If These Wings Could Fly - Kyrie McCauley Page 0,48

hurt them. He hurt them so much that my father is still angry, turning more so every day. And the only outlet he knows is to pass it on again.

My grandfather fought in a war and came back broken. My father grew up in a house that held anger like a stone in its palm. Like it was something worth keeping. And that became the shape of our family tree. When the legacy is anger, the inheritance is fear.

Chapter Thirty-Two

I DREAM OF LIGHTNING SPLITTING THE tree in our front yard wide open, and I wake up to the crack of my door hitting the wall.

Light from the hall spills in, framing the silhouette of a man.

“Get up. Get the fuck up. We have to go through this every fucking time. So I’m going to show you how to do it right.”

Then he’s gone, back into the hall, and I leap out of bed. He’s walking to the girls’ room.

“Leave them alone,” I say. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Well, you all should have thought of that sooner, and done the fucking chores right the first fucking time.”

Another swinging door, spilling light on to wide-eyed faces. The girls are curled up in the same bed, as instantly alert as I was a moment ago.

Mom is standing on the stairs near me, but her eyes find mine. She mouths the words, I’m sorry.

I know. I know. I know. My heart races in time with the words I want to tell her. I know, but it’s so late and we should be asleep.

I know, but in the morning you’ll have forgotten that thing made of fear in your chest. That ache I feel every day and every night.

I move toward the girls.

“Listen, just let the girls go back to sleep. Show me what we did wrong.”

“So you can all fuck it up again next time? No. Everyone up. Downstairs.”

I shove past him and pick up Junie, then let Campbell follow me past him and down to our living room. Every lamp is on, in this room and the next, and in the laundry room, too. Even the porch light is on. My eyes shift along the wall to the clock. 2:37 a.m.

I have an exam in Honors Calculus in less than eight hours.

We plop onto the couch and await orders.

He comes downstairs with all of our carefully folded towels from earlier that night and throws them onto the floor in front of us.

“Show me how to fold a towel,” he says.

I reach for the closest one.

“No,” he says. “Juniper. Let’s see if the youngest of you can grasp what the older two cannot.”

Juniper is ready to cry, and I feel something sharp deep inside of me when she reaches for the towel. She stands up, and the towel is longer than her body, but she still tries, folding it in half so it’s a length she can manage, then in half again.

“No,” he says, tearing the towel out of her hand and passing it to Campbell. “Your turn.”

Campbell folds the towel lengthwise to start, then begins to fold it down.

“No.” He pulls the towel from her hands and holds it out for me.

“If we knew how you wanted it folded, we wouldn’t be awake right now. Why don’t you just show us so we can go back to bed?”

I shouldn’t have said it. I knew it before my mouth opened. But he doesn’t scream. He doesn’t even make me take the towel and fail at folding it correctly. He just looks at me with eyes that are wide and empty and, in that moment, remind me distinctly of a dead fish. His lips twist into a snarl and he still doesn’t yell, he just says it with so much hatred.

“Stupid cunt.”

He reaches for a vase on the coffee table, grabbing it and hurling it across the room. It hits the window, and ceramic and glass shatter together.

“Now everyone has a good reason to be awake. Since the towels weren’t a good enough reason for Leighton.”

Tears of anger fill my eyes, and I will them away with everything I’ve got. He doesn’t get to see it hurt.

He shakes out the towel.

Not a single tear falls down my cheek, but at a cost. My nails are dug into my palms and I’m biting my tongue so hard I taste blood.

“You fold it in thirds lengthwise,” he says, demonstrating with the towel, “and then in quarters. Then the towels will actually fit on the goddamn towel