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I understood the sound of Mom’s cries and her voice. “Please, stop. The girls.”
Her voice sounded funny now too. Like the time she accidentally slammed her finger in the car door and hurt it real bad. She was in pain.
My mom needed taking care of sometimes too. Like when she forgot she baked cookies so I had to watch them so they didn’t burn.
I ran out to the living room to help Mommy find the plasters for whatever she did to get hurt. She sometimes forgot where she put those too.
The coffee table was tumbled over, and all my crayons that I left there so I could draw and watch TV at the same time, they were all gone. All over the floor. Next to Mom. She was all curled up like Polly, but she had a bleeding head and mouth and her eyes were swollen and scary-looking.
She was crying.
Daddy was standing over her, and I first thought he was helping her up after she tripped, but I started to get scared that he was hurting her.
“Mom?” I whispered in a small voice, not knowing what to do. The Band-Aids weren’t big enough to help cover this boo-boo.
Mom’s red eyes went to me, as did Dad’s. His were red but not from crying. He looked weird. He didn’t look like Dad. It was scary.
“Go back to bed, baby,” Mom ordered, her voice not like it was at bedtime. It was different. Like broken at the edges. And panicked.
I didn’t move.
My eyes stayed on Mommy, then moved up to Daddy. He was staring at me, but his eyes were strange and empty. Like marbles. Glassy.
“Lucy,” Mommy said, her voice more like the bedtime voice but still tinged with hurt.
“No,” I said, stepping forward. My knees felt weak and funny when I did it, and I was really scared of the glassy-eyed stare from Daddy, but I kept going.
Then I was beside Mommy. In front of her. Between her and Daddy.
“I’ll get the plasters, Mom,” I said, trying to stop my tears. You weren’t allowed to cry when moms cried.
“I think we might need something bigger than plasters,” Mom whispered. “But I want you to go to bed. Watch your sister.”
I frowned at her. “I did. She’s sleeping. Now I’m watching my mom.”
“Get the fuck to bed,” Daddy roared, and I jumped because it was loud and he’d been all quiet.
Mom jumped too. She made a weird hurt noise at the back of her throat but managed to pull me into her chest.
I felt safe in Mommy’s arms, mostly. They saved me from monsters under the bed or bad dreams. But Daddy wasn’t a monster or a bad dream. And I was more scared of that.
“Don’t hurt her, Alastair,” Mom asked.
Her. Me. Daddy wouldn’t hurt me. I blinked up at his glassy eyes. They scared me.
He watched Mom and me for a long time. The longest.
“Fuck you and the fucking brats,” he said finally. “You can deal with this shit. I’m not doing it anymore. I can do better than this. Than all of you.”
He swayed weirdly but bent to snatch his keys from the ground. Then he stumbled out the door of the trailer.
Mom stayed still, with me against her chest until the sound of Daddy’s pickup truck roared away into nothing.
Then she said nothing.
Then she cried. In a way that scared me more than Daddy’s eyes.
Not that I ever saw those eyes again.
Mom found Pete almost as soon as Dad was gone. Immediately, actually. Dad split without a second glance, while Pete only had eyes for Mom. He was one of the nurses on call the night I brought her in, eight years old, struggling to hold my crying baby sister, my injured mother leaning heavily on me. She had made the drive, and the rib, which had at that point punctured her lung, made her pass out just as Pete was there to catch her.
Catch all of us.
Not exactly the stuff of fairy tales, a man falling in love with a woman after she stumbles into the hospital he worked at with injuries sustained from an abusive deadbeat husband and two kids in tow.
Not the stuff of fairy tales, but better if you asked me. It wasn’t pretty, and their relationship wasn’t perfect, but it was real. They found each other amongst the cruel and weird world, and it was right. And I had a dad. Polly had a dad. One dad. She didn’t have the memories of the sperm donor. But eight-year-old me did. The bad. And the good. The ones that haunted me because even though I loved Pete with all my heart and soul, a part of me was still eight and wondering and confused by the fact that her dad, the only man in her life, had hurt her mom so bad and left without even writing. Even on my birthday.
