Whisper Me This(102)

The TV is blaring, but it can’t shut out his mother’s voice, pleading, or his father’s, threatening.

She’s on her knees, and her eye is swelling shut from where he punched her.

Tony, man-size and powerful, holds a gun in his hands. He aims it, a deadly marksman, at his father’s chest and pulls the trigger. The recoil. The blood. The smell of gunpowder.

But Theresa keeps talking, and her words change the picture.

“You were such a stringy little kid,” she says. “Even at twelve. You hadn’t hit your growth spurt yet.”

“And those glasses!” Barb’s voice adds in. “Too big for his face. Like Harry Potter.”

“You couldn’t see properly that night because he’d blackened your eye and broken your nose before he started in on Mom. Your nose was pouring blood all down your shirt.”

“No,” Tony says. “No, it wasn’t like that at all.”

“It was exactly like that,” Vanessa and Jess say together.

“Defiant,” Barb says. “All of us girls were trying to hide. But not you. You marched out of the room, a little wobbly from the head punches, and came back with the gun.”

Flashes of memory come at Tony from all directions. He can’t look at any of them very long, they’re like a strobe light. Pain in his eye. Blurred vision. Blood gushing from his nose down the front of his shirt. Nausea twisting in his belly.

And the blurred image of his father, yanking his mother’s head back by the hair.

Tony gasps, leans back against the wall behind him. “He had a knife,” he says. “I’d forgotten the knife.”

“You saved me,” his mother says, her calm voice cutting through the haze of his growing panic. “Maybe all of us. He was crazy drunk and into some kind of drugs, I think. I don’t know, but he was worse that night than he’d ever been. Paranoid. He said I’d been cheating on him. He said he would kill me first, and then all of you, one by one.”

Tony’s knees give way, and he slides down the wall, letting the floor and the wall hold muscles that don’t know what to do anymore. He is weeping in a way he didn’t know was possible, as if something lodged deep inside his gut is trying to tear itself loose.

And then Theresa is on the floor beside him, with her arms around him, and she is weeping also. And then all of his sisters pile on, one after the other, like it’s a football game and he’s the quarterback. He’s buried in a pile of soft arms and hair and perfume and tears, but it’s all right. They are there because they love him.

A long time later, when the tears stop and the girls are all sitting on the floor around him, he says, “I remember it all so different.”

“I wish I had asked,” his mother says. “You don’t owe us anything, my son. You saved us. We owe you.”

“I don’t know what that means,” he answers.

“It means,” Mia says, irrepressible and already laughing through her tears, “that you can stop being such an idiot of a martyr and take Maisey out on a date.”

“You’re a crazy girl,” Tony says. But in his heart, he begins to think that maybe, possibly, he might do exactly that.





Chapter Thirty-Four

One day flows into another, and we flow with them.

Marley and JB have moved into a house just outside of town, one with a couple of acres and their own small, personal forest. She says she can breathe out there and is working on clearing away too many years of ugly. Turns out JB is more teddy bear than bouncer, unless something is a threat to Marley.

As for the rest of her band, they weren’t too excited about Colville. She says they can suck it up. She can find new people either here or in Spokane. It’s not like she even wants to be big-time; she just likes to make music. She’s teaching guitar lessons and waitressing for now, but she is talking about going back to school. She says she doesn’t care what she studies, as long as she studies something. She always wanted a college degree.

Geoff succeeded in his bid to have Greg’s custody suit heard here in Colville. He’s also managed to get the date set for the first week of October. That way, he says, the best interests of the child are more likely to have her continue the school year here, especially if things are going well.

We are now two weeks in, and so far Elle is happy. She says school is still boring, and she still wants to homeschool, but she gets that it will be better for the court thing if she’s enrolled in regular classes for now. She’s making friends, and she’s in band and choir and drama.

As for me, I’m still at loose ends. Dad’s cognitive state is pretty good, in general, although he never has gone back to work. He reads a lot, sleeps a lot, takes long walks around the neighborhood. So he doesn’t require much care from me, apart from cleaning the house and making meals.

Sooner or later, I’m going to have to do something to earn my keep, but for right now I feel like we’re both blessed to have time to reset and recover.

I’ve started seeing a counselor to help me work through a lifetime of beliefs that need changing. It’s an amazing process to begin to understand that I couldn’t possibly have ever been enough for my mother, no matter what I’d managed to accomplish. Even if I’d gone into politics and managed to be the first woman in the White House, she would have still needed me to be more.