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Luke drew back. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
I laughed. It sounded as sick as my heart. “Yeah, probably. But I love her. She’s the only family I have. She didn’t protect me the way she should have, but she…” I started to cry again. “She loves me. I’m her only child, and she loves me so much.”
Luke didn’t say anything at all. He rubbed my back, kissed my wet cheeks, and when I had calmed down again, he helped me wipe the tears away.
“Okay,” I said, straightening my shoulders. “We’ll go out there, and she’ll say she’s sorry about the picture, and I’ll say it’s fine, and then we’ll—”
“It’s not fine! Why would she want a picture of her son’s rapist on the wall of her home?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t defend her. I understood my mom better than anyone. I even knew the logic that had led her to make that addition to the wall—I’d indulged in that kind of thinking myself sometimes because Ididhave some fond memories of my dad. That’s what was so sick about it all, wasn’t it? That the man who’d taught me to swim, and who’d bandaged my cuts when I wrecked my first bike, and who’d made up a funny story about a soap-eating dolphin whenever he helped me with my bath had betrayed and hurt me in such a soul-rending way.
Would I ever recover from what he’d done? Could I? And wasn’t the truth of whatI’ddone with him further evidence of how permanent the injury had been?Iwas a monster. I was sick. And now I was truly sick—with HIV—as a fitting punishment for what I’d tried to forget.
But I couldn’t explain any of that to Luke. Not now.
“It’s off the wall now. She won’t do anything like it again.”
“Won’t she? She made the mistake of letting him back in this house. She put the photo on the wall in the first place. Is she seeing him again? Has she forgiven him?”
Luke’s questions seared my sick heart, and I turned to pull the bedroom door open, barging out to the living room where Mama had broken open the frame and was now feeding the photo to the kerosene heater.
“It’s gone,” she said, as it caught fire. She dropped the flaming picture into a bowl she held in her hands. “He’sgone. That was my last picture of him. The only one I’d kept.”
“He isn’t gone, Mama,” I bit out before thumping my chestwith my fist. “He’s in here. I can’t get him out. He’s nevergone.”
“Sugarbaby, I’m so sorry,” she said, coming toward me with open hands. All of her attention was on me, not a glance was spared for Luke, who I knew hovered close behind me.
I took her in my arms. “Mama, you haven’t seen him lately, have you?” I whispered against her soft hair. “You haven’t forgiven him again?”
“No,” she said with a sob. “I couldn’t ever take him back. Not now. Not after the last time.”
“So…you know what he did to me?”
What you didforhim, my mind hissed at me, but I didn’t say it aloud.
“He told me,” she said. “I didn’t want to believe him. That he’d hurt you again like that, and that you’d… That you’d…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.
“I hate him, Mama. I’m scared of him coming back and—”
“He’s gone, Sugarbaby. I promise. He’snevercoming back.”
I let out a shaky breath. “How do you know?”
“Because he’s back in prison.”
I tugged away from her. “You knew that, and you didn’t tell me?”
Mama’s eyes were red with tears, and she chewed on her bottom lip before confessing, “I saw it in the paper. I didn’t want to upset you.”
I looked at the bowl in her hands and the ash of the photo. The woman who’d put that picture up, and the woman who hadn’t told me some of the best news in the world—my father was back where he should have stayed all along—was my mom, the only one I had. “How’d he get sent back?”
“He got remarried, and his new wife had a teenage daughter.”
“Oh God, Mama, no.”
She nodded.
I squeezed my eyes closed. “Mama…”
