25. Luna
25
LUNA
I ’m in a prison cell on my own, in the dark. It’s cold. And unforgiving. There are so many bad memories in this house. So many tortured souls, and I don’t know why he’s brought me here. I’ve always loved the area, but never this house. This monstrosity which will always serve as a shrine to my mother.
I have to believe that they’ll come for me. It’s all I have left to cling to. So I sit and I hope and I pray that they are invested in finding me — no matter the reason — and that they come soon.
It’s cold in the dungeon, and I’m still wearing the clothes I wore yesterday. My father hasn’t given me any food or water, and my throat is scratchy with dryness. I could expire in this very cell and no one would ever know. Would anyone even care? Nadia — if she’s still alive — would never know what became of me. And there’d be no one else to mourn me. No one that cares enough to shed a tear over me or say a prayer that I’m in a better place.
It’s so, so cold at night that my teeth chatter against each other in the absence of a blanket or any warmth. My father is a cruel, cruel man. He makes the devil look simply angelic.
I lay my body against the wooden plank of the makeshift bed, made this way specifically to make a person as uncomfortable as possible. “ No comfort for the weary ”, I remember him saying when I was a child and he would emerge from the belly of the house, his lips twisted into a cruel, wicked gash meant to pass for a smile. I curl my body in on itself, seeking warmth from my bound energy as I fold into myself. If my father doesn’t kill me, the cold certainly will. My head starts to hurt, a sharp icy pain radiating against my scalp. It rattles and thunders between the layers of tissue and blood, the pain a dull, unforgiving ache.
I convince myself that I should have kept running towards the cliff. I should have. That fate would have been a far sight better than the one I’m facing now. Death by suicide would have been more courageous than death by my father’s hand.
My mind flutters and dives into the past, going back in time as it recalls the horror of what my father is actually capable of. How does a child come back from watching their father kill their mother? How do I unsee the unforgivable? Undo the unthinkable? And after all is said and done, knowing what I saw with my own two eyes, he actually tried to convince me that I’d imagined the whole thing.
Singlehandedly, and I don’t care what he says, because I know what I saw, he had managed to deprive me of the scent of my mother. Her smell, her perfume. Her presence. I would grow up without a mother, literally an orphan because he didn’t even act like a father. I would grow up without a role model, that strongest of female connections. And I still didn’t know why he’d done it. One could say it was a momentary lapse in judgment. A moment of anger. A bad decision. One of a whole lot more he was bound to make. But how, really, could you profess to love someone so completely, then be the perpetrator of such a heinous crime? How?
Their fights were louder and more frequent than ever, my father’s raised voice booming above my mother’s fragile one. She was beautiful, my mother. What one would call ‘ethereal’. With her dark blonde hair and gorgeous whiskey colored eyes that beguiled. I would see the way that people stared at her. Even I looked at her in awe.
Whenever anybody asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would always inevitably say, “I want to be just like my mommy”. Little did I know then that I would probably never get that chance. Not with the life and the destiny that was written for me. No, I would rot in this hell.
That day, my father’s voice was exceedingly loud. It was more like a roar, but my mother’s strangled sobs are what finally made me walk toward their room. Their door was open. I stood in the doorway, looking in as though in a trance. My mother was lying on the bed, my father hovering above her prone body, a knife in his hand. His knuckles were white. He was so angry. So venomous.
I heard my mother. Heard the whimper that escaped her lips. I digested the words that fell from her mouth and drummed through my ears, sealing her fate. Why did she say that? Why would she say that?
“I don’t love you,” she whispered, her lowered tone a deafening clang to my heart. “I don’t love you.”
My father, almost as though realizing I stood there, looked up and caught sight of me, his eyes going wide as though something fell into place for him. He finally understood something. I don’t know what, but that much was obvious, because his face shuttered, and he was never the same man again.
That day, I lost both my parents. I lost my mother when my father turned back to her and swiped the knife across her throat until she gargled and left this world. And I lost my father as he disappeared into his own misery and became unknown to me.
I never knew why he did it. He never brought it up, and any time I tried to open the subject with him, he would shut me down so quickly, he’d make my head spin. I was nine at the time, and nothing in the years between then and now had done anything to diminish the pain that I felt.
After that, he found reasons to disappear for long stretches of time, leaving me alone with Maria. She did a good job of looking after me, but she wasn’t my mother. He all but ignored me. As though I was there but I wasn’t. If faced with my presence, he would look through me, instead of at me. Like he couldn’t stand the sight of me. And as he spiraled out of control and continued on his descent into the depravities of hell, I continued to be just another burden on his wicked soul.