STRONGER (Runaway)

by Lexie Ray

  This was going to work because it had to, I decided. There wasn’t an alternative.

  When Mom came home from work, the house was immaculate and I was trying to seize an opening for her attention. Her regular routine was to spend about an hour in Jack’s room. Then she usually mixed herself a drink in the kitchen while Jack took a shower. I refused to ruminate about what they might have been doing in there.

  So when I heard the familiar tinkle of ice in a highball glass, I tumbled down the stairs and burst into the kitchen.

  “Mom,” I said breathlessly. “I have to talk to you.”

  She barely glanced at me. “Jasmine, I’ve had a long day,” she said, exhaustion plain in her voice.

  I knew that her long day had been primarily composed of longing for the drink she was about to suck down.

  I switched tack. “I was thinking that maybe we could move soon.”

  Mom ignored me and focused on dumping as much of her cocktail as she could into her stomach. I sidled into the light, raising my head. I’d changed into a tank top to better display the wretched bruises on my neck.

  She exhaled with a sigh and I could smell the stink of gin in the air. Did that cocktail have any mixer in it at all?

  “Why would you want to move?” she asked, looking at me. “We have everything we need here. Aren’t you happy?”

  I swallowed. Why hadn’t she said anything about my bruises?

  “Of course I’m happy,” I lied. “Jack is really good to us, you’re right. It’s just that I’m a little worried about the gang activity at my school. One of my friends got beat up this week and I think I would be more comfortable in another district, maybe.”

  This would regularly get her attention. Mom loathed gangs. They had apparently taken a large toll on her own childhood, though she refused to talk about it.

  Her eyelids didn’t even flicker.

  “Maybe you’re keeping the wrong friends,” she suggested, an edge to her voice. “I’d certainly hope you’d stay away from the vacuum cleaner who gave you those hickeys. Have some pride, Jasmine.”

  With that, Mom left the kitchen.

  No, we wouldn’t survive on the streets anymore, I realized. Gone were the days where we could spend the night on a bus in search of new hope with the rising sun in the morning. The bus didn’t serve liquor. Only Jack served enough liquor to keep her happy.

  I’d lost Mom to Jack. That was obvious to me now even though he’d told me the same thing this morning.

  I was alone in this house. Alone in this situation. Alone.

  Crushed under the weight of defeat, I climbed the stairs again. No part of this house was mine, not even my room. Not even my bed. What was supposed to feel like a refuge now felt like a prison.

  Crossing the attic, avoiding the creaky parts out of habit, I stared out the window. Families walked down the sidewalk on the way to the neighborhood park, mothers pushing strollers and fathers lifting giggling children over their heads. Why couldn’t any of that belong to me? Why couldn’t I have a loving family? The word “family” seemed as elusive as the idea of having a real one. Visions of Jack and Mom enveloping me in a comforting hug were actually laughable.

  I looked down at the porch and saw Jack sitting in the rocking chair and smoking. It was his favorite evening habit. How could I get rid of him? Half-baked schemes of poison or prison or some Superman to whisk Mom and me away flitted through my mind.

  Almost as if he knew what I was plotting, Jack lifted his eyes to the attic window. He stared at me, his expression placid. He continued puffing and looking at me until I backed away from the window, my heart in my throat, beating hard enough to make the bruises hurt.

  There wasn’t an escape, I realized, unless it was something that I orchestrated. I vowed to bide my time until I saw my way out.

  Desperate days turned into wary weeks. Months fraught with danger melted into years.

  Biding my time was incredibly hard. I tried to adhere to Jack’s orders. If I couldn’t make myself smile, I at least hid my scowl. I gradually eased away from my mother, letting her lose herself in the bottle.

  Once, I realized that I hadn’t spoken in the house for one whole week.

  It was immediately apparent, however, that nothing I could do would please Jack. If I stood silently in a room, waiting to be excused, he’d cuff me for inactivity. If I asked to be excused, he’d slap me for speaking out of turn.

