Page 77 of This is Why We Lied

Nadine had been wrong about the switchblade, which only required the push of a button to release the blade. Dave carried a butterfly knife. It served as both a lethal weapon and a distraction. Two metal handles folded like a clamshell around the sharp, narrow blade. Opening it with one hand required a quick figure-eight movement of the wrist. You pinched the safe handle with your thumb and fingers while you flipped the latched handle over your knuckles. Then you rotated the safe handle, swung the latch handle over your knuckles again, flipped it back home, and you ended up wielding a ten-inch-long knife.

Will didn’t give a shit about the knife.

He swung back his leg and drove his steel-toe boot straight up into Dave’s groin.

January 16, 2014

Dear Jon—

I’ve had you back with me for three years now, which means there are gonna be more years of us being together than years that we were apart. I know it’s been a long time since I wrote you a letter, but maybe it’ll be easier if I tell myself it’s only going to be once a year, especially since it seems like January is the month my life always gets turned upside-down. I’m choosing January sixteenth because that’s what I think of as your gotcha day. I’m gonna be honest and tell you I got that phrase from Aunt Delilah. She’s got a ton of dogs and who knows when their actual birthdays are, but she calls the day they came to live with her their gotcha day. So three years ago is your gotcha day, the day I brought you back to the mountaintop to live with me so I could be your full-time mother.

Not that you’re a stray dog, but I was just thinking about it because this morning I was missing her. I know that’s stupid to say since Delilah’s the one that took you from me to begin with, and I had to fight something fierce to get you back, but Delilah was always the one I ran to when things got bad. And things are really bad now.

The truth is, not a day goes by that I don’t think about drinking and drugging, but then I think about you and our lives together and I don’t do it. The thing is, something bad happened with your daddy over the holidays and before I knew it, I was at the liquor store buying a bottle of Jack. Couldn’t even wait to get home. I just popped the top in the parking lot and nearly downed the whole thing in a couple of gulps. It’s funny how you don’t even taste it after a while. You just feel the burn and then your head swims and I’m not ashamed to say it’s been so long since I got my drink on that I threw it right back up.

There was a time maybe when things were bad enough that I’d get that alcohol back in me one way or another, but that wasn’t this time. I threw the bottle in the trash. Then I sat in the car a long while and thought about what brought me there.

Your daddy almost killed me is the plain way of saying it. It was New Year’s Eve and he threw himself a big party and smoked a lot of meth, which he’s done before but this musta been a bad batch. He was like a possessed devil and it scared the shit out of me. He was tearing around trashing the trailer and I was yelling back at him, which I probably shouldn’t of done, but baby I’m so damn tired.

Your daddy isn’t a bad man, but he can do some bad things. He’ll get a little money in his pocket and bet it on a hail Mary or party all week and then it’s gone. Then he’ll blame me for not stopping him from blowing through all his money. Then he’ll bug me until I give up whatever cash I got stashed away, even if it means we can’t buy groceries or keep the power turned on, and none of this is the worst of it, cause on top of it all he’s been cheating on me.

I mean he’s cheated on me before, but this time he chose a girl I work with. Who I thought was my friend. Not a friend like Gabbie, but a friend anyway that I could talk to and pass the time with. The both of them thought they were so damn clever sneaking around right under my nose, but I could tell something was going on. I just held my tongue because your daddy was only doing it to hurt me, and God knows we’ve been here before, but I wasn’t up for going through the same thing again where he cheats on me then begs me to come back and then once I’m back he cheats again.

What he did this time was, he made sure he was fucking her in one of the motel rooms I was assigned to clean. The schedule is on our fridge he sees every time he gets himself a beer, is how I know he knew. She knew, too, because her name is on the damn schedule. And there they both were fucking up a storm in that very room when I walked in with a bunch of towels and sheets in my hands. I know your daddy was expecting me to blow my top, but I didn’t. I just didn’t have it in me to say anything. I ain’t never seen him so shocked as when I just backed out of that room and shut the door like it didn’t matter.

And being honest, it didn’t.

I told you this has happened before with the cheating, but it was only this time that I could see things had changed. And when I say changed, I mean inside me. You’ll see that as you get older sometimes you can look back and see a pattern. The pattern with your daddy was, he cheats, I find out, there’s a blow-up and a beat down and then he turns sweet in case I get any ideas about leaving. This time, we skipped the blow-up and the beating and went straight to your daddy being sweet. Taking out the trash, picking his clothes up off the floor, even cranking my car in the morning so it’d be warmed up for me. One day I caught him singing to you and it was real pretty but it stopped as soon as I left the room.

