When I hit sixteen, I got a job on the milk run. The hours sucked, but the exercise was good for me. I lost all my puppy fat, and I used the money to buy my first car and help out Ma. Then I started lifting weights. I couldn’t afford a gym membership, so I taped bricks to an old broom handle and added more and more each week. People started to look at me differently; the monster looked at me differently, and hadn’t lain a hand on either one of us since. Until tonight.
There won’t be a funeral for my father; we won’t report him missing, and it’s likely no one will ever ask. He has no family, save for Ma and me, and he played his friends for money a long time ago. No one gave a fuck about him. Besides, husbands leave all the time. They leave their families for other women; they walk out in the middle of the night for a pack of cigarettes and are never heard from again.
My father would never do anything again. He’d never come home from the pub reeking of piss, he’d never raise another hand to my mother or to me, and Ma would never have to live in fear again, because I’d gut any man who tried to harm a hair on her head. You protect the people you love; you don’t beat them down until they quake with fear. You love them, you cherish them, and you treat them right, and you take down any motherfucker who tries to hurt them.
I made a promise to myself in that moment that I’d never let anyone make me feel small again, including love. If you don’t love, you don’t get hurt.
At least, that’s the way it was supposed to go.
I lie down on the back deck in the sunshine and scratch behind Butch’s ears. He gives a lazy little whine before flopping his big head on his paws and stretching out with a doggy huff. It’s too cold for dresses, but I’m wearing the smallest one I own and it’s tucked inside my panties, which I’m wearing for once, because sometimes being a woman who’s been showered with expensive lingerie requires that you enjoy it.
I blink up at the cloudless blue sky and smile as the sun warms my face, and when I drift off to sleep, my dreams are plagued with him and his needles, and those hands that punish.
“It’s okay, Daddy’s girl. I’m here,” he says, and drives the needle in my vein.
I jolt awake, blinking up at the blackened sky several times. It’s dark, and at first I think I’ve slept too long and Tank has finally come home, but then the familiar rush of heroin pumps through my veins like a lead weight, and I slowly turn my head and glance at my arm. My whole body shakes, my breath comes too fast, too sharp, and I clamp my mouth shut so I won’t make a sound. The rubber cord tied around my arm is removed, and another wave of wonderful, maddening smack sluices through me.
“You’ve been a bad girl, Ivy.”
I shake my head, unable to move much more than that. I want to run, but I’m frozen with fear. I knew I’d seen him. I knew I hadn’t been hallucinating.
“Yes, you have,” my father says, stroking the side of my face. “It’s okay though, Daddy’s girl. I’m gonna take you home.”
If the junk in my veins was a lead weight, his words are a prison made from it. And I cannot go back there. It feels as though I’m moving through water as I kick at his knees, and by some miracle he winds up sprawled on the ground beside me.
“Fuckin’ bitch!” he shouts.
I scramble to my feet and attempt to run, but I slip on the deck and fall hard on my knees, my hands delving into a thick pool of blood. Butch’s body lies headless before me, and a small shriek escapes my mouth. I stare at my hands and forearms painted red with his blood in the moonlight. It’s still warm, and the axe lies beside his prone body right where my father left it. “You’ve spent enough time running from me, Ivy.”
“What did you do?” I sob, unable to take my eyes off Butch’s severed head. Stupid fucking dog. Why didn’t he run?
I push myself up, an attempt to stand, but there’s so much blood that I slip several times. The drugs are making me hazy. All my body wants to do is lie down and sleep, despite my racing pulse and the terror pricking my skin with beads of sweat that cool too quickly in the cold night air.
“Bastard was so fuckin’ dumb he didn’t even bark,” my father says, and he’s on his feet now. He plants a foot either side of my body. I don’t have the strength to stand and so I scramble on my hands and knees, but he grabs my hair and pulls me up, lifting me off the ground so I have no choice but to go with him.
“Let me go.” I struggle, sinking fingernails into his wrists, kicking out behind me, using my entire body in an attempt to jerk free.
“No, sweetheart, not this time.” The cold edge of a blade presses against my throat and a trickle of warm blood escapes and runs down my neck. I swallow, and the blade slices deeper. He leans in and sniffs my hair before laying a kiss against my shoulder. He follows the trail of blood with his tongue, lapping it up. Sick fuck. “You been fucking that filthy biker; I can smell him on you. Smell his scent and his cum. You’ll regret that, and so will he. You’re mine, Ivy. You belong to me.”
With the knife at my throat, he urges me forward, through Butch’s slippery blood. I wince as my foot skates out from under me, and I shed silent tears for that stupid dog, who I’d known for such a short time but had grown to love as if he were my own. He was lying next to me; he probably hadn’t even had time to bark before my father had hacked off his head.
He pushes me down the outside staircase leading to the long twisting drive. There’s a car parked in the driveway, a shiny black SUV, much nicer than the beaten up old Corolla we’d had when I was a kid. Whatever my father had been doing in the three years I’d been gone, it was paying a lot of money.
“I don’t belong to you,” I say through gritted teeth, as he pushes me toward the vehicle. “I never belonged to you.”
He chuckles. “Ah, my little girl, you’re still just as delusional as you always were. You belong to me,” he whispers against the shell of my ear, and his tongue darts out to lick me. It’s warm and wet, and his saliva burns like acid. “You’re mine. Stop fighting it.”
His free hand cups my breast and I try to jerk away, but the bite of the blade at my throat is a gentle reminder of why I shouldn’t fight him. It can always be worse, so much worse. “I missed my little girl so much. Don’t you want to come keep Daddy company?”
From head to toe, repulsion washes through me. The heroin courses through my veins, taking full effect now. It thickens my limbs, makes them heavy with lethargy, my mind too. I begin to itch all over, and all I want to do is sleep, but I know if I let him take me then that’s it for me. Drying out, Tank, the idea of love, of being loved and giving that in return—it all disappears. It dies here with this man, with this blade.
My father wraps his arms around my waist. He’s no longer holding the blade to my throat. He no longer needs to. He kisses my neck, in much the same way Tank had when he left this morning, and I smile and lean back into him because the memory of safety, of the promise of something beautiful and new fills my addled brain. For a moment I’m back in the kitchen with Tank, where he’d bent me over the island bench and fucked me and then showered me with kisses before reluctantly walking out the door and flying down the drive on his bike. I sway back and forth with his arms around me, lean my weight on him a little more, and wish that I wasn’t so sleepy. I wish that we were back in that kitchen, and that he was moving into me, one hand grasping the nape of my neck, the other steadying my hips as he pounded into me and then brought me to a beautiful slow release that felt so much like dying and coming back to life again, rebirthed, renewed, made whole once more.
That memory is ripped away, stolen, driven to a screeching halt by the cruel and hollow voice of my father. “Now be a good girl and get in the car.”