part0080

H is face warps in my dreams, and I see it even now, when I’m awake, staring at my devil from across the white table cloth. The flame of the candle makes the shadows stretch waywardly across his face, his eyes narrowed as he takes me in from where he sits. My mother’s eyes dance between us as her lips purse and her arms cross over her chest.

Neither one of them attempt to hide it. Contempt mixed with lust, and the tension swirls above my head like cigarette smoke in a stuffy room. Beneath their turmoil lies my shame, quiet as a mouse.

My father left when I was about three or four, and unfortunately, the only blurred memories that I have of him aren’t good ones. Ultimately, he was an abusive drunk with no ambition. They’d fight constantly, until one day, he disappeared. It didn’t take long for my mother’s beauty to win another heart. Liam’s .

“Emily, how is everything?” My mother asks, but her tone shows no love or concern. Instead, it drips hostility as her eyes burn into me like acid. I’m a nuisance. She makes it known.

Clearing my throat, my eyes flit to hers before I quickly divert them. Shifting uncomfortably in my chair, my sweaty hands clamp together in my lap as I dig my thumbnail into my palm. “Fine.”

I hear her fingernail clink against her wine glass. My answer apparently isn’t good enough. “Do you have a steady job yet, or are you still doing odd jobs ?”

My eyes dart to hers as my heart palpitates. I want to tell her to go fuck herself. Somehow, I was expected to go to college. To live a “normal” life. To be “successful.” How? After what she allowed, I haven’t been able to lead a normal life. My life would’ve been very different had she done what a good mother would’ve done and put a stop to the abuse.

There’s a part of me that howls for retribution and weeps for all that I lost. Another part of me knows that I needed my misfortunes to become the artist that I am today.

Hurt is an integral part of the growing process, even when it eats away at you. Even when you feel like you’re dying, staring yourself down in the mirror, begging yourself to stop crying. To be strong. To be resilient. To be a hero, if not for anyone else, for yourself.

I still haven’t found the light inside of me, and if it’s there, it’s dim. My soul is ill lighted, full of cobwebs. What if everything happened differently? Who would I be?

My mother just did something that she’s never done before. I’m used to the daggers that she shoots at me every time that she sees me, but verbally? She’s always chosen to ignore what was right in front of her since I was sixteen years old; hiding behind a double paned window while she was pumped full of pills and drunk on cabernet. She numbed it. Always, and she still does.

I stare into her distant eyes. She isn’t here, but somewhere else where perverted husbands don’t exist. This is somehow the sixteen-year-old girl’s fault. I never felt her love. It was practically nonexistent. Her tight face pulls into a smirk, her eyes not matching the bottom half of her face, and her chest barely rises and falls as she dares me without a word.

The words sit on my tongue, waiting to escape, but nothing comes out. They remain trapped, just like they did when I was a teenager, staring out the window in the car while the silence wrapped around us like a vise. We never could communicate, and I never understood why.

I used to idolize my mother, hanging on for the ride during her single years. I always wondered why I didn’t look like her. Why my face wasn’t shaped like a heart, or why I didn’t have cupid’s bow lips. She was an absolute goddess in my eyes, and everyone that she met. She had a whimsical charm that she could turn on and off like a switch. Doting mother in front of teachers, and a spiteful tyrant behind closed doors. Her two personalities, yet only one was the truth. I saw it, and I learned from a young age that only I would know her true self. She didn’t see a point in hiding it behind closed doors.

To my mom, appearance was everything. Morals were to be cherry-picked from the good old bible, and she went to church every Sunday because “she loved dressing up pretty for the lord.” When I was younger, she was an enigma; each of her transgressions ignored by the little girl who only wanted to be loved by her mother. When I got older, I saw her for what she was: an imposter. Even a pretty smile can’t hide that fact when you realize that a façade is easy to pull off when you’re charming enough.