  I was doing the dishes after dinner one night as Jack smoked at the table and Mom swilled her drink. A wet glass slipped from my soapy hands and broke on the floor.

  Jack was on me in a second, bending my fingers back until several joints cracked. He wasn’t even frowning. His face was as frighteningly blank as ever.

  “Stop!” I screamed, in agony. “Stop! I’m sorry! Mom! Mommy!”

  “Stop whining,” Mom said, sounding like she was speaking from behind a curtain. Her mind was already well veiled with cocktails. It always was by dinnertime.

  “Clumsy girls deserve to be punished,” Jack said. “You’ll remember to be more careful next time, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” I sobbed, anything to make him release my hand.

  Three of my fingers were sprained. I could barely bend them.

  “Finish the dishes,” Jack said. He took his pack of cigarettes and headed out the front door to his rocking chair.

  I shuddered, looking at all the delicate glassware in the sink. How was I going to manage with my mangled hand?

  Ice tinkled from the table as Mom finished her cocktail. She rose unsteadily, staggering toward the bar to make herself another. How many was she going to pour down her throat tonight, I wondered. Something inside me snapped.

  “Did you see what your boyfriend did to me?” I demanded hysterically, thrusting my hand into her face. “Have you been seeing what your boyfriend is doing to me? Do you see anything anymore? Fucking drunk!”

  For a moment, I thought I saw a shadow of Mom—the person Mom used to be. She looked confused, angry, and sorry. Then, whatever demon drove her to drink reasserted itself. That devil thirst.

  “Get outta my face,” Mom mumbled, shoving me away from her. She mixed a drink and downed it immediately before fixing another. She chugged it again. She was mixing another when I ran upstairs.

  I couldn’t stand to watch her tranquilize herself. It was unbearable without having the same tools at my disposal. I faced every situation painfully sober, naked, without so much as a shield.

  I started staying away from that hateful yellow house. I invented every excuse I could come up with. By then, I was a junior in high school.

  “Beta Club today after school,” I’d say as I was running out the door, “National Honor Society,” though my grades were far too low, “soccer,” though I’d never kicked a ball in my life, “group project.”

  I’d already begun withdrawing from all my friends at school, driven away by their concern at the injuries I couldn’t hide with a turtleneck or long sleeves.

  Jack would probably murder me if the police got involved.

  Instead, I’d crouch in the library until the school kicked me out. I read everything, anything to stop my thoughts and fears from consuming me.

  When they locked the doors to the school, I’d ride the bus. I had a pass to get me to and from school, but I’d visit the neighborhoods we used to live in. I thought about how life would be different as I stared up at the apartment buildings that had hosted happier times between Mom and me. How did everything get so screwed up? I’d ride to the end of the line, the bus driver blinking in surprise at me because he thought everyone had gotten off at their stops.

  Even then, I was learning to become a shadow. I just didn’t realize it yet.

  If I got home too late, there would be hell to pay. Mom would be inconsolable, spitting and screaming at me in a full drunken lather. Jack would beat me in front of her, saying that it was for my own good. I had to learn to listen. I had to learn to mind.

  “You’re
lucky Jack gives a shit about you,” Mom slurred. “He wants you to be safe and good and you just spit in his face. You don’t give a goddamn about the people who love you.”

  The people who love me? The next day I had to explain a black eye to my high school counselor.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Stark,” I said, shrugging and grinning sheepishly. “I’m just not very athletic. I was trying to catch a baseball, but it hit me in my eye.”

  At that point, I was more than eager to see Jack get his, but until I could be sure he’d have jail time or worse, I couldn’t risk involving the police.

  I just had to bide my time.

  But one evening, after I had ridden the bus in my usual circuit around the city, I came home to an ambulance in the front yard and police pulled up onto the sidewalk. I smiled at the blue and red lights like they were Christmas. I thought that surely Jack had tumbled down the stairs or lit himself on fire with a cigarette or choked to death on his own spit.

