CHAPTER TWO

Before I begin to unravel a tale that’s sure to rip your heart out of your chest, I first want to express that my father, as twisted as he was, in so many ways, didn’t always hate me. A rarity it was, his love, but my conscience (even the dead have a conscience, something you’ll come to understand when your time arrives) can soar beyond the memories that saturate the capacity of human minds. I find it very fickle that, in my conscience, lies the answers to all the questions I hadn’t correctly answered on my history test the week before I died. I can tell you the year Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, 1863. I can tell you that our galaxy formed along a cosmic filament which transpired from stars and dust whirling violently through space. Among a million things I can tell you, most of all, I can answer the one question most mortals break the plane of science trying to discover: Is there a God? 

Yes, there is… or at least, there is something.

We stand together every evening at dusk upon ground concrete with flamboyant, earthly colors of nature and watch the light, warm with embrace, as it sears through the rooftops belonging to every city and small town in existence and illuminates our eyes, alluring us as if we are but a vast crowd of moths drawn to the rhetorically-branded phenom awaiting, the creator of this place and the place beyond which we, those with faith, long to go in due time. Beside me, her raven hair blows in an evening breeze singed with golden bliss.

My spirit guide’s name is Haven. She died three years before me and is my age. Sixteen. We’ve been sixteen since arriving. Days go by, but time, though it seems to pass like it does in our world, stands still when we depart. There are many beautiful illusions here. Desire births reality, much like the dreams we wish to come true as humans. Yesterday, Haven desired a tree with leaves of cotton candy. Beyond her eyes, where a painted canvas of lush sprawls of grass greener than that of Earth, roots sprouted up, and as if it was pencil-etched by an artist outlining his most prized piece, bore a trunk swelling with a color rich in umber. We took from the tree, held the pink delicacy in our hands, and we ate. To savor the simple times of life here is an experience tenfold to that of life before.

 I’m not certain where Haven came from, nor am I certain how or why she was appointed as my guide, and I don’t believe she knows, either. Haven was waiting for me when I came through. She wore a smile as beautiful as she is. And a stranger, she was not. There aren’t any strangers here. We come to know one another like we know our mothers and sisters. I am grateful for her and the time we have together. We’ve spent three years building a house out of clouds that we lasso with a rope the shade of dawn and pull down with the utmost exertion, pretending we possess the strength of Hercules (even in the afterlife, the adolescent entertains the idea of make-believe). Sometimes the clouds are white; sometimes they’re pink. Sometimes they’re both. Haven and I compromise the way Maggie and I would compromise over who went first at Hopscotch, one game me, the other her and vice versa. She is like my sister�"my heavenly sister, or my sister here… in this limbo.

Back to my father. If I merely think about it, I can visualize the day he picked me up off the sidewalk on our street. I had fallen and scraped my knees, something fierce, too. I can see how I had closed my eyes when he dropped the hose he was using to wash his Mercury and began running over. It was the norm, back then, that when I messed up, he would run after me and remove his belt quickly. He coiled its leather tightly in the palm of his right hand, gripped it far below the buckle, a whirring fury as he brought it down and it met my young, tender flesh.

But over the sound of lazy traffic heading out of the dead end and into the bustle on the other end of town, I heard his clement voice call to me: “Mercury, sweetheart, are you all right?” With my eyes open I saw his belt was still firmly around his waist, looped around a pair of light denim jeans flared at the ankles. He looked worried, and for a second I swore my real father had been tied up, taken away and held for ransom: a dad for a car. Oh, how I wished that car would disappear. Like me on the night I made the biggest mistake of my life. Truthfully, if my “real” dad had been tied up, taken away and held for ransom, the captives could’ve kept him and that forsaken car! 

“I�" I think so,” I said. My voice was feeble, its volume decreased because of my wonderment: Was my father really caring? Was this a turning point in his behavior? Was he going to stop hurting me? Was he going to stop touching me? I pondered deeply as he examined my wounds. There hadn’t been a solitary scorn about his demeanor. Like usual. His face was bright with concern; it gleamed in the sun like the cherry red car sparkling a fresh coat of primer behind him.

“You need to be careful when you’re on the sidewalk, sweetheart. Do you see how it elevates from the street?”

“Yes, daddy.” I spoke. “I’ll be more careful, I promise.”

He helped me up and hugged me. That was the only time I met the father every loving child deserves. “Come on, let’s get you doctored up.” 

