“Are you?” she asks. In her eyes is an accusation.How dare you do this to yourself? How dare you let him do this to you?“You look like Mom,” she adds as another knife in the gut.
“Stop it.”
“You do. You look like Mom. Whatever’s going on here, you need help. You should talk to someone.”
“Like who?”
“Like a therapist.”
I don’t want to be our mother, but I can’t escape the fact that I seem to keep dating variations of our father. Callous, selfish men who know how to turn on the charm when it suits them. I look away, out of George’s kitchen window. Staring at nature soothes me, even if being in the thick of it gives me the heebie-jeebies. I’ve never been able to do spiders, creepy-crawlies, or big trees at night. Not up close. I look back to my sister.
“I’m not sure what to say.”
And then she does what she always does. The perfect thing. She gets up from the other side of the kitchen island, walks over, and hugs me. The weight of her love is crushing, so firm that it squeezes the pent-up emotions out of me, and I finally cry, too. I haven’t once, yet. Not after what he did. Not when I realized that just as Claire said, I was becoming our mother. Tiptoeing around a home that didn’t feel like mine, with a man who felt like he was poised to hurt me.
When we finally let go of each other, it’s like all the awkwardness has been wrung out of us. We laugh, feeling the weight of it lifted, cheeks still wet. Claire drags her stool over beside mine, shuffles up, clasps my hands on the counter.
“Go on, then,” she says. “Tell me everything.”
And I do, Claire’s hands intermittently becoming claws on mine. She keeps her face passive for the most part, flinches flashing across her expression at some of the worst of it. It’s only when I get to the very worst that it gets too much, her nails suddenly in my skin.
“Claire, ouch! Fuck.”
“Sorry.” She’s obviously contrite. “I just—I just can’t believe he…Oh my god, Natty, this monster raped you and you’re still living in his home?”
My voice is smaller than ever. “I don’t know what to do.”
“What do you mean?” Her voice is bigger than ever. More desperate, too. “Shit, Natty, have you learned nothing from our parents? You take your shit and you get out!”
She’s wrong; I learned plenty from our parents. I learned that sometimes playing dead keeps you safe, that confronting violence can simply raise the stakes, turning what would have been bruises into open wounds. But I’m beginning to realize that playing dead can just as easily make you a predator’s plaything, just as easily leave you dead, a baby seal thrashed in an orca’s jaws.
“Nat, after Marc, after Luca…” She pauses for a breath. “You’ve got to be smart enough by now to see you’ve got to leave him. I can’t keep watching you make horrible decisions.”
For the first time since she’s arrived, I feel calm, icy certainty in my words. “Move out and what? Just let him get away with it?”
For the first time since she’s arrived, Claire seems unsure. “What do you mean?”
“I mean he did something pretty fucking awful to me, and he deserves to be punished for it.”
And there it is, that hunger. That knowledge of what I’m capable of, which I’ve tried to ignore and deny for years. It’s obscured by the frustrating veil of black that descends upon my memories, blank nights followed by bloody mornings. But through the darkness, a flash of roof, the sound of a fall. A pill between two fingers, a water bottle, and an idea.
Tempting as it is to manufacture another staircase accident, George doesn’t have the alcoholism that ultimately gave our mother an easier time in getting the police to believe Dad fell. Still, I’ve learned there’s a saw, hammer, and shovel in the shed in the communal garden. Learned it’s smart to dig your holes before you have your body. Learned where the good places to dig might be. If George looks in the wrong place, he’ll find a plastic tarp in the flat. If I hadn’t secretly borrowed a spare work phone, he’d see Reddit pages on hermetic containers, pigs, slit arteries in bathtubs, flooding my browser history. But my fear of him leaves me frozen with indecision. I don’t know how to convert my anger into action without the rush of alcohol or Class As, and yet I can’t afford to lose my faculties around a man like George.
“I don’t get it, Natty,” Claire says, although from her hushed tone, I think that she does.
“I get such heinous dick fog, but now that’s lifted, I can see things more clearly. Sure, he has a good job and looks like a nice guy, but he’s abusive. Why doesn’t he have any friends? Why have I never met his family? He hurt me, and I’ll bet he’s hurt other women. Bet unless I stop him, he’ll hurt someone else.”
Claire’s question is barely a whisper. “ ‘Stop him’?”
“I’m talking about Marc, Luca…”
“They’re dead.”
“I know.”
Fear and concern wrinkle her forehead. “You’re not mak— They were accidents.”
“Were they?” The look I level her with is even and cool. There’s more calm composure in those two words than she’s seen from me in the past two years.
