerator and I brought Tanner his beer.
When he saw it was me, he cursed me, saying I was just as much of a waste of space as my mother. And when I got close enough, he hit me for the first time, an open-handed whack across the face that shook my teeth and made me see stars.
But from that night on, I brought him his beers and food, and cleaned the house. Anything to keep him away from my mom, who was getting sicker each day.
He hit me. He kicked me when I was down. Once, when I was thirteen, I dropped a hot skillet and it left a scorch mark on the linoleum. Tanner picked it up, pulled up my T-shirt, and pressed the hot edge of it against my side to teach me a lesson. I heard my skin sizzle like steak dropped into a pan. I knew I couldn’t go to the ER, so I treated the burn myself, and I still have the scar. It did teach me a lesson, though. The less he saw and heard me, the less he hit me.
And so I became invisible. My self-confidence disappeared. Every day, I heard how worthless I was, the words driven into me with his fists. He laughed at my dreams of green, faraway places and ripped down the pictures I’d taped to my walls. I was glad I’d hidden my dad’s paintings at the bottom of my closet or they would have been destroyed or sold. I retreated into myself, dressing in shapeless hooded tops and jeans, making myself as neutral and easy to ignore as possible. Boys looked right past me. Teachers forgot I was even in their class. I took a job at a grocery store to help with the bills: my mom was barely able to keep her store open, she was sick so much.
When I was eighteen, I went up to the roof of the apartment block. I was so lonely, so beaten down, I was at the point of jumping. But I was worried about my mom. If I left her alone with him, he’d start beating her again.
That’s when I saw it, balanced right on the edge of the roof. A bird’s nest, with a mother bird perched on the edge, feeding her young. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I was so close: the birds were completely unaware of me.