It took eight days, sixteen hours, twenty-four minutes and thirteen seconds for Mommy to come back.
She walked into our shared bedroom, looking no worse for wear. Her brown hair hangs limp around her shoulders, stringy and threadbare. Her dull brown eyes as lifeless as they’ve always been. Mommy was always been skinny, but as the years pass by, her body grows frailer and her bones curve, like she’s retreating in on herself.
Sometimes I wonder if she ever looked at me with love in her eyes when I was born. Before Daddy sucked her lifeforce away. What did she look like before him? Was she vibrant and full of life and love? Did she do everything with passion and ferocity?
I want to know who she was before she let someone destroy her so deeply.
“Mommy!” I gasp, rushing to her and embracing her in a loose hold.
I learned long ago not to hold her too tightly. It hurts her.
Relief washes through me so strongly, it takes all I have not to collapse from the force of it.
“I’m okay, sweetie,” she says tonelessly, patting my back before stepping away. She ambles past me, her slippers sliding against the floor as she walks.
Did she pick up her feet when she walked before Daddy?
“What happened to you?” I ask, following after her like a lost puppy.
She glances at me, but her eyes shift constantly, never staying in one place for more than a second. Never looking directly at me. Another thing that’s shifting throughout the years—it seems to get harder and harder for her to meet my eyes.
“I was in one of the other houses,” she replies.
Daddy created a small compound for the Church to live in. He came from a long line of old money, so he bought a hundred acres of land and built ten large houses, all set up in a square. He assigns a couple of the trusted Church goers to go outside the compound and get whatever supplies we need once a month.
Otherwise, none of us are allowed outside the premise. Especially without his permission. We go to school every day with one teacher, and then do work around the house to keep us busy.
When a man has eighteen kids, with five more on the way, it’s important to implement some type of law and order around the compound. Daddy does his best to stay at the houses evenly, but even a single day spent in my house is too often.
I’ve never been outside of the premises. Never even seen what the rest of the world looks like. One day I will convince Mommy to leave this place with me, but the first and last time I brought it up, she smacked me in the mouth and told me to never say those words again.
I listened, but only because the terror in her eyes scared me into silence.
But I’m even more scared that if I wait any longer, Mommy won’t be around long enough to get away from Daddy.
“Why?” I ask on a whisper.
“Sibby, honey, don’t get sensitive about it. Leonard wanted me to assist with some things in one of the houses, so I did. You were fine here, weren’t you?”
She sits down on a twin bed, directly across from mine. There are over sixty people that attend our Church, so we’re all forced to share rooms. I got lucky enough to share a room with Mommy. Though, I know Daddy holds that over my head. It’s something he constantly threatens to take away, but never seems to follow through with.
Maybe it’s because he knows Mommy is the only one in this Church that has any type of control over me. And Daddy has all the control over her. Like a house of cards, if I fail—so will she.
And I fail a lot.
I think I’m killing my mother.
“I guess so,” I whisper. “Daddy didn’t hurt you?”
She sighs, weary and tired. “Don’t ask questions like that, Sibby. Leonard isn’t a bad man, he just is doing the best he can for us. He has a lot of responsibility on his shoulders.”
She lies. She doesn’t even believe the words coming out of her own mouth.
Before I can stop it, I curl my lip in revulsion. The only thing he’s doing the best he can with is getting people to ride his cock and making my life miserable.
Clearly, he’s making her life miserable, too.
Mommy brushes her hair back, thoughtlessly, just to get it out of her eyes. But the small motion turned my life upside down.
Around her neck are deep handprint bruises. She’s wearing a turtleneck sweater, which isn’t out of the normal for her, especially during winters in Ohio. But her mangy sweater is sagging and exposing the lies Mommy told me.
He did hurt her.
Those bruises are not just blue, they’re nearly black. How long and hard do you have to squeeze a woman’s throat to turn it that shade?
My eyes round and a gasp slips from my lips. Her brown eyes snap to mine and they widen ever so slightly. Quickly, she brushes her hair forward again to cover the bruise. But she knew there was no covering up what I had already seen.
Her face falls, and her eyes shift some more.
Mountains of emotions rise to the surface—so many, I fear I’ll never be able to climb out of them. Rage. So much rage. Pure, utter heartbreak. Guilt, revenge, sadness. Every emotion a human has ever been plagued by is thrashing in my chest and bleeding into my heart.
I lost some of the red out of my heart in that moment, replaced by a deep, bottomless black. I feel so, so black.
“Why did you lie?” I plead, my lip trembling. A sob climbs up my throat, and there’s no stopping the tears. I’ve never felt like tears were a weakness in front of Mommy. Not when that’s all she’s ever given me, too.
It’s an unspoken understanding. That it’s okay to cry in front of one another. But never anyone else.
“Baby…” she trails off, at a loss for words. “It’s not your fault, Sibel. You know it’s not.”
“Then why did he do it?” I snap, enraged by her abuse. By my abuse. By this whole fucking community’s abuse. We’re all being subjected to it in one form or another, all by the same goddamn man—no. The devil. Fucking Satan himself.
She looks down at her lap, tremors wracking through her nimble fingers. Those same fingers that wiped so many tears away, brushed the hair off my face, helped me up after I had fallen. She was only a child herself when she had me—nowhere close to the maturity she should’ve been when mothering a child.
