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No matter how hard shetried to remember his face, the image kept slipping away from her, like a reflection that disintegrates when you plunge your hand into water. There and gone. There and gone. She knew that face lurked somewhere deep in her memory, but she could not reach it. Instead, when she closed her eyes and thought about him, she saw cornflowers. Faded blue cornflowers on wallpaper that was streaked with mold and stained an ugly yellow from years of cigarette smoke.
Even all these years later she could still picture that bedroom, scarcely larger than a closet, with one small window. A window that might as well not even have been there, because the house was tucked up against a hillside, which blocked all the sunlight. Her room was a grim little cave that her mother had tried to dress up and make cheerful. Julianne had hung curtains she’d made herself from remnant lace bought at a yard sale. From that same yard sale, she’d also bought a painting of roses that she’dhung over Amy’s little bed. It was an amateurish painting—even at eight years old, Amy could tell the difference between the work of a real artist and that splotchy attempt, signed on the bottom by someone named Eugene. But Julianne was always thinking up ways to brighten their lives in that cramped house, where the walls themselves reeked with the accumulated odors left by countless previous tenants. Her mother always tried her best.
But it was never good enough forhim.
For too long she’d suppressed the memories of those days and now she could not conjure up an image of his face, but she could still remember his voice, raw and angry, yelling in the kitchen. Whenever he was in one of his moods, her mother would send Amy to her room and tell her to lock the door, leaving Julianne to deal with his rage the way she always dealt with it. Which usually meant quiet pleading and an occasional black eye.
“If I lose, you lose” was what he always screamed at her. Amy did not understand why it had such power over her mother, but those words inevitably defeated Julianne and made her go silent.
If I lose, you lose.
But it was her mother who bore the bruises, who got in the way of his fists. The one who trudged off to work at the local diner every morning at fivea.m., where she’d heat up the griddle and brew the coffee before the farmers and the long-haul truckers showed up for breakfast. She was the one who dragged herself home every afternoon to cook dinner and help Amy with her homework before he got home. Then they’d both watch him get drunk.Family values,that’s what he called it, what he threw in Julianne’s face whenever she tried to leave him.Family valueswas a threat, the cudgel he used to keep them forever locked with him in battle.
Most of the time that battle played out in other rooms, whereAmy couldn’t watch it. But she could hear it through the wall as she lay curled up in bed, staring at the wallpaper with the blue cornflowers.
Even now, and hundreds of miles from that house under the hill, she could still hear those voices in her head, his growing louder and louder, and Julianne’s fading to silence. Family values meant keeping your head down and your voice soft. It meant having dinner on the table by six and your paycheck in his hand every other Friday.
It meant keeping secrets that at any time might explode in your face.
Was that miserable shack still standing? Was some girl now sleeping in her old bedroom, or had it all been torn down, its ghosts bulldozed into the earth where they belonged? The ghosts of those cornflowers would never vanish; they were here in her head, still so vivid she could see their nicotine-stained petals, but why couldn’t she remember his face? Where had that memory gone?
All she remembered was the voice screaming in the kitchen, vowing that he would never let them go, would never give them up. No matter how far and fast they ran, he said, he would find them.
Is it possible? Is he coming for us now?
