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So I let it slide.
I never should have let it fucking slide.
I should have pushed.
I should have demanded to know.
I could have done something.
But hindsight was always twenty/twenty.
In the moment, I had been nearly blind.
I missed it, the way she flinched when I asked even the most basic questions about her life before, ones that were associated with the time period that she must have spent with Mikey's dad. I guess maybe if I had noticed it, I would have attributed it to the abuse. And the fact that Erica was a proud woman, likely embarrassed - as ridiculous as that was - by the fact that she had endured it.
I certainly never thought there was more to it.
I didn't have the kind of imagination that would allow me to guess the reality.
"Baby, just leave it," she told me on the phone one night, after listening to me bitch about a shoddy job on the wiring of an apartment building just outside of town that had just been built, the contractors clearly cutting corners, and it was endangering everyone who lived there, mostly low-income families. So, naturally, no one seemed to give a fuck about them. They had nowhere else to go. Who cared that the fucking electric outlets sparked when you tried to plug anything in? Fucking assholes. "Go back tomorrow to finish the job," she reasoned, and I knew she was right. It was closing in on eight. I needed to get home to get Mikey to bed. "I have a stew in the crockpot," she added, knowing that would get me. It always did. Who didn't love a good stew after a long ass day working?
"Alright. I'll wrap up. I'll be home in twenty."
I had no idea this was the night my life would change forever.
I had my mind on stew and some good, hard fucking after, one of the happiest men in the world at the prospect of it.
I was even in a rush to get inside, leaving my toolbox in the car and taking a long-legged pace to the front door.
I barely got a foot in the door before a blow landed to the side of my head, making my vision black out for a moment as I dropped down to the floor, the pain screaming through my skull.
"No!" Erica shrieked, voice desperate.
Erica. Desperate.
That woman was never desperate.
I fought against the unconsciousness my brain wanted, shaking off the pain, forcing my eyes to scan the room.
And that was when I saw them.
The man to my side with the bat.
The man towering over Erica sitting in her chair, tears streaming down her face, making the mascara leave black streaks down her skin and on her white tee.
And, last, but worst of all... the man holding Mikey to his chest, a big, ugly gun to his temple.
This was maybe the only time in life where his autism worked in his favor. Blissfully oblivious to the insanity going on around him, to the implications of a gun to his head, to what it meant that his mother was hysterically crying, he was simply staring down at the game in his hands.
"Let them go," Erica pleaded, looking over at the man standing above her, a man who - there was no mistaking it - must have been Mikey's dad. It was in the somewhat broad foreheads, the almost black eyes, the snub-shaped noses.
But where the look in Mikey's eyes was simply blank, the look in his father's was cold. Ice, really.
It was right about then that I noticed the gash in Erica's lip, the darkening of her cheek that suggested a bruise starting.
She had gotten away, but not far enough.
And he was back.
With his goons.
For what?
To drag her back? Was he one of those fucks who couldn't let a woman leave him, who thought it emasculated him? Because he wanted his son? Then why would he have a gun on him?
"Don't want to hear shit from you, cunt, unless it is what I want."
"What does he want, Erica?" I asked, not sure why the hell she would deny him anything if he had a gun on her son.
"Erica?" the man said, turning, looking a dark kind of gleeful. "That what this lyin' bitch tellin' you her name is? Erica," he scoffed. "Rhonda Martinez was what she was born with, but 'round the block, we just called her Ronny."
"Give him what he wants," I said, ignoring him, not giving a fuck. Her real name didn't matter.
"I can't," she sobbed, shaking her head. "I can't."
"See, always so fuckin' unreasonable, amIrite?" he asked, speaking to me. "She's a goddamn pain in the ass. Don't know why you'd be putting up with her and the little retard over there."
His son.
His fucking son.
But, really, not his.
Mine.
That kid was as mine as he was anyone else's. More, maybe.
