I can’t say the same for my father. Even his lips quiver when he begs for the men to let me go. “Please. I’m begging you. She’s a Petretti. She is mafia royalty. You can’t do this.”
My eyes dart to the corner of the room when a hand slices through the air. Although the hand is covered by a leather glove perfect for hiding fingerprints, I know they belong to a man. Nothing occurs in this town unless it was a direct order given by the man who rules it.
My uncle has come to visit, but instead of arriving with gifts and splendor, he has come to maim.
“I told you what would happen if you disobeyed me, Sean.” My brows furrow when my uncle steps out of the shadows. His face isn’t as wrinkled as it was the last time I saw him, but the evilness in his eyes is abundant. “Despite your last name, you must pay for your error in judgment.” He mockingly waves his hand over our much-loved yet derelict home. “You have nothing to give me that I don’t already own…” My mother steps back when his eyes lock with hers for the briefest second, and he smiles an evil grin. “So I had to get inventive.”
I want to fall to my knees and comfort the little girl clutching my dad’s leg like he will forever be her hero when my uncle’s focus shifts to her. She’s so scared by his presence, she has peed her pants, and big salty blobs are streaming down her face unchecked.
It’s clear she’s traumatized enough she’ll do everything in her power to push this exchange to the back of her mind the instant the horrifying event is over. Even more so when my uncle mutters in her ear, “You’ll make a nice profit. Blonde hair and blue eyes went out of fashion years ago. They love milky white-skinned girls with dark, stormy hair. They’ll pay top dollar for you.”
“Leave her alone!” I scream at the same time my dad yanks my younger self behind him. My dad is taller than my uncle, and his shoulders are a tad wider, but since he was birthed by my grandfather’s whore instead of his wife, he wasn’t granted the notoriety my uncle has had since birth. The men lighting up his chest with semi-automatic weapons don’t cower when he puffs his chest out with determination. They mock him, praying he will make a mistake that will leave them no choice but to break the rules their realm is governed by.
Much to his disgust, my uncle couldn’t order the death of my father. However, he could torment him until he was nothing but a shell of skin and bones.
“Give her to me,” my uncle snarls in my father’s face, his closeness so near. Even with this memory being almost two decades old, I recall the ghastly scent that bounded out of his mouth. He drinks his liquor like he rules his monarch—hard and undiluted.
My father shakes his head before he adds a stern “No!” to his non-verbal reply.
My hand shoots up to clamp my mouth shut when my uncle backhands my father. He hits him so forcefully, a tooth clatters across the warped wooden floors of the living room. It’s a hit that would see most men knocked out in an instant, but not my daddy. He remains standing tall, forever on guard when it comes to my mother and me.
“You’re a fool, Sean,” my uncle garbles out a short time later.
When my uncle clicks his fingers two times, I prepare my stomach for the worst. He only ever clicks his fingers when he’s on a warpath with no intent for survivors.
My instincts are on point. Their focus was simply on the wrong child. The goons don’t force themselves past my father to get to my younger self cowering behind his thigh. They snatch up the sleeping child in a crib at the side of the room. They take Kaylee.
“No!” my mother screams, her rebellion finally on par with my father’s. “You promised,” she screams on repeat while thumping her fists onto my uncle’s chest. “You said she’d never be in any danger. That you would keep her safe.”
My uncle’s brutally swung fist ends her campaign for all of thirty seconds before she’s back on her feet, yelling and hitting like she’s possessed. But this time, her anger isn’t fixed on my uncle. She hurls abuse at my father, telling him how she hates him and that she’ll never forgive him.
She’s so worked up she doesn’t care that half of her wildly swung hits connect with my younger self instead of my father. She pummels into her on repeat, heartless to the fact my younger self’s cries leave my father no choice but to shove her to the other side of the room with force.
When her head smashes into the wall with anoomph,my hand instinctively raises to the area my brain rattled against when my uncle hit me in his Audi. My head didn’t crack the glass, but even weeks after his assault, a bump can still be felt under the skin.
While frantically trying to work out if this is a memory or a nightmare, I trace the lump. With my mother sobbing in the corner and my uncle and his goons gone with Kaylee, the house is eerily quiet. It replicates a house of horrors to perfection.
“It’ll be okay, Demi. You know what mommy is like,” my father mutters gently, drawing my focus back to him.
He lifts my younger self into his arms before he paces us toward my childhood bedroom. This time, I follow him, aware of who my focus needs to be on. I love my mother, but she was never there for me like my father was. That’s why I was so surprised he killed himself. My uncle tormented him daily, but even during a mental psychosis, he chose to endure the torment than have it pushed onto me.
After changing my younger self’s soiled pajamas, he places her into bed like his entire world isn’t being upended before his very eyes, then carefully removes the locks stuck to her tear-drenched cheeks. Once he has them tucked behind her ears, he drags the tip of his index finger down her nose, raising her sagging lips into a ghost-like smile. “It’s time to go to sleep now, Demi, but we’ll make pancakes in the morning. Pancakes make everything better.”
When he hums a familiar nursery rhyme, the memory in my head fades to another. This one appears to be a couple of years later than the first two. My knee is badly scarred, and the love hearts I drew over my schoolbooks have the same set of initials in them—MW.
The crib in the living room is gone, and a highchair no longer dangles off the end of the kitchen table. I could say that’s because Kaylee would be too old for baby things, but my gut won’t allow me to act so stupidly. Family photographs no longer adorn the fridge, and not an ounce of love is felt in the air. Not even the fake, made-up kind I didn’t realize was fraudulent until now. It’s cold and icy, and I appear more grateful that summer holidays are over than disappointed.
“Are you ready, kiddo?” my father asks as he walks into the kitchen. His shoulders appear heavier than they were in the last montage, but his large frame hides it well. “If you want the pick of the dorms, we better get a wiggle on.”
He tickles my younger self’s stomach like I did Kaylee’s in the first memory before he gathers her school bag off the kitchen table. When he peers at my mother at the side of the room, it’s obvious he’d give anything in the world to see her smile. He still loves her even with it appearing as if his love isn’t reciprocated.
When she fails to notice his prolonged watch after several heart-wrenching seconds, he sighs, spins on his heels, then directs our trek outside. My younger self doesn’t say goodbye to my mother either. It was rare to get a response out of her anyway. If my memory isn’t leading me astray, she only said happy birthday to me the month prior. My party was six months earlier.
After climbing into the front seat of my father’s run-down car, my younger self latches her seat belt, then peers into the back seat, exhaling harshly when she notices the back seat is void of a car seat.
“What happened to Kaylee?” I ask at the same time my younger self works up the courage to do the same.
My dad rustles her hair like he always did when he needed me to be quiet before he shifts the gearstick into park and drives away.
