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Because there was a good chance that a man like Benny wouldn't let his woman leave with his son. Even if he had no interest in them. It was a reputation thing. And Benny was working his way up in the ranks.
So my mom played her part.
She kept the house.
She turned a blind eye.
She let him get her with four more babies by the time I was ten.
By then, yeah, I was old enough to know. To understand. To feel completely helpless about it.
The screaming. The slamming. The begging. The crying. the mornings after when my mother's face was mottled with bruises and stained with blood, when she couldn't pick one of my sister's up because of a busted rib or wrist.
I knew what he was doing.
And I knew I had no way of stopping it.
Because, by then, I was in school.
And everyone knew who Benigno Flores was - the second-in-command of the Ñetas. That I was his kid. That being his kid meant no one could mess with me.
And if my father had the power to make other clueless ten-year-old boys keep a wide berth around me, I figured there was no way anyone could help us.
And they didn't.
And I had to watch my mom break a little day by day, week by week, year by year.
While my father lived the good life - making and blowing money, drinking, drugging, fucking, fighting.
She was home raising babies, keeping the house spotless, keeping his clothes cleaned, keeping meals on the stove for him three times a day even though he was rarely home to eat them because if she didn't do all those things, she would pay for it in blood and bruises.
I mean, he would always find other reasons to beat her, but she tiptoed around him, scrambled to remove any possible external reason for him to go at her.
"I'm sorry," Liv interrupted, reaching over to give my knee a reassuring squeeze. "You must have felt so powerless."
Powerless.
That was the right word.
Fucking powerless.
It didn't matter that when I turned thirteen, I sprouted up to his height, that I widened out to be bigger than he was.
He was still the second most powerful man in our area.
I had no chance of standing up to him.
But then a year passed us by.
Mom had a face without bruises for a whole three weeks in a row.
She felt it.
I felt it.
It was coming.
It had been too long.
She cooked and cleaned. I helped with the laundry, with the shopping, with the lawn maintenance.
But in being so busy, we had forgotten one thing.
Keeping the girls quiet.
At nine, Mia and Zoe knew how things in the house worked. Ana, at seven and Elisa at six, were smart, picking up on all the stress in the house, naturally marking their tones, playing quietly.
But Leala was only just halfway to four, was full of energy, crazy, buzzing around the house like a whirlwind.
And her idea of playing was something akin to screaming.
My mother and I had been used to it.
It was our normal day to day noise.
But my father had been sleeping one off.
I'd never forget the cry that morning. It was something I would hear in quiet moments on occasion still, all these years later.
It had been ear-piercing even to us, used to the screams of little girls.
The dish my mother had been washing slipped and shattered to the ground in slow motion as I turned fast enough to overturn the chair at my side, both of us rushing out to the living room, sure she had impaled herself on something, had severed a goddamn limb.
"My father had thrown her into a glass coffee table."
"Jesus," Liv hissed, jaw getting tight. "Was she alright?"
She'd been lucky.
The shards hadn't stuck her in every inch of exposed skin like they could have.
She'd taken a slice to her forehead, deep enough to require stitches which she wasn't allowed to get because there was no way to coach a three-year-old to tell the hospital workers that she had been running around and fell into the table, not that her daddy had shoved her into it.
It had healed jagged, leaving her with a scar there, even as an adult.
Leala had never been wild and carefree again, she silenced herself, withdrew, became a quiet, sullen girl who jumped away from men, not just her own father.
And that was when I had started planning it, plotting it.
I never told my mother, knowing she would try to talk me out of it, that she had, in many ways, become comfortable with the discomfort of her life. It was all she had known for over a decade.
But there was no way we could stay.
I didn't mind the occasional ass-kicking I was subjected to. And as much as it killed me to see my mom bruised and bloodied, something about my little sister, yeah, that motivated me.