  Then I saw him sitting in the rocking chair, smoking a cigarette, as the paramedics wheeled a black body bag on a gurney toward the open doors of the ambulance.

  I ran up to the house, screaming incoherently. One of the cops caught me before I could reach the porch.

  “What have you done to her, you son of a bitch?” I shrieked. “You motherfucker! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

  Shock, everyone agreed, shock at losing her mother.

  She never took to the idea of her mother having a boyfriend, she was always a little too attached to her mother.

  She’d been self-harming, hitting herself with objects to make bruises, make it look like she was being abused.

  The mother drank to drown her troubles, unable to deal with her difficult daughter.

  How could that child be so desperate? Didn’t she see how good she had it at that house?

  He’s a saint for keeping that girl. If it were me, she’d be institutionalized. Strap a straightjacket on her, she’s done.

  The shot will make her sleep. The pills will keep her calm. If she won’t take them, crush them up in a drink. In her food.

  I woke up groggy. My head pounded and I felt like I’d been asleep too long. For far too long.

  I struggled to remember something important. I struggled to sit up.

  I noticed that my arms and legs were restrained first. Second, I noticed I was in Jack’s room. In all my years of living in the house, I’d never been in here, let alone laid on the bed.

  The glowing cherry of a cigarette drew my eyes over to a corner of the room.

  “Your mother’s dead.”

  That was what I had to remember. Mom was dead.

  One part of my brain told me that I needed to cry. Mom was dead. That was something to be sad about.

  But the rest of my brain couldn’t muster the tears. I felt like a dry husk. Shriveled. Not like myself.

  “She drank herself to death,” Jack continued conversationally. “She passed out before dinner. When I came back to check on her, she had choked to death on her own vomit.”

  Cry, that part of my brain coaxed. Your mother is dead. Cry.

  But there was nothing. All I could do was stare at Jack, who took another drag on his cigarette in the corner.

  “So I’ve lost her, but you’re still mine.”

  Tell him to fuck off, that part of my brain demanded. He’s an asshole. He as good as killed your mother.

  But I couldn’t even manage words. What was wrong with me?

  “And with that little stunt in front of all those people, suggesting that Fiona’s death was somehow my fault, well.” Jack’s chuckle should have sent chills through my body, but I couldn’t manage to experience a single emotion.

  “It’s well past time you learned to obey.”

  I found my voice in a scream as he burned my arm with his cigarette.

  My cry seemed to excite him in some horrible way. He tore my shirt off, bruised me while wrestling my bra off. The cigarette came down again and again, burning my tender breasts. The screams seemed to rip my throat open.

  Jack cursed irritably when he accidentally pushed down too hard and ground the cigarette out against my skin.

  He fell to beating me, punching my face again and again. Blood filled my mouth and I mercifully lost consciousness.

  He kept me tied to the bed for a week, like an animal, beating me when it pleased him. Jack explained that he had the whole week off of work for bereavement.

  He seemed anything but sad.

  The pills he kept feeding me muffled my despair and screwed with my sense of time and self, but it was still the longest week of my life.

  After the seven days were up, Jack returned to work. He dosed me with enough medicine to make me pass out.

  When I woke up, he had already returned. I’d lost the entire day and was lucid just in time for his torture. He wasn’t creative—his methods didn’t change much. He liked to hit. He liked to burn. He liked to hurt. I absorbed it as a new reality—had to.

  It became apparent to me that I was going to die one day when his blow to my nose didn’t wake me up but almost choking on my own blood did.

  Biding my time wasn’t going to work anymore. Time for action.

  One morning, when Jack was in a particular hurry because his torture session had lasted too long, he didn’t stick around to make sure I passed out after drinking the cocktail of medication.

  It was easy enough to lean over to the side of the bed and vomit. The hard part was dislocating my wrist getting one of the restraints off.

