by Nikki Roman
My body doesn’t move anymore, except for the beating of my heart and the expansion of my lungs. Dad loosens his arms and I slip free.
“Are you okay?” he asks, a ghost of a smile on his lips.
I don’t answer him right away. Instead, I take the shovel in my hand and draw a heart around us. I smile widely and say, “The possibilities are endless.” I stab the shovel into the sand and rise. Dad picks himself up too, but it takes him more effort, like buckets of concrete have been tied to each of his limbs.
He reaches for the shovel and I grab his hand. “Leave it for someone else.”
On the ride home, the stars come out to light the way, sprinkling the sky like metallic confetti. I press my face against Dad’s beef jerky jacket and whisper into it, “Take me to the moon, Daddy.”
•••
Hopping off the bike, I take three bounding leaps until I am standing in front of the locked apartment door. I kick my feet up and down like I need to go to the bathroom, excited. Dad gives me a funny look and unlocks the door. I rush in, stopping in the middle of the living room, surprised by how homely and commonplace it looks. A couch, television, and coffee table furnish the little room.
Dad flicks on the lights. “It’s not much … only what the church donated,” he says.
“What church?”
“Naw, I don’t even remember the name of it,” he says with indifference.
I throw my boots down in the middle of the living room and he does the same. I imagine Mom’s face glowing red, all her features enlarged and her voice grating my ears, “Boots by the door, young lady!” I smile to myself.
“Where’s your room?” I ask.
He points to a door just off the living room. I walk into his bedroom, holding my breath. I’m not sure what I expected but whatever it was, his queen size bed and six-drawer, white wood dresser exceeds it. Dad comes in and puts a hand on my shoulder, “Do you like it?” he asks.
I don’t know why it would matter if I did or not, it isn’t my room. But still I say, “I love it.”
He bends down a little so he is eye level with me. “I’m making myself a sandwich, hungry?”
I hate to turn down the first meal he’s made me since my toddler days, but my stomach feels like it could wait another eleven years before needing any food. It knots inside of me like a rubber band ball as I think of Mom finding me here. She won’t show mercy when she discovers I’m hiding from her in the arms of the person she detests most in this world—my father.
“No, thank you, I think I’m just going to take a shower,” I say.
He steps away and looks at me, sizing me up. I know what he is thinking; I am too thin. He doesn’t have to taunt me with words like Mom does; his eyes do the job just as well. He felt it when he held me, every bone in my ribcage, my sharp shoulder blades jabbing his collarbone.
“Mom couldn’t afford food after you went to prison and she started drinking.” I defend my malnourished body, but it sounds like an accusation that I starved because he wasn’t there for me. And really it is the truth, but I didn’t mean to be so blunt.
He looks hurt, gazing downward at his toes. “There are towels under the sink,” he says, and the bedroom door clicks shut behind him.
The bathroom is adjoined with the bedroom. I walk in and shut the door. My heart races as I search for the light switch. I find it and flick it up. Exhausted, physically and mentally, I slump against the wall for support. I snap my head around and take in the shower curtain, pitch black. Body-bag- black. I groan.
Peeling off my clothes where I stand, I toss them to the floor. I pull back the shower curtain and step into the tub. I fiddle with the faucet knob for a while, turning it left and right until the water is no longer melting my skin, nor turning me into an ice sculpture. It’s lukewarm. Like me, lukewarm—in the middle of emotions. That grey area; I’m not sad, angry, happy, or worried. I am everything and nothing.
I squeeze shampoo into my palm and rub my hair. Sitting down under the stream and closing my eyes, I hug my knees to my chest.
I am eight years old again, Mom is bathing me. I’ve upset her in some way. She rubs my skin raw with a Brillo pad. You filthy little girl. But there’s not a speck of dirt on me.
She squeezes shampoo into her hands, too much. She rubs it in my open eyes. Around, around in circles. My eyes sting and I don’t even try to stop her. I never try to stop her. My eyes are red and stinging for days after.