                      ***

Inside Valerie’s bureau, there are photos of my father when he was in the Army. Before I was murdered, she would pull them out, dust them, and neatly place them back. Before, she would admire them with him, her arms around his neck as he sat on the edge of their bed. “Handsome,” she would say. “I love a man in uniform.” After this, they would kiss gently, and my father would tell her he loved her and that there would never be another. If I only had the nerve required to speak up, I would have told my mother that behind my father’s serpent lips was a lie coating a forked tongue, and behind that, a truth she had every right to know. Now the photos just sit there collecting the dust she no longer cleans. My mother hasn’t spoken to my father in three years. 

But on that night in February, a cold snow billowed from a starless sky. We were in my father’s Mercury, him and I. I remember watching the wipers do their best to make the highway on the other side of the windshield visible. The snow was falling hard, white flakes plump with crystalline water covering the atmosphere. The man on the radio said it was to be the biggest snowfall the southern part of Illinois had seen in half a century. Having just turned sixteen on January 12, I had enough wisdom�"not that it took a great deal of wisdom�"to know that in Mill Shoals, or the entire midwest for that matter, anything was possible weatherwise; it would rain cats and dogs just outside your home, but two blocks down the sun would be glistening, cloudless overhead. I had enough wisdom to know that when my father told my mother he was taking me to the Dairy Barn for a couple of shakes, at eleven and on a school night, when a big storm was coming, that he had the urge again. The urge had come more frequently when he took notice of the changes my body had undergone since childhood. Here, the place where every preacher tells you no bad exists, no murder, no pain, is full of bad and pain. I don’t feel hate, per se, part of me even feels sorry for him, but I can still feel the pain my life, leading up to my death, invoked. It comes in waves and hits hard deep within my stomach. Haven scolds me sometimes because she says I let my death weigh on me more than I should. She says death has no place here, and she’s right. But I can’t seem to satisfy its everlasting pull; it yearns for me to soothe its savage cry. 

My father grabbed his grey wool coat from the hook next to the front door. Maggie and my mother sat on the couch, curled up like a couple of cats under a beige throw. Boy Meets World was on television. Neither Maggie nor my mother seemed too curious about my father’s devious plot, one he played out repeatedly since I was three and one he never gave much effort in. He was a good liar. “We’re going out for ice cream. Maggie, if you are a good girl while we’re gone, I’ll bring you back a vanilla cone. Okay?” Maggie smiled and nodded vibrantly. She was sold. But, of course, she was a sucker for ice cream. 

“It’s a little late, isn’t it?” my mother said. But it wasn’t at all a question she hadn’t known the answer to. She knew it was late. She was using the conversation as a way to break the silence that was commonly defiant in our house in the later hours of the night. During those times, my father grew distant from my mother, not at all shy to loaf around in her skimpy nightgown, fleece just thick enough to cover the bareness of her chest. My mother felt like she had to chase my father for the intimacy he had withheld when his eyes looked upon me in the way they once looked upon her. Like that night in the car on the way to nowhere near the Dairy Barn downtown to buy a couple of shakes and a vanilla cone for Maggie.

There were many places my father would take me when he wanted me. When Valerie was in her cubicle at Writer’s Republic, penciling out filler-words on a client’s manuscript, Maggie was next door at the Bailey residence, playing with Sadie, a friend of likewise age. I was usually on my bed, flat on my back as he entered me. Other times I was pushed over the back of the living room couch with his hand over my mouth to silence the agony escaping my lips.

“You scream and I’ll kill your mother and your sister. You understand?” I nodded every time. It hurt. A lot. No matter how customary the act had become�"no matter how mature my body had become, it hurt more than anything I ever had hurt in my life. Our dog, Bell, “the best labrador in the world” (something Maggie once childishly branded her), had knocked me off our back porch when I was ten. I had broken my arm on impact, and I screamed lividly. The pain was horrible. My arm spent that summer in a plaster cast, and when the itchiness brought on by healing occurred, my mother taught me how to scratch with the metal end of a flyswatter. My injury, however, healed. The pain of molestation never did. Not in life and not in death.

Nights when my mother was home, the front seat of his Mercury stood in for his pleasure and my misery. Like that night. Little did I know my silence, the very thing that kept my mother and my sister clean of the pain stained under the radiant front my exterior shimmered into the eyes and approving minds of my peers, would turn the happiness of my mother and Maggie inside out. In my realm here, their tears are a monsoon that falls through a bright blue sky that turns gray with sadness… and the pain my death has brought upon them. Days when no tears rain upon me, Haven brings her heart-shaped pendant that her mother laid gently over her head before she was taken to Elmwood by way of hurst. She hugs me and tells me, “You’re loved, Mercury. Here and there, too. That’s why they cry. Soon, they will understand.”

