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I struggle to form words. My lips feel thick and rubbery. “Pleash, let me go… I have friendsh… I told them where I wash going tonight…” Saliva drools from my mouth.
“Did you really, now?” His voice is dry and amused. “You’re a very poor liar, Tamara. But we’ll have plenty of time to discuss that later.”
Oh God. Oh no.
“Arrrr you going torshure me?” I don’t know if my words make sense anymore. My cheek is pressing against the floor, and I can’t feel my body.
Joshua kneels next to me and strokes my cheek with his finger. “You don’t get to ask me that. You want to know why?”
No.
“Yeshhhh…” I can’t see anything. I am numb. I pray to stay numb forever, but God has never been that kind to me.
I think he says, “Because I am fate, and you are nothing.” But his voice is coming from so far away.
CHAPTERFOUR
JOSHUA
The first one to die was Remus. He drowned in an icy pond in the dead of winter, under a pale blue sky.
I think Remus was around six. My father made him strip down in the sub-zero weather.
My father stripped down too, dropping his clothing into a pile in the snow. I’d never seen him naked before. He had scars on his body.
I was only a few years old then, but I’d already learned a lot about survival. We all had.
Even before they entered the pond, Remus’s lips were blue and his skinny body was shaking, but he didn’t say a word or beg for mercy. He knew better. He followed our father and marched right into the frigid water. They swam across the pond, then turned around and headed back. Halfway across, Remus sank. He disappeared, the black waters swallowing him. My father glanced over at him and kept swimming. He didn’t miss a stroke.
We were all lined up on the shore, watching. My mother included. She stared straight ahead, her eyes on Remus the whole time, obeying orders.
I would never admit this to anyone, but I still felt fear back then. And I was sick with it. But I also felt anger, and contempt. Why was Remus so weak? Why hadn’t he saved himself?
When my father emerged from the lake, he didn’t shiver. The man wasn’t even human. I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans and sandals—clothing my father had picked out for me on this snowy day—and I was shaking so hard my teeth rattled. Somehow, as he approached, I locked my muscles tight and managed to force myself to stop. My other brothers didn’t. My brother Romulus, Remus’s twin, shook the hardest of all, and even worse, he had tears in his eyes. My father slapped him so hard he fell to his knees. Romulus lost the hearing in his right ear for the rest of his short life.
My twin brother, Charlemagne, sneaking glances at me, managed to suppress the worst of his shivering. He was quick on the uptake, like me, figuring out the rules of survival early. In the end, it wasn’t enough to save him.
My mother stared straight ahead.
Fortunately for me, that day, most of my father’s wrath was trained on my mother.
“Weak,” my father sneered at her. “They’re all weak. Because of you. My genes are strong. Yours are poison. You’ve ruined my sons.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she whispered, the way she’d been taught.
We headed back through the woods, and her head drooped in despair. He would punish her for Remus’s failure—after making her watch her son die.
Her screams that night twisted through the air. He made sure we heard them. Our rooms were in a row down the hall from theirs so that we’d hear everything he did to her. It was always agony for her. That was all we knew of sex. A man’s cruel laughter, the dull thud of blows, a woman’s wails of pain.
Sometimes she needed time to heal. She’d limp around the house, dragging her body around, whimpering in pain with each step as she cooked our meals and washed our clothes and scrubbed the floors.
When that happened, he’d bring another girl home for a while. Never women, just girls, middle-school age. He kept them in the basement downstairs, until my mother healed and could serve him again the way a wife should serve her husband. My mother had been one of those girls, once. I found that out from her when I was in my teens. She thought she’d been eleven when he took her, but she was no longer sure.
I am nothing like my father.
But I absorbed his hard lessons, learned many things from him. On the day Remus died, I learned not to cry, or shiver. I haven’t done either since.
I think about that as I look at the man standing in front of me. He’s shivering violently.Weak.
