The memory of how Thad came to be had not waned in twenty-four years:
Every night for two weeks April had gone to the church to practice piano until the song she would play that coming Sunday was something memorized in the tips of her fingers. She’d turned off the lights and was headed to lock up, the sanctuary so still that even her muffled screams echoed.
There was little light to be had, which made it hard to see who was holding her there, her vision so frosted by tears that everything blurred, impossible for her to see the man, just a shadow figure that smelled of corn liquor and Aqua Velva, the way he always did, the way he always did even on Sundays, even when he stood at the reverend’s side and broke bread, even when he dressed up as Santa Claus that one Christmas when the congregation gathered in the fellowship hall and held a cakewalk for the Aikens, who’d lost everything in a fire. Booze and cheap cologne, he’d always smelled like that, and that’s how she knew.
She didn’t need to see his face. She could smell him. She could smell him as he moved over her. She could smell him as if her face were buried in him. She could smell him from then on. She could smell him in the fragrance aisle at Walmart when she went to town. She could smell him any time someone who’d been drinking breathed. It was something she hadn’t forgotten, something she could never forget, not now, not ever, a smell nine months older than Thad, a smell that, to this day, left her helpless with fear, her body tightening to stone, her mind a furious turning.
The man who broke her had said to keep quiet, and she did. She kept quiet when her stomach started to swell and the kids she’d grown up with called her a whore. Having sex didn’t make you a whore, but getting pregnant did. She kept quiet when her parents kicked her out of the house, and when they left the church and moved out of Little Canada from shame that they’d raised her. She kept quiet when Thad was old enough to ask about his father and she could barely look at him and all she could do was lie and say the man was Cherokee. When George Trantham forced her to go back to that same church on Sundays, when she had to look at the man who’d hurt her sitting piously behind the reverend, she shoveled it all deep inside and never said a word. But all of that anger and all of that hatred was reflected onto Thad, the one reminder that could not be buried.
April relived all of those feelings as she knelt on the floor and cried into her hands, a queasiness in her stomach that built till she was certain she’d be sick. The way Thad had rushed her and pinned her to the floor seemed some eerie revelation that her son’s deepest truths were rooted in blood and could not be blotted out or erased. He was his father’s son. In her mind, he was no different from the man who’d raped her. But for the first time in all those years, the sickness that rose with the resurfacing of memory filled her more with rage than fear. She stared through the open doorway into the light outside where Thad had disappeared and prayed that the sun would burn him alive. She prayed that he would be incinerated and in that moment her memory would be erased and it would be as if he’d never existed at all.
“I wish he were dead,” April said under her breath, wiping the tears from her cheeks with both hands as if she were washing her face.
“What did you say?” Aiden asked.
Neither of them had moved from the floor since Thad walked out, and these were the first words spoken between them.
“I wish he were dead,” she repeated, so matter-of-factly that it was clear how many times she must’ve thought it before.
“You don’t mean that,” Aiden said. He stood and looked down on her.
“I’ve never meant anything more in my life.”