  Pain was something I had tried to accept, but it just wasn’t something I could get used to. Within a few fumbling minutes, I was free from the bed. But more than a week of inactivity had made me weak. My knees buckled when I tried to stand, sending me straight to the floor.

  I couldn’t tell whether my head swimming was all the blood rushing from it or some last vestiges of the tranquilizers. It made me panic. I couldn’t stop now. I couldn’t handle another minute of being in this house of death.

  Crawling on my hands and knees to the shower popped my wrist back into its socket with a wretched relief. The cold spray helped wake me up as fully as was possible.

  I had to get out of here. Today was the day.

  The water and soap hurt my wounds—particularly the cigarette burns—but I scrubbed all the same.

  The girl in the mirror’s reflection was a ghoul, a swollen, bruised version of Jasmine. I barely gave her a second glance. She was a stranger.

  I paused in the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. My appetite was nonexistent, but I knew food would give me strength. I opened containers and shoveled their contents into my mouth without looking at them.

  When I couldn’t stomach another bite, I pulled myself up the stairs, leaning heavily on the banisters.

  I was fully prepared to load up my suitcase and backpack like old times, but I knew I was too weak to handle them both. I was only going to be able to take the backpack.

  I stuffed it with a few changes of clothing and the money I’d been saving from selling my duct tape creations at school. There was a few hundred dollars. Mom hadn’t asked for the money for a long time—since we’d moved in with Jack. She’d probably forgotten about it just like she forgot how to be my mother. The money was all mine.

  Getting dressed was a challenge, but I managed it, tying my sneakers with some difficulty.

  I wished I could’ve left some message, some cosmic “fuck you” to taunt and haunt Jack for the rest of his life. I wanted to trash his perfect house, take a knife to every pillow, couch, chair, and bed in the place.

  But to tell the truth, I was just a scared 17-year-old. I thought he could come back at any moment. I really didn’t want to be here when he did.

  I left Jack’s precious yellow house untouched, rushing out the door and to the bus stop with no destination but “away.”

  * * * *

  Girls had gone in and out of the lounge while I told my story, but
Mama had never looked at them. She gave me her undivided attention.

  It had been years since I’d spoken so much and for so long. The glass of water had long since been drained. My throat was sore and I was emotionally spent. Once I’d started, the words had tumbled out, building and building in a frantic crescendo in their haste to leave my body. Someone had to know what happened to me. Someone had to help me.

  Mama stayed quiet for a long time. I was scared to death that I’d driven her away with my horrors. I’d tried to censor myself, tried to hide the worst parts, but I knew she could tell everything that had happened. I couldn’t even think about those parts.

  Finally, she covered my hand with hers. That hand—dark, meaty, perfectly manicured, and utterly comforting. It told me everything I needed to know even before Mama opened her mouth.

  “All that is over,” she said. “I’m sorry that it happened to you. No girl of mine—if anyone ever—oh, Lord help me.”

  Mama took a deep breath and composed herself, her hand not leaving mine.

  “This is your home now,” she said. “I want you to think of it like that. I’m your Mama, and these girls are your sisters. We’re going to take care of you now.”

  Tears obscured my vision. “Thank you, Mama,” I said, my voice thick with emotion.

  “Tonight, I want you to rest,” she added. “First thing tomorrow, after you get a big breakfast in you, we’re going to go out and I’m going to get you a few things. Then we’ll talk about work and what you’ll be doing here.”

  “That sounds good,” I said, wiping my eyes.

  “Now, you go on upstairs and back to Cocoa’s room and bed down,” Mama said. “That’s where you’ll be staying for now on. I’ve got a nightclub to run or I’d take you myself.”

  “I remember the way,” I said.

  Chapter Two

  Cocoa woke me up with a steaming tray of food.

  “Mama sent it up,” she said, setting it on the table and handing me a robe. I’d gone to sleep wearing just the loaned panties and uniform blouse, not wanting to go through my roommate’s clothes.