I scream.
The shower curtain is lying in the tub with me, bunched up like a Grim Reaper’s cloak. My eyes burn, I blink away suds and turn the water off. Dad knuckles on the door.
“Bailey, are you okay?” There is fear in his voice, hanging on his every word. My scream was the kind you only hear when someone is in pain—agonizing pain.
I get out of the tub and grab a towel from under the sink, covering myself with it I open up. “You need a new shower curtain,” I say.
Dad’s mouth gaping open, he looks over me and nods. “Uh huh.”
“Too dark,” I say. I take the nightgown and underwear from him, he loosens the tension in his hand like a robot letting go.
Scratching the back of his neck, he walks out of the room, leaving me alone. I change into Mom’s nightgown and turn the bathroom light off. The shower curtain crumpled in the tub blends into the darkness.
•••
Dad is in the living room with a Dr. Pepper in one hand and a remote in the other, surfing channels.
“Can I go to bed?” I ask.
He jumps, startled. “Christ, you’re quiet,” he says. “You don’t need my permission to go to sleep.”
I try to make space between us as I move toward the couch.
“Where are you going?” Dad asks, his hand brushing against my arm, stopping me in my tracks. “I’ll take the couch, you can have my bed.”
“No, it’s okay, I don’t mind.” Without waiting for him to agree I lie across the couch, but he digs his arms underneath my back and forklifts me up. “Hey!”
Taking me to his room, he throws me on the bed, and stares down at me, an inkling of a smile on his face as I try to gather myself, disorientated from his game of pick-up and toss.
“I was only playing,” he says, a second smile failing to register on his lips. “Did I scare you, angel?”
“That’s your name,” I say tiredly. “I’m Bailey.”
“I used to call you angel all the time…and honey, and darling, and princess.”
“And flower,” I say.
“Yes, get under the covers flower so I can tuck you in.”
I hold my head in my hand, my elbow indenting the pillow as he tugs the blanket out of its tight corners and brings it around me. He collapses in a wicker chair next to the bed and stares at me contemplatively.
I share his gaze like we are having a staring contest, unbeknownst to him. “Go to sleep, flower,” he says pushing my head into the pillows with a feather-light touch.
“I can’t,” I say, popping back up. “It’s dark in here…did Clad tell you what the dark does to me?”
“He mentioned something about night terrors… you want light? What light shines the brightest?” He riddles me.
The moon, I think at first but when I say so he shakes his head. “The sun?” I try again.
“You’re getting there.”
“Starlight,” I say, as synapses connect in my brain and breathe life into a childhood memory long forgotten.
“That’s right, Bailey.” Dad walks over to the window and parts the curtains. Stars crown the top of the moons head. He taps the glass with his finger and asks, “Which one do you like?”
“That one,” I say pointing to no star in particular.
He taps the glass to the left. “This one?”
“No, that one over there,” I giggle.
“This one?”
“No, that one… to the right!” I carry on.
“This one?” he says pawing at the glass and cupping his
hands around it like he has captured a star.
“Yes, it’s the brightest.”
Dad walks to the bed slowly with his body hunched over his hands, protecting the star. I lie back down on the pillows and he leans over me. “Turn your head,” he says.
“Why?”
“I’m going to put the star inside your head, through your ear.”
“Through my ear? Is that even safe?”
“Of course it is! I’ve done it many times before, don’t you remember?”
“My memory’s a little foggy.”
“Just move your hair out of the way, quick. Starlight burns out fast after a star has been plucked from its place in the sky,” he says, shaking his hands like the star’s energy cannot be contained. He puts his hands around my ear and blows through them. “There, the star made it.”
“Yes, I can see the light of it,” I say.
He sits back down in the wicker chair and his body relaxes. I peek at him over the mountain of blankets, judging the emotions on his face lit by moonlight. He looks lost and sad, like he’s reached for something that the tips of his fingers brushed against but could not grasp.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Go to sleep, Bailey.”
