CHAPTER NINE #3
“You have no idea. My older sisters tried to find her and turn her in to our father, but when our aunt found out that they weren’t being honest with her, she cut ties.
She reached out again, carefully, to me through the librarian when I was eighteen.
I was scared to leave though. I also didn’t want to communicate with her too much in case my dad found out. ”
“He was abusive?”
“Extremely.”
“So was mine.”
I reached across the seats and took his hand, rubbing my thumb over his knuckles. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
“I got married off to a horrible, older man. Like twenty-ish years older than me. It was a thing. Older men who’d never married—and for good reason—would come to our community in search of a young wife.
They might come with a bit of money and buy their way in.
That’s what Ephram did anyway. He bribed my dad for my hand, and my dad was more than happy to be rid of me.
He used to always say that God cursed him with only daughters. ”
Lennox made a face of disgust. “Men like that make me sick.”
“He is a very sick-in-the-head person,” I said deadpanned. “Anyway, I married Ephram when I was twenty-two and he was nearly fifty. You want to talk about age gaps … that was too much. He was old enough to be my father. And he was twice the size of my dad.”
Lennox made another face of disgust.
“He was a drunk, and when he drank, he got violent. I’ve had every rib in my body broken, my pinky finger snapped at least three times.
” I held up my left hand to show him the crooked little digit.
“So many black eyes. For a few years, I thought I had tinnitus because I couldn’t get rid of this incessant ringing in my ears.
It started after he knocked me hard into the wall, and I fell and hit my head on the coffee table.
I woke up to him on top of me, and I had no pants on. ”
“Naomi—” my name croaked out of him.
“I’m fine talking about it if you are okay hearing it. If not, I can stop.”
He bunched his empty fist on his thigh, and a muscle ticked at the corner of his jaw. “Go on.”
“Anyway. I miscarried a few times, then eventually, I got pregnant with Austin. It was a rough pregnancy and a difficult labor. He came out sunny side up, which is not ideal, and had to be in the NICU for a week because he was a little early and his lungs weren’t fully developed.
Ephram roughed me up pretty badly when he got the hospital bill for that. ”
“Your husband is dead, right?”
“Yes.”
I made sure of it.
“Good.”
“It wasn’t until he went after an eighteen-month-old Austin with a belt—while I was pregnant with Honor—that I found the courage to leave”
“How did you escape?”
I glanced out the front window and watched three gulls, their wings open wide, bobbing up and down on the gusts. I’d dreamed for far too long to be that free. And now I was.
“Ephram died,” I finally said, not looking at him. “Heart attack.”
“Well, that was convenient.”
Sliding my eyes sideways at him, all I did was nod.
“And your aunt welcomed you to the island?”
“With open arms. Gabrielle had already escaped her husband, but she was living in Spokane. She wanted to go to college. I came right to the island. Honor was born in the living room where we ate pizza and played games last night, then when Gabrielle moved here, the kids and I moved to the cottage in the woods. It has three bedrooms, and it’s small, but cozy and completely ours. ”
“Why’d you give up the house?”
I shrugged. “I loved the cottage. There’s just something so magical and whimsical about it. Shake siding, a woodstove that keeps it toasty in the winter, and my bedroom is a loft with a great view of the vineyard. It’s the perfect safe space for me and my kids.”
“Naomi …”
I really liked the way he said my name. It was slightly breathless and almost like a sigh. My chest fluttered every time he did it.
At some point, we’d switched our hands, and now he was rubbing his thumb back and forth over my knuckles. I gasped when he tightened his grip and hauled me toward him and onto his lap. I sat sideways, my back against the driver’s side door.
“Do I get to know more of your story?” I asked, tentatively reaching up and tracing my finger across his scar. “Where is your birth mother? Your father?”
“Dead. And in prison.”
I frowned. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry about my mother, not about my father.”
All I did was nod.
With a weary sigh, he kept his gaze focused out the front window. “I never could get a straight answer out of my dad about how my mom died. One time he told me it was a car accident. Another time he told me a stroke. Then he once said she killed herself.”
