Chapter Thirteen

 

New Castle, Delaware

Summer 1956

 

Emma and Greg were playing hide and go seek with neighborhood kids on the hill across from their house when they heard their mother call their names. Her voice was shrill and panicky.

Greg looked at Emma. “What do you bet? He’s drunk again.”

They raced across the street. Their father’s pickup truck was parked with the front tires in the flowerbed alongside the driveway.

Greg reached for Emma’s hand. Their pace slowed to a crawl as they crossed their front yard and stopped in front of the porch steps.

Their mother stood in the doorway, rocking in place. “Your father wants to see you,” she whispered. “He’s in the kitchen. Be very careful. He lost at the racetrack, and his mood’s not so good.”

Emma looked sideways at Greg. His face stiffened, and his eyes opened as wide as if a flash bulb had just exploded in front of them. “He’s drunk again, isn’t he?”

Their mother nodded and held the door open.

They entered, took off their shoes, and tiptoed into the kitchen, where their father sat at the table, his head in his hands.

“You wanted to see us,” Greg said.

Their father lifted his head. “Well, if it isn’t the little beggars.” His voice was slurred, and Emma could smell the whiskey on his breath.

Emma dug her chin into her chest, stared at the floor, and pressed her teeth together to keep from saying anything.

“Look at me, goddamnit.” His heavy voice boomed, echoed inside her ears.

Emma’s gaze lifted from her shoes and landed on her father’s face. A lit cigarette dangled from his lips. She slowly inhaled as deep as she could, and resolved not to breathe again until whatever he had planned for them was over.

“I got one question for you two. How come Colored George knows so damn much about my kids? And what the hell were you two doing in that store? Begging for candy like some trailer trash. Besides that, I told you a million times not to talk to strangers, not to go near Buttonwood.”

Emma broke one of the rules of silence Greg taught her and spoke back. “He’s not a stranger. He’s my friend. He likes me... and... I talk to him sometimes. He’s really nice. And he wanted to give me some candy. He invited us to come to his store. What’s so bad about that?”

She didn’t realize she was crying until the tears wet her cheeks.

He glared at her.

She’d stepped over the line and knew what awaited her couldn’t be avoided. Her father swung at her like a windmill gone berserk, hitting her on the face, head, and shoulders, slamming her into the kitchen table, then knocking her against the wall. He lost his balance and stumbled to the floor.

Greg kneeled next to him, his fists pounding on their father’s chest. “It’s not her fault. I’m the one who wanted to go. Hit me, big man. She’s just a little girl.” Greg’s face reddened as his father pushed him aside, stood and regained his balance.

He grabbed Greg’s arm and jerked him to his feet. When their father unbuckled his belt, Emma froze. The strap whipped through the loops in his trousers and coiled, like a snake about to strike. He thrust the belt forward. The silver tip of the buckle cut a gash in Greg’s cheek—a piece of flesh gouged from beneath his right eye. Blood gushed.

Emma screamed.

Her mother pushed her aside and grabbed a knife in her right hand, while the thin fingers of her left hand splayed across their father’s chest. “If you lay another hand on him, I’ll use this. So help me God, Calvin. I will.”

Greg and Emma scattered like mice into their bedrooms. Emma hid, like she always did, in her closet. She closed the door and stared at herself in the attached mirror. The hems of her tattered dresses brushed over the bruise already spreading across her cheek like blue ink.

A few minutes later, her mother opened her closet door, a look of terror on her face. “Come with me. We’re taking Greg to the emergency room.”

A blood-stained towel wrapped around a plastic bag of ice covered Greg’s cheek as their mother drove to the hospital. Emma stood next to the gurney while the curved needle dove into her brother’s flesh and surfaced again and again. She held his hand and cried harder than he did.

When the doctor asked how Greg had gotten the cut, her mother lied. Emma and Greg kept silent. It was always best to say nothing. She’d known that all along, but today she’d broken her own rule and look what happened to Greg.

For the rest of her life, every time she stood in a hospital emergency room, she would remember that night with her brother. His smooth, apple-faced cheek pieced back together—black thread X-ing his skin like a tic-tac-toe game nobody won.

* * *

It was strange how Lillianna had always stopped the memories with the beatings and never took herself beyond. She never before tried to see anything that happened afterwards. In retrospect, she supposed she didn’t want to see the rest. Hating him came easily if she remembered only pain and the times he’d hurt her. It was harder if she allowed herself the other moments. But for whatever reason, this time she progressed beyond the beating she and Greg took and into the next scene.

