I squeezed my nose in my little hand to stop the bleeding and leaned my head against the closet wall. My cheeks stung with fire from where her hands had smacked them. My face felt hot and my blood was throbbing. I felt around in the dark and found a shirt. I covered my bleeding face.
I could still hear her shouting and throwing something in the other room. Later I would think back to this moment and wonder why I hid in the closet instead of running out the door. I guess because I did not know where to go. Anyone I would run to, she knew, and then she would come looking for me.
My nose finally stopped bleeding and the heat in my face subsided. I was still too scared to come out of the closet though. I had no idea if she had settled down enough for me to escape her violent fits.
When I first opened my eyes, I had forgotten where I was. I thought for a moment that maybe somehow it had all been a dream and I was waking up in a safe place. Then I felt the hard, blood soaked fabric I had used to clean myself with and realized I was still in the closet.
I carefully opened the door and peeked out. All I saw was the yellow nicotine stained walls of my prison bedroom. She was nowhere to be seen. I shielded my eyes from the daylight coming in through the window and decided to change my clothes. I took the ones I had been wearing and rinsed them out in the bathroom sink. As I was changing, I noticed the red lines she had left on my body. They were everywhere, on my back, my stomach, and my legs. I looked like a backwards zebra, red instead of black. For some reason, I never had any bruises. This made me angry because I had never heard of anyone who could be hit so much and so hard and not end up with bruises. I thought no one would believe me if I told them she had hit me if I didn't have bruises. Too many times I was right.
I took the wet clothes out to the garage and put them in the washer. I knew from experience that those blood stains would never come out if I did not wash them soon.
"What are you doing?" I heard her monstrous voice behind me. I turned to look at the person I would never see as a mother. A mother would never treat their child as she treated me. At times I felt like a beaten Cinderella. I felt I was forced to work just to stay alive.
"I'm just washing some clothes." I tried not to look her in the eyes. For some reason, whenever I did, I would start to cry which I hated her to see me do. I cried for many reasons, because of the pain, because of the distrust, because when I looked in her eyes, I never saw the love I always wanted to see, a motherly love.
"Well, if you weren't so dirty, you wouldn't have to wash your clothes all the damn time now, would you?"
I wanted to scream at her. "If you didn't make me bleed all over my clothes, I would not have to wash them all the damn time!" I would never say that to her, at least not without enduring more of her physical angry expressions.
"No." That was all I could muster up to say.
I left the garage and went to my room. It might have seemed like a prison room, but it was the only place I could go to that seemed like it belonged to me. I turned the radio on low enough to where she could not hear and pretended to do school work. I spread papers and books across the floor and lay down on the floor that was hardly ever vacuumed to write in my journal. I never wrote about her though. I wrote about how I wanted my life to be. I imagined what it was like to have a really nice mother. One who loved me and treated me like her little angel and was my best friend. Reading my entries was the only thing that ever made me happy. To know that somewhere out there, there could be a mother like that for me, even if it was only in my imagination.
Before I knew it, it was time for dinner. She might not have been the best mother, but she always forced us to eat at the kitchen table for dinner. She said that when she was a kid, her parents never sat down and had dinner together with her, so she wanted to make sure that I had that experience. I never understood this concept, due to the fact that this was basically the only attempt she really made at trying to be a "nice" parent to me. Regardless of her attempt, dinner at the kitchen table was never something I looked forward to. She always tried to get me to talk about school or my friends. I always lied. I never wanted her to know anything about me or school, or especially my friends.
Luckily, for me, dinner went smoothly for the most part. I shoved my food down my throat as fast as I could and started to clear the table. Every night I was expected to clean the dishes and the entire kitchen. I hated this chore more than any other I had, because I was always so nervous I would break a dish, and the counter was too tall for me to stand at, so I had to stand on a chair which wobbled on the deep grooves of the tiled floor. We also did not own an automatic dishwasher, so I had to wash all the dishes by hand, which left my hands prune-looking and dry afterwards. I could never have nice pretty hands, because I had to wash dishes by hand.
Little did I know that this night began my life of never having to do dishes by hand again. She had retired to the living room and I could hear the news blaring across the house. I'll never forget the story that the news anchors were telling that night. It was one of those stories about some teenage kids turning up missing. I will never forget the story because I remember thinking to myself why can't that be me? It was heartbreaking even then to think that I wanted to be a missing child. Heartbreaking not because I would be in a place I was not familiar with, but because I felt like I wanted so badly to be away from the one person in this world that should love me.
I must have lost myself in fantasizing about being a missing child when I felt the smooth edge of the porcelain plate slip from my fingers and make its way to the floor. It all happened within seconds. There was cursing, screaming, a hard shove and I found myself looking up at her from the corner of the floor. I put my arms up in defense and felt what should have been bruises on my forearms ache as she struck me again and again. She was shouting words that I do not remember or, for that matter, want to. It was probably something about how I was disrespectful (her favorite), or how I was inconsiderate of her belongings, just like my dad had been. Like it was somehow my fault that he had wronged her and I was the one who now received his punishments.
I crawled across the floor as she continued to scream at me and somehow made it to the doorway. I pulled myself to my feet and then it happened. It took half a second to decide to run out the front door. I am still not sure why I found the courage on this night. I had never before even considered ever running away from home because I always thought she would come after me. I suppose at this moment I was not thinking that far ahead or somehow I knew that it was worth it to get away from her.
As I opened the door, a whole world stood in front of me and I ran into it with opened arms. The night embraced me as I ran across its pavement in bare feet. I hadn't had time for shoes. I tore every callus off my feet that night as I ran to the closest person I knew.
Mrs. Lovett answered her door with suspicious eyes. Later I wondered what a women her age had been doing up that late. The stars were out and I knew that my grandma always went to bed before the stars. Mrs. Lovett had to have been in her eighties. She was known by the kids in the neighborhood as 'the-lady-who-walks-the-wiener-dog.' She always bought Girl Scout cookies and went to church.
She helped me like no one else had ever helped me in my life. I never saw my mother again because of Mrs. Lovett. Some people from her church bought me all new clothes and a new pair of shoes and arranged for me to live with a new family.
The new family never was as nice as I had imagined in my dream diaries, but they also never once hit me or said mean things to me. I never did have the relationship with a mother that I had always dreamed about, but my new family taught me to have a different kind of relationship. I now knew how to feel safe and at peace. I never gave up yearning for love, but they taught me to settle for comfort and peace. I could live with that.
Jennifer Horton was born in Kansas City, MO in 1986, but traveled to Houston with her mother in 1990 and has been a big city girl ever since. Her love affair with fiction writing, and with literature in general, began as early as the first grade when she was given the lead role in a play. She promptly changed her interest from acting to journalism and is currently pursuing her Bachelor of Arts and Science Degree in Communications with a concentration in Journalism at the University of Houston.
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