Let me die. Let death come with its icy fingers and sweep up my soul, stiffen my bones and body with rigor mortis. Let the faceless men, the non-heroes of my dreams dance alone in my ashes as the world, this room and my life burn around me. I am done. I’d rather face an eternity of fire, of wandering alone across barren, salted earth or nothingness than this.
I’d prayed for death, but it hadn’t come. I hadn’t died, though it had certainly felt like I had. Maybe a part of me had. The part that believed that even though I knew what my father did was wrong, perhaps there was some vestige of humanity left inside him, buried deep underneath the grasp of his sickness and the hold that his heroin addiction had on him. I know now that that isn’t true. And when I wake to his brusque shaking on my shoulders, and his monotone, unconcerned voice, I realise he really doesn’t care whether I live or die. In his mind, I’m no longer his daughter but a possession, like a dog you tolerate, or a watch that used to be nice but that no longer works. I am a plaything. Maybe that’s all I’ve ever been.
And though the drugs he pumps into my veins make me weak—and mostly compliant—there is still a tiny fragile glimmer of fight in me, of sense, of the knowledge that one day I will get out, and I will flee, and he will never find me. I’ll make sure of it.
And I did that pretty well … up until now.
I wake to darkness. My head pounds, and from head to toe, I ache all over. There’s a body lying next to me. I take a deep shuddering breath and shift as quietly as I can. And then I feel them—the course fibres around my neck. It’s not suffocating, but tight enough to remind me that I need to stay put. I’m tied to the bed the way you’d tie up a dog to a post. And the message is clear: I own you.
A strangled cry escapes my throat and the mattress dips beside me. He rolls over and then there’s a little click, and the room is flooded with light. White hot and searing, it pierces my eyes, but the scream that tears from my throat belongs to him. He owns that scream, just like all the others he coveted throughout the years.
He sits on the bed, the lamplight bathing his black curls in a golden halo like some twisted dark angel. “Shh, you’re home now, Daddy’s girl.”
Home. Back in the house of horrors I grew up in, down in the basement that became my bedroom the day I turned twelve and Lochie, the boy across the road, kissed me in the middle of the street, in front of all of his friends. In front of my father. That kiss, that small, fleeting thing had been a prison sentence.
Though the lambs are faded, the same flannelette pink sheets adorn the bed I’d called mine. The same posters are on my walls. Not the ones of boys in bands that I’d wanted, because he didn’t let me have those. Instead, I had My Little Pony pictures and stuffed animals strewn around the room, right up until the time I was seventeen. It’s as though he hasn’t touched this room since, but has instead made a shrine out of it. Just waiting for the day I would return and occupy it again.
The horror of it becomes too much and I scream again, choking out a gruesome wounded animal sound as he slaps his hand over my mouth and shoves me up against the brick wall. My head smacks off the cinder block and my mind swims, the room sways, and the last thing I see is the wicked red scar trailing his face. The scar I gave him when I left him bleeding out in this very room.
He’d been a strung-out junkie then too, and he’d been careless. It’s funny then that it took me getting clean to become just as careless.
This time when I wake I’m strapped to the chair. Pain sears through me and my father kneels at my feet, between my legs. I’m naked and he’s holding a scalpel to my tattoo. Blood trickles down from the wound he’s creating. I scream around the gag in my mouth, and tears stream down my cheeks.
“You know, if you hadn’t covered this up I wouldn’t have to do this all over again. You’re mine, Ivy. You belong to me.”
I whimper and shake my head, attempting to squeeze my legs together. My thighs slip on the slick chair beneath me and I jolt forward. The scalpel sinks deeper and all the breath is squeezed from my lungs.
“Damn it. Look what you made me do,” he says, and picks up a wet washcloth that’s already soaked with blood. He pries my legs apart and cleans the blood from off of my thighs, the chair, and my lower abdomen. It hurts like a bitch, and I let out another gasp of pain. “Now, open your legs for Daddy and let me finish this. Afterward, if you’re a good girl, I may let you have ice cream.”
I close my eyes and roar my frustration behind my gag, but my father just stares up at me as if I’m three years old and throwing a temper tantrum over not being allowed a new toy. I never threw tantrums. I was always too afraid of the punishment.
He shoves my legs wider and bows his head, blowing on my burning flesh. I flinch and attempt to move my hips further away, but he reaches up and slaps my breasts. The sting is tempered slightly by the bloody handprint left in its place.
“I do love what you’ve done to your body though, Ivy. It really is a fucking masterpiece now that you’re a grown woman. I love it all, but this …” He trails off, tracing his fingers over the tattoo on my lower abdomen. It’s a skull, cracked open at the crown, and all around it are roses shot through with arrows. It spans from one hipbone to the other and then down to my pelvic mound, covering the scars that he made years ago—or it did. He edges his index finger across the ruined image, playing with the freshly tortured flesh. I sob. He’s not finished. Not by a long shot, but he sets down the scalpel and admires his handy work.
“Shh, Daddy’s here,” he says, and he buries his face in my groin.
When it’s complete, he wets the washcloth in a bowl sitting nearby. Blood taints the water, creating swirling patterns, like the licking flames from a bonfire warring with the first few drops of rain before a downpour.
My skin is on fire. My body is on fire, and I’m spent from both pain and fear.
He unties my hands and I shoot up from the chair, adrenaline bursting through my bloodstream. I lash out at him, but I make it three steps on shaking legs before my head swims and I hit the floor, hard. He stoops over and lifts me, as though I weigh nothing, and then he carries me to the bed and lays me down. My father ties the rope around my neck as I struggle, yanking it so tight that he cuts off my air supply, and my efforts turn from fighting him to fighting for breath, clawing at the rope with slick bloodied hands that do nothing.
“When you can behave, I’ll remove the rope,” he snaps, and when I still he loosens it a fraction. Not enough to get out of, but enough so that I can breathe again, and then the thing that occurs to me—as he ties it off in several knots and then leaves the room without another word—is that I could have ended all of this. Right then and there. I could have fought harder, and he might have choked the life right out of me. I would have been free.
But I didn’t. My instincts kicked in. I fought to survive.
And I hate myself for it.
I think of Tank, and I know that he’d be proud of me. But for what? For staying, surviving? Chained up down here like a dog?
I wonder what Tank will do when he finds the gory signs of our struggle. When he finds that Butch was another casualty of my father’s determination to get me back. I wonder if he will come looking for me, or if he’ll simply decide that he’s better off. That last thought twists my stomach. Will he look for me? Will he avenge me? I don’t know. But I know without a doubt that I won’t be walking out that door again.