heard, or maybe not even seen at all. It’ s a skill I perfected watching my mom, the one piece that has stayed with me. So many times since her death I have searched my face for signs, looking for her hard brow in my sea of freckles. I had to look no further than the way an angry man can make me fear for my life.
We didn’ t know, with Gary. Not at first— or at least, I didn’ t know. In the years I was away, she had met him, had a child with him, and lived her life with his temper. I came into their chaos on the whim of my caseworker. Mom gave me a room, a small bed, and no explanations. In the first few months, I clawed for his attention, sinking my talons into him in the same clingy way that would drive boyfriends away all through middle school. The less attention he paid me, the more desperate I got, until simply a dirty look after I pushed the baby would be enough to satisfy my hunger.
Like so many things, I don’ t know what drove him to it. I’ m sure I did something, because I was always doing something. I pissed him off and suddenly I was laid out on the ground, on my belly. Whap. Whap. Whap. Hot pain on the backs of my calves, throbbing so hard that the welts themselves seemed to pulse. I saw him retreating with his large stick, flakes of bark falling onto the kitchen floor as he walked. He didn’ t throw it out the door as I expected, but set it against the door frame. He sauntered back into the living room where I was burying my face in the carpet.
“ You see that? You do that again”— and even then, I remember not knowing what I had done, what that had been—“ and you get the cane again.” I lay trembling on the floor long after he walked away, not sure if getting up would set him off again.
So many of the facts have been filled in for me in recent years. Gary had been raised on a Mexican farm, and the caning of calves was simply what was done to naughty children. His abuse was, for all its irony, his way of treating me like his own child. Later he told me stories of his pet chicken, and how his father chopped its head off in front of him. He described the blood gushing, and how the chicken still walked around while on the ground his head twitched. I was shocked and fascinated at the time, and it would be years before I realized that the man who terrorized me was not born that way, but like most monsters, was created.
It was like a switch flipped. For all my groping for his attention, suddenly I was doing everything in my power to avoid the focus of his rattlesnake eyes. The stick stood by the screen door, daring me to misbehave each time I went outside. Fortunately for me, Gary got a job in the kitchen of the local hospital, and with
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