by Lilly Pink
All the while, he’d raged at her, telling her that she smelled of that wet dog she’d been rolling around with in the barn. If words wouldn’t work on her he said, if she was too thick in the skull to follow instructions, he would use his other methods of persuasion. Yes, by God, that was exactly what he would do.
“Daddy!” she shrieked, cowering with her hands covering her face and using a name she hadn’t called this terrifying man by in many years. “Daddy, please! Stop! You’re hurting me, don’t you see that?”
“You’re going to learn your lesson, by God, yes you are. You’re going to learn your lesson with fist and with fire!”
He was like a man possessed, fists raining down upon her, spit flying from his mouth as he snarled. He looked very close to shifting and if he did that it would be the first time in her whole life she’d ever seen him shift because he’d lost control. The idea that he might do that with her had terrified her and the use of her girlhood name for him had been an instinctual action of self-preservation.
Although she hadn’t known that was what she was doing, hadn’t meant it as anything manipulative, it had worked. Her father’s hands had trembled in the air for a moment longer before dropping to his sides. He ran his hand over his mouth, wiping away the sweat and spittle there as he worked hard to slow his breathing back down to something resembling normal. As she watched, his eyes began to return to normal as well. They lost the tinge of silver that had been slowly closing in around his pupils and returned to their standard grassy green.
“Let this be a lesson you don’t forget, Daughter. The next time won’t go so well for you.”
“Yes, Father.”
“That boy is not for you. Do you hear me? He’s not for you and you’re not to go anywhere near him, not ever again.”
“Yes, Father.”
His eyes narrowed, flashing at her with a momentary silver brilliance that sent her heart straight into her throat. He took a step forward, making her want to move backwards desperately only there was nowhere for her to go. She cowered with her back up against the door, feeling the cold metal of the door handle digging into her flesh so hard it would leave a bruise.
“Make sure you understand me. There will be no other chances in this matter. If I catch you with that boy again, I’ll kill you.”
“Father!”
“There’s no discussion. If I catch you with him, if I even so much as catch a whiff of the mutt on you, I’ll kill you. I’d rather you be dead then disgrace our family with those gypsy trash. Now go on, go upstairs before I decide you need more of a lesson.”
Eloise had done exactly as she was told, flying up the stairs two at a time and not daring to look back behind her for fear her father had decided to follow. She had practically vaulted herself into her room, shutting the door as softly as she could manage and retrieving its little silver key. She thrust it into the lock and then let out a sob of relief, beyond thankful to know that her father would not be able to follow her inside.
She had lifted her decanter of spirits with a trembling hand, tossed back a drink and then another, and curled up in bed in a little ball. For the first time in her life she had cried herself to sleep, cried until she felt empty and broken and terribly unsure of where she was supposed to go from there.
She slept hard and without moving so that when she awoke, grudgingly and with almost as much fear sitting in her gut as there had been the night before, her body felt as stiff as a body left all night on the table of a cold morgue.
“It wasn’t,” she said in a thick voice, eyes shut tightly against a world she wasn’t sure she knew how to face. “It wasn’t real, it wasn’t. Wasn’t!”
Even as she spoke, however, she found herself incapable of believing her own lie. Her hands crept up to her face, fingertips exploring the mess her father had left there, and she winced, biting her tongue to keep from crying out loud. He’d gone to work on her, alright, gone to work on her and left his mark so that there would be no forgetting. And what did that say about her future in the home, however many days she was meant to spend there?
Now that the Wright’s patriarch had resorted to such physical violence by way of punishment, was she supposed to believe that it would not happen again? Was she supposed to believe that it was an isolated incident that she would never be made to suffer again? Was she really?
“Miss? Miss, what the devil is going on in there? The door don’t want to budge for me!”
“Em!” she gasped to herself, sitting up straight in her bed with muscles crying out in pain at the quickness of her movement. “Oh no, Em.”
She had completely forgotten about the maid she loved so well. The world she was living in now didn’t seem to be the same one she’d lived in the morning before and that was the world Em Cormier belonged to. This new world, this dark, uncertain world where her entire body ached and her lips were so swollen she could hardly press them together without crying out in pain, was not a world where things like maids made any kind of sense at all.
“I’m alright, Em!” she called out in a weak voice that wouldn’t have convinced a stranger, let alone a woman who had known her for all her life. “I’m just taking your advice for once.”
“My advice?” the woman answered suspiciously, trying the door handle again to no avail. “Which advice would you be going on about, now?”
“About learning to take care of myself, of course! I’ve made my own breakfast and now I’m going to take on even more responsibility. I’m like a new woman, a changed woman, and I’ve got you to thank.”
