Good Girls Lie(20)

He started cheating on my mother well before their marriage bed grew cold and distant. I walked in on him once, with another woman in my mother’s bed. They were giggling and laughing and happy. She was blond, ice blond, like my mother, even looked like her a bit. But she sounded so different. So light and loose.

These sounds were unfamiliar, they drew me, a moth to the flame. I wanted to see what had finally, finally, made my parents happy.

Silly me. Silly, dangerous me. He came to my room that evening. Explained my role in their complicity. Tell your mother and I’ll kill you, he said, giving me his lopsided, gap-toothed smile. A smile to others, a threat to me.

And I, weak little mouse, thought, Sure, Daddy. I’m happy to cover up for you.

No, I didn’t. I put his words in my growing databank of slights and hurts and nasty things, ready to be pulled out at a moment’s notice, a sharpened razor to the wrist. To the throat.

Don’t worry, Daddy. I know your secret now, and I’ll keep it in my heart where no one can find it until the time is perfect, and then I will use it against you and laugh while you burn.

Our relationship worsens the older I get. I push my father’s buttons, as my mother likes to say. She does it now, her lips pursed. Instead of kicking his sorry, cheating, lying, homicidal ass out of the house or offering to get me to a dentist or even have Cook bring up an ice pack, she takes his side.

“Ashlyn, don’t push your father’s buttons. Tell him what he wants to know.”

“I. Didn’t. Do. Anything. What do I have to gain seeing you humiliated further? It’s embarrassing enough the whole world knows you’re fucking that trollop. It reflects poorly on the family.”

Ah, the time-honored tradition of daughter throwing her parents’ words in their faces.

He roars and his hand swings again but I’m faster this time, braced and ready for the blow the moment the words leave my mouth. I duck, grab my bag with my right hand, and scoot out the door, leaving them both staring in shock.

I clatter down the stairs, one flight, two. I can hear him behind me, shouting. He’s gaining. My boots are at the back door. I detour through the kitchens, past the shocked face of Dorsey, our family’s cook for my whole tender life. She steps out to stop me but she’s too late, and my father crashes into her. They go ass over teakettle into a heap on the flagstones, giving me the break I need.

“Ashlyn,” my mother calls again, pleading this time, but I grab my boots and I’m out, doing a runner through the labyrinth and out the back garden. Thanks to Dorsey, I’ve escaped.

Again.

Half a mile down the lane, I scoot through the hedgerow into our fields. I smoke here by the stone fence. It abuts the graveyard, where I like to go after dark. I sit by Johnny’s grave. His presence comforts me. He, unlike the rest of the family, forgave me ages ago.

I find a spot out of the wind and assess the damage with my hand. My face hurts, but my jaw isn’t broken. I still have my tooth clutched in my left palm. I wonder if anyone can put it back in for me. No, too dangerous.

I have a water bottle in my bag, dregs from yesterday. I swish out my mouth, spill the last of it over the bloody stump of gory white, then press it firmly back into place. The pain makes me go wobbly in the knees, so I sit down hard on the ground. Shut my eyes and grit my teeth, praying the tooth will take root.

I need a cigarette. Or a bump.

I have to get out of this hell.

There have been rebellious daughters since the beginning of time. Most are like me, I assume, stuck in a house with people whose priorities put them last, who don’t care a whit about them, except to see what price they can fetch, what ladder they can be used to help climb, which advantageous match can be made. Too rebellious, and they shipped you off to a nunnery (or school, nowadays) or pawned you off on the first idiot man who’d take you. And if you thought Daddy was bad, just wait until you understood what the rest of your life was going to look like, on your back or on your knees, being forced, getting pregnant, and good luck living through the birth of the first, not to mention the thirteenth.

Female rebellion is a time-honored tradition, yes, but it’s usually more genteel now, death by a thousand cuts. Mine is coming to a head, soon, and I won’t bother with a thousand cuts. Just one. Well placed. Well timed.

Finality, Damien, comes for you on the wings of chariots.

The last fight we had, Daddy swore to cut me off, and I told him to go ahead, I didn’t need his money, his filthy blood money. Lord knows there’s none on my mother’s side; she married up, way up.

Without my inheritance, I suppose I’ll have to get a job. I can get an ID card that states I’m eighteen, forge enough documents to establish a short-lived work history. Rent a flat. I’ve been saving money—it’s one thing to have access to Daddy’s accounts, those can be frozen at any moment by the solicitors. No, I’m smarter than that. I’ve been filtering money for the past few years. Granted, a lot of it went up my nose or down my gullet, but I have over forty thousand quid stashed away now.

I don’t want to work, but I’ll do what I have to if it means escaping. I just want to get away. Find some peace.

My God, do you blame me? My parents are the real monsters.



AUGUST

Marchburg, Virginia



15

THE MISTAKES

Bewildered. That is the only word for it. I move from class to class, borne along the flow of girls like a mountain stream down a hill, relentless.