I’M A FLIGHT RISK. Always have been. Things get heated and instead of sticking around to figure out if there’s going to be a hot-dog roast or a natural disaster, I assume the worst and split.
Don’t hate me for what you can’t possibly understand.
I feel like I’ve always done my level best with what I’ve been given. Or, at least, usually. But sometimes life doesn’t hand you lemons—it throws a snake in your lap. And what are you supposed to do about that? Before my grandpa died he taught me that you take its head off. Clean, with one sure chop of a sharpened hoe.
But I’ve never been good with garden tools. I prefer to run.
Usually straight into the arms of exactly the wrong man. Funny thing is, I fell for a good man once. Or someone who I thought was good. Stable, safe, familiar. But he turned out to be all soft inside, and not in a sweet way. He was rotten to the core. Nora tried to warn me, just like she has every single time. And I don’t deserve her no-strings-attached friendship, because I’m about the worst listener alive.
I traded my truck for a two-door Corolla and a quarter gram of glass. My last. Can you blame me? But then, you don’t know who he is. What he’s done.
Believe it or not, it was the things that I couldn’t put a label on, things he could never be convicted for, that seeded my imagination with violent thoughts. Those incidents made me understand with almost sickening clarity how satisfying it would be to claw his eyes out with my bare fingers. That’s an expression, you know, but it’s more than that, too. It’s the very core of each layered feeling I have for him: the lust masquerading as love, the dependence, the need. The way he made me feel wanted in a way that I had never been wanted before. As if I were air and water and light and life. As if he needed me for his very survival. Once, I believed he would die without me. But none of those things were real. And when it was all peeled back and I saw what he really was? It was too late. Almost.
We had been together for over a year when I glimpsed the truth. Of course, I’m no saint myself. Never have been, probably never will be. I met him in another man’s bedroom, and if that doesn’t tell you something, I fear you lack imagination. There were drugs and far too much alcohol. Rehab, sometimes. It didn’t do much good.
He only hit me once. We were fighting about something. Maybe rent (it was his turn to pay?). I don’t remember. But I do remember that I was, as my auntie would say, sassing. I have a sharp tongue. I use it. And why not? He wasn’t my father, my elder. I thought we respected each other.
I was wrong. Without even giving it a thought, he hauled off and smacked me across the face. It was vicious, backhanded, and the class ring he still wore on his third finger split my lip like a piece of overripe fruit. I was too shocked to react. As the blood spilled warm and quick from the corner of my mouth I just stood and stared. Of course, my mouth throbbed and a headache was sparking behind my temple like a struck match, but I barely registered those things.
It was the betrayal that hurt. No one had ever hit me before. Not even my auntie, who chased me with a wooden spoon and pretended like she’d paddle me purple. She never did. If she caught me—which was rare—she pulled me to her scrawny chest and held me so tight I wondered if she had decided to suffocate me instead of beat me.
“Good God in heaven,” she’d whisper over my dark curls. “You are ten handfuls, Tiffany Marie. And I only have two.”
But wasn’t that a good thing? An abundance. An overflow. It sounded perfect to me. I didn’t know what it was like to have too much of anything.
I thought of that as the first drop of blood hit my white blouse and ruined it. Finally. Extravagance. It wasn’t what I’d always hoped it would be. And even though I knew I could soak my pretty shirt in ice water, try to erase the dark blot with stain remover and sunshine, I’d always know that beneath the line of turquoise embroidery there was a smudge of evidence. Proof that I wasn’t the woman I believed myself to be: wanted, safe, loved.
Maybe everything would have been different if we had been alone that night. I’ve already admitted I’m prone to escape. What’s the point in fighting when you can walk away? But we must have woken her with our arguing, and when she stumbled bleary-eyed and half-asleep into the kitchen to find me bloody, she screamed.
Her fear was primal, a dark and wild thing that made her cling to me like a spider monkey. She was all arms and legs, sinew and terror wound so tight that I ended up bleeding all over her, too. The next morning I didn’t even try to wash her Dora pajamas or my flowing peasant shirt, even though they were both favorites. I just crumpled them in a ball and pushed them to the very bottom of the garbage can beneath the sink. Out of sight, out of mind.
We used the same tactic to divert her attention. A half-eaten bag of M&M’s calmed her down while I dabbed at my face with a dish towel. She rested her cheek on my shoulder and ate the candies one by one from his outstretched hand, saving the green ones for last because I had once told her they were my favorite. When the only chocolates left were green, she snagged the bag and handed it solemnly to me.
“For your owie.”
“I fell,” I told her, and had to suppress an inappropriate, crazed giggle because it was so cliché. A bad after-school special. I determined right then and there that we were gone, baby, gone. Forget the farmhouse I thought I loved and the way that he ran his calloused hands over my bare skin. Forget that strong chin and the look he gave me when he wanted me. My auntie always told me there were plenty of fish in the sea and maybe this time I would find one worth keeping.
But when I dared to sneak a glance at him, he was crying. Real tears on his cheeks and a line dashed across his forehead that proclaimed his guilt, his never-ending regret for what had happened.
“I’m so sorry,” he mouthed to me. And when I gave an almost imperceptible nod he made a quiet, strangled sound like a sob.
“Why are you crying?” she asked him. “Mommy’s hurt.”
“Your momma’s hurt makes my heart hurt,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “I’m just so sorry that it happened.”
“She fell,” my little girl said sagely, and though a little burr of disgust caught and held in the pit of my stomach, I let her go to him when he reached out his arms.
“We have to take good care of her, you and me,” he said, pressing her head into the crook of his neck. “You and me . . .”
She was asleep in no time.
And I, foolish fairy-tale-believing simpleton that I was, didn’t run.
I’m running now.