He scoffs. “The whip marks on your back would disagree with you there. They may have faded, but they haven’t ever gone away completely.”
“There are no scars on my back, and he never touched me like that. It was Leona. It never was me.”
He sighs. “This is getting old, Sam. How do you not know your own back is scarred to shit? And your dad was a fucking weirdo pervert. Trust me, the story you told the police was thorough. You had many details.” He grabs me, lifting my shirt and running his hands down my back. “See, scars everywhere.”
I turn my head, shaking it. “I can’t see. I need a mirror.” My back burns as if the injuries I didn’t know about are fresh.
He points at the house. “Come on, we can get this over with and you can use the mirror in the bathroom. How the hell do you make someone not see the scars they once had? Dash is a master of something, that’s for sure—mostly bullshit, I think, though.” The whole conversation is coming out of our mouths too easily. We clearly have some ability to detach.
We walk in the long dried grass, next to each other. He still seems tense or angry at me for not remembering, and the closer to the house we get, the worse it is.
When my hand brushes against his, I pull it back. “I swear to you, my father hurt the other kids. I remember it, sort of.”
“It doesn’t matter. I hate coming here, and I hate talking about this. I had a chance to kill that filthy bastard, and I never took my chance. Still pisses me off. Coming here makes me want to burn this dump to the fucking ground so I don’t have to see that look on your face ever again.”
“What look?”
He takes my hand in his and squeezes. “The one where I think for half a second you think maybe you deserved to be tortured.”
His words burn inside me as we round the corner of the house to find the front door is still hanging funny since Derek kicked it in. We push our way in, stopping at the entryway. It smells the same and looks the same, but the pictures are gone from the floor. My heart hurts and my lungs don’t feel like they fill with enough air, like I am starved of essential things the moment we enter.
He walks to the kitchen, looking around, but as if I am attached to a string that a puppet master controls, I walk to the back of the house. Upon entering my bedroom again, I drop to my knees as though I am in a trance. I crawl along the floor to the wall at the very far end of the room and slide my hands along the edge of the wall, next to the baseboards. I catch the jagged piece of wooden floorboard I am looking for, sliding and lifting it, revealing a storage place in the floor.
I lean forward, a little scared of what’s in there, only to find simple things a child would have hidden. Inside the dusty, cobweb-ridden space is a small brown box coated in enough dust that I actually believe I am the first person to open this. Beneath the layer of dust and cobwebs, I see there’s a four-leaf clover pressed into the lid. I reach down, noting the way my hands shake. It feels so heavy in my hands, regardless of weighing almost nothing.
I lift it into my lap, sitting back on my butt and crossing my legs.
“What is it?”
“A box I made with my mom before she died. We pressed the four-leaf clover and pasted it onto the lid with a gluey hodgepodge. I cried for the clover. I said it was now trapped for life under the glue. It would never again feel the wind on its leaves or the sun on its stem.”
“Dramatic for a small kid. Ya have always seen the glass half empty, though. What did your mum say to that?” He drops onto the floor next to me with a thud. I jump from the sound, but my eyes won’t leave the box.
“She said I should be happy for the clover because now it won’t ever age and it won’t ever rot. We preserved it in the perfect condition, so it will be lucky and beautiful forever. Always bringing me luck.” Tears fill my eyes as I hear her voice with my own.
“What’s inside?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.” How I can recall some things and not others is driving me insane. Bravery fills me, forcing me to lift the lid. What’s inside is odd.
“A necklace Mom gave me when I was three. I took it off when she died and kept it in the box like it was a treasure.” I lift the small silver chain and place it on the floor. “A rubber ball Leona gave me that my father gave her. She said I could have it. He’d given her a pretty ring, and she liked that better. He had never given me anything. I wasn’t even allowed to see inside the bin of the pretty clothes.” It dawns on me then that my father never touched me except obviously in violence. I recall the meanness. But the bin of pretty clothes wasn’t for me. Leona wore them. So did Michelle, another girl who also babysat me. She was fourteen, like Leona, when I was nine. I gulp away the horror inside me as I grab the next item. “A fortune from a fortune cookie that says You will find a way inside of—. I got it when my friend Nicole’s family took me out for Chinese food. I’d never had it before. They said I should get a new one because it was unfinished, but I liked it the way it was. It left possibility.”