I know a lot of people grow to hate their abused mothers for never standing up, for never fighting back, for not leaving. I never felt that. I know she was in love with a ghost. She was haunted, waiting for that man to come home to her and rescue her from the one he had become. I was waiting, too. She had so much faith, it was contagious.
“He’s going to kill her,” my brother told me the night before.
I was lying beside her in the bed, and he sat on the floor of her room, his back against the door. He’d held my father off until he’d stormed from the house. We were waiting for him to come back, but he didn’t.
My mother was sleeping, fitful, sighing.
“Don’t say that,” I whispered, panic constricting my throat.
“We have to leave this place,” he said. He was just a shadow by the door; his baseball bat lay beside him, his hand resting on it.
“She won’t leave,” I told him.
“Then I’m going to wind up killing him.”
“Stop,” I said, a sob rushing up my throat. “Stop it.”
“That’s how these things go, you know. The violence—it just escalates. Until.”
“He’s getting better,” I said, not believing it myself. There would be days, even a week of peace, where my father worked hard during the day, slept well at night. Where he was happy. There was laughter, and home-cooked meals, music from my father’s guitar in the evening. Prior to that night’s explosion, things had almost been good.
“You sound like her,” said Jay, voice heavy with disdain. “I told you not to love him.”
His words rang in my head, knocking around in my frightened child’s brain. My father would kill my mother, or my brother would kill my father. This was what I carried into town with me. It burned in my center, burned like acid up my throat.
In the big grocery store, I wandered the colorful aisles. It had been a while since I’d been off the property. And I’d forgotten, maybe never even noticed before that day, the wild, Technicolor plenty of an American supermarket. The rows and rows of snacks in glossy, crinkly bags, the bubbling bottles of soda, the fat, waxy produce, and the bloodless meat in neat packages. I grabbed the royal blue package of Oreos. My mother took them from me indulgently and put them in the cart.
“Go get the beef,” she told me, and I obeyed her, walking off. The other shoppers glanced at us askance. Why? Maybe we were a little raggedy, hair too long, clothes past worn. I think they called us hill people, those of us that lived off the grid out of town. Energetically, there was something different about us now.
We were just like you, I wanted to tell them. Not long ago, I never dreamed of killing a living thing, or growing my own vegetables.
My father said that they—the worldly ones, the people still dwelling in the modern dream—were all sleepwalkers. So it seemed, all of them lost in their own thoughts, maybe casting a glance in our direction but nothing more. They didn’t care, that’s what Dad said. They didn’t care about anything except their own desires, fears, and cravings. They didn’t even know there was anything else besides the movie playing in their minds.
Was he right?
There was what seemed like a mile of chicken, turkey, hams, different cuts of beef, all tightly wrapped in plastic, neatly on yellow foam trays. Not a drop of blood, no odor, clean and prepped.
After I’d killed the deer, my father and I had hauled it back to the waiting truck. Later he hung it from a tree to bleed it. The blood ran from the doe like a viscous river, collecting in a bucket. I threw up twice.
People should know what it means to eat meat, my father said. Someone has to do the slaughtering, the cleaning, the butchering. There’s always pain and fear and blood. That’s life. That’s death.
Above the tidy, bloodless packages, I caught sight of myself in the reflective side of the meat case—a feral girl in dirty jeans, and a too-small shirt, hair wild, soil under her nails.
At first, I thought it was Robin, turned to look for her. Then I realized it was me.
Help them, she whispered, inside my head. Help your mom and Jay.
That’s when I saw it, the pay phone over by the bathrooms.
It was fast; I knew I had to be. I called 911.
What’s your emergency?
I talked quickly and clearly, telling the operator that my family was in trouble, that my father was unwell. I told her about the weapons on the property.
Where, honey, where does your family live?
With a sinking feeling of terror I realized that I didn’t know our address.