Later that night, Greg tucked safely into his bed and their father asleep, Emma again wedged herself into the closet corner, behind the lopsided line of clothes.

Her mother didn’t say anything, just slipped inside and pulled the closet door closed behind her. Then she yanked the string beside the bulb and light flooded over both of them. Her mother slumped on the hardwood floor, folded in on herself, her head nestled in her hands while sobs engulfed her. She made no attempt to coax Emma out from behind the clothes and, for what seemed a long time, she cried while her daughter watched and listened to her mother break apart inside.

It was the first time she’d seen her mother cry like that and she remembered it so clearly because her mother wanted something. She sensed it, even then, but didn’t quite understand the need so she couldn’t respond. Until that night, Emma had believed her mother was rock solid. But with the light from the naked bulb in the closet washing over her as if suddenly lit up from within, Emma saw the hollowness. Her mother was empty and fragile beyond Emma’s belief. It terrified her, seeing someone she’d consistently believed strong, stable and predictable, diminished like that.

After a while, Emma couldn’t stand it any longer and climbed over the shoes and rubber boots to curl up next to her mother.

Cassandra wrapped her arm around Emma, and she nestled under it, her face against her mother’s soft breast.

“I don’t think I can keep on going, Emma girl. I’ve reached the end of my rope.” Her mother’s tears dripped onto Emma’s neck. They lost track of the time spent huddled into the safety of that small closet.

Finally, she held Emma away and looked at her—not at her, really, but beyond her daughter and into her own thoughts. “It’s time for bed, honey. I’ll run the water for your bath.”

Relieved by the mundane, every night normalcy of what she said, Emma loosened her muscles and words came. “Where’s Dad?”

“He’s sound asleep. We won’t see him again until morning. And, as usual, it’ll surprise me if he remembers any of it.”

“Why was he so mad? Colored George is a nice man, Mom. He really is. And he asked us to come for the candy.”

She took a long time to respond, and it made Emma think there might be more than one answer, and her mother needed a few minutes to choose the one she thought best, the one she wanted her daughter to hear.

“Bad things can happen in Buttonwood, especially to little girls. Not everyone is nice, and you can’t be sure who to trust.”

“Nothing bad happened. Colored George gave us both handfuls of candy for no money. Just because he likes to hear me play my clarinet in the woods.”

Her mother didn’t say anything else but returned later to tuck Emma in. It was something she didn’t do very often, and Emma liked it a lot.

“You got a bruise on your cheek, honey. Does it hurt?”

Her mother had that look on her face grownups get when you know they can hardly endure what just happened, a terrifying look of sympathy.

“Not much,” she lied.

“You have to learn to listen, Emma. It’s for your own good. You’re just a little girl. You don’t know all the bad things, but your father and I do. You have to mind what he tells you.”

“I’m sorry, Mom. Is Greg gonna be all right?”

“Yes. He’ll have a scar, though.” She shook her head, eyes big and sad, then kissed Emma’s cheek and left the room.

“Would you leave the hall light on and my door cracked just a little? And close the bathroom door... please.” Her hands played with the hem on her sheets, fingertips caressing the stitches. Her mother had no idea how much Emma thought about bad things. She was afraid of the dark, of bogeymen and bears whose black shadows crept across her walls at night, especially if the bathroom door was open.

 

Baltimore, Maryland

Wednesday, September 27, 1995

 

Jolted back into the present by the sound of laughter in the hotel corridor, Lillianna stood, then wandered around the room for a couple minutes. This box where she spent her evenings closed in on her, leaving nowhere to run and nothing to distract her from remembering.

Lillianna examined the old hurts again and again in her mind, the false starts, all those beginnings in a world she called the past like she believed they could tell her who she was, or who she might have become. Perhaps that was it, after all. More than unraveling the complicated threads of her father, Lillianna wanted those photographs to tell her about her young self. And they did.

Outside, the thin, crescent moon shone, bright in the midnight sky. It was autumn all right, and there was no denying it. Even in the daytime when she walked around the hospital grounds, she could smell the decaying maple leaves, just as if she’d turned the clock back thirty-five years and roamed the woods behind their house in Collins Park. Certain moments never changed. They just never stopped being a part of you, but Lillianna was a grown woman and ready to put the bogeymen to bed.