See, I didn’t give him the reaction he wanted, which was to throw myself at his feet and beg him to stay. I don’t know what it is about your daddy that’s so broken inside, and it’s hard to explain, but what he wants most in the world is for people to get desperate enough that all they got left is to cling to him.

And then when they’re clinging, he hates them for it.

What kept me going this time was I promised myself that you and me would be out of that godforsaken trailer by the end of January. But I wasn’t gonna be a sneak about it. Sneaking is your daddy’s territory. I thought about this a lot, and I had it set in my mind that the right thing to do was to tell him we were leaving instead of packing up all our shit and moving out while he was gone. Anyway, it wasn’t like I could really get away from him since we live in the same damn town. Also, there’s you. I can’t stand being around him anymore, but Dave is still your daddy, and I’m not gonna take you away from him no matter what terrible things he does to me.

Anyway, he’ll tell you I was a bitch for leaving him, but I want you to know I didn’t plan on being a bitch. I wanted to keep it civil. So I brought him a beer and sat him down on the couch and said that he needed to listen to me cause I had something important to say.

He was dead quiet right up until I mentioned the apartment in town. I guess that’s when it got real for him, and also looking back I think that’s when he realized I hadn’t told him about all the money. He asked me how much the deposit was, did it come furnished, where I’d park, did you have your own room, that kind of thing. Which I stupidly at the time took to mean he wanted to make sure it was safe for you and me. I made a point of promising him that he could come by and see you whenever he wanted. I said a couple or three times how important he is to you, that I always want you to have your daddy in your life. Which is true, because I’m saying the same thing to you in this letter.

What he wanted to know next was about child support and that kind of thing, which honest to God I hadn’t even considered. Ain’t no judge alive who can get money out of Dave’s pocket. He’ll either go to prison or his grave before he parts with a penny, even for somebody he loves. Even if that somebody is you. Anyway, he was real calm through all of it, smoking and nodding and drinking and not saying much more than those questions, then when I went quiet, he asked me if I was finished talking. I said yes. He put out his cigarette. And then he went fucking nuts.

I’m not gonna lie. I was expecting him to punish me, so I was prepared for the beat down that was coming. Your daddy ain’t creative when it comes to hurting me, but there are a couple things he’s never done before that he did that night. One was he pulled out his knife. The other was he choked me.

Now when I read back through that, it makes it sound like he was gonna use his knife on me. That ain’t true. He was gonna use it on himself. And while I sure as hell don’t want to be married to him anymore, I don’t want your daddy to die, especially by his own hand. The Lord turned his back on me a long while ago, but I know for damn sure he doesn’t forgive people who take their own lives and I would never wish eternal hell on your daddy.

That’s why I nearly lost it when I saw that blade draw blood from his neck. I was on my knees on the floor begging him not to do it. He kept saying he loved me, that I was the only person on earth who made him feel like he belonged, and that he lost so much at the children’s home and I was the only one who could make it up to him.

I don’t know if any of this is true, but what I do know is we were both crying our eyes out by the time he finally put the knife down on the coffee table. All we could do was hold each other for a good long while. I would’ve said anything to stop him from killing himself. I kept telling him I loved him, that I would never leave him, that we would always be a family.

After that part was over, we both sat on the couch just staring at the wall, so exhausted from our own emotions, but then he says to me, “I’m glad you’re not leaving”, and that part I could not abide, because I was even more sure after that emotional display that I had to go. What I said was I would always be there for him. That I will always love him, and that I just wanted him to be happy.

Then I guess the mistake I made was I shoulda just left it at that, but I had to open my stupid mouth and tell him that I wanted to be happy, too, and there was no way either of us would ever be really happy while we were still together.

I have never seen your daddy move as fast as he did then. Both his hands went around my neck. The scary thing was, he wasn’t even yelling. I’ve never heard him be so quiet. He was just watching me, his eyes all bugged out as he strangled me. I felt like he wanted to kill me. And maybe he thought he did kill me. I don’t wanna be woo-woo about this, cause I’m not psychic or anything, but I would swear to you on a stack of Bibles that even after I passed out, I knew what was going on.

The closest I can come to describing it is, I was hovering up by the ceiling, and I looked down and saw myself lying there on that ugly green carpet that I could never get clean. I remember feeling embarrassed because my pants were wet like I’d pissed myself, which ain’t happened in a good long while, not since I gave up the drink and drugs. Anyway, your daddy was still choking me out while I watched from the ceiling. Then he gave me one last shove and stood up. Instead of leaving out the door, he just stared down at me.

And stared. And stared.

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