Even though I haven’t been able to sleep, my phone buzzing startles me out of a daze and I fumble for it.
I’m here.
Hey
Evan?
I start to type, but I’m groggy:
OK.
I get up and weave a bit getting to my bedroom door. I steady myself and head toward the front door. I look through the peephole and see him standing there. Even with the way a peephole can alter your features, he still looks like the guy I want to kiss more than anything else. I open the door. He looks at me and starts to cry.
“Do I look that bad?”
He leans in and places his head against mine. He pulls back a little and whispers, “Are they here?” I shake my head. “I don’t know where I can touch you. I don’t want to make anything hurt.”
“You couldn’t possibly do any more damage. I never thought I’d say this, but we have to go into my bedroom.” I’m leading him to my room. “My parents are at the store. I don’t know when they’ll be home, but I’m not supposed to see you. This is . . .”
“I’m so sorry. Ev, I’m sorry.” He follows me to my room.
We enter and I close the door behind us.
“You didn’t do this.” I sit on my bed and look back at him.
“I did. I came out to my parents and somehow word must have reached school. This happened to you because you’re friends with me. I shouldn’t have said anything. I was being—”
“You didn’t do this.”
Henry stops and looks around my room. “I feel like I know this place, but I’ve never been in here. Everything is so . . .”
“It helps me. It helps to have everything in its place and neat.”
He comes over and kneels in front of me. He puts his hands gently on my knees.
“I want to make every one of them feel pain. Who was it?”
“It doesn’t matter. Really. I want things to calm down. Can they just be normal again, please?”
Right now. Here in my room with this boy, I feel wounded and brave all at the same time. This boy—just looking into his eyes—makes me strong and vulnerable.
He lifts up from his knees slightly and we kiss. His hands are on the back of my head and mine are on his shoulders. He kisses my eyes. He moves to the cut above my left one and kisses there, too. Then to the bandage on my nose and then to my swollen and bruised chin. The last thing he kisses are my hands.
My parents are still out shopping. I’m taking a huge risk, but I want to. I turn off my phone. Henry lies next to me and we drift off to sleep quickly.
I’m suddenly awake and reach over to my nightstand. I turn on my phone. It’s 3:19 a.m. And then I see the phone is filled with texts. I ignore them. Henry is curled up in a ball behind me. His head is wedged into the middle of my back and his left hand is wrapped around my waist. I try to slowly move my body away from his and out of bed. Everything feels extra achy and stiff. I shuffle toward the door and put my left ear to it. I do my usual checks to make sure the coast is clear.
“Ev?”
I go back to the bed as quickly and silently as possible. I lean in and whisper, “Shhh. We have to get you out before my dad wakes up. He’s usually up by four.”
Henry makes a face and whispers, “Why can’t it be like this all the time? Minus you in pain and without us being in your parents’ place. Other than that, like this all the time.”
Right now, in this moment, he looks like he did all those times we’d go camping with his parents in Wisconsin. We’d wake up in the morning, early, just before the sun. His hair would be sticking up in the back like a crown, but all it took was a quick finger comb and it was back to normal.
His squinty eyes seem even more downturned at the edges, and his lips are so pink. I look at him and think the exact same thing, Why can’t it be like this all the time?
“I’m going to go out and see if anyone’s up. Get your stuff and be ready to go once I come back.” I make my way to the door.
I unlock it and go out into the hallway. I take a few steps and peek into the living room. All clear there. There’s a bathroom between my room and my parents’. I listen at their door. I hold my breath. I can hear snoring. My dad is definitely asleep. It’s fifty-fifty with my mother. I walk back toward the door of my bedroom, stick my head into the room, and signal for Henry to come out.
The walk to the front door seems like the longest journey. Once there, I unlock it oh-so-quietly and turn to Henry. I give him a half smile and then look back down the hallway. He turns my head toward his and kisses me a little longer than I’m comfortable with in this situation. I push down on the door to open it, since I can minimize the squeaking by doing that. It still creaks and cracks a bit. He runs out and I close and lock it. I exhale. Was I holding my breath the whole time?
Walking back to my room, I hear my parents’ bedroom door open. My mother pokes her head out and spots me.
“You finally up?” She starts to come out into the hall. She’s tying her robe around her waist and walks past me. Once she’s in the kitchen, I hear her ask, “You want coffee?”
“Okay.” I walk into the dining area, which is open to the small kitchen.
