He rises out of his chair. She steels herself because she knows what is coming, but it doesn’t hurt less for it. One quick strike to her stomach, doubling her over, and then he wraps her hair around his fist, yanking her up, bending her back. He spins her around as he does so, so her back is to him. Her scalp hurts, hairs at the edges tearing free. He stares straight ahead and holds her against him.
“You need to learn respect. Clearly, your mother hasn’t done enough to instill that in you. I’ve let it slide for far too long, but that’s over.”
She wants to shut her eyes, but she knows better. It will be over quickly, she tells herself. He does not leave marks where they can be seen, he does not lose control. He does not strike them out of anger, he tells them. It is not punishment but a lesson.
Two more blows, at her side below her ribs, carefully calibrated. Pain, not damage. A horrid wheeze in her throat as she tries to take a breath.
He releases her. He leaves her there, still wheezing slightly, and walks out of the room. She collapses onto the ground, hand on her side where the pain throbs, trying to breathe, hating the tears that leak from her eyes. She isn’t crying because she feels sorry for herself, though that’s what he’ll say if he sees it. She isn’t crying out of sadness or fear—it’s a purely physical response. Because she isn’t sad or afraid. She’s angry.
She sits seething on the ground as his footsteps move up the stairs. She doesn’t move until she hears the sound of canvas tearing.
She runs for the stairs.
The utility knife in her mother’s hands has a dull gray handle, wrapped in weathered tape. Emma keeps it in the top drawer of her desk for trimming paper and slicing away dried gobs of paint. Her mother wields it with brusque efficiency, opening a gash across the canvas in front of her, a yawning crescent of nothing splitting Gabriel’s face.
Her mother whirls, face pale, lips clamped together. Her rage is genteel. It is contained. The marks on the canvas, three of them, are made with surgical precision to obliterate the image with the least amount of violence.
Emma screams. She throws herself forward. She’s not sure what she’s saying as she slams her open hands against her mother’s chest, shoving at her. Strong arms wrap around her waist and pull her back. She claws at her father’s arms, twisting in his grip, and manages to turn.
“Emma, calm down,” her mother says, but she won’t, she can’t, she rakes a hand at her father’s face—
The punch comes without warning, a quick pop to her eye. She thuds backward on her ass, stars sparking in her vision. The impact makes her teeth click together and pain jolt through her skull. There is suddenly silence.
Her father shakes his hand. “That’s quite enough of that,” he says. He flexes his fingers. Emma touches a disbelieving hand to her eye and finds her cheekbone exquisitely tender. She looks at her fingertips, as if expecting to find blood, but of course there’s none. “Get up.”
Her mother is breathing heavily, her eyes bright and a look on her face that might be regret or fear. Emma pushes herself to her feet. Her father looks down at her desk. One of the other portfolio pieces is there, a charcoal piece depicting a girl in the park, crouching down with a stick in one hand, which she is using to prod a dead bird. Casually, he picks it up and tears it in half.
This time, Emma doesn’t move. She stands, shaking and silent, as he bends down to pick up the portfolio that holds the rest of her work. Each one, he neatly tears into four pieces. Then he hands her the pile. Only the painting of Juliette at her piano remains, propped up in the corner. Emma doesn’t cry. Crying always makes things worse.
“Throw these out,” he instructs.
She takes the scraps from him. Her hands are trembling. There’s a lump in her throat that makes swallowing painful, and her vision blurs, but she doesn’t cry. She looks down at the scraps of paper in her hands. Useless now. She’ll have to start again.
She can’t start again.
“Fuck you,” she says.
“Emma,” her mother hisses, and something in her tone makes Emma actually think for a moment she might be concerned for Emma’s well-being—but this only lends a kind of comedy to the situation, and Emma bares her teeth.
“Fuck. You,” she says again, the worst insult she can muster, fangless and ineffectual. She throws the stack of ruined work at her father, paper fluttering to the ground as he stands impassively, and she runs.
Her mother calls after her, but her father says “Let her go,” and then Emma is at the door, shoving her feet into shoes, running out. He’s letting her go because he knows and she knows that she will have to come back, and when she does, the punishment will be far worse than if she’d stayed.