In Her Skin(42)
“Mad Daddy was part of the act, of course. The Last One would bust in hollering, claiming my addict mom had set the whole thing up and he knew nothing about it. Naturally, pictures would be taken. Threats made. Money handed over.
“Sometimes I got mine. I knew the Last One liked to watch from next door on a video camera he set up, so I did obnoxious things to the camera behind the mark’s back. Flipping the Last One off, for example. He knew there was danger for me, being alone too long. Not from the mark, who would look around the room like he didn’t know how he got there and then grow sad. These were the ones that cried hardest and paid fastest. The one with a glint in his eye when he saw no adult had bothered to attend the ‘transaction’—these were the ones to fear. They saw a girl alone and they thought, jackpot.
“But the kind of mark didn’t matter to the Last One. He only had to swoop into the room and cash in on our double payment: first, the arrangement fee collected online, second, the extortion fee, which could go on forever, since we had the mark’s personal info. A payment plan for sin, he called it. Anyway. This one time toward the end, we made a killing, because the mark was what they call a ‘public figure,’ with a lot to lose and deep pockets. A guy with pale hair and a wife and seven kids. He was a politician for one of those states where the people all call themselves Christian but have lots of wives and whatever. Point is, the guy had to pay whatever we asked for or kill himself out of shame, which he did anyway one year later. The Last One got so drunk celebrating that night that he stumbled in and forgot Momma was in the bed next to us. Making noise about doing to me what the marks never got to, and for that he was The Man. I remember laying there thinking about a new fantasy, the scene in one of those Silence of the Lambs movies, not the first one, but maybe the second or third, where they train the pigs to eat the bad guy’s face off, and how perfect a fate that would be for him, and wondering where you’d get such pigs.
“That’s when Momma woke up.
“I saw her first, her eyes wide in the stripe of parking lot light coming through the parted drapes. She blinked and blinked and then sat straight up in her bed, and I flinched underneath him, because I knew the jolt must have hurt her head. She screamed, grabbed the back of his shirt, and tore him off me, and he swore like I’ve never heard anyone swear, staggering around the tiny room, banging into a desk and knocking over a lamp, and I scrambled up and pulled Momma away, because I knew that he would kill her. He was drunk, really drunk, and couldn’t get his balance, and when Momma screamed for me to get into the bathroom and lock myself in, I did.
“He hurt her bad that night, though by some miracle of God he passed out before he killed her. We moved on to a new hotel, and the scams ran the same. But after that night, a switch flipped inside the Last One. He stopped touching me. He got panicky, using the money to buy us dumb presents like a big microwave for the hotel room and a bracelet for Momma with little glass beads, each one with some special meaning. She took it and thanked him but didn’t mean it, and once he left, I watched her whip it against the bathroom sink until each bead had starburst cracks. On my birthday, he brought home a cheesecake from a factory that made only cheesecakes, any kind you could think of, and my cake was called Death by Chocolate and I kept thinking Death by Flesh-Eating Pigs. Momma stopped using altogether, though she didn’t tell him. She pretended to sleep all the time still, but mostly, she watched. She skimmed money off our grocery allowance, and that money went inside the cookie tin. It was unsaid between us, what she was doing, because she wanted to keep me safe, but I knew. It wasn’t easy. He watched her closer than ever. It wasn’t her that was so valuable to him, of course: it was me. The hotel scam brought in more money than any scam before, and he’d learned that we could run it without her. I guess that’s why, when he found the hidden money, and the name of the shelter we were leaving for that same night, he beat her to death.
“After Momma was gone, there was a buzzing around me, black insects, I imagined, that crusted my eyes and nose, a rot that could take me out of this world if I let it. I had to act fast. Momma had spent most of her life trying to die, but I had spent most of mine trying to live. I took that whorl of black-winged rage and pain and sucked it inside, let it fill up my chest and lungs. My back got straighter, my eyes clearer, my mind sharper with their humming inside me, and I controlled that rage, converted it into something powerful. It led me to my escape.
“The last time he touched me was six weeks before he killed Momma: enough time to convince him I needed to buy a pregnancy test.
“The thing about the Last One is, he’s a con. A con is always thinking about their next move, the longer term, three steps ahead, when they should be thinking about the here and now. Instead of thinking, ‘I’m giving Jolene a chance to escape,’ the Last One was thinking about where he would dump my body if that stick showed two pink lines. Or, if there was one pink line, how this was a wake-up call to get me birth control, and where was the closest free clinic? And also, since Patty was out of the picture now, wasn’t it time to get back to our old ways? He fixed on these things as I slipped the keys out of his pocket. He fixed on these things as he asked the gas station attendant for the Early Result pregnancy test. He fixed on these things as I slid into my seat on a Greyhound Bus bound for Boston with half the money from that last scam, and the driver pulled the door closed.”
“You became Vivi to hide,” you murmur, breathing deeply.