Page 15 of With This Lie

8

Dani

I’m nine years old.My mother has put me in the closet again and I know enough to know my mother doesn’t have a normal job like other parents. She doesn’t have to leave for work. She’s in the house all the time. Sure, our house is nice. I mean, I guess. It’s not the biggest house, or the fanciest, but we have okay furniture and I have my own room and my bed is almost brand new. My mom doesn’t even smoke inside like some people I know.

People come in and out a lot, though. Men, mostly. I wish they didn’t. I know they’re having sex. I don’t know exactly what happens during sex but I know that’s what’s happening. They leave money with her and she tells me they’re just massage clients, but something doesn’t seem right about it. I nod at her simple explanations.

“What do you want for dinner, princess?” she asks me one night after all her clients are gone for the day.

“I don’t know,” I say, a little sadness in my voice.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Nothing,” I insist. I always say nothing every time she asks. She knows I’ll say it before she asks, I’m sure.

She looks at me and tilts her head. “Oh my princess, you’re getting so big. Soon you’ll be a woman,” she says.

“I don’t want to be a woman,” I say. The thought frightens me. There’s too much that happens, too much to deal with. What if becoming a woman means I have to have sex too?

“But you’ll love it, darling. You can wear pretty dresses and high heels and make up. Don’t you want to?” she asks.

“Mother?” I ask, because this feels like a mother moment rather than mom.

“Yes?”

“When I become a woman, will I have to have sex too?” I ask.

“No, my love. Never. You can be anything you want to be when you become a woman. Do you hear me? Anything at all. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you have to be a certain thing. You can even be more than one thing if you want. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I say.

A moment of silence falls over us and she moves across the length of the room to me. She pulls my face up by the chin to look me in the eyes. She smiles down at me and tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear and runs her finger across my cheek. Finally, she leans in and hugs me tightly.

“Now. Enough of that. How about a nice, big stack of pancakes?” she asks me.

“Pancakes? For dinner?” I ask, excitement in my voice.

“Of course, why not? There’s no law against it,” she says, smiling big at me.

“My favorite!” I say.

“I know, my princess, I know,” she says.

She starts pulling things from the kitchen cabinets to make the pancakes while I watch from one of the stools at the bar. I know she’s doing this just for me, to cheer me up. Even at nine, I can tell I’m being bribed in a way. Distracted.

My mother always made things up to me. She was good at it. Apologizing without saying the words. She had a gift for it, a real talent.

I ate my pancakes that night. She sat across from me, watching intently, smiling. She made funny faces and tried to steal some bites of my pancakes. Most of the time I let her. She never made her own pancakes. Not even once that I can remember. She said they would give her cellulite, whatever that meant. Probably something I would have to worry about when I became a woman.

She took me by the hand and led me to my room. She laid me down and tucked me in tightly like a burrito. And then she sang. She always sang to me at bedtime. Some songs I recognized and some I didn’t but I loved the sound of her voice so I didn’t care what she sang. I drifted off, her face the last thing I saw before black.

I woke up some time in the middle of the night in a panic. I heard the noises, the night-time clients. There weren’t many and they weren’t all the time but somehow they were worse. They were louder. Sometimes I heard things break in the other room. Sometimes I heard their loud voices through the walls, their laughing. Sometimes I could hear my mother asking them to be quiet. I cupped my hands over my ears.

I could not escape it. I would never escape it.

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