I used to count the long, thin cracks in the plaster of the ceiling from wherever I’d made myself small. Under the kitchen table, behind the bathroom door, pressed into the corner of the closet with my knees pulled to my chest and my hands pressed flat against my ears. The press of my own palms against my own skull was the closest thing I had to someone holding me.
I counted the cracks. I pretended they were rivers on a map or the veins in a leaf. I waited for the sounds to stop.
I got very good at waiting.
I got very good at making myself nothing.
A child who takes up no space draws no attention. A child who needs nothing cannot be punished for wanting. A child wholearns to be invisible early enough will eventually stop being able to find herself in the dark.
That was the first thing my childhood taught me.
That I was safest when I disappeared. To be whole was to be a target; to be gone was to be at peace. To erase yourself out of existence was the only way to keep the body alive.
I grew up watching my mother flinch and pretend she hadn’t. She was like a bird startled by a snapping twig. A small, rapid twitch of the shoulder toward the ear that lasted a second, as though she could tuck her whole self into it, and then relax like she’d remembered she wasn’t supposed to show it.
I grew up watching her cook his favourite meal after he’d screamed at her for an hour. The same hands that had trembled while he yelled would dice onions into perfect, identical pieces. Each one the same size, neat, geometrical arrangements. As if she could control at least that much. She never once cut herself. I think about that sometimes. How steady she could be even when she was terrified.
I grew up watching her cut her hair short so he couldn’t grab it. Then grow it long again because he said he missed it. His voice, when he said it, held a kind of mournful rumble, a low, almost liquid note. Then she cut it again when she remembered why she’d cut it in the first place.
Sometimes I wondered, how would she have kept her hair, if she had lived a different life?
I learned everything I needed from watching her. But the most important lesson she gave me—the one she pressed into my hands in the dark, the one I carried out of that house and into the next one—was this:
“If he doesn’t hit you,” she would whisper, her voice so thin I had to lean in to catch it, “then it’s not that bad.”
Everything else—the shouting that rattled windowpanes and peeled the paint off the walls, the coldness that lasted for weekslike a stain you couldn’t scrub out, the betrayal that came and went and came again—is tolerable. It’s manageable. You can survive it.
You can make his coffee. You can fold his shirts along the creases he likes, your knuckles white on the iron. You can lie beside him in the dark with your eyes wide open, watching the ceiling cracks stretch like veins, counting the minutes until the first pale light bleeds through the blinds, and tell yourself: at least your ribs don’t ache when you breathe. At least you don’t have to turn your face away from the grocery store clerk when she asks how you’re doing. At least you don’t have to practice a smile in the bathroom mirror before you leave the house, watching your mouth lift at the corners while your eyes stay flat and dark, two stones at the bottom of a well. At least you don’t have to say you walked into a door again, and watch the person on the other side of the counter pretend to believe you.
My father’s lessons were different. Other fathers used words. Mine used his fists.
He pressed bruises into my body like signatures. The curve of his thumb on my wrist when he dragged me out of his way. The socket of his knuckle in the dent above my collarbone when he pushed me against the wall. The hard ridge of his ring—a plain band, gold, the same one he wore to work and to church—grinding into the flesh of my upper arm while I stood perfectly still. My breath caught in my throat like a hooked fish, because I had already learned that moving only made him dig in deeper. That any shift, any attempt to slide away, was read as resistance. And resistance required demonstration.
He would hold me there sometimes, just holding, not hitting, his face inches from mine, his breath rancid with whatever he’d been drinking, and he would watch my eyes get wider and wider until he got bored and let go.
Once he shut the door on my fingers. The hinge side, the side where the weight of the door meets the frame with a thud that is also, somehow, a kind of chewing. I remember the sound: a wet crack, like a boot crushing on a snail, but deeper, more internal, a noise I felt in my molars before I heard it with my ears. Opened it again to see what he had done. He took a look at my hand.You’ll live. Said that and walked away. I held my fingers to my chest and counted them. All five. All crooked. The skin not visibly broken, but the knuckles beginning to swell into the colour of ripe plums.
My shin remembered the strike of his boot when I didn’t scramble out of the way fast enough. I was eight. He was coming out of the bedroom in a rage about something—I never knew what, I never knew why, the reasons changed like weather—and I was standing in the hallway with my doll. Just standing there. Just a girl with a doll.
His boot connected with my shin and I went down and the doll went flying and he stepped over me like I was a rug and kept walking. I didn’t cry until I heard the front door slam. Then I cried into the carpet. I picked up the doll. One of its eyes had popped out. I kept that doll for years, one-eyed, because throwing it away felt like throwing away the only witness who understood.
The small of my back wore the echo of his palm from the night I spilled my milk. I was nine. My hand slipped. The glass tipped. The milk spread across the table like a slow white tide and then dripped onto his lap.
He didn’t yell. He didn’t even speak. He just stood up, and hit me so hard I flew off the chair. I landed on the floor with my tailbone against the leg of the table and my head against the refrigerator. I lay there for a long time, staring at the light under the freezer door, listening to him breathe.
From the floor, I saw my mother’s hands twitch in her lap. I saw her knuckles go white around her napkin. Her chair creaked—a tiny sound, a millimeter of movement—and my eyes found hers. I shook my head. Just once. Just enough.Don’t.Please don’t.
The last time she stepped between us, he hurled her into the hallway wall so hard the drywall cracked. She wore a sling for two weeks and told the neighbors she fell down the stairs.
Her hands let go of the napkin. They fell to her sides, limp, like birds that had forgotten how to fly. She pressed her palms flat against her thighs and stared at the tablecloth. The muscle in her jaw jumped once, twice, then went still. Her chest rose and fell in these tiny, shallow breaths. When he turned to look at her, she didn’t look back. She just sat there, her head bowed, her hair falling across her face like a curtain she could hide behind.
Her finger traced a circle on the back of her other hand. Round and round. A prayer with no words. A mother drawing something on her own skin because she could not reach across the table and touch her daughter.
I was neverhisdaughter. I was a thing he kept in the house. A thing he remembered to wound when the mood took him. A piece of furniture he kicked when he stubbed his toe. A sound he liked to hear—the thud of my body hitting the floor, the sharp gasp I couldn’t always swallow, the small whimper that escaped sometimes before I could catch it and lock it away in the back of my throat with all the others.
Some nights the rage came. His face went red. His voice went sharp. I could see those hits coming from across the room. But the ones that scared me more—the ones I still feel in my sleep—came from nowhere. The night was long. The TV went to commercial. He needed to occupy his restless hands.
I would walk past the couch and his fingers would close around my wrist, holding me there just to feel me shake.Boredom settles into the bones. Boredom stays. Rage burns itself out and leaves you alone. Boredom keeps you close, keeps you still, keeps you because it can.