“Do … do you think he killed her?”
He glanced at me. “Yeah … I do.”
Fucking hell.
“She died when I was seven. It was very sudden. One day she was there, taking me to the library, laughing with me as we baked cookies, and the next day, my dad sat me down and told me she was dead.”
“And he never explained?”
“He was vague about it. I remember wondering why he wasn’t more upset. Why he never cried. I later realized he’d isolated her from her family. They had no idea about me, or her death, which was why they never came for me. Never sought me out.”
“Have you looked for them?”
His head bob and shoulder jostle were noncommittal. “Maybe I should put more effort into it.”
“When you’re ready.”
“Anyway, my dad remarried less than six months after my mom passed. A part of me wonders if he’d already been seeing Kyla and got rid of my mom to make room for her.
But I’ll never know the truth. Because all he really needed was a live-in babysitter for me.
He worked on offshore oil rigs and would be gone for months at a time.
So, he married Kyla and left me with her.
Two weeks after their wedding, he left for three months. ”
“Jesus.”
A part of me was kind of scared to ask how the abuse started, but if we were going to go into this … whatever it was we were starting—with total honesty, I needed to hear it. All the horrific details. He listened to mine, after all.
“It started out really weird,” he said, his voice quiet.
“She would come into the bathroom and insist on helping me wash myself. She said that was what moms were supposed to do. Bathe their kids. I told her I didn’t need any help, but she acted really hurt.
Said she was just trying to be the mom I didn’t have anymore, and I was pushing her away. ”
He wasn’t looking at me, just out at the waves and the birds. So I did the same. It was probably easier to unload without seeing the other person’s reactions.
“She’d insist that we shower together and that I help wash her too.
Said it was a way for us to bond and get to know each other.
I think I was around eleven when I had my first wet dream.
She found the mess on my sheets and said that that wasn’t normal and that it was her job as my mom to help me take care of those things.
A few nights later, I woke up to her with her mouth on me. ”
My stomach twisted into a tight knot, and I had to unclench my molars before I chipped a tooth.
“She said that this was what mothers did for their sons. When I tried to tell her I didn’t like it, she would withhold food.
She locked me in my room for an entire weekend.
I wasn’t able to use the bathroom or eat, or anything.
She would say that she did this because she loved me, and if I loved her, I would accept her as my mom and all the things a mom is supposed to do. ”
“This woman sounds insane.”
He glanced at me sideways briefly before focusing ahead again. “Eventually, it escalated to her forcing me to perform certain acts on her as well. She wouldn’t let me out of the house to even go to school unless I … ‘satisfied mommy.’”
Bile rose up the back of my throat.
“I was really good at basketball and kept my grades up. I spent as much time at school and at my friends’ house as I could.
I did everything I possibly could to not go home.
I ran away a few times, but that just caused her to call the cops on me, then I’d get in trouble from my dad when he came home.
He’d knock me around. Or Kyla would punish me for staying away. ”
“Lennox … this is … nothing about this was okay. Your dad and Kyla are monsters.”
“I lost my virginity on my twelfth birthday. But I struggled to stay hard because I really hated what she was making me do. Lucky for her, she was a pharmacy assistant and started stealing Viagra from work. Then she’d mix it into my food so that I really had no choice in the matter.”
“She could have killed you with that.”
He nodded stiffly. “I’m assuming she knew the dosage to give a person of my weight that wouldn’t be fatal, but maybe not.
Within six months of my twelfth birthday, she was pregnant.
My dad obviously did the math when he was home and accused her of cheating on him because he’d been gone for four months and she was two months pregnant.
He got violent with her, and a sick part of me hoped he’d rough her up enough that she’d lose the baby.
Then she made the stupid mistake of telling him the baby was mine, and he tried to kill me.
He broke my arm in three places, cracked a bunch of my ribs, shattered my eye socket and cheekbone. ”
He spun his left arm around to show me scars hidden within the tattoos.