“Do you even own a rosary? Since when’d you start going to church?”
“You don’t ask a man about his prayers,” he said.
Angel held her hands up. “O-kay.” So she spent the evening scrolling through her phone, trying to watch television. She tried calling her grandmother again, to no avail. Finally she went into her grandmother’s room and lay on the pink canopy bed, pressing her face into the pillow to inhale the velvety, perfumy scent.
Today is warm for April, and Angel breaks a sweat. She thinks of her sticker and picks up her pace. Above, the clouds are as fluffy and benign as those in a picture book.
The road rises and falls gently. In a car, taken with some speed, these hillocks cause a thrilling drop in the stomach. Angel remembers being little and yelling for her dad to go faster faster faster! And he always would, laughing at her laughter. On foot, the hills are just challenging.
She looks at her phone again. No missed calls. She’s tried her grandmother a thousand times in the last several days, and the calls always go to voicemail.
She brings up her mother’s number on the screen, but doesn’t press it. In the last year or so, a silence has settled between them, a silence instigated by Angel to both punish her mother and bring her closer. But it doesn’t seem to be working. Angel tries to hold out, to remain incommunicado until her mother is forced to call first, but her mother always wins. The galling fact is that Angel is a kid and needs her mother more than her mother needs her.
Marissa has no right to be mad at Angel—not when Angel was almost murdered by her mother’s stupid jerk boyfriend. You always hear about girls who don’t report their abusers to their mothers and teachers and grandmothers, but Angel never understood that. Her mother, she was certain, would annihilate anyone who touched her. Of course Angel told her mother. With pleasure, she anticipated the scene that would follow: Marissa tossing Mike’s belongings into the yard—the hardback history books he keeps wrapped in plastic and alphabetized, his tilted drafting table that takes up half the living room, his expensive, needle-tipped pencils. Her mother would charge at him—possibly with a knife—her whole little body radioactive with fury.
But when Angel explained that Mike tried to strangle her, Marissa just shook her head. “He was joking. Mike jokes around.”
“No way,” Angel said, hand at her throat to demonstrate. “He tried to kill me.” But the truth is, now Angel does wonder if it had been a joke.
“Mike wouldn’t do that.” Marissa took Angel’s face in her hands—not very gently—and tipped it this way and that to examine her neck. “There’s no bruises.”
“So he did a shitty job of it! Plus I don’t bruise easy.” Angel’s eyes smarted and she hated herself, because she doesn’t know how to feel. It hadn’t hurt when Mike encircled her throat, and he hadn’t even squeezed, but still her heart had thrashed with terror.
Marissa turned and began putting the clean dishes away. Her temple pulsed. “I think he was kidding around and you couldn’t take a joke.”
And even if this was true—it might be true—her mother’s betrayal was so shocking that Angel didn’t at first believe the conversation was over. She waited for her mother to turn back, to apologize and admit how wrong she was and to make sure that Mike never, ever touched her baby again, but Marissa was opening the freezer, taking out the jumbo shrimp for Mike’s favorite coconut curry.
Angel lasted a week more at home, refusing to speak to her mother or Mike, with the disturbing sense that she had indeed blown things out of proportion.
But then yesterday she awoke gasping from a nightmare in which he was strangling her, his face nearly touching her own, and her anger was so total, so visceral, that she paced her room until morning, when she announced she was moving in with her dad and grandmother. Her mother had driven her here in silent fury, the muscle along her jaw pulsing, while Angel’s heart skittered.