From the moment he got up in the morning and had his first drink to when he would stumble in later from whatever rathole he crawled out of to terrorize us again, my father was always a monster. And terrorize us, he did. My brother and I were still really young at that point, with me being older by two years, and with him being so small he mercifully managed to stay free of our father’s daily abuse. I didn’t. My mother certainly didn’t, either.
I still remember how particularly cold it was that December, looking out the window as the snow came down in thick clumps whipped by the gusting wind and hoping with everything inside me that he would just pass out in it somewhere and disappear, smothered to eventually be forgotten forever. I heard him come in through the front door instead, throwing it open, his speech garbled and manic. I heard him smack my mother across the face and when I came into the hallway crying he did the same to me, too. I was only seven years old.
It was Christmas Eve that night, and I lay awake less concerned with any idea of Santa Claus and what he might bring me than with the commotion going on downstairs. It lasted for about an hour, far longer than the usual easy submission he would take from her, and after that, silence. I could hear my mother cry no longer.
Eventually, I managed to fall into a dreamless sleep. When I woke up, my dad was standing in the open doorway, watching me. He had a strange look in his eyes. Stranger than usual. Scary. It scares me to think about it still, all this time later. He told me to come downstairs and open my presents, and I noticed that he was holding my little brother’s hand who seemed as though he had just woken up, too. My heart began to race, but without thinking I climbed out of bed in my pajamas and followed them both down. As I went, slowly behind my dad, he began to explain in this low murmur about how my mother had ‘basically ruined Christmas’ and that she was still ‘super wasted from last night’, but he said that we shouldn’t worry because he got us lots of presents and that he had ‘made everything okay again’. It wasn’t until much later that I would learn that he had started to abuse crystal meth around that time.
My brother complained that he was hungry, but dad wouldn’t let us go into the kitchen to eat, insisting that the presents just couldn’t wait. So, we followed him into the living room. There she sat, upright on the couch with her neck against the rest behind her so that her face looked up to the ceiling. Her face was covered with a rag which seemed to be wet with something, although I’m still unsure. I asked my dad if she was okay, and he told me that my mother was fine, and that she was just ‘learning her lesson for being an idiot’ and that we should just ignore her. Being children, we did what we were told and had fun opening up our Dollar Store presents and the horrible knitted sweaters our grandma who wasn’t allowed to come over would send for us.
When we were done, dad made us clean up the wrapping paper, then, he put our parkas and boots on over our pajamas and sent us outside into the thankfully calm snow-filled day outside, still hungry. We were still out there in the yard building our snowman when the first police car rolled up. The officer told us to get in the back, and that was the last time either of us ever saw that house, our mother or that man ever again. He had killed her, then himself after he had sent us out to play shortly after he had called the police and told them what he’d done.
I still find myself replaying that morning and the night before over and over again in my mind. So much in fact that I can run through almost every detail of it in a matter of seconds. I play it again and again, trying to figure out if one particular bump in the night was her being smashed against the ground, or if one of her screams or sobs was when he hit her so hard her brain started to bleed. But, mostly, I can’t help but obsess over why he didn’t kill us, too. Why he posed her like that, on the couch, so that we wouldn’t know that she was dead just feet away from us. It hurts me so much to think that if that night had been the night I had finally been brave enough to try and sneak downstairs to the phone and call for help, that my mother might still be here, but my psychiatrist says I can’t think that way. It’s hard not to, though. It’s hard not to blame myself for what happened…
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