“Is that so? Well are ya going to sit in your room all day? Is that part of what you learned?”
“No, of course not! I’ll be down in just a little while, I promise.”
“That’s alright, I guess. But…”
“Yes?”
“Are you alright? Are you really? Because you don’t sound so, if you don’t mind me saying. You don’t sound like yourself at all.”
Eloise lowered her head and clamped her hands tightly over her mouth. She had to do so to keep herself from sobbing great racking sobs she would never be able to hide. She couldn’t let that happen, she just couldn’t. If she allowed those sobs to start she feared she would never be able to stop them again and then where would she be?
And so she bit down on the inside of her cheek until it bled, grateful for the pain because it helped her get a hold of herself. When she was able to speak again, she put on the greatest show she could manage, concentrating with everything she had on making her voice sound light and airy.
“I’m perfectly alright. I just didn’t sleep well, that’s all. I’ll be down in a little while; don’t you worry about me.”
“If you say so. Just make sure you’re taking care of yourself miss, okay? I want to see you taking care of yourself.”
“Oh Em, I will. You worry too much. You know that, don’t you?”
“Maybe I do, but I mean what I say, all the same.”
Eloise heard Em’s skirt rustling as she moved on down the hallway, ready to go about the rest of the seemingly endless housework she still had to do. She felt a moment of weakness in which she wanted nothing more than to call out to Em to wait, to wait and come back so that she could tell her what on earth she was supposed to do now.
She felt that weakness and instead of giving into it she clutched her duvet in her fists and waited for the urge to pass. She knew it would and it did and once it was done she forced herself to get out of bed. She didn’t want to do that either, not one bit, but she made herself do it all the same. Suddenly it occurred to her that every second she stayed in bed was another second when she was letting her father’s brutality win. She had gone to bed shocked and feeling as if she had perhaps deserved what her father had done to her but in the morning sun she knew that wasn’t so.
Because she knew it so completely, she walked across her bedroom floor and into her bathroom where she sat down decidedly at her large vanity. When she looked into her mirror, she for
ced herself not to cry out loud. Her face was hardly recognizable to her. Her bottom lip was split and one cheekbone was sporting a deep cut.
Her right eye was swollen and bruised with a terrible black eye. Some of the blood vessels in the eye had actually burst. Looking at herself she thought that she should probably be crying, only she couldn’t muster up the tears. She didn’t feel like this was her life she was living, not anymore.
It was her first time having an out of body experience and part of her wondered where her lion’s spirit had gone in all of this. She had always been sure that if she were to find herself in a fight she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from shifting. Maybe if it hadn’t been her father that’s exactly what she would have done, but it had been him and so she hadn’t done a thing.
Sitting there and doing her best to cover up the uncoverable evidence of what her father had done to her, she wished she had done things differently. She wished she had at least tried to protect herself and resolved to do so when she greeted her parents in the dining room with their breakfast.
That was the thought that she carried with her when she descended the stairs and entered the room where her mother and father sat sipping their morning tea. Because of this, when she saw their reaction to her she was hit with that disembodied feeling all over again.
“You’re late,” her mother quipped, glancing up at Eloise and then returning to her paper. “Your tea will be cold. Shall I ring for Mrs. Cormier to bring you another cup?”
“Um, no. That’s perfectly fine. I don’t want any tea.”
“Fine, suit yourself. Have whatever you like.”
Eloise stood and looked at her mother, feeling utterly astounded and hating herself for it. Her mother had heard. She knew her mother had heard and yet she had not even a sympathetic glance to give her only child.
As for her father, he looked up at her and smiled, smiled the way he would have on any other day, on any day when he had not spent the previous night beating on her. She was so stunned by this that she could not open her mouth and say the things she had imagined herself saying as she walked down the stairs.
This was probably a good thing, seeing as any one of those things would only have made the situation worse than it already was, which was hard to believe but was also true. What she did was just stand there looking at him, her face an impassive mask that hid the seething anger that broiled just below her surface.
“Eloise! We thought you were going to sleep all day! Em woke you up, I suppose?”
“No. I woke up on my own.”
“Did you now? Well, that’s uncommon, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps. I wasn’t feeling quite myself.”
Her mother winced a little at that comment, something that made Eloise feel absurdly vindicated, but her father didn’t appear to be troubled in any way. He didn’t look troubled because he wasn’t, Eloise realized. He wasn’t troubled one bit because he felt entirely justified in what he had done. The realization hit her every bit as hard as his fists had and she had to fight the urge to throw up.
It wasn’t like there would have been anything to throw up anyway and the last thing she wanted to do is let her parents see how completely her father’s actions had sent her reeling. She did not want them to see the thing she had just come to understand about them, the thing that made her heart want to break.