She’s not perfect, but she’s the best mother I could’ve asked for, given the fragility of her sanity. Her mind is breaking into pieces before my eyes. It has been for eighteen long years, and she’s so close to giving up. I can feel it in my bones, and the knowledge sends a fresh dose of panic into my bloodstream. It constricts my lungs like a python, slowly but surely sending me to an early grave.
“Why does he do anything around here?” she whispers under her breath. The words weren’t meant for me to hear, but I heard them anyway.
“Let’s leave,” I say quietly, pleadingly. “Please Mommy. You know he’s evil. You know it. We can run away together and start new lives far away from him. Somewhere he’ll never find us.”
A tear tracks down her cheek. Quickly, she wipes it away like it was never there in the first place.
“I can’t,” she says, her voice cracking. A sob bursts from her mouth. She slaps a hand over her mouth immediately, quieting the sound.
But you can’t silence heartbreak. It’s loud and painful. Even after you grieve and heal, it lingers in the background, sliding back into your life just when you think you’ve overcome it.
Mommy is well-versed in heartbreak; she’s been feeling it since the moment she lost her life. Now she’s just a shell of a woman, and her soul is ready to find something better.
More tears track down my cheeks. Desperation rises to the surface. Because I don’t want Mommy to leave me. I want us to leave here.
I want her to find that something better with me. Together.
Getting up, I rush over to her and sit next to her. The second I cradle her in my arms, she completely loses it. Shattering into tiny pieces in my hands. I want to pick up the pieces, but they’re like sand, and slipping through my fingers.
So, I do the only thing I’m capable of right now. Holding her. Comforting her. Loving her.
She lets loose almost two decades worth of trauma, abuse and sadness. She cries so hard, sometimes it takes a full minute for her to regain her breath again. Over and over, until there’s nothing left of her to give.
I cry with her, tightening my hold. Feeling her skin on mine. Warm, and soft. I’m desperate to feel her skin, so I hold her hand in my own, while she uses the other to quiet her pain.
Slowly, she regains her composure. Scrambling for her pieces and shoving them back inside her. Still broken, but at least they’re not lying at her feet anymore.
Wiping away her tears and then cleaning the snot from her nose with a tissue lying on her nightstand, she straightens back up and clears her throat.
“You shouldn’t have had to see that,” she says, her voice even but exhausted.
“You shouldn’t have gotten punished for my mistakes,” I argue.
She shakes her head. “I’m here because of my own mistakes. You’re here because of my mistakes, Sibel.”
I shake my head, opening my mouth to argue, but she holds up a hand to stop me. A hand that looks like it belongs to an eighty-year old woman, not a twenty-nine-year-old.
“Everything will be okay soon, Sibby. You’re stronger than I am. That’s why you’re the only one that can stand up to Leonard. You have fire in you that I simply do not possess.” She pauses and takes a deep breath, as if she’s gathering strength for what she’s going to say next.
“Which is why you’re the only one who can stop him.”
My eyes widen as I stare at her with incredulity. She can’t be saying what I think she’s saying. She gathers herself and leans down into her nightstand. She pulls out a beautiful knife. The handle is a beautiful pink, the wood hand carved and ornate.
It’s so… pretty.
I don’t know where it came from, or how long she’s had it, but it no longer matters. She’s giving it to me now. And I’m not sure how to feel about it.
She hands me the knife. When I go take it from her, she resists and looks me deeply in the eyes. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” she asks, placing her other hand on my thigh and squeezing.
Choppily, I nod my head.
“Good girl,” she says, patting my thigh and releasing the blade into my hand. “Let’s get to bed now.”
A strange, overwhelming sensation tugs at me. Without thinking, I wrap Mommy in a hug and hold her tight. In this moment, I know that if I don’t, she’ll slip through my fingers. She hugs me back just as fiercely, not a single complaint spoken.
“I love you, Mommy,” I whisper in her ear.
It takes several swallows before she manages to utter out a, “I love you too, sweet girl. You’re going to do great things in life, I just know it.”
I leave her alone after that, but I don’t take my eyes off her. I lay awake all night, staring at her still form, clutching my new pretty knife in my hand. Hardly blinking, refusing to take my eyes off of her for even a second. She doesn’t move from her spot. And that’s when she finally slips through.
Early in the morning, when I force my eyes away from her, I look at her alarm and watch it ring out, blaring loud. But she doesn’t stir. She doesn’t move from her spot at all.
What I didn’t know is that before she came to our room, she poisoned herself. I found Ricin left on the bathroom counter after I realized she was dead—she never even tried to hide what she did. The only people who could’ve gotten that for her are the trusted people who go out every month. When Daddy found out someone betrayed him, he didn’t even try to figure out which one got her the poison.
He killed them all.
And I was glad for it. None of those people were pure. And one of them allowed Mommy to leave me here alone. And I hate them for it.
I’ll never know the exact moment she took her last breath. I’ll never know why she chose to kill herself rather than running away with me.
Or why death was more appealing than a life with me.
But what hurt most is knowing that I spent the entire night staring at my mother’s dead body and never even realized it.
