bare feet punching, jabbing.
This had never happened before. Before, when he came toward her on the couch, Shirley had stayed very still. She’d let him do what he wanted to do, because it never lasted very long, and you could put up with anything, right? If you knew it would be over soon?
Belfa was crying. She was pulling at Shirley’s T-shirt, trying to get her to stop fighting him. It was better to give in. Better to ‘ride it out,’ as Shirley had put it to Belfa. If you fought back, you just made things harder for yourself later.
Because he remembered. He made you pay. You always paid.
It was better, Shirley had told her, to go along, better to keep quiet, better to let him bother you and then just forget about it. Go back to sleep.
Shirley had always said that. So why, Belfa thought, was Shirley fighting now? Belfa kept reaching out with both hands for her sister’s thin shirt, grabbing tiny fistfuls of it and then losing it again, trying to get her to stop. Their father was roaring and yelling. Bellowing, like an elephant. That was what it sounded like to Belfa, like an elephant she’d seen on a nature film at school.
Back when she was going to school regularly.
Shirley was yelling at him Not her! Not her! but it didn’t make sense to Belfa, the words were crazy. Belfa stopped pulling at Shirley’s T-shirt and fell back on the couch, confused and exhausted, and she closed her eyes, because she didn’t want to see. Pinched them shut. She could hear his terrible breathing. Then Belfa heard the animal noise again, as if he was in pain, but not exactly like pain, either. Something else. And the grunting.
Shirley did not cry.
When he was finished with Shirley, he left the living room and went into the kitchen. He did that a lot. He’d fall asleep in a chair in the kitchen. He didn’t go back to his own bedroom; he’d eat something in the kitchen and then fall into a deep quivering slumber in the dinette chair, shirt undone, hands in his lap, head rolled to one side, lips twitching with each big blubbery breath.
The small rectangle on the front of the stove gave the time in perky digital numbers: 2:34 A.M. You couldn’t see the moon in the small window over the sink, but a little bit of its light made it in, a milky white stripe that crossed the room, illuminating things.
He was sitting in the chair. Asleep.
Shirley took a few steps toward the sink. She had left the knife there. The knife she’d used a few days ago, to cut off the top of the detergent bottle. Nobody ever did anything at the sink except Shirley.
She picked up the knife. She looked at Belfa, then she looked at their father, spread out in the chair, head back, snores bubbling up out of him. His throat looked white and exposed in the frail light, puffed out with fat layers and stippled with black bristles but still somehow tender, soft, a strip of pure vulnerability.
This was it.
Belfa knew that, without Shirley having to say anything, without a word being exchanged. This was their chance. They’d had other chances before – but this was the right one.
The one they’d been waiting for. The one that had been waiting for them.
Shirley moved closer until she was standing next to him. The knife was in her right hand. She lifted it.
He stirred, sloshing his tongue around in his mouth, smacking his lips. His body jerked. Shirley jumped back. Belfa, too, twitched, and she felt a warm trickle of pee leaking into her underpants. Belfa was more frightened than she’d ever been before in her life. If he woke up now and found them here, he’d kill them. He hated being looked at when he wasn’t in charge, when he didn’t have the upper hand.
False alarm. He was still asleep.
Shirley looked at her sister. Shirley’s face looked different now than it did by daylight. The sharpness was gone. Moonlight made her features soft, dreamy. Her eyes shifted in the direction of the living room. The meaning was clear.
Leave this room. Go. Go now.
Belfa followed her sister’s silent instruction. She never saw what happened in the kitchen that night, but she had a clear vision of it, anyway. She could imagine it. She could taste the moment on her tongue, feel it on her flesh. Because they’d wanted it so long, both