Chapter Twelve
A knock pounded on the door and Chloe groaned, mind still asleep, but her body uncomfortable enough to wake. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes. Trenton was gone and sunlight flooded her living room.
“Mom, open up.”
Easing off the couch, she rubbed her back and shuffled to the door. The kids barreled in and Adam followed, appraising her appearance. “Those clothes look familiar.”
“Shut up. Do you want some coffee?”
“Can’t. We’re heading down to the farmer’s market. Just wanted to see how last night went.”
She smiled. “I guess I should thank Tommy and Georgia for interfering.”
“That good?”
She smirked, tiny butterflies skittering about her stomach. “That good.”
“What’s this?”
Chloe turned at the sound of her son’s voice. He was holding a piece of paper. “‘Sorry to run, Sleeping Beauty. Call you tomorrow. Trent.’ Ew! Is this a love letter?”
“Give me that.” She snatched the paper out of Dayton’s hand.
“Is that guy Trent your boyfriend?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Why not? You’re my mom.”
“I’m also an adult—”
“So? What about dad?”
The room silenced at the mention of their father. Adam awkwardly shifted from foot to foot, his hands firmly rooted in his pockets and his gaze on the ground. Mattie stepped into the room and watched her with an expectant expression that was neither happy nor sad, just curious.
Taken off guard, she said, “Your father doesn’t live with us and we’re no longer married.”
“Yes, you are. This guy can’t just come in and take Daddy’s place.”
“No one’s taking anyone’s place, Dayton.”
His face reddened as his posture stiffened, his little hands balled into fists at his side. “This sucks! We don’t get a say in anything. I don’t want another dad, especially that guy. Why would you like a guy like that?” He made a sound of disgust. “You’re so stupid.”
“Hey! Do not talk to me like that, young man.”
“Why not? You are. God, I can’t stand it here!” He ran from the room and there was a sharp crack as he slammed his bedroom door. Mattie jumped, reminding her of his presence.
“Sweetheart, no one’s going to replace your father. Trenton’s just a friend.”
“I don’t mind if you have a boyfriend, Mommy. As long as he’s nice to you.”
She hugged her youngest, his words touching deep inside of her heart. “Thank you, baby.”
After Adam escaped the awkward moment, she situated Mattie with a snack and a movie so she could talk to Dayton. Grabbing three extra cookies from the jar, she headed down the hall.
Lightly knocking, she entered. “Hey.”
Dayton ignored her. He sat on the floor with his back against the frame of his bed, his elbows resting on his spread knees, face angrier than a storm cloud.
“We need to talk, bud.” She placed the cookies on his bureau and sat on the bed.
“Why? It’s not like anything I say matters.”
“That’s not true. We’re all members of this family and we all matter.” She waited for him to comment, but he didn’t. “Dayton, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s actually bothering you.”
“Nothing’s bothering me.” That was fast and unconvincing.
“Do you want to talk about your father?”
Silence.
Drawing in a steadying breath, she whispered, “It’s okay to ask me about him if you have questions.”
He sniffed, his face locked in a tight grimace. “I’m starting to forget what he looked like.”
Okay, you can do this...
She took another deep breath. “Well, he had dark brown hair like yours and his eyes were hazel like Mattie’s. He was tall and when he smiled his front teeth overlapped in the slightest way. He had a nice smile.” When he used it.
“You talk about him like he’s dead.”
She stilled, realizing she could only speak of him in past tense without getting upset. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to.”
“How come he never calls us?”
Because he’s a monster who can’t know where we live. “Would you want to talk to him?”
He shrugged.
She didn’t want to put bad thoughts in his head, but she had no idea how much he actually remembered. Her boys had witnessed a lot of things children should never see, but at least with Mattie, his age at the time made those memories hard to recall.
“Dayton, what do you remember from living in Virginia?”
