I heard another crash. Sounded like a skillet hitting the floor. I crept to the door and closed it quiet behind me, so as not to wake Mya, so as to let my dolls come back alive and talk of things to come. At the top of a spiral maid’s staircase that descended down into the kitchen, I saw Wolf. She was the color of snow and about the same size as me when stretched out, nose to tail. Her black-tipped ears went upright as I approached. She paced the top of the staircase, agitated.
“It’s just me, girl.”
Wolf relaxed when she saw me. Settled into herself, resting her massive head on her large front paws, and gave a tired sigh.
I scratched Wolf’s ears in the way she liked, then made my way down the stairs, careful to tiptoe on the carpeted part to mask my approach. I tucked the folds of my long, pale-blue nightgown into the crook of my arm. The light at the bottom of the stairs grew brighter as I crept down. I found my perfect perch, one I’d used many times before, where shadow met light, where I could catch a glimpse into the illuminated kitchen and where the thick banister kept me masked in shadow.
I understood why Wolf had stayed at the top of the staircase.
The fights between my parents had escalated over the year. A few times, the police had been called. Not by us, never by us: the neighbors. The noise of it all. Their shouting could shake the house. It isn’t any wonder they were called. The banging of pots; the smashing of china. The police, deferential to my daddy—he was a high-ranking Marine Corps officer, after all—would knock before entering, and my parents would quiet. Daddy pressing an angry finger to his lips, a snarl like Wolf’s still curling over them as he ever so slowly let the officers in.
It looked like a storm had blown through our kitchen. The refrigerator door was open, and food had spilled out. Heads of lettuce, green tomatoes on the floor. Pots and skillets hung at odd angles from the rack in the center of the ceiling. The big silver pot my mama resurrected every Christmas to cook chitlins lay on its side on a burner. It rocked slightly to and fro.
I heard my parents before I saw them, heard the unmistakable alto of my daddy.
“Say, you just had to wear that dress. You looked like a goddamned fool tonight.”
My mama’s bitter laugh. “I’m a bad mother, right? Might as well be a bad wife. Get off of me!”
My parents barreled across the kitchen toward the open refrigerator as one chaotic force, a swirl of sequins and Marine Corps dress blues. Daddy still wore his blue jacket, the ribbons on his jacket gleaming in the kitchen light. Mama’s back hit the edge of the refrigerator door hard, and I saw a frightened look in her eyes as she twisted like a cyclone from the pain of it. Mama threw herself onto the island to stop herself from falling. And Daddy was her shadow throughout, in a boxer’s stance, bouncing on his toes, waiting to strike. I held my breath, hands balled into fists, as if I were his opponent in the ring. I had heard my parents fight before. A light sleeper, I often woke to the sound of them shouting. My father cursing, my mother crying. But I had never before seen my father hit my mother. I did not think that kind of chaos was possible. The truth shocked me, but I couldn’t deny it. There it was in front of me: My father was capable of dark, terrifying things. He had hit her. Maybe he had before. The casual way he followed her, the boxer’s stance. Maybe that’s why my muscles were tensed: I was ready to hurtle down the rest of the stairs and throw myself in front of my mother.
But Mama was a force. She ran around the kitchen island in her gold sequins, creating distance between them in a matter of seconds. With the quick reflexes of a rabid animal, she picked up a plastic Heinz mustard bottle that was among the disarray on the floor and squirted the bottle’s contents straight into my father’s face from across the island.
The yellow spray reminded me, ridiculously, of the arc of a jump rope at its height. It slid down Daddy’s perfect uniform, the cheap yellow seeming to make no sense on his formal blues. For a moment, I thought of a parallel world where parents finished a glamorous evening eating messy late-night hamburgers, playful and teasing.