Dad hit her again, harder. When she hit the wall, he looked down, saw the blood on his knuckles, and stared at it.
A high, keening howl of pain burst out of him, ringing off the log walls. He stumbled back, putting distance between them. He gave Mama a long, desperate look of sorrow and hatred, then ran out of the cabin, slamming the door behind him.
*
LENI WAS SO SCARED and surprised and horrified by what she’d just seen, she did nothing.
Nothing.
She should have thrown herself at Dad, gotten between them, even gone for her gun.
She heard the door slam and it knocked her out of her paralysis.
Mama was sitting on the floor in front of the woodstove, her hands in her lap and her head forward, her face hidden by her hair.
“Mama?”
Mama slowly looked up, tucked the hair behind her ear. A red splotch marred her temple. Her lower lip was split open, dripping blood onto her pants.
Do something.
Leni ran into the kitchen, soaked a washcloth with water from the bucket, and went to Mama, kneeling beside her. With a tired smile, Mama took the rag, pressed it to her bleeding lip.
“Sorry, baby girl,” she said through the cloth.
“He hit you,” Leni said, stunned.
This was an ugliness she’d never imagined. A lost temper, yes. A fist? Blood? No …
You were supposed to be safe in your own home, with your parents. They were supposed to protect you from the dangers outside.
“He was agitated all day. I shouldn’t have talked to Tom.” Mama sighed. “And now I suppose he’s gone to the compound to drink whiskey and eat hate with Mad Earl.”
Leni looked at her mother’s beaten, bruised face, the rag turning red with her blood. “You’re saying it’s your fault?”
“You’re too young to understand. He didn’t mean to do that. He just … loves me too much sometimes.”
Was that true? Was that what love was when you grew up?
“He meant to,” Leni said quietly, feeling a cold wave of understanding wash through her. Memories clicked into place like pieces of a puzzle, fitting together. Mama’s bruises, her always saying, I’m clumsy. She had hidden this ugly truth from Leni for years. Her parents had been able to hide it from her with walls and lies, but here in this one-room cabin there was no hiding anymore. “He has hit you before.”
“No,” Mama said. “Hardly ever.”
Leni tried to put it all together in her head, make it make sense, but she couldn’t. How could this be love? How could it be Mama’s fault?
“We have to understand and forgive,” Mama said. “That’s how you love someone who’s sick. Someone who is struggling. It’s like he has cancer. That’s how you have to think of it. He’ll get better. He will. He loves us so much.”
Leni heard her mother start to cry, and somehow that made it worse, as if her tears watered this ugliness, made it grow. Leni pulled Mama into her arms, held her tightly, stroked her back, just like Mama had done so many times for Leni.
Leni didn’t know how long she sat there, holding her mother, replaying the horrible scene over and over.
Then she heard her father’s return.
She heard his uneven footsteps on the deck, his fumbling with the door latch. Mama must have heard it, too, because she was crawling unsteadily to her feet, pushing Leni aside, saying, “Go upstairs.”
Leni watched her mama rise; she dropped the wet, bloody rag. It fell with a splat to the floor.
The door opened. Cold rushed in.
“You came back,” Mama whispered.
Dad stood in the doorway, his face lined in agony, his eyes full of tears. “Cora, my God,” he said, his voice scratchy and thick. “Of course I came back.”
They moved toward one another.
Dad collapsed to his knees in front of Mama, his knees cracking on the wood so loudly Leni knew there would be bruises tomorrow.
Mama moved closer, put her hands in his hair. He buried his face in her stomach, started to shake and cry. “I’m so sorry. I just love you so much … it makes me crazy. Crazier.” He looked up, crying harder now. “I didn’t mean it.”
“I know, baby.” Mama knelt down, took him in her arms, rocked him back and forth.
Leni felt the sudden fragility of her world, of the world itself. She barely remembered Before. Maybe she didn’t remember it at all, in fact. Maybe the images she did have—Dad lifting her onto his shoulders, pulling petals from a daisy, holding a buttercup to her chin, reading her a bedtime story—maybe these were all images she’d taken from pictures and imbued with an imagined life.