Page 175 of Memories Like Fangs
She returned to work today. Her tiredness went deep, but it was lessening more and more with each passing day. Besides, she craved normalcy and missed the Archive. I couldn’t blame her because I wanted everyday life with Byrd. So, I got up early and made her breakfast and coffee before she left, like a good house-studband.
But, there was still a fear rising in my chest like raw bread dough. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe it was just my trauma at play, having taught me to flinch at the quietand brace for the noise at all times. I was hopeful I was wrong, that cursed feeling sneakily taking root in me when I knew better.
As I was decorating the clementine cake, I noticed some bananas that I had bought to make banana bread. With all the cream and milk in the house, I decided to pivot. I had done a massive grocery haul while Byrd was recovering, figuring I would be in a baking frenzy while I waited for her to wake up. I had overbought, not thinking it was going to bethisbad, but it was a good thing I did. I had run through most of the supplies I purchased already. I, however, was grateful for the challenge of finding new ways to use whatever I had left. I gathered the ingredients for banana pudding tres leches mini cakes, starting with peeling the bananas to mash them.
Mom called me after I had just kissed Byrd goodbye and started to clean the kitchen up this morning. At first, she said she wanted to check on me and Byrd, yet I knew that pinch. I asked her what was wrong.
A pause. Then: The Hunter’s Council has scheduled the hearing for Cooper and Lilah. Your father has confirmed his attendance.
My heart dropped into my stomach before both plummeted to the floor.
Of course.
Of fucking course.
Of fucking course he would be there.
I whisked the bananas, Mexican vanilla, milk, and other wet ingredients before starting on the dry ingredients that I would combine into one cake batter. I should have used a hand or stand mixer, but I liked the burn of my muscles with hand mixing. It was another layer I could put up to ignore what I didn’t want to think about.
My ADHD was quickly starting to stand for All Day Hyperactive Distraction.
My chest constricted as if someone had reached in and clutched my ribs. I cracked an egg. The shell crumbled, missed the bowl, and landed on the counter with a slow ooze that matched the quiet burn behind my eyes. I grabbed another one to start again.
My fucking father. It had been a few years since I had seen the old man now. After he and Mama divorced, he only came around during the holidays. I think it was mostly out of the habit of having tried for years to be a family, as well as my mother’s persistence that she could heal anything. Mama didn’t want to get back with my father—he was a fucking psychopath and she would never hurt me like that—but trying so hard to love someone and build a life with them linked you together in some way beyond comprehension, according to her, especially when you keep seeing the potential for better in them. Although my mother was known as the Killer Queen, who had a flawless record of never failing a mission she had been assigned to, she refused to murder her dreams of having a loving family who persevered beyond dysfunction.
Nevertheless, my father had given up any pretense recently to just continue taking on big game hunting missions all over the world, which was how he had made a name for himself decades prior: Safari. It was also what he thrived on, the only thing that brought him any semblance of happiness. I had grown up hearing the stories of his hunger for the hunt, his monstrous ruthlessness, and his inconceivable cunning around school. He was a legend, so much of a perfect killer that he owned his hunting ground. He was highly revered by many whom I tried my best to avoid interacting with. I didn’t care how good a hunter he was. No one knew the price of him being so good at what he did. No one knew what it was like to be hisdaughter, trying to avoid paying the same costs and turning out like him.
I was grateful when he was far the fuck away from me.
Now, he was coming. Still, quiet, and eerie, it felt like the calm before a great storm that had been predicted years prior and was long overdue. But, there was no amount of preparing for the storm that was my father.
There would be no only acknowledging him with a hello and goodbye. My mother wouldn’t be able to play peacekeeper with his temperament, keeping him calm to ensure the storm that he was wouldn’t surge. I wouldn’t be able to get away with being in the shadows out of his sight with the cousins, so we could steal a shred of joy from another shitty family holiday like we always did. No, when he arrived, he would have questions forme. And, when my father had questions, it was because it was what he wouldn’t have done and that was always the wrong answer. There would be no justification that satisfied him. Nothing was ever good enough for him, but failure? That was a character flaw he didn’t allow to be associated with him.
I could take the heat about Cooper. That would be normal bullshit that I was used to. Those cuts from his words were familiar to me, like bad tattoos that he kept retouching.
But, Byrd? Would he say anything about her? Would he try to do something to her?—?
Suddenly, the bowl I was whisking in cracked.
No, not just cracked.Shattered.
The sharp sound jolted me out of my thoughts. Glass fragments and whipped cream had sprayed all over the marble countertop and my apron, but most of the sharp yet cloudy mess had rained onto the floor. My hand that had been holding the bowl had been sliced through. The cuts didn’t sting at all. In fact, most of them were already healing as I looked at my hand. But some drops of blood from the larger pieces of broken glassmanaged to fall to the white below before they pushed the shards out and healed. I followed the droplets as the red landed against the white with its shimmers of broken glass.
Like Byrd’s blood on the snow?—
No—
Another time when you allowed Byrd to get hurt?—
This was different?—
You did nothing?—
Iwoulddo something against my father?—
Your mother forbade you, so you can’t?—
No, but?—
