If These Wings Could Fly - Kyrie McCauley Page 0,62
feet are now a part of the stairs themselves and I couldn’t possibly lift them. I’m nothing but the carpet, the wall, the stair. Less than that. A hair on the carpet. A spot on the wall. A nail in the stair. I’m not even here at all.
Because I can’t just go to her. If he is hurting her, my sudden presence could escalate everything.
So I wait, and I sit on our narrow staircase.
I press my feet against the cold wall, hard. It is fine. She is fine. It’s going to be fine. I repeat the mantra, with my eyes shut. I feel something give under the heel of my foot. A crack appears in the wall where I was pushing on it. It splinters up, past my toes. Past the nails on the wall where the pictures are no longer hanging. They litter the staircase like birds that just suddenly fell from the sky for no reason. The line on the wall continues to grow, even though I’ve stopped applying pressure. I stand to watch as it reaches the ceiling, and doesn’t stop. It turns outward, breaking the ceiling. The tiniest fracture line, but it’s splitting the whole room in half. Like the house was just waiting for the slightest provocation to fall apart.
I’m still watching the line when they come into the living room.
Mom isn’t crying, but I can tell that she was. Her face is puffy and red, and when she sees me standing on the stairs, she shakes her head. She doesn’t have to say a word to convey a message. She wants me to go upstairs, but I’m rooted in my spot. He catches the subtle movement, though. There. The glimmer of silver. Not the dull gray of his gun.
He’s holding a kitchen knife.
I think of the crawl space. The stupid crawl space. I feel like I’m already in it, walls closing in. Which is stupid, because if you are dead you can’t feel claustrophobic.
“Let’s go back in the kitchen,” Mom says. Her voice is light, like there’s nothing wrong. But this isn’t her pretending everything is okay. This is her trying to convince him. He looks at me and sneers. His nose is running and his eyes look wild. Mom takes his hand, leads him into the kitchen. He places the knife on the counter.
I step off the stairs. I follow. I’m so dumb, but I want to take her with me. I cannot leave her down here with him.
“Let’s go to bed, Mom, it’s late,” I say.
“She’ll go to bed when I fucking tell her to, Leighton. Get out of here.”
I don’t listen. Instead, I grab Mom’s hand, and I try to pull her along.
He charges at me.
I am shoved against the kitchen countertop. The force of the impact knocks the wind out of me. When I turn around, he towers over me. Eyes bloodshot. How can he hate me this much?
He spits in my face.
Mom screams at him, pushes him away from me.
Mom is crying, lifting me to my feet.
“Go, Leighton,” Mom says, leaning in to brush my hair behind my ear and wipe off my face.
She pulls me in tight. Whispers in my ear that everything is fine.
I let go of her. I run away from the kitchen with its too-bright lights, where Mom is crying and the knife is on the counter and the gun is on the fridge. I run until I’m safe, tucked into the armoire with the girls, breathing harshly and choking on tears.
A few minutes later, I hear the front door slam, and I burst from our hiding spot and down the stairs. I hear the engine rev on his truck a few times before he pulls away.
He’s gone.
Auburn, Pennsylvania
December 6
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Chapter Forty-Five
WHERE DOES IT HURT? MOM WOULD ASK.
When I was four and I stepped on a piece of scrap metal in the yard and sliced the bottom of my foot open. When I was seven and woke up in the middle of the night, on fire with a fever. When I was eleven and couldn’t stop sobbing when I got my period the first time and thought that I was dying.
This time it is Mom who fell down. Mom who is hurt. Sick, maybe.
Confused.
“Where does it hurt?” I ask her, searching.
“Everywhere,” she says. She is hunched over, curled in upon herself, facing the kitchen floor. Her tears don’t even touch her cheeks: they fall straight from her eyes, into air, onto the linoleum. I can