I lacked that charm. I wasn’t sexy, like her. I’d practice her signature “move” in the mirror – attempting to gracefully run my finger along my collar bone, then down the middle of my chest where my breasts would be, but I was a late bloomer. In fact, I never really bloomed at all. I was bony, sick looking, and odd. She was a beautiful, tanned blonde with an honest smile that she didn’t earn. I’d see her on the nights she’d have her “friends” come over. Sometimes, she’d tell me “just call him daddy. He’s nice.” More times than I’d like to count, I saw them stare at me from over her shoulder while they grabbed her ass cheeks in front of the sink.

When she met Liam, she thought she struck gold. He was doing well financially, and he was looking for a fool to fall into his trap. She was the fool. Liam didn’t hesitate to use his wealth to control my mother and, like me, she had the sickness, too – craving someone to hold onto her reins so that she didn’t lose it completely and go farther down the rabbit hole. She never was content, because she was looking for happiness in a person. She was looking for the very qualities that were destroying her.

It’s a cycle, and something tells me that she’s used to being objectified, though she never cared to talk to me about her younger years - except for the occasional drug induced hiccup. Still, I only understood sometimes. It depended on how many pills she took that day.

“Ang,” Liam says, his deep voice soothing as her eyes flit to his. The display is disturbingly subservient, and it makes me want to slap. Not only did she look the other way for all these years, but her eyes never cease to worship him whenever he talks to her like that… smooth as a cat’s purr.

“You need to calm down,” he continues, his tone becoming sterner with each word – his energy blanketing everyone around the table; sucking the words from both women that he had a hand in destroying until they looked at him like he was a god… a sick god put in place to control what they thought was inevitable. To keep safe, because we were bound to be unstable.

It was a curse in our blood that my mother and I only communicated with a look, and that look always meant one thing: “Try me, bitch.” It wasn’t a mother-daughter relationship. Instead, it was a competition, and after I saw her in the window the night that Liam took my virginity, it was game on.

Her lip trembles and her eyes brim with tears, more emotion than I’ve seen from her in a long time. It takes her a minute, but finally, the words come out as a sob. “You’re fucking her. You’ve been fucking her.”

“Angela,” he warns, his voice low and menacing as his large hands turn into fists. “My relationship with Emmy is none of your concern. As far as us, I’m going to need you to remember a couple of things. First, I took your little whore ass in and took care of you when you wouldn’t have had a chance otherwise. I disciplined Emily, and I was a solid man in her life. I would consider responding to your last statement, but we won’t be getting into that right now. We’re in the middle of a fucking restaurant, and I so happen to have a client right over there.”

He pauses, raising his whisky to two elderly men across the way, flashing his Prince Charming smile the entire time. They return the gesture. My legs tremble when his hand slinks under the table before he begins massaging my thigh. His touch is always incredibly erotic, because he taught me how to find pleasure in everything wrong. It became a drug.

His ability to speak a threat with a kind tone is both frightening and addicting. Sometimes, I find myself acting against him, just so that he’ll deliver the pain and scrutiny that I deserve for never being good enough.

Mom lets out a deep sigh, more tears rolling down her cheeks as Liam watches her, his face straight, yet his eyes reflecting disgust. She flinches, and I realize that his other hand is on her leg, but instead of massaging her, like me, he’s disciplining her.

I smile, and I feel guilt almost immediately afterward. Part of me is jealous that she and him are together every day, miserable as they are. My desire to hold him at times is unbearable, and I find myself squirming in bed every time I wake up, needing his touch more than anything, craving his sex like it’s something that I require. He was always stern, initially giving me “tough love,” but it was his need to control every single aspect of my life. When I was a child, I was a nuisance, but when I became what he desired, he showed me a love that felt safe – a lust that was powerful enough to keep me grounded.

