Eight Years Ago.
PAM CARTER JUST WANTED TO be taken seriously.
That’s what she told me, anyway, in the rare moment where she’d decided to acknowledge my existence.
“I have a lot of potential,” she said around the long cigarette tucked between her lips, looking at me through the rearview window of her crappy car. Her once-raven hair was now platinum blonde, her dark roots telling the story of her empty pockets. “I went to college, you know. Almost finished it, too.”
When Dad died, my mom looked almost relieved. He died in the stupidest possible way. He fell and broke his neck. The stairs leading to his office were wet. The last day of his life, I’d told her I needed new shoes, and she’d said, “We don’t have the money. Your dad has a new family, you know. A second one. Maybe that’s where all the money goes.”
I’d turned around to him, looked at his helpless face. “Is that true?”
He didn’t deny it.
Then, very calmly, with the tone I’d borrowed from her, I said, “I hate you. I never want to see you again.”
I carried this moment in my life like the mark of Cain.
I didn’t know when, exactly, Pam had met Darren, but I remembered the first time she told me about him. I believe it was akin to a royal wedding announcement. She’d said she’d fallen in love with a man, and that he was wonderful and caring. That I would love him, too.
We moved in with Darren four months after Dad had died, the weekend they got married in Todos Santos’ City Hall. There wasn’t much to tell about Darren. Everything he did, he did gingerly and neatly. He was harmless, and would often expand his eyes when he was spoken to, as if he, himself, couldn’t believe he was worth the attention. It was easy to see why he took a liking to Pam. She was a great actress and could fake emotions perfectly.
She made him feel powerful and important.
All the things he didn’t believe about himself.
Darren laid the Daddy stuff on real quick and real thick. When he found out I was into books, he set up an entire library in his living room. He would often take me on spontaneous shopping sprees and hold my hand.
“Would you like that, Jethy?” At first, his lisp embarrassed me. Then, I grew to like it.
I would nod.
“Then it’s yourth.”
He would actively try to engage with me in conversations every time we sat at the dinner table, and when I brought up the subject of wanting to visit my dad’s grave, and Pam almost fell over, Darren was there to tell her that it was a good idea. He was even there to buy the Kit Kat I wanted to place on Dad’s grave, a token for all the Kit Kats we’d shared at the bus stop every morning while we waited. Me, for the bus to take me to school. Him, for the bus taking him to work.
“Two for you, two for me.”
“But you’re bigger, Daddy.”
“Which means that you are growing. Remember: the journey is always better than the destination.”
I’d been reluctantly happy. How could you not be, when you move from a two-bedroom apartment in Anaheim to a mansion in Todos Santos and get a brand-new wardrobe and built-in dad who tries really, really hard to fill the impossibly large shoes your real one left behind? It wasn’t Darren’s fault that we’d been injected into each other’s life artificially. And it definitely wasn’t his fault that I missed my real dad like an inner organ you couldn’t function without.
Darren only had one vice. Just the one. And we were so accustomed to it from living with Dad for so many years that it blended into our lives like an ugly piece of furniture that’s an heirloom from a dead loved one.
Every now and then, he would come back home from a business trip fuming. Anger issues didn’t begin to cover his mood. But, like Dad, he always spared us his wrath. The first time he’d stormed into the house with face like thunder was scary. Then again, he went straight to his office upstairs and didn’t leave there for two days straight. It was odd, to say the least, but by no means terrible. When he finally came out, he was calm, serene, and polite. “I’m thorry I lost it. I’d found out that I invested a lot of money in a hotel that is not going to be built in the next ten years. It was wrong, and it won’t happen again.” He would smooth his wrinkly tie.
Only it did happen again. And again. And then a-freaking-gain. I’d tried to block it out. It wasn’t like he took it out on Mom or me. I sometimes heard him screaming at people on the phone—lispless, like losing his mind came with gaining his demeanor—but he was always soft-spoken when he talked to us. One time, a man came over to our estate a day after the anger started. A grandpa-looking lawyer in high-belted pants. I watched them from my bedroom window. Darren nearly punched him square in the face.
Darren only ever screwed up once, but that time was enough to tilt my whole world on its axis and rewrite the pages of my history and future. I really loved hanging out in Darren’s office. I knew it was forbidden—it wasn’t for me to enter and use—but I still liked it. He had three laptops, a library consisting of thousands of books, most of them untouched. “They look good, don’t they?” he bragged once. “The interior dethigner really put an effort into buying all the clathics.” It felt like a dark cave where I could be alone with my thoughts, the words. With Pushkin.
It was the time he came back from Honduras. I’d been in his office, lying on the deep green velvet couch, a Jane Austen book draped over my chest. I’d been sleeping. It was well after three in the morning.
Darren stormed in, slamming the door shut after him. I perked up immediately. He had a bottle in his hand. He never had a bottle in his hand. Vodka. I recognized the scent immediately, because it reminded me of my dad. I slid the Jane Austen book back to its place above my head, tucking my hair behind my ear.
He turned around. Noticed me.
“Hello, Jesse.”
He didn’t have a lisp, and that worried me. It told me I was getting a Darren I didn’t know. Darren who didn’t necessarily want to be my dad.
He locked the door.
I blinked, and it felt like my eyelids were a camera, taking a picture of his back, memorizing the moment and cataloging it somewhere in my brain, like a flight recorder.