“I don’t know. I remember my room was blue and our kitchen was big. I remember Mattie’s highchair, but I can’t remember you being pregnant, like, I remember, but only a day of it.”
Chloe figured that was because by the time she was pregnant with Mattie the novelty had worn off for Marcus. He didn’t care that she was pregnant. Only that she keep producing sons.
She kept her thoughts to herself. Even her memories of her second pregnancy were sparse and littered with bad ones. By her first ultrasound, she remembered hoping the pregnancy would go by quickly and worrying her marriage might be destroyed by the time she gave birth. Her thoughts pulled back to that day.
“What is this slop?” Marcus’s fork clattered in his bowl.
“It’s a tuna casserole. I got the recipe from a housekeeping magazine full of slow cooker recipes.” The article was for busy, cold days.
“It smells like cat food.”
The evening was going to be a trying one. “I won’t make it again. I had my ultrasound today and didn’t have much time—”
“So you thought you could feed your family some sort of homeless shelter sludge?” He stood and yanked Dayton’s plate away, tossing the dishes into the sink with a loud crash.
“He was enjoying that.”
“Make something nutritional. I don’t want my son eating this shit.”
Standing, she went to the stove and pulled out a pan to sear what should have been tomorrow’s pork chops. Rather than argue, she cooked silently.
Dayton fussed in his booster seat—still hungry and wondering where his dinner had gone. Marcus stormed into the living room, never once acting regretful that he’d upset his son.
When the pork was finished he returned and ate in silence. After dinner, she bathed Dayton and put him to bed. Marcus awaited her in the hall.
“Did you want to say goodnight to him?”
He pulled their son’s door closed and nudged her toward their bedroom. When he was upset, like he so often was of late, there was very little talking during their alone time. Their bedroom door shut and his belt buckle rattled.
“I still have to put some things away in the kitch—”
“It’s not my fault you’re behind schedule today.” He shoved her to the bed and her stomach sank, knowing he was intent on making some point by flaunting his authority.
She slipped off her shoes and he scoffed. “This pregnancy’s making you slow.” Shoving her hand away, he pushed her back on the mattress and yanked off her pants.
“Marcus, wait—”
“Shut up. Those cheap dinners are making you fat. You’re on salad for the rest of the week. Roll over.”
Her heart trembled as she reached for a pillow to place under her chest, but he didn’t give her time, nor did he do anything to ease his entry. At the first stab of his erection she let out a painful gasp, her eyes flooding with tears.
He degraded her, berated her, and as he pushed his weight into her, she worried he might hurt the baby. Maybe that was his goal.
There wasn’t any touching or holding. He hadn’t shown such tenderness in too long for her to recall, but that didn’t stop him from fucking her regularly. That’s what he did. He fucked her. She was supposed to be his wife, the mother of his children that he cherished and loved. But by the way he used her body, she never felt like anything more than a hole he filled and a post he kicked when he needed to scream at something.
Holding her stomach, she cried herself to sleep that night. She hated the feel of him on her skin but wasn’t allowed to shower until morning.
She didn’t understand why he slept with her when he only ever complained how unappealing her body was. Over time she realized he did it to punish her. What she didn’t understand was how he got aroused if he found her so disgusting.
Part of her believed it was the punishment that turned him on. The nights he hurt her in bed, pinned her down and made her cry or beg for mercy… Those were the nights he lasted the longest and slept the soundest. Those were the nights she dreamed of suffocating him in his sleep.
“I remember Daddy had a red car,” Dayton said, pulling her back to the present.
Her skin itched as if spiders crawled under her clothes. She wanted to wash the memories away and do everything in her power to avoid discussing him, but Dayton obviously needed to get something off his chest.
Brushing her hand over his mop of hair, trying not to wince as he nudged away from the maternal contact, she smiled sadly. “That’s right, a convertible. He loved that car.”
“I don’t have a memory of saying goodbye to him. There’s just then and then there’s here, Aunt Gina’s house.”