Since my life ended, I have tried so hard to understand why I was chosen, knowing people like my father were out there walking, breathing and living free, their guilt but a light feather on sturdy shoulders.

“Never too late when ice cream’s involved,” he said. “Besides, this won’t take long.” 

My mother looked at him and shrugged. She gave him that just-go-and-get-back look she often did when she failed to be on the same page as a bullheaded man who darn well would do what he said he was to do either way.

“Mercury! Let’s go!” he yelled, and down I came from upstairs.

I zipped my coat and followed my father outside into the cold, and though impossible it was for me to know it would be the last time I saw my home, where so many good memories had been made, I turned and fell away into a timelapse manifested by enough love from my mother and Maggie to last all sixteen years of my short life. I saw the day Maggie was born and how happy my mother had been that the pre-eclampsia she had during her pregnancy hadn’t killed her or my baby sister. I saw the old box fan Maggie and I would sing karaoke into when summers were upon us and humidity choked the ambience with a thickness that stole your breath away. My mother would, at first, lose her patience because her best curling iron made a great microphone for the cover band that performed The Cranberries and The Judds but would laugh contentedly when the humor of the scene took effect. We were terribly off key, but we sang lustfully and with heart. 

Through the living room window, fogged with winter’s frozen kiss, my mother looked away from the tv, her eyes heavy with sorrow.

Rectangular headlights burned through the falling white as they hooked left and brought to light a snow-covered road that was ordinarily gravel. East and West were fields occupied with round hay bales tarped with ice sickles and a dew reflecting back to us in miniscule beams. I could only watch them as we passed. My mind saw the ghosts of children reliving the days when they were healthy and rich with that dried yellow color after the Johnson grass was cut and raked and channeled through the best machinery John Deere ever manufactured. They were jumping from bale to bale and laughing and falling and frolicking on and on. Their lips were sticky from succulent slices of sweet watermelon, and this chimera was alive more than this cold, dead, February night when slumber had yet to come calling. 

Low on the radio played “House Of The Rising Sun”, and with a decisive turn of the knob, he quieted its evocative melody. In the sideview I saw him looking upon me hungrily, his right hand fondling his groin. 

One of the ghost children, a little girl with ice cream stains on her dress and pigtails that fell messily to the sides of her face, seemed to beckon me with inaudible screams. “Goooooo baccccck! Goooooo baccccck!” she called. I could read her lips as they moved slowly, as if she was trapped in a time long gone. That little girl was me, and she was warning the older me to get away.

I focused on the silver handle on the door panel and found myself reaching for it, slowly, so he wouldn’t notice. At the speed of which the Mercury chugged along, I figured I could leap free and tuck and roll into the thick powder of snow below me without so much as a bruise. Then I would run, run into the black and towards town, towards anywhere where someone would help me escape from the pain my own father was about to give me, towards anywhere that hadn’t a belt or penis of a brutal man laminated in monstrosity, scum and devilish ways.

The lock shot down and hid itself within the plastic compartment of the door. His hand was a flash, a creamy apparition in the backlight of the radio nestled in the dashboard. Upon retraction, his hand found my inner thigh and from there it inched closer to my vagina.

“Oh, Mercury, I’ve missed touching you,” he said. His hair clung to his forehead; dark brown strands turned black from sweat. His breathing picked up as his fingers throbbed just outside the fly of my High-Rise jeans.

I forced myself to not accept this knowledge. It froze me. The only mobility in my possession were two blue eyes full of fright and tears. They sought desperately for a way out of the Mercury’s mouth, its doors two red lips savoring the pity of a girl soon to be swallowed whole and never to be seen alive again.

“You have a fellow in school?” he asked, a crooked smile pulling at the right seam of his mouth.

I did not answer. Silence held my words within me.

“Hmmm?”

I shook my head.

“No? Good, good. I knew you weren’t a w***e like those other girls. That’s good.”

“Daddy…”

“But you can be my w***e,” he said. I began to panic as I heard the groin of my pants tear open. The zipper had come off its track, its metal teeth littering the Mercury’s bench seat.