Remember this picture, Jesse.
I couldn’t swallow the saliva gathering in my mouth.
“I need to leave.” I thought I said it, but I wasn’t really sure. I was frozen with a fear I’d never felt. I couldn’t even explain it. He’d never been anything but nice to me. But everything felt different that night. Like the devil got the pen to write my script till morning.
He looked like hell in a crumpled suit, and for a moment, I pitied him. Pitied that he felt compelled to make so much money in order to be up to par with his deceased father. Pitied that he’d married a woman who actually cared about how much he was making. And that, even at his age, he still thought he had something to prove.
“Jesse,” he croaked. Was he crying? Jesus. He was. I glanced around me. An irrational urge to hurt him washed over me. My survival instincts were making every nerve in my hands and feet burn.
“I’m so sorry,” he apologized, his voice clear, strong, stable. “You shouldn’t have come here tonight.”
I finally managed to stand up. I watched him drinking for a few minutes, too afraid to make a move.
“You’re really beautiful, you know.” He took a step in my direction. I took a step back. My fear was like blood-sucking ants, rushing up my feet, up, up, up. They itched and burned until they covered my entire body.
“I’m going to go now,” I said, advancing for the door. My suspicion and anxiety materialized into a reality the moment I felt his hand wrapping around my wrist. My hand was planted on the round door handle that I knew was locked, and still, he didn’t let go. He looked down at the same time I looked up, and our eyes met.
He offered the bottle of vodka with the snowflake adorning its label silently. “Drink.”
I didn’t move. He twisted my wrist, my palm facing upward, and placed the vodka inside it. “Drink until you can’t feel it in your throat.”
The best way to go about it was squeeze my nostrils with one hand while holding the bottle in another. It was heavy. I remembered thinking, I might die tonight. And I did, in ways I couldn’t fathom at that age.
I walked back to the couch on order. It was still warm and dented with the shape of my small body. He hovered above me, leaned in, and pressed my wrists to each side of my head. The room swam out of focus, everything blurry and numb.
“You’re drunk,” I said. “My dad was drunk all the time. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
He shook his head. “Just this one time, Jesse. Give me this one time.”
“No. Please. No.”
He crawled on top of me, ignoring my plea. He smelled like a man, not like a boy. Boys smell spicy and sour, with too many hormones and deodorant. Men smell like violence. Bitter, but subtle.
“Oh, God. You’re so beautiful. So beautiful, Jesse…” he said as he moved inside me. It probably hurt like hell. Sad thing was, I couldn’t feel it at all. “Your tight, hot body against mine is just heaven. I want to live inside you, Jesse.” His vodka breath burned against the shell of my ear.
I want to live inside you.
I want to live inside you.
I want to live inside you.
The words bounced inside my seemingly empty head. I kept on asking myself why I wasn’t fighting, but I already knew. I was more scared of the alternative than what was already happening. First, I was scared that if I tried to push him away, he would become violent, and the plush, sincere approval he’d showered me with would evaporate. Second, I was afraid that it wouldn’t matter anyway, and he would still rape me. He was so much bigger and stronger than me. Third, I was scared that if I told my mom, she wouldn’t believe me—or worse, would say something crazy, like I’d tried to seduce him. And fourth—even if I, theoretically, overcame all of the above mentioned obstacles, where would it leave me? My mom didn’t have a job. If she left Darren, we’d be homeless and poor and thrown back onto the streets.
I faintly remembered him tucking me into bed. The next morning, I woke up, slid my PJ’s down, and saw dried blood clustered on my inner thighs. The unnerving feel of wanting to throw up took ahold of my stomach, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I tried to pee, but nothing came out. I turned around, threw up into the toilet, and hugged it for a while, plastering my damp forehead to the edge of the seat and not caring much about the fact that it wasn’t the most sanitary moment of my life. Pam strode past the open bathroom in the hallway, stopped, and looked at me, fixing her diamond earrings as she spoke.
“Not feeling well?”
“I think her thtomach upthets her,” Darren called out from their bedroom, his tone casual. “I had to carry her upthtairs latht night.” Pam’s eyes dropped to the blood on my thighs. Her pupils dilated. I followed her line of vision down to them. Had I finally gotten my first period? That was the first thing that popped into my mind.
A lot of girls my age got it, and they always reported stomach cramps and other gross stuff I didn’t want to deal with. Realization washed over Pam’s face. She shook her head and turned her back to me. I blinked.
Click.
Remember this picture, Jesse.
“You can stay home today. Hannah will make you breakfast,” she said coldly. “I have a session with my trainer and then lunch at the country club, but I’ll be back to check on you after. Congrats,” she snorted, her voice cracking a little. “You’re a woman now.”
That day, I started taking pictures of people’s backs. Hannah’s. Then Pam’s. Then Mrs. Belfort’s, when she went out to her maze, and I watched her through my bedroom window.
And that night, my first nightmare occurred.
Click.
He plastered his forehead to mine.
I didn’t move.
He stood up.
I didn’t move.
He looked down.
I didn’t move.
He said, “Fuck”—the first and last time I heard him curse.
I started to cry.
I tucked that memory somewhere safe and took a picture of Darren’s office door.
Never remember this picture, Jesse.