My head rests against the back of the seat as Liam’s hand runs along my thigh. I wrap my fingers around his, and his thumb sweeps across my knuckles. Everything about this moment seems sweet, but it’s nothing more than a sick dependency – on my end, not his. If Liam somehow disappeared from my life, it would be because he removed himself, because my depravity couldn’t bring me to do it. As much as I hate to admit it, I’d be devastated. Everything about normalcy frightened me after that night in the backyard. I allowed him to take it, because he was going to, anyway. He got more ballsy as time went on. Why would he care? Mom already established that sex with her daughter wasn’t necessarily off-limits, so long as nobody talked about it.

When I turned eighteen, Liam immediately moved me out of my childhood home, originally to the nicer side of town, right beside his office building in the shiny, promising city. At that time, he was with me all the time. Every night, we’d live like a couple, and we’d have sex constantly. That was our relationship. Rough, painful sex and a dominant/submissive relationship that went far beyond the bedroom. He controlled everything, down to my “agenda” for the day, and I let him. His jealousy only got worse, which I also had mistaken as a “display of love.” He cares enough that you’re broken, Emmy. He knows how to fix you. First, he breaks you entirely. Then, he’ll mend you. One day.

Liam had already established that him paying for my expenses meant that I did what he said, no question. At that time, I didn’t necessarily think that our relationship was acceptable, but it was safe. If I had to leave the house, at least Liam would take care of me, so long as I listen . Everything was going okay, until Liam’s iron fist threw my fractured mind into one of the darkest periods of my life. I still never dug myself out.

The more mom would complain about the time and money spent on me, the less Liam would come around, leaving me alone in the large flat. I wasn’t allowed to leave. Liam said it was too dangerous out there. When I took a razor to my wrists, he took it all away – his company, his touch, the pain he disguised as affection… I didn’t want his money, only the comfort that he inevitably offered – strong arms wrapped around me after his hands delivered the blows.

That’s when I left and moved to the lower end part of town. I found my people there, in the squalor. Looks were deceiving. Love couldn’t be found in the suburbs, where the lawns were manicured and the white picket fences connected the neighbors. Instead, acceptance was discovered in a rundown bar, love was unearthed in a nickname, and happiness was each time I picked up my guitar. The moments were short, but sweet, and I found it addicting – even if those occasions weren’t meant to be everlasting.

Soon, my sadness became a black mass that followed me everywhere, threatening to swallow me whole. I missed Liam, but I fled. Nobody knew where I was, at least until my next suicide attempt. This time, I swallowed a bottle of my antidepressants. I woke to a somber Liam, shaking his head slowly as his large hands dangled between his tree trunk legs. “This is it, Emmy,” he said. “We can’t do this anymore.”

A child’s admiration is a feeble thing, and from the time I was sixteen, he was the only affection I knew. It didn’t matter that he tore me down all the years beforehand. All that mattered were his massive hands that felt safe, his body wrapping around me, keeping me warm, and the intimacy he provided, even though it was so wrong. I decided long ago that it was Liam that I wanted. Whether it was to spite my mother, or to fill some type of void is beyond me. I never took a moment to decipher why I felt so protective of my relationship with my stepfather, I just knew that I would do anything to keep him around. Which is exactly what I did, only each cry for help seemed to push him further away.

Liam ran a hand through his disheveled hair; the other rested on his hip as his chest heaved. His white dress shirt was now missing three buttons, and the dark hair on his chest was visible. His wedding band caught my eye, causing more tears to follow suit as I clung to the doorframe for dear life.

Something told me this was it. He’d finally given up on me. He couldn’t fix what he broke, so he was running. Still, I didn’t stop, even though I knew that my tears and words were no use. He had his mind set on leaving.

“You did this to me,” I sobbed, considering his dismal eyes. They told me everything in their emptiness. No words were needed, but I expected an explanation.

“Emily,” he growled. “My love can only get you so far. I can’t come here at three A.M. anymore, pounding on your door. Wondering if I’m going to have to bust it down one day, only to find you dead. Do you know what that would do to me, Emmy? I’d be devastated.”

The memory fades away as I continue to hold his hand. He stayed away for close to a year, and then one day he and mom got into a fight. Again, he was with me all the time until he went back to her once more. Repeatedly, I was his backup.