Her back is to me. She’s at the sink filling the coffeepot with water. She then fills the coffee maker and turns it on. She comes and sits opposite me at the table.
“I heard the door. Were you outside?”
I think quickly. “The cold air feels good on my face. The swelling and all.”
She gets up, goes to the freezer, and grabs a bag of peas. She hands it to me.
“Here, put this on your face.” She sits back down. “Your father didn’t want to wake you last night. We got home after ten, went to the mall too. Did you eat anything?”
I shake my head. “I was tired. I just slept.” I can hear the coffee start to brew.
“How are you feeling?”
“Okay.”
We sit and look at each other. The six-year-old in me can’t help but think, Maybe this is a new her, a new us. Maybe from now on she will change, be like other mothers are. Maybe everything will be okay.
“Your life isn’t hard.” She looks right into my eyes. “You have a roof over your head. You have both your parents. You have food. And that man in there”—she points in the direction of their bedroom—“he sacrifices everything for us.”
“I know. He does.”
“But you’re ungrateful.”
Something turns in my stomach. I’m thinking, No, no. Don’t do this. Don’t be this person. Don’t be you.
She sounds calm. There’s no yelling or exaggerated hand gestures, which somehow makes it worse. She gets up to grab three mugs and the sugar from the cupboard above the sink and the cream from the fridge. She puts them down on the table in front of me and sits back in her chair.
“What are you going to do for him?”
I’m so lost in my thoughts that it takes me a minute. “Who?”
Don’t say anything else, because if you do it will only be worse. Don’t say a word.
She says, “Your father. We can’t pay for you to go to college. You don’t want to help him open the restaurant? You would work for a stranger and not for your own father? That’s not why we came to this country. Are you not proud of your family?”
She looks down and shakes her head. With her head still down, looking at the dining table, she begins to wipe dust off the surface—where there is no dust—with the left sleeve of her robe.
“Then you go ahead and get into this.” She looks up, still wiping her sleeve on the table, and runs her eyes over all my battle wounds. “I used to look like that.”
This last line is said very faintly and far away. I want to ask her to repeat it, but she gets up and grabs the coffeepot from the kitchen. It’s filled with light-brown liquid. Her coffee is always really weak, and then she adds so much cream that you can’t even make it out as coffee anymore. This is one of the things I know about my mother.
She grabs a small dessert plate from the cabinet above the sink to the left. With one hand she places the plate on the table and the coffeepot on top of it, neatly, precisely. She sits back down.
“My brothers used to beat me till both my eyes were swollen shut and my lips were so cut I couldn’t eat.” She pours what looks like a full cup of cream into her mug, then adds a splash of coffee. I’m still. My father would say I didn’t know what she’d been through. That her life wasn’t easy. I just never knew the details. I never cared to ask. Am I a horrible son?
“Because they didn’t want me to disgrace the family. They raised me. No parents. They did. I had big ideas. Like you. Big ideas for myself. I wanted to be a singer.” She smiles a little at the memory. “But that was considered work for loose women.” Her voice goes flat. “Small village. Small minds. I would sneak off when they were at work to take lessons with a woman in the next town over.” She adds two teaspoons of sugar to her coffee. “They found out. They beat me to teach me about honor. About a woman’s place.”
She looks at me and I look at her. Neither one of us says anything. The words are there between us, and I want to say something but I don’t know what. I’m trying to see my mother as a girl, as someone who would sneak off and try to live her dreams.
Finally, she says, “You’ve disgraced us, don’t you see? Everyone looks at us, everyone at the church, here in our neighborhood. We live in a small village. They all talk. You don’t think they know what you are? You don’t think I know what you are?”
I am going cold everywhere, inside and out.
“You make our life so much harder. My beatings taught me lessons. You. You learn nothing.” She takes another sip of her coffee. And then she says to me, her only child, “They should have killed you.”
From someplace very far away, I hear the bedroom door open and my dad clearing his throat. Every morning the throat clearing is intense. Maybe it’s all the years of smoking, or maybe that’s what happens when you’re old. He’s headed to the bathroom, where a good solid five minutes of hacking, coughing, and throat clearing will take place.
My mother leans in, looks right at me, and lowers her voice to a hush. “Die. If this is who you are.”
And now blood has turned to ice. My limbs have turned to ice. I am frozen.
She leans back in her chair. She takes me in. Scans my face with all its evidence of violence. Her eyes squint. The corners of her mouth turn upward slightly.
My dad enters the dining room. “Morning.”
She turns to him and smiles. “Morning, my love.”