22. Ryan
“Do you swear that the testimony you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
Ally raises her right hand. Her fingers are steady. I don’t know how. “I do.”
I hate every fucking thing about this.
Not because Roman is sitting fifteen feet away with two attorneys and a police officer posted at his shoulder.
I can deal with Roman. I can hate Roman.
I can spend the entire morning imagining increasingly creative ways for him to trip on his own handcuffs.
What I can’t deal with is the geography of this room — Ally alone in a wooden box on one side, me pinned to a bench on the other, and thirty feet of polished floor between us that I’m not allowed to cross.
Mom sits on my left. Dad on my right. Arthur is at the table in front of us with his team, surrounded by binders and laptops and photographs and medical reports — three weeks of turning the worst night of Ally’s life into something a judge can put in a file and act on.
The room smells like old paper and floor wax and the cold nothing of a building where terrible things get read out loud in calm voices.
Ally lowers her hand and sits. Carefully. I fucking hate that word now.
She spent the first week after the hospital in my bed because Darla put her on bed rest. Bathroom, shower, doctor — that was the whole approved list. Mom brought food upstairs.
Dad carried Tobias up when he fell asleep downstairs.
I learned exactly how many pillows go under her knees before her back stops aching, and exactly how long I can watch her sleep before she cracks one eye open and calls me a creep.
The doctor cleared her last week. Cleared doesn’t mean forget it happened.
It means she can go to school. Walk around.
Sit in a courtroom and describe watching her mother die.
It means be careful. So I watch the way she lowers herself into that chair.
I watch her hand drift over our baby without her noticing it does.
I watch her face for the flicker that means pain.
I watch everything, because I’m three weeks removed from looking down and seeing her blood running down her legs onto white marble, and my body has not agreed to forget that no matter what my head says.
We haven’t spent a night apart since. Not one.
Most nights, neither has Tobias. He’s got his own room at our house — Mom made sure of that the first day, his own bed, his own blankets, his own shit spreading across the place faster than anything that small should be able to.
He starts there. Then, somewhere after midnight, our door opens.
Sometimes he says he had a nightmare. Sometimes he says nothing at all — just pads across the floor, wedges himself into the middle of the bed, grabs a fistful of Ally with one hand and me with the other, and goes back under.
I love it. That’s the fucked-up part. I love waking up with his heel in my ribs.
I love the way Ally finds him sprawled sideways across both of us and gives me that sleepy, wrecked little smile over the top of his head.
And then I remember why he’s there. I remember that three weeks ago he had a mother.
There have been nights with Ally asleep on one side of him and Tobias dead asleep on the other, and me staring at the ceiling, crying so quietly neither of them ever knew.
I love that kid. I love his sister so much it physically hurts. And right now I can’t touch either one of them.
Ally looks at me. There are twenty-some people in this courtroom and somehow she finds me on the first try, like she always does.
I hold her eyes. It’s the only thing I can hand her from here — I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere, you’re not alone in that box even though it looks like you are.
She reads all of it. She always does. Then she takes a breath and turns toward Arthur, and lets go of the one thing keeping her steady so she can start.
Arthur stands. He buttons his jacket, comes around the table without hurry, and stops a respectful few feet from the stand.
When he speaks, his voice is gentle in a way I’ve almost never heard from him.
“Alison. I want to start with your father.” Ally nods.
“How would you describe growing up with Roman O’Toole? ”
She takes a breath. “Careful.” Arthur waits, letting the single word sit there.
Ally looks down at her hands, then makes herself keep going.
“You had to be careful around him all the time. It wasn’t like there was one list of rules, and if you followed them, you were fine.
The rules changed depending on his mood.
You had to read him. You learned to read him before you learned a lot of other things. ”
“What happened when you got it wrong?”
“He punished me.”
“What did punishment mean?”
Her fingers thread together in her lap, knuckles going pale.
“When I was little, he’d grab me. Hard enough to leave marks sometimes.
Drag me to my room by my arm. He used a belt.
” Mom pulls in a sharp breath beside me.
I don’t look at her. If I look at anyone but Ally right now I’m going to come apart.
“When I got older, it got worse. He’d shove me into walls.
