Elle drops her eyes and slams her journal closed, holding it pressed flat between her palms. “Not exactly okay. She said sometimes being a girl sucks, but you have to be smart. And if you’re smart, and watch the signals and don’t antagonize a man, then he won’t hit you.”
“That’s what she told you?” I picture Greg’s gentle wife, so lovely and warm toward Elle, giving this advice. The image makes me shiver. “I’m not sure she’s right about that, Elle Belle.”
“It’s what you do,” Elle says.
Touché.
The world narrows down to this single moment, to the huge responsibility of selecting the right words to set my daughter straight. Grief hits me for my own beautiful self-confidence, shattered so many years ago that I can’t imagine ever putting the pieces all back together. Maybe it’s too late for me, but Elle still has a chance to stay free of this broken thinking.
“I think it’s like this,” I say, finally. “If you were really rich, some sort of gazillionaire, some thief might come and steal your money. And then maybe people would say, ‘She should have had better security. She should have put the money in a safe and hired a bodyguard.’ And maybe those things are true, or maybe not. Either way, the guy who came and stole your money is a thief and a criminal. Do you see that?”
“I guess. What does that have to do with Daddy?”
“Any man who hits a woman is like that thief.”
“You spanked me when I was little.”
“Maybe I was wrong to do that. I don’t know. You needed to learn some things, and I couldn’t think how else to teach you.”
Elle lies back on the bed, journal clasped over her chest, and peruses the ceiling as if it holds all the answers.
“And maybe Daddy is doing the same thing. Teaching me.”
God have mercy. My mother used to say that parenting classes should be mandatory before people were allowed to reproduce. She didn’t mean this to apply to herself, of course, but to the ignorant hordes whose children run wild in Walmart, pillaging candy bars and throwing tantrums. At this moment, I’m thinking there should be a mandatory university degree, which includes not only psychology but also existential philosophy.
I lie down beside my daughter and join her in staring at the ceiling. There’s a water stain in the corner, but otherwise no answers I can see.
“Does that seem true to you?” I ask, finally.
“It feels—different,” she says. Her voice catches as her rigid control finally breaks, her breath uneven with sobs she can’t suppress.
I lie perfectly still, quelling the need to hold her. She doesn’t want that, doesn’t need that, and this conversation is so not about what I need.
“And how does it feel?” I ask her, or the ceiling, or maybe the universe.
“Not good,” she says, and I think that’s all I’m going to get. She’s only twelve, for all her precocity and adult behavior. But then, as usual, she surprises me. “It makes me feel like . . . gum. Old parking lot gum. On a shoe. Inconvenient. Annoying. Disgust—”
She can’t finish the word, crying now in earnest, and I have to work hard to translate what spills out of her, distorted by her weeping.
“What’s wrong with me? He didn’t used to look at me like that.”
I roll toward her and put a hand on her shoulder. She buries her soaking face in my chest and clenches her hands in my shirt. I stroke her back, slow and steady, and rock her, until the weeping eases.
“Oh, sweetheart. Nothing is wrong with you.”
Elle pulls away a little to blow her nose, then shoots the crumpled tissue at the waste basket, overhand. It falls short by six inches, a crumpled wad of snot and failure. Not one to accept defeat, she lobs the second tissue, and this time it’s a slam dunk.
“See? You’re even good at tissue basketball. Perfect in every way.”
“You’re kinda biased,” she says. She laughs, just the tiniest bit, which makes my heart ache even more when she asks, with a little quaver, “Do I have to go back with him tonight?”
“You are staying right here with me.”
As I say the words, a shadow Greg looms up over me, all-knowing, all-powerful. Are you sure you want to play that game with me, Maisey?
My answer? The thing I didn’t have the guts to say? No. No, Greg, I don’t want to play. But I will. For the sake of this strong, beautiful child, I will do anything. Give anything. Confront any challenge, any obstacle, you set in my path.
I’m just afraid that all I have will never be enough.
Leah’s Journal
Pain is what I remember first. White lights in my head. A deep ache in my eye socket that made me need to vomit, only I was lying on my back and couldn’t move.
Pinned, I thought, remembering Boots straddling me, only he wasn’t there anymore. The weight was gone. My body didn’t want to respond to my brain.
I managed to roll to the side, and the blaze of agony from moving set me to heaving. Not much in my stomach—I think I’d missed dinner—but just enough to foul my pillowcase.
Another task. That was my first conscious thought. Now I would have to do laundry.
The babies were still crying.
Boots was nowhere to be seen. His truck was not out front.
Somehow I managed to get through that night. To feed the twins. To strip the stinking pillowcase and throw it in the laundry.
The next few days were a blazing hell beyond any conscious thought. His mother, when she came over, didn’t look shocked, just sad. She didn’t even ask what happened to me. She fixed me an ice pack to put over my eye and my cheek. Changed the babies, held them.
“Steak is good for bruises,” she said, but we both knew neither one of us could afford the luxury of steak, even for eating.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Despite all my best intentions, I’m not much of a warrior woman. I’ll fight it out face-to-face with Greg if I must, but phase one in the plan to keep Elle from flying back with him is to be elsewhere when he shows up to get her. Dad and Elle both being complicit, we vacate the house in the early afternoon, in case Greg comes early.
Elle and I turn our phones off to minimize the ping of guilt that will arrive with each unanswered text message or voicemail. Dad has never carried a cell phone.
Staying occupied in Colville isn’t as easy as it would be in the city, but we hit the early movie at Colville’s one and only theater, which fortunately is rated PG, not R. We go for hamburgers at Ronnie D’s. We pick up new socks and T-shirts for Dad at Walmart. And we go to get groceries.
We’re in the cereal aisle at the Safeway—Dad, me, and Elle—having an argument about what would be acceptable for consumption, when Dad drops the bombshell.
Elle has gravitated toward the brightly colored, sugar-coated varieties. Dad mutters something about the good old days and oatmeal, and I’m really just staring at boxes and wishing there was a Make a Decision button so I wouldn’t have to think.
It’s 6:45 p.m., and my mind is thoroughly occupied with film clips of Greg showing up at Dad’s house to find it locked up tight. Ringing the doorbell. Talking to Edna. Maybe he’ll come looking for us and recognize Dad’s car in the parking lot. My eyes are in constant motion, up and down the aisle.
“This one,” Elle says, thrusting a garish box into my hands. “Look. Whole grain.”
“And sugar is the first ingredient.”
“No, it’s the second ingredient. Why can’t sugar be a grain?”
“Because—”
“I was wrong. I think we need to go see Marley.” Dad says this as if he’s read the words on the box of Raisin Bran he’s peering at through his bifocals.
I take a steadying breath. “Is the Raisin Bran sending out telepathic signals now?”
Dad ignores me. “We should skip town tonight. Drive to TriCities. Get a hotel. And then we’ll go talk to her in the morning.”
“All three of us. Just like that.”
“It would solve the Dad problem,” Elle says.
The box of cereal in my hands feels extraordinarily heavy. I set it back on the shelf.
“I need to get out of the house,” Dad says. “What do they call it—a grief holiday?”
“A what?”