My body shook, and my throat filled with pain.
I’d just let go of the wheel.
Oh, my God.
I steal air as fast as I can and whimper as I cry. What the hell has happened to me?
I stumble as my father throws my back into the wall next to the sink. Before I even have a chance to straighten myself, his hand comes across my face with a loud slap, and I wince at the sting traveling down my neck.
“Stop it!” I rage against the blur in my eyes.
He grabs me by the shoulders and pins me against the wall again and I cry out.
“Make me,” he challenges.
My fists slam against his chest, and I heave my whole body into the push. “Stop it!”
He steps back to steady himself but comes up again and grabs my head between his hands.
“Don’t you think that it gutted me when your mother took you away?” he asks, his eyes heartbroken. “I punched every wall in the goddamn house, Fallon. But I swallowed it down. Because that’s what we do. We swallow every brick of shit this world feeds us until the wall inside of us is so strong that nothing breaks it.” He lowers his labored voice, sounding stronger. “And that’s what I did. I let her take you, because I knew that cunt would make you strong.”
I clench my teeth, trying to stop my tears as I look at him. I love my father, but I can’t love him for letting my mother take me away. I guess in his head he thought it was a way of hiding me from his enemies. Did living with my mother make me strong? Of course not. Look at me, blubbering and ruined. I’m not strong.
“You don’t get to give up. You don’t get to quit!” he yells. “There will be other loves and other babies,” he growls, shaking my head between his hands and leveling me with his hard stare. “Now. Swallow. The. Pain!” he rages all around me. “Swallow it!”
His roar shatters my insides, and I stop crying, staring at him wide-eyed.
He holds my head tightly, forcing me to keep my eyes on him, and I focus, looking for something to grab on to. Anything. I concentrate on the tiniest point I can find, the center of his black pupils.
I don’t blink. I don’t budge.
The center of his eye is so dark, and I try to imagine that it feels like cruising through space at warp speed. In my world there is no one but him. The gold surrounding the black flickers, and I wonder why I didn’t inherit that in my green eyes. The white in his irises looks like lightning, and the ring of emerald, before you get to the white of the eyeballs, seems to ripple like water.
Before I know it our breathing is syncing up, and he’s setting the rhythm I follow.
Inhale, exhale.
Inhale, exhale.
Inhale, exhale.
Madoc’s face flashes in my mind, and I tighten my jaw. Memories of my aborted pregnancy crash into his image, and my teeth rub together. My mother’s voice enters my ears, and I suck my tongue dry, taking all of it, all of them, and swallowing the hard lump to the back of my throat, down my pipe, and I feel it all leave my brain.
It’s still inside me. Heavy.
But it’s quiet now, buried in my stomach.
My father releases my head and runs a thumb across my cheek as he holds my chin.
“Now who are you?” he implores.
“Fallon Pierce.”
“And where were you born?”
My voice is calm. “Boston, Massachusetts.”
He takes a step back, giving me room. “And what do you want to do with your life?” he asks.
I finally look at him, whispering. “I want to build things.”
He reaches to my side and picks a towel off the shelf, handing it me. I hold it to my chest, not really feeling the cold anymore. Not really feeling anything.
He leans in and kisses my forehead and then meets my eyes. “‘Nothing that happens on the surface of the sea can alter the calm of its depths.’” He quotes Andrew Harvey. “No one can take away who you are, Fallon. Don’t give anyone that power.”
I hadn’t cried since that day that’s suddenly on my mind. I’d come close, but two whole years and not one tear. My father kept me home for exactly one week to heal the injuries from the shards of glass from the windshield that had cut me up, but then he sent me back to boarding school to get on with my life.
And I had. That’s something everyone needs to learn on their own. Life goes on, smiles will come again, and time heals some wounds and soothes the ones it can’t.
I brought up my grades, made a few friends, and laughed a lot.
I simply couldn’t forgive, though. Betrayal cuts deep, and that’s what brought me back to town last June.
I just didn’t expect Madoc to still affect me.
He wanted me. I knew it. I felt it. But why? What did I really ever do to deserve him?
He’d been faithful to me when we were sixteen. Of that, I was pretty certain. I couldn’t hate him anymore for looking for a good time when he’d thought I’d willingly left him.
There are so many things I should tell him. Things that he had a right to know. And then I felt that I’d told him too much.
Madoc was better off without me. Our relationship started off in the wrong place to begin with. We had nowhere left to grow. He didn’t know me or what interested me. We talked about nothing.
Once he’d had his fill of the sex, he would leave. Not to mention the baby. If he ever found out about the baby, he’d jump ship. No doubt. Madoc wasn’t ready for anything that heavy. I wondered if he’d ever be.
I turned up “Far from Home” by Five Finger Death Punch and swallowed the guilt all the way back to Shelburne Falls as I drove home at my mother’s request. She’d texted this morning to let me know I had stuff at the house. If I didn’t come to collect what I’d left last summer, it was going in the trash.
I shook my head and ran a hand over my weary eyes.
• • •
Punching the gate code in, I inched Tate’s G8 forward as the black iron bars creaked open.
It was Saturday, late morning, and the October sky was lightly sprinkled with clouds. It was chilly out, but I hadn’t brought a jacket, opting for my black-and-gray-striped long-sleeved T-shirt and some jeans. My hair still hung loose from last night, but it’d been fluffed after my shower this morning. For some reason, though, I’d wanted Madoc’s smell to stay in my hair along with the tiny bits of grass I kept finding. My long bangs fanned around my cheekbones, and I picked my glasses off the passenger seat as I parked in front of the Caruthers’s house behind my mother’s BMW.
My glasses had been intended for reading years ago, but I took to wearing them almost all of the time. It felt safe somehow.