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“Whatever you want,” I say. “I don’t care where she goes, but she can’t stay here.”
The clouds part for a brief moment. The heavy wind blows them across the sky quickly, each one thicker and darker than the next. Through the opening, the moon is a pale silver disk.
It’s the same moon that bore witness to what the Garrisons did to my parents. I look up and all at once I’m back there.
In that fucking room.
***
I’m laying on my back staring at the nearly full moon through the window. The cold air creeps in through the cracks of our employee housing. I’m a child, wrapped in the frayed quilt my grandmother gave me before we left Boston.
My mother is crying in the kitchen. Heavy, wet sobs like she’ll never stop. My father’s voice is a deep rumble. I hear his chair scrape back and her footsteps patter. I know he’s holdingher, probably stroking her hair. He always does that when she’s upset.
Earlier in the day, I came back from school to find the house empty. The kitchen chair was overturned. There was something red on the floor, like dark red paint was dripped across the dusty boards.
I followed the drips to the back of the house and found my mother sitting by the laundry sink.
Ice cold fear gripped me. Her eyes were puffy and her nose dripped blood down her chin. My father knelt at her feet with a wet rag in his fist. Dabbing at her mouth and nose, trying to stem the flow.
“Dad,” I whispered.
I didn’t know what to ask. Is she alright? Who did this? Surely my father didn’t do that. He’s never even said an unkind word to my mother in my entire life.
My mother made a muffled sound and covered her mouth with her hand. Her eyes were so sad, so swollen with tears.
“Baby, go to your room,” she said, putting on that fake happy tone that means she’s trying to protect me.
I swallow hard because my throat is bunched up. My father nodded, jerking his head towards the doorway. I fled to my room and here I am, wrapped up in a quilt. Still in my school clothes and shoes. My lids are heavy despite my pounding heart.
I lie there with a sickening sense of dread in my small chest. Listening to them talk and cry until finally the moon winks out and I fall asleep.
For almost a year, I don’t know what happened. I’m sure my father hit her, but I’m confused why she still kisses him and lets him hold her against his chest. And I don’t know why we have to move into a cheap motel and my father has to go to work before dawn and return drenched in mud from the oil fields.
On my ninth birthday, I decide I’m a man now and I confront my father about it one night on the back porch.
How could he have hurt mom? Why is she so scared now? Why did she go from being soft and pleasant to rail thin and haunted?
He starts crying and I sit there, heart in my mouth, and wait for him to stop.
He tells me that Abel Garrison tried to rape my mother. He held her down and beat her face when she resisted. If my father hadn’t walked in the door with a shotgun, he’d have gotten away with it.
He chased him down the road, shooting at him once and missing.
My father doesn’t cry. He doesn’t believe in it, but for my mother, he makes an exception.
The cold northern mountains make for hard men. My father only showed softness to my mother. He hit me at the end, after her death destroyed him. But I never hated him for it because I remembered, when things got dark, that he wept for her that day.
My first introduction to the concept of sex is through an explanation of rape. I’m innocent so he gives me The Talk with tears streaming down his face before he explains the rest. It’s not lost on me that this isn’t the way these things should happen.
He keeps his gaze on the ground.
Worn hands tangled together, eyes fixed on his boots.
He tells me why we had to leave Garrison Ranch. That while I was at school, the Garrisons evicted my parents at gunpoint. Driving them out with nothing but a few belongings in the back of their truck.
I’ll never fucking forget that.
Not if I live a thousand years.
