crush her windpipe, but simply cut off the blood flow through her carotids until she passed out, and then he would lay her on the floor, where she would splutter, almost instantly, back to life, just as mad as before, and he would say, “Jesus Christ,” like she was just too much for him and why couldn’t she just stay passed out, just for a minute, just for once. Her relentless consciousness was galling.
“Had he ever strangled you before?” the prosecutor asked.
“Yes,” she said, sure that this was the right answer. He had been bad, he had been bad two times, he had been bad many times! God, how many times had he strangled her!
“And the times that he strangled you before, had you ever feared for your life?”
“Yes,” my mother said.
“And yet, fearing for your life, you would not call the police or separate from your husband?”
“Well, I’m sure that I did, but—”
“What about this time made you fear for your life so intensely that you picked up that knife?” the prosecutor went on.
But it had already happened. I could see it on my mother’s face, she had lost the thread of her righteousness. She had never believed he would kill her. Not in the past, not in that moment. He would never have let her die. If anything, my father would have killed my mother by accident. But her body did not know he wouldn’t have killed her. Her body was fighting for air and trying to get him to stop, and her body picked up a knife. My poor mother did not have the vocabulary or wherewithal or ability to try to make such a distinction in that courtroom. It was all happening too fast. She was too intimidated by the prosecutor and his glossy brown beard and his purple forehead vein. I still remember he applied cherry ChapStick. The ChapStick brand one. He kept one in his suit pocket and he applied it at least once an hour. I thought it was so weird. I had never seen a man wear ChapStick before, even though I understood it was normal. I had just never seen it before, and it stirred something in me. It seemed almost lewd, this man constantly bringing attention to his rosy lips.
In the end, my mother did not know why she had stabbed my father. It was her body that had stabbed him, but not her. Even in that courtroom, she still loved him. And after her failure to be able to adequately explain this to anyone, she became withdrawn. She guessed too soon that the trial was already over, and maybe part of why she lost is that she stopped fighting. Her eyes glazed over. She didn’t listen to the testimony. She looked bored, but also ashamed. And she was ashamed. Because she knew what the lawyers and the judge and the police and probably the jury thought she was, and she knew, too, that their thinking she was trash would make her trash. Her future didn’t matter to anyone. Her love for her children was as theoretical and easy to discard as a bitch’s love for her pups. Everyone but her knew what was best. And how could she argue? She loved a man who was bad and bad to her, and that was shameful, shameful the way loving food or drink that is bad for you is shameful. And so she let them. She let the trial happen. She let us move into foster care and then into Aunt Deedee’s house. She let everything happen around her, like events were so many petals falling from a bouquet of flowers left too long in a vase.
The thing Bunny said after she met my mother was: “Wow, I had no idea she would be so much like you.” We looked alike. We talked alike. We had the same blend of morbid and dorky in our jokes. Both of our mouths jutted with slight, uncorrected under bites. We had a joke when she kissed me good night, we would call them “piranha kisses” because of the shape of our mouths. We shared a flair for the dramatic in our language and our looks, pale skin, dark hair. She could get angrier at me than at my sister or even my father because she expected true friendship from me. I was her companion, her comrade.
If my father was too drunk, we would catch each other’s eye. If my sister was being