Page 89 of Stay Away from Him

Rose

It’s time for the whole truth.

There’s no escaping it anymore. Not after the attack. I’ll never be safe—my whole family will never be safe—until we can acknowledge the truth.

Thomas might not want to talk about it. He’d prefer to deny it, repress it, cover it up.

But that doesn’t mean that I have to.

***

I love my girls. Love them as much as Thomas does. More, even. I’m tired of agreeing to his definitions of things—his definition of love, his definition of what it means to be a good parent. Love doesn’t mean ignoring what’s wrong, insisting over and over again that your children are perfect when you know they’re not. Rhiannon and Kendall have always preferred Thomas because he’s the one who coddles them, who gives them what they want, who is always fun—never a disciplinarian. He’s managed to distort that, turn it into this idea that he’s a better parent than I am. That he loves them more. Even they have come to believe it.

But it’s not true.

The days when my daughters were born were the two best days of my life. I can see that now, own it in my own way. I loved the girls—lovethem—and they loved me too, before Thomas turned them against me.

Yes, I was afraid of my babies at first. What mother isn’t, a little? Maybe it was my love for them that scaredme, the fierceness of it, the feeling of all my cells, my DNA, reorienting themselves toward these creatures that had been laid in my arms. The hormones flooding my body, bonding me to them. I’d do anything to protect them, even if what I had to protect them from was me and Thomas, from the brokenness we carried with us. Determined that whatever was wrong with the two of us, I could not allow to be passed down to them.

Rhiannon was my quiet one, my shy one—so beautiful, so sensitive, so vulnerable to every wound and slight the world had ready to deal her. I saw myself in her as she grew, saw myself in the way she would bring her pain inward, internalizing every bump, every bruise, every careless word from a mean boy on the playground. The realization blossoming dark and sad behind her eyes:So this is the way the world is.I saw it in her even in the early days, from her first halting steps, from the falls she took as she learned to walk and then run. Each new hurt brought an equal hurt in me, and I found myself wanting to draw her to me, to love the pain away, to reassure her that everything would be all right—even when it was a lie.

Kendall was something different. Bright and outgoing where Rhiannon was shy, she reminded me more of Thomas: aggressively charming even from an early age, with some spark inside her that drew people to her. From the day I brought her home from the hospital, I had people commenting on what a beautiful child she was. Seeing a new face, her own face would brighten, smiling from her eyes, laughing, dimples coming to her cheeks. I loved her. I did. I write this now and know it’s true. I loved my second daughter.

But there was something unnerving about her as well. The world was charmed by Kendall, drawn in by hercharisma. But I saw something else when I looked at her eyes—or rather, behind her eyes. There was an emptiness there. A lack of feeling that terrified me.

This, too, reminded me of my husband. I realized it about Thomas after we got married—too late. He’d charmed me when we were dating, pursued me like I was the only thing in the world he wanted, showered me with love and affection. It was only after the hunt was over and he began to lose interest in me that I realized there was a yawning emptiness at the core of him. A black hole that sucked up everything that got too close. Thomas’s charm masked something dark and dangerous. He’d learned over time to conceal it from the world—but a wife knows her husband better than anyone. And I could see through him.

A mother knows too. And I knew there was something wrong with my Kendall. It reared its head soon enough. My first memory of having my fears about her confirmed came when she was four. It was summer, one of those languid days when the air conditioning struggles to keep up, the kids running in and out of the house constantly, faces flushed and slick with sweat, bare feet browning with dirt. Sometime in the afternoon, Kendall appeared at the front door with something dead cradled in her arms. A squirrel.

“Look!” she said, red-faced with excitement.

I completely lost it. My first thought was of the diseases that corpse must be crawling with, and I rushed at her with a mix of panic and disgust that rose as bile at the back of my throat. Unable to hide my aversion, I shouted at her to put it down right away, then packed her into the bath. Only later, as I scrubbed her skin raw with rubber gloves on my own hands, did I realize the entirety of what I’d seen. The animal was not just dead but mutilated, its tail cut off, its eyes gouged out of its sockets.

“Kendall?” I asked. “Did you notice how the animal you found was all cut up? Did you find it like that?”

But she wasn’t about to tell me anything. I’d terrified her with my reaction, and now she was whimpering in the bath, her shoulders shuddering with the aftershocks of the sobs that had wracked her body after I’d yelled at her. Kendall was capable of shame, of understanding that things she did could bring people to reject her—though not, as I later came to believe, capable of remorse, or empathy with the suffering of living creatures.

I told Thomas about it when he came home, but he swore it was nothing. The first of his many, many denials.

“She’s a kid,” he said. “How does a kid even catch a squirrel?”

Perhaps. But I felt certain that somehow, our childhad,for the simple experience of torturing another living thing.

***

Kendall’s unsettling behavior escalated as she grew—older, bigger, stronger, more difficult to contain. Alone with me, she’d sometimes become suddenly, irrationally angry and throw a heavy object at me, or fly across the room at me, a screeching whirlwind of fists and feet. I’d have to physically restrain her, hold her wrists and wrap her in a straitjacket hug until she calmed down. Small though she was, I couldn’t always subdue her in time, and as I scrambled to grab at her flailing limbs, I’d receive a tiny fist to the face and see stars. Once, as I held both wrists, she actually snarled at me like an animal, strings of spittle flying from her lips, then lunged forward and bit me on the cheek, drawing blood.

Thomas insisted it was nothing. “Kids get dysregulated,”he said. “They have tantrums. It’s your job to help her learn how to manage her emotions.”

My job. Like this was all my fault.

I knew the problem with Kendall was something more than her getting dysregulated. Rhiannon had her moments of anger too, her fits, her tantrums—but this was different. Yes, sometimes Kendall would go on the attack because she was angry, but other times, her outbursts of violence seemed to come from nowhere, to have no cause. One minute she’d be calm, even sweet—that charm she inherited from her father—the next, murderous.

She went after Rhiannon too. I know she did. Sometimes I saw it, put myself between them, sacrificing myself to protect my daughter. Other times, I’m pretty sure it happened without my knowing. I found bruises on Rhiannon’s body sometimes, freshly scabbed cuts, the surrounding skin still angry and red. When I asked her where they came from, she’d just shrug and say she couldn’t remember. Taking her pain inside, still, internalizing it. Thinking she deserved it.

Most terrifying of all was when Kendall began coming to my bedside to watch me sleep. Sometimes I’d wake up and see her standing next to me. Once, she held a hammer. Another time, a knife. Her eyes glowing white in the darkness, looking at me with such icy calm.

I knew, then, that she wanted to kill me.

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