“Goodnight, Daddy,” I whisper.
“Goodnight, darling,” he mumbles, biting his thumb as if he could chew out his thoughts and then tackle them with his bare hands.
I pretend to be asleep, my hair falling over my open eyes and hiding them. Dad doesn’t move from the chair, a philosopher in the dead of night—master of thoughts. Waiting until he is sure I’m passed out, he talks out loud to himself. “So many precious moments lost,” he says, in a calculating tone. “Eleven years she had you, what I would’ve given to take her place. Eleven years of abuse.”
He sucks in a staggered breath and says, “I did it for you, Angel Cakes,” his voice sounding the same as it did on that unforgivable night.
The star fizzes like Mentos in Diet Coke and the light dims. The darkness that is a permanent resident in my head pulls the dead star into its shadows. My heart hammers out an irregular beat and, for a brief moment, my body tenses as I realize that darkness is filling it like an invisible, poisonous gas.
Chapter 24
A floor is like a weak minded person; scuffed and trampled on by careless feet until, one day, somebody decides to listen. To place their ear upon the wood, stone, or marble, and hear its echo as it is stepped on, hear its cries of pain. A floor can muffle dreaded foot falls or scream out their arrival. The floor is where I lie, safely, after the nightmares have come and gone because it absorbs them the same way it does a spilled glass of water.
Dad’s hand smooths my hair. He is half asleep after being woken by my screams. He let me lie here, between the coffee table and couch, so I wouldn’t have to be alone as I try to drag myself out of the marshland of night terrors that suck me in.
Morning light meticulously seeps through the kitchen and living room, starting at the floorboards and sweeping up the walls. The tension in my body loosens as it breaks through the blinds above my father’s sleeping head and shines on my face. The nightmares always hit harder when I leave Spencer, returning with a vengeance.
“Is it morning already?” Dad murmurs, cursing the light that wakes him.
“It couldn’t come soon enough,” I say.
“I’m sorry, honey. Are you okay, now?” he asks, sitting up and letting his blanket fall on top of me.
“Rough night.” I put his blanket around my shoulders and stand up. Dad pulls his legs into himself, making room for me on the couch.
“Clad told me about them… the nightmares, but nothing could have prepared me for last night,” he says.
“How is he? Or, how was he before you left him?”
Dad stretches his legs off the sofa and across the coffee table. As he thinks about Clad I watch his eyes change color. They go from blue to teal, like they are the jewels of mood rings. Teal must mean melancholy. “He was scared you would stop visiting him and that you wouldn’t read his letters anymore,” he confesses.
“I have thought about stopping. I don’t want to lead him on. Maybe I should just close that chapter of my life.”
“After all that he did, lead him on? But you’ve kissed him and he saved your life. How could you just wipe yourself clean of him, when he’s sitting in prison, scared and lonely?”
“All because of me,” I say and a stony silence breaks apart our conversation.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Dad says, filling the silence. “I just mean, he loves you and he did a really great thing for you, don’t you owe him at least your friendship?”
“Sure, but we both know he doesn’t want my friendship—he wants me to himself.”
“Do you want hot chocolate?” he asks, abandoning the topic.
“Yeah, that sounds great.” I smile, equally as happy to leave the subject of Clad, and our relationship.
Dad stalks into the kitchen and starts a pot of water on the stove. “It’s like liquid gold in prison, could trade it for a bit of Mary Jane or-” He stares at the pot and whispers an obscenity to himself. He hadn’t meant to reveal his drug habits to me. “I just mean, it’s invaluable in prison.”
“You don’t have to keep secrets from me,” I say. “I figured you did drugs.”
“It’s just not something I want my little girl knowing,” he says, smiling weakly, and dumping packets of cocoa powder into the pot of boiling water. A minute later, he hands me a mug of the frothy chocolate.