After returning to her chair at the round table, she flipped a page in the album but needed to finish the other memory first and carried it into the next day when her father woke up sober.

 

New Castle, Delaware

Summer 1956

 

Daylight had not yet ventured as far as the window of Emma’s bedroom. The pink, stucco walls were still dark and shadowed with the night’s ghosts when she woke to find him there. He’d moved her desk chair next to the bed and sat watching her sleep. At first, she pretended she didn’t see him and clamped her eyes tight. When she re-opened them, the sun had found the glass panes, and the room was washed in light. Afraid he would hit her again, she yanked the covers over her head.

“Hey, Em. It’s okay. Wake up, sleepyhead. I’m not gonna hurt you.” He nudged the blanket down inch by inch until only her eyes peered out from beneath it. Her father smiled.

Her chest tightened. “You still mad at me, Dad?”

“I’m not mad at you. I never was.” He talked to his bedroom slippers. “This isn’t gonna be easy for you to understand, but I was mad at me. I made a little extra money on a paneling job yesterday. Then I headed for the track, thinking I could turn it into more. I wanted to win enough to buy those bicycles you and Greg been wanting—the ones with the fancy chrome fenders. But instead, I lost all of it. Then I got drunk to make it go away.” He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear but still didn’t look at her.

“But it always comes back, Dad.”

“I know that, honey.” He sat on the edge of the bed, gathered Emma into his arms. “I’m so sorry, Em. I never want to hurt you or Greg. I don’t know what gets into me. Sometimes I think I’m back in that war. I know I shouldn’t drink. It’s poison, just like with my pa.”

“It’s okay, Dad. Greg and me, we don’t need new bikes.”

“I’m sorry, Em. I shouldn’t have hit you. And I’m sick inside over what I did to Greg. I should have just explained that...” Her father hunched his shoulders and ran out of words.

This time, Emma understood her father had raged because of his fear something might happen to her and Greg.

“You know I love you. I’d do anything for you, Em. Anything.”

He brushed the back of his good hand across her bruised cheek and looked so pitiful, she thought he was going to cry.

“It’s okay... really it is. Don’t be sad. Mommy said Greg will have a little scar. That’s all.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and kept them there until he pulled them away. “Would you stop drinking for me, Daddy?”

He was quiet for a moment, then turned to leave, but stopped in her doorway and stared at her, his eyes still bloodshot. “I wish it was that easy, honey. But I promise I’ll try. I got a lot to regret about my life. No little girl should have to see her daddy…” He lowered his head, and his shoulders shook. It took a minute before Emma realized he was crying.

When he turned and disappeared into the hallway, both her gaze and her heart followed him.

He’d made that same promise on a dozen other occasions. And every time he did, she believed with all her little girl heart this time would be different.

 

Baltimore, Maryland

Wednesday, September 27, 1995

 

Now that Lillianna had allowed herself to remember, she couldn’t seem to stop. She remembered the danger, the violence, erupted only when her father drank. Sober, he was kind and never raised a hand against her mother, Greg or Emma. But he drank repeatedly. He made promises he couldn’t keep, and he didn’t stop drinking until after their mother died and Emma no longer had anything to do with him. After a while, she believed she’d stopped caring.

There was one thing she should have learned early in life, and she thought she had, but she hadn’t. In truth, Lillianna had to do her own drinking before she really learned it, but she knew it now positively and without a doubt. If you were drinking, sadness made you drunker, and if you were sad, drinking made you hopeless.

It occurred to Lillianna her father had spent more than half his life feeling hopeless. With the thought came a sensation she couldn’t name, a glimpse of something deeper she’d felt before but always let slip away. Here, at the end of this different memory, it returned. But no matter how much time she spent exploring it, there was nothing she could do to alter the fact she’d spent nearly twenty years pretending she didn’t have a past, pretending her father was dead.

As the moon shifted, the darkness outside the window turned into a mirror, and Lillianna stood staring at herself. An abrupt silence filled her head, and then something passed into her awareness—a flash of insight, ethereal, yet somehow still defined. It was like the instant when a school of goldfish pivoted in exact unity, and a glimmer of orange moved ever so briefly beneath the surface of their fish pond.

She’d allowed a different truth to enter her consciousness. That gilded time when she had loved her father.