Chapter Four Nora
Ever since I was a child, I only ever wanted two things.
A roof that stayed over my head.
Food that stayed on my plate.
That was the entire dream. The whole of it. I didn’t build it bigger than that because I had learned, early and thoroughly, that to reach out for the sun is a good way to get burned. Hope was a door left open. And open doors let things in. Things that were too big for my body, too big for my life.
So I kept mine shut.
I didn’t wish for birthday presents. I wished the day would pass quietly, without incident, without my existence becoming the thing that set him off.
I didn’t dream about the future. The future was too far away and too uncertain, and my father had taught me early that certainty was the only safe currency. You didn’t spend what you didn’t have. You didn’t hope for what hadn’t arrived.
I wished the front door would stay unlocked long enough for me to slip inside before my father’s mood turned sour and he bolted it shut, leaving me on the step in the dark, learning early that a house is not always a home and a home is not always safe and safe is not something every child gets to take for granted.
I wished, on the nights he threw me out, that Mrs. Halloran next door would forget to turn her porch light off.
That small yellow square, warm as a moth’s lantern, held against the dark.
I had mapped every porch light on our street by the age of seven.
I knew which neighbors slept early and which ones stayed up late.
I knew the angle of the gap under the Petersons’ side gate and whether a child could fit through it without making noise.
You tuck your elbows. You slide on your back, like a worm in loose dirt. You hold your breath because the metal scrapes.
I was seven years old, and I was an expert in exits.
I knew the sound of my father’s boots before he reached the top of the stairs.
The way a fox knows the snap of a trap before it springs.
I learned that sound the way other children learn their alphabet—with repetition, with consequence, with the understanding that getting it wrong has a cost. Heavy meant a bad day at work.
Slow meant he’d been drinking. And the particular drag of the right heel—that soft, abrasive scuff—that meant he was already hunting for a reason.
I wished the sound of his boots on the front step didn’t travel through the floor and into my knees and turn them to water before he even crossed the threshold.
I wished my body would stop knowing him before I saw him.
Stop bracing. Stop the way my stomach would clench like a fist, and my breath would go shallow and my whole small self would begin the process of becoming invisible—quieter, smaller, stiller, less—all of it happening without my permission, without my choosing, as automatic as a heartbeat.
An animal playing dead, hoping the danger would pass over.
I used to think everyone’s body did that.
I used to think that was just what it felt like to hear someone come home.
My stomach would turn hard and hollow on the nights he decided he didn’t like my mother’s face.
How she’d set a plate down. The sound she made when she was tired, that soft exhalation through her nose that was not quite a sigh.
The specific, invisible sin of a small animal being out in the open, simply existing in his line of sight when his mood had already made its decision.
I would sit very still at the table on those nights.
Still enough that maybe the air wouldn’t notice me.
Still enough that nothing I did could become the reason.
I learned to eat without scraping the fork against the plate.
To swallow quietly. To need nothing, ask for nothing, take up the smallest possible portion of the world and be grateful for that small, thin slice of peace.
Some nights the food didn’t stay on the plate.
His arm would find the table’s edge, and everything would go—the meal, the effort, the careful hope that this evening might hold its shape. My mother would clean it up without crying. I learned that from her too. You clean it up. You don’t cry. Crying makes it worse.
You just… clean it up.
You go to bed with a hungry ache in your belly, and you lie very still in the dark, you do not move a hand or a foot. You wait for the boards to stop their groaning and creaking until the house settles into a silence that means it’s over for tonight.
I used to count the long, thin cracks in the plaster of the ceiling from wherever I’d made myself small.
Under the kitchen table, behind the bathroom door, pressed into the corner of the closet with my knees pulled to my chest and my hands pressed flat against my ears.
The press of my own palms against my own skull was the closest thing I had to someone holding me.
I counted the cracks. I pretended they were rivers on a map or the veins in a leaf. I waited for the sounds to stop.
I got very good at waiting.
I got very good at making myself nothing.
A child who takes up no space draws no attention. A child who needs nothing cannot be punished for wanting. A child who learns to be invisible early enough will eventually stop being able to find herself in the dark.
That was the first thing my childhood taught me.
That I was safest when I disappeared. To be whole was to be a target; to be gone was to be at peace. To erase yourself out of existence was the only way to keep the body alive.
I grew up watching my mother flinch and pretend she hadn’t.
She was like a bird startled by a snapping twig.
A small, rapid twitch of the shoulder toward the ear that lasted a second, as though she could tuck her whole self into it, and then relax like she’d remembered she wasn’t supposed to show it.
I grew up watching her cook his favourite meal after he’d screamed at her for an hour.
The same hands that had trembled while he yelled would dice onions into perfect, identical pieces.
Each one the same size, neat, geometrical arrangements.
As if she could control at least that much.
She never once cut herself. I think about that sometimes.
How steady she could be even when she was terrified.
I grew up watching her cut her hair short so he couldn’t grab it. Then grow it long again because he said he missed it. His voice, when he said it, held a kind of mournful rumble, a low, almost liquid note. Then she cut it again when she remembered why she’d cut it in the first place.
Sometimes I wondered, how would she have kept her hair, if she had lived a different life?
I learned everything I needed from watching her. But the most important lesson she gave me—the one she pressed into my hands in the dark, the one I carried out of that house and into the next one—was this:
“If he doesn’t hit you,” she would whisper, her voice so thin I had to lean in to catch it, “then it’s not that bad.”
Everything else—the shouting that rattled windowpanes and peeled the paint off the walls, the coldness that lasted for weeks like a stain you couldn’t scrub out, the betrayal that came and went and came again—is tolerable. It’s manageable. You can survive it.
You can make his coffee. You can fold his shirts along the creases he likes, your knuckles white on the iron.
You can lie beside him in the dark with your eyes wide open, watching the ceiling cracks stretch like veins, counting the minutes until the first pale light bleeds through the blinds, and tell yourself: at least your ribs don’t ache when you breathe.
At least you don’t have to turn your face away from the grocery store clerk when she asks how you’re doing.
At least you don’t have to practice a smile in the bathroom mirror before you leave the house, watching your mouth lift at the corners while your eyes stay flat and dark, two stones at the bottom of a well.
At least you don’t have to say you walked into a door again, and watch the person on the other side of the counter pretend to believe you.
My father’s lessons were different. Other fathers used words. Mine used his fists.
He pressed bruises into my body like signatures.
The curve of his thumb on my wrist when he dragged me out of his way.
The socket of his knuckle in the dent above my collarbone when he pushed me against the wall.
The hard ridge of his ring—a plain band, gold, the same one he wore to work and to church—grinding into the flesh of my upper arm while I stood perfectly still.
My breath caught in my throat like a hooked fish, because I had already learned that moving only made him dig in deeper.
That any shift, any attempt to slide away, was read as resistance. And resistance required demonstration.
He would hold me there sometimes, just holding, not hitting, his face inches from mine, his breath rancid with whatever he’d been drinking, and he would watch my eyes get wider and wider until he got bored and let go.
Once he shut the door on my fingers. The hinge side, the side where the weight of the door meets the frame with a thud that is also, somehow, a kind of chewing.
I remember the sound: a wet crack, like a boot crushing on a snail, but deeper, more internal, a noise I felt in my molars before I heard it with my ears.
Opened it again to see what he had done.
He took a look at my hand. You’ll live. Said that and walked away.
I held my fingers to my chest and counted them.
All five. All crooked. The skin not visibly broken, but the knuckles beginning to swell into the colour of ripe plums.