“Our mother left. Another man,” she shakes her head. “She abandoned her children without looking back. Jamie was three years old,” she says, controlling her rage. “She left us with him. Maybe she had no idea what would have happened or maybe she did: it’s not something I think about,” she says bitterly.
“Our father didn’t take it well. He had a bad temper – always did – but this pushed him over the edge, and day by day it got worse. He was an unreasonable hothead, was prone to fits of rage that put the fear of God in us,” she says inhaling deeply.
“Never ever a kind word, no affection or hugs. Just indifference. But Jamie and I were able to get by – he was my world and I could have gone my whole life like that just to watch him grow up. But he was insecure, fragile… He was just a kid that needed to find his path, while my father wanted to raise a tough guy just like him. A bastard. He started taking out all his rage on my brother when he was just eleven years old. Beating him, a lot…” she says, barely keeping it together. “I tried to protect him, to redirect his anger at me, to get in the middle. Sometimes it worked, and Jamie would escape and lock himself in his room as my father took it out on me, and other times…” she says shaking, but stays standing. “According to our father, Jamie was a kid who needed to be shown the right way to grow up. But Jamie was perfect – my dad was the only problem.”
“That’s enough, Riley, please. None of this is useful now.”
“I need to!” she yells, on the edge of the abyss.
I lean over the counter, taking my head in my hands. I was the one who provoked her and set the timer. All I can do now is to sit back and wait for the explosion.
“Jamie cried every night. And if he heard…” she brings her hand to her mouth. “So, I brought him to my room, I pushed the dresser in front of the door and then I held him and kept him safe until he fell asleep. I told him all kinds of stories about how his life would be, about what we’d do when we were finally free, all the wonderful things that would happen to us. I promised him every day that I would take him away from there, and that he’d have the future he deserved. We just had to hang tight a little while longer until I could take care of him. We learned how to hide our bruises, the visible ones as well as the ones only we could see and feel. We learned to pretend, to how keep going, to stay on our feet even if we didn’t have the energy. We learned how to survive,” she says proudly.
“That damn day, my father saw Jamie leaving a locak coffee shop. He was holding a boy’s hand. His fury was uncontrollable.”
“That’s enough,” I try to take her hand, but she wants nothing to do with me.
“God, Ian…I could hear the bones crushing under his fists,” she says with tears in her eyes; but they don’t fall. “I couldn’t see anymore, I put myself in the middle and his rage fell on me. I yelled for Jamie to run away, to call for help and I don’t remember anything else after that, apart from the pain. I woke up in the hospital two days later. They told me that my father pushed me down the stairs and that I landed on the bottom step. I had a broken arm, bruises, and this,” she says, raising her shirt to show me her scar. “An internal hemorrhage. I was saved by a miracle. They took out my spleen.”
Right now, the only thing I want to do is hug her but she won’t let me near her.
“The worst part of it was that it was the week before my eighteenth birthday and I could have left without looking back. I had left school, I had already been working for two years and I had a second job my dad didn’t know about. I was saving my money just to escape, but things didn’t go to plan,” she comments bitterly.
“The first time my dad hit Jamie, I tried to call for help. They came to our house and asked my dad all sorts of questions and my father went insane. He hit both of us, he threatened us and locked us in the basement for three days. All it did was make things worse, and no one helped us. So, we tried to stick it out until we could finally leave. You probably think I was stupid, that I should have insisted and asked for help again…”
“No Riley, I don’t think that.”
“They put Jamie in an institution, Ian. I was in the hospital and they took him away. That’s how they helped us,” her voice is quivering. “It took me a year and a half to get him out. Do you have any idea what his life was like?” she is yelling again. “That bastard took everything from him and then the system took him away from me!”
“Calm down, Riley. It’s all past now. Jamie is fine, you…”
“And me? You want to know how I got along while all that was going on, Ian?”
I close my eyes.
I can’t do this. I can’t stand it.
“You want to know what I am, Ian?”
“Please,” I beg her.
“Homeless, that’s what I am. With no family, no house, no money, no dignity, nothing. Invisible to the world. Someone who lives on the street and off the charity of others. Someone who lives in fear and emptiness!”
Riley is yelling again, she’s all worked up, on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“You don’t know what it means not to sleep. To always have one eye open in fear that someone might hurt you. Not to eat, unless it was someone else’s leftovers. To hide yourself, always. Do you have any idea what it means not to exist to the rest of the world, Ian?”
“Calm down, Riley.” I grab her by the shoulders but she can’t stay still.
“Calm down? Are you kidding?!”
She tries to squirm out of my grasp but I hold on tighter.
“For everything, Riley. I’m sorry, for all of it.”
“You can’t imagine the things I’ve seen,” she brings her hand to her mouth. “The things I put up with. The only thing that kept me alive was Jamie. The only thing that gave me the energy to not let go. And seeing the man that he is today helps me to go on now. That’s the truth, Ian. Did you like my version of it? Do you feel better now?”
“I feel like shit.”
