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But he was opening the door, and tossing Mommy out onto the front steps, reaching into his jacket, and pulling out something black.
But why did he have one of my brother's toy guns?
I didn't get a chance to ask as the door slammed, as my head turned to find my brother on the stairs.
"If she was good, Daddy wouldn't have to hit her," he said in a practiced way, a way that said Daddy had said it to him - or around him - before.
But he was older than me. Only by a year, but older. So he must have known what he was talking about.
"Fucking pissed herself," I heard one of Daddy's friends laugh even as it happened.
A big boom like thunder, but not.
Loud enough to make me jump back.
A shriek moved out of me when I felt frantic hands on my shoulders.
"It's me, herzchen," Helga's voice said, soothing, yet frantic. Little heart, as she always called me. "Come on. Let's go get you cleaned up, okay?"
That was what she did.
And then put me back to bed.
Sang me to sleep.
I didn't see Mommy the next day.
Or the next.
I'd asked Daddy when he passed through the kitchen on his way out.
But he just shot me a cold look. "Don't ask about that bitch again."
And when Daddy talked like that, he meant it.
Helga turned to me after the door slammed, wiping her big hands on a towel she always had hanging out of the pocket of her apron. She moved a few feet toward the doorway that led to the rest of the house, looking out, then coming toward me, brushing a hand down my dark hair.
"Herzchen, your Mommy isn't coming back, okay? I know that is going to make you sad and scared. But I'm here for you, okay? You can come to me."
"Instead of Daddy?" I'd asked.
She had turned to look at the doorway again. "Yes, herzchen. Always, always come to me instead of your Daddy."
"He yells a lot."
"Yes, he does."
"He yelled at Mommy. She was crying."
"I know. I know. And that is why you will come to me. Helga never yells at you, does she?"
"No," I'd agreed, smiling a little. "Michael says I have to be a good girl, so Daddy doesn't hit me."
There had been a look on her face then, a look I didn't understand. But it almost seemed hard which was out of place in her soft face.
"For now, baby, yes. You should try to be a good girl. Try not to make your Daddy mad."
"For now only?"
"Yes, for now. Until I tell you different, okay?"
And with the only parental figure I had in my life, I had done what I needed to, even if I didn't fully understand.
I'd agreed.
It was years before I finally understood what happened to my mother.
I had felt her absence every day of my young life, trapped in cold, lifeless walls with men who ignored or mocked me in equal turns, often finding Helga too busy to play with me the way my mother had, take me to the beach, the park, carefully braid my hair before bed.
She'd been there for the big things.
My school functions next to an empty seat for my father who never showed, whose presence I did crave even though I feared him more than loved him.
She had pulled me aside when I was eleven to explain in awkward, painstaking detail that I was going to be a woman soon. I had blushed at the mechanics of it, at the explanations about how I was to handle it.
But it was more than that.
"You're going to be so beautiful Helen. Just like your Mama," she had told me, her eyes and voice sad at the idea even if I delighted at the prospect of looking like my mother. Or, at least, what I remembered of her at that point because there wasn't a single photo of her in the house. Helga didn't even have one for me. My father had wiped her away like she had never existed in the first place.
"Thank you."
"No. No, don't thank me. This will be your curse. To be so beautiful. In this house. It is full of ugly men with ugly hearts. And now, now they will start to look at you. They will look at you, and they will think things. And those things you don't want them to think."
Young, naive, I hadn't understood the implication. I wouldn't. Not for another few years anyway.
"You listen to me. You keep your head ducked down when you see your father's friends. You don't look at them or talk to them. And you don't ever get stuck in a room with them. Okay?"
Again, just like when I had been a confused little girl, she was all I had. And even if I didn't understand, I had agreed.