That thing was that her parents were not the people she had always believed them to be. And it was more than that, unfortunately. The thing she had realized and was being forced to realize over and over again, coming in waves like the nausea of a really bad stomach virus, was that her parents were not good people.
It wasn’t only the fact that she was now painfully aware of the fact that her parents were not the heroes her girlhood self had made them out to be, they were monsters. Not the kinds of monsters that hid under children’s beds, but monsters all the same and the kind she wanted nothing more to do with.
They were worse than the kinds born of children’s fears because they were so difficult to suss out. She knew that now and if she hadn’t, her father’s next words would have driven the point home like a railroad spike through the lid of her coffin.
“Have you heard the news yet, Daughter?”
“No,” she answered slowly, feeling stupid in the wake of her father’s unnervingly chipper voice, “not that I know of, I don’t think. What news?”
“News of the circus, darling. That circus you were so set on.”
“It wasn’t a circus. It was a carnival.”
“Yes, yes,” he responded dismissively, waving her words off with the wave of one hand, “whatever you say. They’re all the same, don’t you think? Anyway, they’re going.”
“Going? What do you mean, going? Going where?”
“Who cares where? All that matters is that they’re going away from here. I took it upon myself to gather up a few of the other gentlemen of the area to pay those carnival fellows a visit.”
“You didn’t.”
“Of course, I did,” he said in a sharp voice, his eyes taking on just enough of the angry look of the night before to shut her up again. “And why wouldn’t I? They’re a menace, trash marring our little piece of paradise. Needless to say, we made them see how much better it would be for everyone if they cut their run here short. I’m sure you’ll agree. It would be nonsense if you didn’t.”
“Of course,” she managed to choke out, her voice sounding like a stranger’s, “nonsense.”
“Good! I’m glad you agree. Now, on that note, your mother and I are going to pay a call on the Whitmores. They’re having some kind of horrible brunch. I’m sure it will be awful but we should really make an appearance.”
“Alright.”
“Alright? What an answer. Would you like to come? You’re invited, of course. If you like.”
Eloise could see from the look on her father’s face and from the way her mother refused to look at her at all that neither one of them wanted her to come along with them. That was just fine with her because she had no interest in going anywhere with them, neither one of them.
If she had things her way she would never go anywhere with them again. She wanted to get away and miraculously it appeared that she was about to get her opportunity. With this in mind, Eloise begged off of the dreaded brunch and instead excused herself back to bed, claiming a headache.
She stayed in her room until she heard the front door open and close, then the engine of the car ignite and fade into the distance. Because of what she was, her ears were impeccable and she knew the moment it was safe for her to make her escape. She flew around her room, shoving things haphazardly into a weekend bag without paying any real mind to what she was choosing to take. It didn’t matter, in the end. All that mattered was that she get away.
Everything else could be taken care of afterwards, one way or another. There was only one thing she regretted, and that was Em. The idea of leaving Em and not seeing her again, maybe ever, was just a little bit devastating and the only thing that could possibly keep her where she was.
Except that she couldn’t stay where she was, not anymore. She couldn’t do it and be happy and so she would not do it at all. Choking back tears, she listened for the sounds of the woman in the house. She could hear her down in the basement, doing the endless amounts of laundry the three of them generated, the machines making more noise than one would ever think possible. She could even hear Em’s humming to herself, some kind of Irish lullaby Eloise had been hearing from her since she was small.
Eloise could hear these things because of what she was and the things that being a shifter allowed her to do. Em, on the other hand, wouldn’t be able to hear her at all, which meant she wouldn’t hear her go. The lovely mothering woman would simply go on with the washing and then move onto her other chores and by the time she realized something was amiss, Eloise would be long gone.
Thinking about that, Eloise did let out a sob. It was a short, strangled sound and she only
allowed herself the one, but it was a sound she would hear echoing in her dreams for many years to come.
“There’s no time for this,” she whispered fiercely to herself, desperate to psych herself up enough to do the only thing left for her to do. “Stop acting like such a baby.”
She resented the words even though they came from her own mouth, but they were enough to do the trick. Quickly, as quickly as possible so as to keep herself from chickening out, she gripped her bag in one shaking hand, took a last look around her room, and left. She shut first her bedroom door and then the bathroom, careful to move as deliberately as possible to keep from attracting any unwanted attention.
It wasn’t until she could no longer see her home that she started to run. Once she started, she found that she couldn’t stop and probably would have gone on running forever if she hadn’t run directly into the heart of what had so recently been the carnival but was now only a mess of angry looking gypsies and runaways.