I didn’t know where I was running.
It didn’t matter.
Through the woods. Fast as I could.
Branches whipped at my face. Thorns ripped my pants. I tripped over a tree root and went down.
I was multitasking. Running and thinking. Thinking and running.
When he’d looked at me on the couch that night. That gagging nausea that overtook me like a bolt from the blue.
It was Father’s look.
Those times they’d get out the video camera and pose me. Open your legs a little bit more . . . good girl . . . that’s right . . .
Jake had been trying to watch the Knicks that night. When I opened my legs, he’d watched me. That same sick, sweaty stare—why I’d almost thrown up.
Those same sick pictures. And I had thrown up.
I found myself in the clearing of yellow grass. Stumbling past the gray stone.
I whispered a prayer. “Sorry, Jenny . . . sorry . . . God bless . . .”
I was in mourning.
For her. For me. There wasn’t a difference now.
I kept running.
Lurching into the thick trees. My heart hammering.
It started around four. Her problems. One day she was a perfectly normal little girl. Then one day she wasn’t. She just changed.
Four years old. When something else changed. When Jake must’ve stopped reading Jenny bedtime stories and begun making up his own. When he began paying her early-morning visits, with Laurie and Ben still safely asleep.
He’d paid her a visit that last morning—after she’d dutifully locked her brother in the downstairs closet during a game of hide-and-seek.
He’s locked in, she’d whispered to her imaginary friend that morning. Be right up . . .
Then she’d tried to set Ben on fire.
She looked like she wanted to kill me, Ben said, the morning he’d woken up with a pillow over his face.
I understand, Jenny. I do. I do.
Ben wasn’t the one being sexually abused every night.
He was magically exempt.
Those friends of hers—them, too. Toni and Jaycee. Able to go to sleep at night without having to wonder if they’d be getting a visit from the tooth fairy.
Jenny couldn’t lash out at her tormentor. At Jake. It’s not allowed—the fucked-up heart won’t allow it. The rest of the world would have to do. Anyone within arm’s length.
What had Toni said? You were violent. As in physically the fuck harmful to me and Jaycee.
The trees were thicker here. Crowded together at jagged cross angles. I felt a sharp stitch in my side. Stitch one, slip two . . .
Snakes.
The one part of Ben’s dream Krakow hadn’t bothered explaining. Maybe the symbolism was lost on a priest—at least, a priest who wasn’t ass-fucking altar boys.
Snakes equal dicks. Dreams 101.
I wasn’t aware till this second that I was crying. This whole time tearing ass through the woods. Sobbing. Snot and tears and scratches making a mess of me.
Then I heard it.
I was making the tangled twigs and roots snap, crackle, and pop.
So was someone else.
First my racket, then seconds later another one. Like an echo.
We weren’t in Tom Sawyer’s cave.
He was coming after me.
I went down again. Twisted an ankle. When I sprang back up, pain shot straight through my leg like an electric current.
I needed to move faster. Faster and faster and faster. I was slowing down.
I saw a patch of light through the trees.
I went for it.
When I stumbled out the other side, gasping for air, holding my side, I was staring straight into the sky. As if I’d been running toward heaven.
I was.
I was standing on a cliff. Eagle Cliff.
Jake had burst out of the brush and was standing there blocking the only way back.
You sick motherfucker.”
This time I understood I’d stated it straight out loud. Screamed it.
“Daughter fucker. Jenny fucker.”
It tumbled out of me—an incoherent torrent of rage. I knew I wasn’t just shrieking at him. At Jake. Father and Mother were here. See them? I was letting them know what they’d done. To that little girl they’d bought for a bag of crystal meth. The girl in the closet. The girl with the Raggedy Ann mouth. The girl they’d strapped to a bed. The girl who’d grown up and wanted to be anyone on earth but Jobeth.
“You had no right . . . you destroyed her . . . you killed her . . . you did . . .”
“I didn’t mean it. It was an accident,” Jake stated calmly.
Huh? What?
Jake had killed her? Jake . . . not Ben?
I’d been raging at him about murdering the child inside. Her tiny innocent soul.
He’d murdered the child.
Jake had.
“You told Laurie it was Ben. All these years. Blamed it on him.”
Jake didn’t bother answering. His eyes were scanning the surroundings—the thick trees . . . the flat area of cliff . . . the steep drop.
And now, what should have been obvious the moment I’d turned around and seen my only way out was blocked suddenly became ice clear. My anger morphed into something else. Fear. Searing heat into sudden bone-cold chill.
“Too bad . . . ,” Jake said.
How far was I from the edge of the cliff? Five steps, maybe less.
“You getting on that computer. You seeing. I loved her, you know. She loved me. We had a special relationship.”
I almost gagged.
“Is that what you call it?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand fine. I had a special relationship too. My parents were real fuckers. I was the fucked.”
“Jenny loved me.”
“She didn’t have a choice. She was six. You did.”
Jake shook his head.
“Shit. I really wish you hadn’t gone on that computer. Fuck . . . fuck . . . fuck . . .” Like he was wrestling with what I was forcing him to do. One thing to have an accident. Another to make someone else have one.
Eagle Cliff is like a hundred million feet high . . .
“I’ll keep my mouth shut. Just like you said.”
Jake snorted. “Sure you will.”
“It’s mutually beneficial. You’re right. I don’t want to go to jail.” A strange thing to beg for your life. I’d begged for plenty of other things—food, money, a place to sleep, not to have to walk into a pitch-black closet or get strapped to a bed or let a stranger in a tracksuit come into my room. This time was for keeps.
“Sorry. Neither do I.” His face was flushed. Not just from running after me through heavy brush. From what he was about to do.
“Please . . .”
“Shhh . . .” He was walking toward me. Face flushed, eyes narrowed, arms out as if he were zeroing in for a hug.
When I first went to my new house, I would try to dodge them, dart past their outstretched arms and down into the basement, where I’d hide, shivering and terrified. I made it a few times. Mostly they’d manage to snag me—by my neck, my nightgown collar—then I’d be dragged back to bed. Tied down. Raped.
It felt like death. Every single time. It was death now. For real.
I almost got by him.
Almost.
He hooked me by my belt—the one Laurie bought me that day at the Roosevelt Field Mall. Jammed his fingers in there good and tight and yanked me back hard. The back of my head hit the hard stone. I felt the jolt of pain all the way down my spine. He began dragging me to the edge of the cliff.
I fought back.
Hard as I could.
Just like I’d done at the edge of the sink that morning when they’d forced my chin up so they could sew my mouth together. Just like those times in the basement, when they’d yank me out from behind those mildewed cardboard boxes stacked with old Superman comics—I wasn’t Super Invisible Girl—and I’d imagine Superman flying right out of those comic books to save me like the girl in the burning house.
He didn’t ever.
Not once.
Eighteen years old and way past believing in comic book heroes and my last thought on earth was that: Superman coming in to cradle me in his two superstrong arms as I went flying out into space.
Because I could swear—really swear—he was there flying toward me—as I tumbled, tumbled, to my death.