I sip thirstily. “I’m not a little girl,” I say. “I’m a woman now.”
“That’s what all little girls say,” Dad says ruffling my hair. I roll my eyes at him and he grins with a chocolate mustache. “I’m going to leave for the store in a minute, all right? I’ll be back before eleven; I have a special errand to run.”
“I’ll just be here—” I look around the apartment, “on the couch…watching T.V.”
“Okay sweetie, I’ll be back soon,” he says, bending down and kissing the top of my head. He grabs his truck keys off the kitchen counter, slips into a pair of flip flops, and heads out the door with his mug of hot chocolate.
It doesn’t take long for me to tire of watching television; it has never been able to hold my attention. I turn it off and let myself wander around the small apartment, ending up in my father’s room, in front of the bed that made my nightmares return. Blankets and pillows are strewn across the floor, something I must have done in my sleep.
This room doesn’t hold the same lightness as the living room and kitchen, there’s something here that makes the air heavy and stuffy. Instead of white sunlight beating down on the furniture and walls, barley orbs, like warm beer, are splashed on everything.
It’s too white in here, white bed, white chair, and white bare walls except for a singular painting. A strange painting, tacked to the wall. I stroll to it, my nightgown brushing against the wood floor and collecting dust bunnies as I go along.
The artist has signed it, Clad. I pick the tacks out of the dry wall and the painting curls in on itself, landing like a rolled up Dead Sea Scroll on the floor. I unroll it with my foot and try to make sense of the dainty flower petals crossed out with violent smears of red.
It’s a funeral. Men and women dressed in black, a casket beneath a slash of red, a face with blue eyes peering out. Dead blue eyes. My dead blue eyes. My long black hair. My silhouette in a coffin, burning my vision.
Clad has painted my funeral.
•••
The first tear is small, the tip of a corner, and then the strips become longer, wider. Ripping away the image of my Dad in black and Clad standing right in front of him. Picking out the flowers like real ones from the ground, because oh, how realistic Clad has made them look. How very real the scene is, as if he saw it happen.
I decide now, promise myself, that I will leave him and never look back. That by the time I have finished destroying his pain
ting, he will have left my memory altogether.
I don’t realize Dad has come home until he is standing right above me, mouth slack at Clads painting now just bits and pieces of paper in my lap.
“Why did you do that?” he asks, turning me by my arm to face him. The paper falls from my lap. “That was the only thing I had of Clad, the only thing to remind me of who I was in prison.”
“Why would you want to remember any of it?” I ask, tugging on my arm. He holds tight, his nails digging into my skin.
“Listen to me, Bailey,” he says, his voice stern.
“Let go of me!” I scream at him. “It was an awful painting! Why would you want to keep it?”
“Listen!” he says, with even more force this time. “I had a life in prison before I came back to you, a life that was crap, but not one I want to forget. If I forget it, then I’ll forget who I am. And, I never want to forget the boy who saved my daughter from the same life I lived for eleven years.”
He lets go of my arm.
“Don’t ever touch me again!”
“I only grabbed your arm to get your attention,” he says, irked. “I didn’t hurt you.”
“Yes, you did.” I show him five little cuts where his fingernails broke skin. I want to make him regret, I want to make him hurt, because now all I can think about is the boy I promised to forget.
“I’m sorry about that, angel, it was an accident. You know I wouldn’t hurt you on purpose, right?” I can hear the extra saliva behind his words as he tries to hold back tears. “I never want to hurt you like your mother has.”
Mom has never seen this look of malice in my eyes. I didn’t know I could give it to anyone but Miemah; I especially didn’t know how easily I could unleash it on my father. “I’m sorry I ripped it…it made me miss him. I miss him right now and it makes me sick.”
“That’s okay, you didn’t know what it was to me. Can I have a hug?” he says, relieved that I am no longer staring up at him like the girl from The Grudge.
I spring from the floor and throw my arms around him, bits of Clad’s painting falling from my lap.