“You don’t remember your last few days there?” They had been awful days so it was probably better he’d forgotten.
“No, and how come I remember this truck I used to play with all the time? What happened to stuff like that?”
Chloe wondered if time erased those memories or repressed them. There were specific arguments she recalled Dayton witnessing. Perhaps it was time they spoke to someone as a family. She was professional enough to know she was too close to the issue to counsel him properly. She wanted her sons to be happy and whole, so if he needed to talk about this she would have to start looking for a family therapist who could help—someone who wasn’t a battered wife or his mother.
“Dayton, I married your father because I loved him. However, over time, some things changed.”
“Do you still love him?”
“I think when you have children with someone, you’ll always love a part of them.”
It was the unfortunate truth. No matter how much she hated Marcus, he gave her the boys and she couldn’t imagine a life without her children.
“Then why can’t we all live together like a family again? Why do you have to go out with that guy?”
“Is… Help me out, Dayton. Is this about your father or about me going out with Mr. Cole?”
“I dunno. Both, I guess. If this guy’s your boyfriend, it’s like daddy’s never coming back. Mr. Cole shouldn’t do that if we can all be a family again.”
“Dayton, your father and I are not going to live together again. Ever. I told you that long before Mr. Cole came around.” Hoping for such an outcome would only lead her son to more disappointment.
“Why?” he snapped vehemently, clearly placing the blame on her.
The little similarities between Marcus and Dayton frightened her most. And when he snapped at her, she heard his father’s voice. “Because we didn’t get along.”
“But when me and Mattie fight you tell us ‘too bad’. We have to get along because we’re family.”
“I tried to get along with your father, but… There’s stuff you don’t remember that I can’t tell you.”
“I remember sometimes he’d get really mad at you and yell and stuff.”
She wondered exactly what ‘stuff’ entailed in her son’s mind. “Right, and no one wants to live like that.”
“You shouldn’t have made him so mad. He wouldn’t have yelled if you tried harder and then we wouldn’t have had to leave.”
His blame hit her like a punch to the stomach. She fought to hide her hurt, but it was impossible as tears rushed to her eyes.
Pinching the bridge of her nose to hide her face, she explained, “It’s not that simple, honey. I…” Her thoughts scattered as his words still reverberated.
Losing her ground—and her grip on her tears—she chickened out. “Listen, I want to talk about this, but I want to think about how to explain it at a level you’ll understand. It’s a nice Saturday. Why don’t we shelve this topic for now and we can talk about it again later?”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you gonna go out with that guy?”
“I thought you liked Mr. Cole?”
He shrugged. “He’s okay. But what if you make him mad the same way you made Daddy mad?”
“Dayton, no matter how mad people make us we still have to be nice to them. That was something your father struggled to understand, something I try very hard to teach you boys.”
“But … sometimes Mattie makes me so angry I don’t mean to hit him, but I do on accident.”
“We have to think before we act, Dayton. It’s never an accident when you hit someone out of anger.”
Her son sighed. “Mr. Cole’s really big, Mom. He could hurt you.”
She sighed. Anyone could hurt her if they wanted to, size rarely made a difference when cruelty was burned into someone’s bones. “He is big, but I don’t think Mr. Cole gets angry easily. And if he does, he seems to take the time to work through his emotions before acting on them.”
“Why do you like him?”
“He’s nice and he makes me happy. Don’t I deserve to be a little bit happy?” She playfully nudged his shoulder.
“I guess.”
Chloe placed her hand over her heart and wobbled. She flopped back on the bed and gasped. “To think, after all my hard work, making close to two thousand sandwiches with the crust cut off, and reading over four thousand bedtime stories, my son thinks I may deserve a little happiness.”
Dayton laughed, quickly covering his grin with the steely expression that was his current norm. “You’re a dork, Mom.” He tossed a pillow at her face.
He could call her any silly thing he wanted if it meant her sweet boy smiled for a change.