I blink several times, but I don’t budge when he tries to move me, because I remember who I’m with. Stupid of me to forget. Even with the drugs impairing my thoughts.
“Fuck you,” I say, and my voice is slurred and pathetic. I lash out with my elbow, smashing it up and into his jaw the way Kick had taught me years ago when I first came to the club. My father grunts, but doesn’t budge; and that little act of defiance earns me an excruciating punch to the kidney. Pain bursts through my lower back. I gasp for breath, and double over on instinct. He uses that opportunity to his advantage, wedging me tightly between him and the car door.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he says, and I’m whacked in the back of the head. I blink away the stars in front of my eyes and fight to stay awake through the white-hot pain, but it drags me under anyway. I rally and I fight, I lash out at whatever I can, even though it’s all for nothing, even though I know I have no chance in fending him off while the heroin is dragging me under. With any luck, he’ll strike me too hard and kill me by accident. I’d rather be dead than let him take me again. Because I know exactly where I’m headed, and I know this time there’s no chance of ever escaping. Dying with a needle in my vein would have been better than this. Winding up like my mother would have been better than this.
I wake knowing exactly where I am. The smell, the feel of the sheets beneath me, and the dank, heavy weight of the air pressing all around me.
My head hurts; my body, too. My limbs are still stupid with misuse. I wish I’d died. I wish he’d hit me hard enough to crack open my skull, and had left me bleeding out on the gravel drive, because anything is preferable to this.
I blink several times, but pain, despair and lethargy roll over me in waves. I close my eyes, and I’m back in Tank’s kitchen where it’s warm and light and beautiful. So much different than my reality.
Two weeks after that dreaded party, I’m busying myself with schoolwork when my father enters the room. I must be caught up in my equations because I don’t even hear his footfalls on the stairs or the door swing back on its hinges. I glance up at him as his huge form fills the doorway. He’s high. I know it, and I feel the peculiar sense of both dread and jealousy wash over me. In the days since his “friend” introduced him to heroin, he’s been meaner, flighty and paranoid. He’s also been a lot rougher with me. Careless. Where once he was careful to never leave marks on my skin, now my body is covered in bruises.
He produces a needle from his back pocket and pops off the safety cap. I stare at the sharp tip and long for the release it will bring me, but I also don’t want it, because though I can’t feel a thing but blissfully unaware when the drug pumps through my system, afterward I feel everything, too keenly.
My father smiles. It’s faint but cunning, like a cartoon fox convincing prey to follow him to his den. The truth is, he needn’t do much convincing. I want it so bad my teeth ache, and as he moves forward with the rubber tie in one hand and the needle poised in the other, I see myself extending my arm towards him.
“That’s my good girl.” I don’t look at him; I just keep my gaze focused squarely on the needle in his hand.
He sits down on the bed beside me and ties the rubber restraint around my arm. I glance down and my face flames when I see the track marks scarring my pale, once smooth skin. He pushes the end of the needle to release the air and then he slides the tip into my flesh.
My father pulls my hair aside and presses a kiss to my shoulder that I don’t shy away from. I no longer care whether he touches me or not because the poison is already working its way through my system and all the fear, the hurt and the pain fade away.
“We’ll have to move onto another area soon. Those veins are going to start collapsing in on themselves before long,” he whispers as he sets the needle down on the nightstand. Without his body to support me, I fall back on the bed. In the space between my drooping eyelids, I see him remove his belt. He’s in a hurry. He doesn’t move with the languid grace of the images in my mind, but seems to be rushing, juddering with halted, lurching movements. I giggle at that thought and my laughter is a tangible thing, breaking off in front of me, shattering into a swarm of butterflies and light prisms as I feel his familiar weight settle on top of me, into me.
For a half second I remember that I’m supposed to do something. I’m supposed to fight … but it’s barely even a thought and then it’s gone, borne away on the wings of the thick poison that chokes me with its tar and opiates. This drug is a monster holding me down. It pins me to the bed. I leave my body and drift beneath it, through it, until finally I’m on top of it, above it, and I see myself lying prone, empty, helpless.
I scream and lunge for the monster, but I can’t unseat his hold on me. Thick ropy muscles strain, oil-black and dripping onto my faded pink flannel sheets. I’m suffocating beneath it, screaming without sound. I lunge at the monster, at my father, again and again, but it’s too strong, he’s too strong, and eventually I give up. I drift in silence, floating in mid-air, my arms stretched wide, as if I were floating on the surface of a serene lake.
It’s the sharp bite of a blade that brings me down to earth again. The freedom, the release, the euphoria is gone, replaced by pain with wicked teeth and frayed nerves. When I look down, the sheets around me are covered in blood and my father straddles my legs, completely naked. His eyes are feral, and his hands work furiously with the knife in my skin. My breath comes in a rush, in horrid, terrible gasps as I see more of my blood spilling onto the sheets, more blood pooling beneath me … and the pain. The agony is unbearable, so much worse than when the one with soulless black eyes used his knife. This is so much worse than that.
My father stops his ministrations and wipes at the gouges he just made in my flesh, sitting back on his heels to appraise his work. He grabs a corner of the sheet and dabs at the blood oozing from the wound, and it feels like scraping sandpaper over a fresh cut, but so much worse. A billion times worse. It’s the most pain I’ve ever endured, and my body is frozen in shock, save for the shaking.
As though he’s only just aware that his meat canvas is awake, his empty eyes roll over me and he finally meets my terrified gaze. He’s high as a kite. He presses a bloody hand to his lip and makes a shushing noise, as though he were cooing a tired baby back to sleep. “Shh, there’s my girl. Now everyone will know,” he whispers, as he climbs off the bed.
He picks up the used needle and the bloody knife then walks away, slamming the door behind him. I raise my head, but I can’t see. A part of me doesn’t want to see. Despite the bolt of searing pain, I roll over and stumble out of bed, hitting my knees on the concrete floor and crawling over to the big double wardrobe with the full-length mirror. It’s the one luxury—other than books I have no interest in reading—that he affords me.
It takes me several moments of trying before I can get to my feet, and when I do, the pain is so bad and the blood loss so great that my head spins in ways very different to the heroin. I’m shaking so badly my vision is blurred, and I have to wipe away the blood from the wound with the flat of my wrist in order to see it properly.
Now everyone will know, he’d said. I couldn’t fathom what that meant when I’d heard it, but now, as I look at the words he’s carved into my flesh, right over my pubic mound, I understand it all too well.
Daddy’s girl.
I lean over and vomit on the concrete floor of my bedroom, my prison cell. I don’t know if it’s the pain, the drugs, shock, or dread over those words and the things he did that stirs within my stomach, or if it’s a combination of all of those things. But either way I lose my bearings. My feet go out from under me and I collapse, hitting my head on the hard surface. My stomach lurches again, and this time I don’t even want to turn on my side. I don’t have the strength.