Page 86 of The Moment Promised

The door gets kicked open. My father’s black leather boots have demolished the wood.

I jump.

I run.

I try to scream, nothing comes out.

The neighbor is watering her garden.

I look back at my window.

My father sees the neighbor.

He walks away.

I made it.

The memory slams into me. Flight, such a natural instinct for prey. It’s all they’ve ever known, it’s what’s always kept them safe.

I mount my feet in place.

Inaction is what hurt my mother. When I finally came back home that day, many years ago, I saw the purple around her throat, the stitches across her brow bone, the emptiness that took place of light behind her eyes.

Granted, I was only a little girl. Back then I did the only thing that gave me a fighting chance, I ran.

“Damn, kid, the fuck happened to you?” Jason steps down the stairs, as nonchalant as ever.

My mind tries to catch up tothisreality, the one where we aren’t baring our claws and fighting to the death.

He’s dressed in denim jeans, and a camouflage T-shirt two sizes too small, showing off his huge beer belly. His hairline has moved back at least an inch since I last saw him, and his eyes are sunken in.

He makes it to the bottom level, where my feet are implanted, and then he really looks at me.

“Wow, you’re all grown up.” He doesn’t say it in a gushy, sentimental way. The way you’d expect a normal dad to after not seeing his daughter,his only daughter, after four years.

I’m dumbfounded. It feels like a ghost has visited me from the past, only now the lights are on and I realize I’m about an inch taller than him.

I do a quick body scan of myself, and realize my shoulders pull back on their own, my chin sits above his without a conscious effort. I am confident, and it’s not even for pretend.

I blink a few times, realizing we are just staring at each other, and I haven’t said a single thing. Not that he deserves my words, but I speak for myself…closure, or something.

“Well, I’m an adult.” My voice holds no sentiments, I’m completely ice cold. “Where’s my mom?”

“What, I don’t even get a fuckinghugor something?”

I push past him and begin my search.

I try to shred the dreadful memory out of my head, it clouds my vision: Her limp body, slow breathing, hanging onto her life by a thread.

“You haven’t seen me in what, four or five years, and this is my greeting? I didn’t raise you to be a cunt.”

My feet almost stop right in the middle of the stairs, but I push past my anger and take a deep breath. I imagine the lyrics to my favorite song to tune him out.

I walk briskly through the hallway, past my bedroom, straight to my mother’s room.

Loud clunking trails me, and more nonsense leaves his mouth. “You know I could’ve died, right?”

What is he going on about?

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