I threw myself against the door, using my shoulder as a battering ram. My hands flailed and jerked at the handle, hoping it would jolt the door off its hinges and out I would go. I dug for the lock with my fingertips, snapping my nails off at the base as I did so. 

No use. The car reeled a sharp right and halted before a silhouette of trees lurking in their dark winter grave. He threw the gear shift into park and was on me, one hand closing off my larynx. My cries were hoarse behind his masculine grip. 

“Ooooh, you like it rough? So do I,” he graveled. My legs were spread open by the two of his. He choked me. Below our waists, he undid his trousers and removed his penis. 

“Noooooo,” I begged quietly. Quietly was as loud as I could within his grasp. Hard. Crushing and powered more with provocative want.

His incisors gnawed at my lower lip until blood began to dribble down my chin. He was in me, thrusting and heaving and I could feel how his heart drummed against my breasts like a judge’s gavel upon solid wood. I wished he would have a heart attack and die, die a broad, sweaty mess upon me, in me if need be. As long as he was dead, I would be saved.

In my freshman year at Mill Shoals High, I heard Denise Walters talking about losing her virginity to Brandon Anderson and how amazing and perfect and special it had been. Brandon was a senior then, a young boy sculpted with a man’s definition. His skin was a bright olive radiance touched up with deep dreamy eyes of mahogany and a smile sure to capture the wondrous things that lay ahead of him. Even in his basketball attire, which didn’t do justice to his charming appearance, the girls swooned over him all the same. I myself wished it had been me instead of Denise, who was reluctant to let the experience go beyond her small circle of cheerleader friends. She said she couldn’t live with herself if people were to find out and label her as the girl who lost her virginity before marriage. Denise was a lot of things: popular, beautiful, envied and loved. But she wasn’t a w***e to no one. Not Brandon Anderson, and not her father, who loved her the way a father should love his daughter. 

And here was me, the girl who lost her virginity to John Bernz, the girl who lost her virginity to her own father at the age of three. THREE.

“Do it like you did before, Mercury…” 

I cried and accepted him now. The fight in me was gone. I just laid there and took him inside me and waited for the pain to pass like it temporarily had so many times before.

“Kiss me, Mercury,” he said sternly.

And I did. Softly. Passionately. Not wanting to at all, but it was what had to be done.

“Tell me you love me,” he demanded. He had never commanded me to do this before. I had repeated all the dirty things he wanted me to over the years. I had told him he was hot, sexy, and the best lover. I even went as far as telling him how good it had felt, knowing it never once felt good. But never had I told this b*****d that I loved him. Nor would I ever. I’d rather be dead, I thought. 

Still hard and deep within me, he raised his torso and opened the glovebox. Inside was a hunting knife with a black stone handle and a blade as sharp and ridged as it was bright in the darkness he raped me in. He pulled it forth, and it smiled at me in a beam of moonlight homing in from its place behind snow driving downward. He pressed it into my throat.

“Tell me you love me! TELL ME!” 

I didn’t. I couldn’t. This was the brave me�"the strong me pecking away at the iron shield that separated the strong and brave me from the cowardly and weak and used me. This was the stubborn me, and as much as I hated admitting it then, I was happy that at least one good quality from the b*****d had been passed down. That one good quality was in my favor, for my failure to accommodate rattled him, paralyzed his violent thrusting and degrading nature brought on by a mind deeply troubled with no clear explanation. For a span of time only seconds long. Was it right to prod his authoritative ruling? Was it right to risk my life for a right to triumph, even for a moment? Yes, I had thought. I wanted to think no. WHY didn’t I think no? I supposed I believed he wouldn’t kill me; he wouldn't get rid of his best pleasure. He refused to touch my mother, something that nipped at her ankles like a territorial dog. She had the greatest belief of an affair he had started more than a decade ago. With whom, she couldn’t fathom.

Mom, dad has been raping me for thirteen years. You really think she wants to hear that? Do you realize what that will do to her? What will become of it? I thought, and as the blade ate at the flesh of my throat, my thoughts disappeared.

“TELL ME!”

I returned silence and closed my eyes. And I kept imagining returning home to my mother and Maggie later that night, hurting without a trace of pain physically in view. But I never returned home. 

On the night of February 17, 1995, in the front seat of my father’s 1972 Mercury Marquis, I was raped, killed and dismembered by John Bernz, who drug a potato sack full of severed limbs down a snowbank that overlooked Ryker’s Creek. The water washed away his shadow upon the parallel streak of night and snowfall.

The water, too, washed me away.