Slap me. Sometimes it was his fist. He grabbed me by the hair more than once.
” She pauses, and her voice goes flat in the way it does when she’s protecting herself from the memory even as she says it.
“One time he kicked me, because I was already on the floor and I wasn’t getting up fast enough for him. ”
Every muscle in my body locks. Dad shifts an inch closer on the bench — not touching me, just there, a wall on my right so I remember I’m anchored to something.
Arthur doesn’t make her catalogue it. He doesn’t ask her to number the times Roman put his hands on her, because he told us he wouldn’t, because the point isn’t the count.
“How old were you,” Arthur asks quietly, “when you understood that the safest thing to do was obey him?”
Ally thinks about it. Really thinks, her brow drawing in. “I don’t know exactly. Seven? Eight?”
Seven. Jesus fucking Christ. Seven.
“I know it was before Tobias was born, because I remember Mom being pregnant with him and Dad being angry one night, and I stayed in my room. I sat on the floor with my back against the door.” Her voice thins. “I thought if I was really, really quiet, maybe he’d forget I was in the house.”
Arthur’s jaw tightens. He lets that one breathe before he moves. “What else did your father control?”
“Everything.” She almost laughs — a small, broken sound with nothing funny in it.
“What I wore. Who I talked to. Where I went and how long I was allowed to be gone. My phone. My money. My car. School. He read my messages. If I went anywhere I had to tell him exactly who would be there, and sometimes he’d call to make sure I wasn’t lying.
” She looks up. “It wasn’t parenting. I didn’t understand that for a long time, because it was just my life.
But it wasn’t parenting. It was ownership. ”
“Were you allowed to date?”
“No.”
“When did you understand why?”
Her hand moves, without her permission, to rest over her stomach. She catches herself, but she doesn’t take it away.
“I was fifteen when he told me I was going to marry Victor Tremblay.” Victor’s name lands in the room and just sits there, heavy.
This isn’t his hearing. This is Roman’s.
But you can feel the whole room recalculate.
“He didn’t ask me. He told me. Like he was telling me what we were having for dinner. ”
“When did you later learn that discussions about that marriage had begun?”
Ally’s mouth twists. “When I was thirteen.”
“How did you come to understand what had happened?”
She looks straight at her father for the first time. Roman meets it for about half a second before his attorney leans in and murmurs something and Roman looks at the table instead.
“My father sold me.”
Roman’s head comes up. His attorney’s hand lands on his arm.
Arthur doesn’t so much as glance at them. “What do you mean by sold?”
“There wasn’t a piece of paper with a dollar amount on it, if that’s what you’re asking.
” Her voice is steady now, and somehow that’s worse than if she were crying.
“But he made an agreement about my whole life with a grown man when I was thirteen years old. Then when I was fifteen, he handed me the result of it like a schedule I was supposed to follow.” She swallows.
“When I said no — when I told him I didn’t want to marry a man in his fifties — he beat me until I stopped saying it. ”
Roman’s face hardens into stone. Mine, I’m sure, does something worse. Mom’s hand finds mine on the bench and I grip it hard enough that it can’t be comfortable. She doesn’t let go.
Arthur gives Ally a moment. Lets the room hold it. “Did the control get worse after that?”
“Yes. Because then everything was about keeping me suitable for Victor. What I wore mattered more. Who I talked to mattered more. He made it very clear I wasn’t allowed to date, wasn’t allowed to be alone with a boy, wasn’t allowed to—“ She stops. Her hand presses flatter against the baby. “He wasn’t raising me anymore. He was preserving me. For somebody else.”
Mom makes a small, wrecked sound. Dad’s arm comes around her.
Arthur lets the silence do its work, then quietly changes direction. “I want to talk about Tobias.” Ally’s whole face changes the instant she hears her brother’s name — softens and breaks at the same time. “How did your father discipline him?”
“He was hard on him. Way too hard, for a little kid.” Her voice tightens with something that isn’t fear. It’s anger, finally. “He’d yell. Grab him. He expected Tobias to behave like an adult. Tobias is six.”
She says it like an accusation, and it is one.
“What happened when Tobias cried?”