And then, as we approach the motel, he leans over to me, his breath hot on my ear.
“If you don’t come with me when we get to the motel…,” he whispers, before saying something so evil I can’t bear to repeat it. I know that he will hurt the people I love most if I don’t go.
The air in the car curdles. I can taste the hatred in his mouth, the stale, peevish nastiness frosting the inside of the windows. I’m trapped; my mother hasn’t heard what he’s said. If I say it out loud, what will she do: call the cops again? We had our chance, and now I’m stuck here with him.
Part of me wants to calm him down, and part of me is still that little girl who’s in love with him. The rest of me is pure terror.
There’s no way out. We turn into the motel parking lot. I see thatmy hands are shaking again, almost imperceptibly, like the ripples of a distant earthquake.
The car stops. My mother waits. He gets out of the car. He looks back at me, and I know I have to go with him. Before he can shut the door, I get out of the car.
Now my mom starts screaming.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she shouts. “What’s wrong with you?” All the years she couldn’t save herself from Lala seem to come to the surface of her voice. She’s screaming for me, and for herself.
“I’m just going to go in there for a little bit and sit there,” I say, shaking.
“You go in there and I’m never fucking talking to you again,” she says.
“I gotta go, I gotta go,” I say.
I am looking at her, back into the low glow of the car, praying she can see the two words my eyes are trying to convey:
Help me.
Because I feel I am going to die tonight; everything in me feels that. But the power of my sad eyes fails me. She cannot understand what my eyes are trying to say. This is not a language any mother can, or should be able to, understand. Her daughter is walking away toward a fifty-buck-a-night motel with this man. What can she do? She has seen the future, and it can’t be stopped; she has lived this in the past, and for many years couldn’t stop that either. I am an adult now. I can make my own choices. This is the choice I’ve made, though perhaps just as she understood once, it’s something that was no choice at all.
Incredibly, my mother starts up the car and drives away. My eyes couldn’t reach hers. It is not her fault, just as it is not mine.
The motel room is as disgusting as you might imagine: brown, mottled, unkempt carpet; a gross bedspread that has God knows what living in it; a TV that’s mostly static; a single broken brown chair in the corner; a yellow rotary-dial telephone; orange, too-thin curtains; a Gideon’s Bible in the side table… Actually, the room was so bad it was probably aJeff’sBible.
I don’t know why a joke about a Bible comes to mind now when I think about that horrible moment. Perhaps I’m still trying to save that girl with funny.
The man throws his shit down on the floor, takes a step toward me. My body hits the bed, hard. I’m paralyzed there. I know I’m doomed, that I probably won’t live through this.
This is the end.
He sits down in the chair and looks at me. He smiles, a sick, evil smile.
“Another evening ruined by you,” he says.
I can’t move. My body feels like concrete, like a great lost weight falling to the bottom of a six-thousand-fathom ocean.
“Can I call and say I’m here…?”
I think of it this way: if I call my mom, perhaps the waver in my voice will communicate what my eyes couldn’t convey—that I need help. They say a new mother can tell the cry of her child above all the others in a packed newborn nursery. Perhaps mine will hear my cry in the quaver of my voice, in the words Idon’tsay, in how far I stray from what I would usually say to those words Idochoose to share.
I have to tell her. I have to tell her to get me out of here…
“No!”he shouts.
Then he reconsiders and says words that still haunt me; they will always haunt me.
“Actually, you can call whoever the fuck you want,” he says quietly, firmly, nastily. “It won’t matter.” I see in his eyes that I’ll be dead before they even get here. “I really don’t give a shit.”
I watch him walk across the room and go into the bathroom. I hear him punch the mirror, hear the shattering glass. I watch as he brings out a shard. He comes toward me. I feel something cold on my neck.
My newfound sense of the possibility of survival falters. I realize with horror that he’s not going to kill me yet, that in fact something worse is going to happen before he does so.
