STRONGER (Runaway)

by Lexie Ray

  “Mommy, when I grow up and get big and strong like you, am I gonna change colors like you, too?”

  Mom laughed. “My sweet Jasmine,” she crooned, taking me into her arms, “my smart girl. This is your color, and this is my color. This is the way we’re both going to be for the rest of our lives.”

  The explanation wasn’t enough to satisfy me. “But you’re my mommy,” I protested. “Why aren’t I brown, too?”

  Mom sighed almost sadly and as little as I was, I knew I shouldn’t have asked the question. I tried to wriggle away, but Mom held me tight in her armchair.

  “You’re a big girl now, and you’re asking big girl questions,” she said, smoothing the braids in my hair. “You deserve big girl answers.” She paused, her mahogany eyes tracing the patterns on the peeling wallpaper around the room as if deciphering the flowers and squiggly lines would give her the right words.

  “Your daddy was white,” Mom said finally. “White as milk. White as the clouds. When he put you inside of me, it was like mixing paint colors. I’d dipped my brush in brown, and he’d dipped his brush in white. God mixed them around and out you came.”

  I looked at my hands in wonder. Mixing colors was what we did in art class. This was something I understood perfectly.

  “I’m a work of art,” I said dreamily.

  Mom’s shriek of laughter burst my reverie. “You are that, Jasmine,” she agreed. “And now you know why you’re your color and I’m mine.”

  “Because of my daddy, who was white as clouds,” I said, “white as milk. White as snow?” I looked at Mom for approval, and she nodded, smiling.

  I was a big girl. I was getting big girl answers. I asked the most natural follow-up question.

  “Where’s my white daddy?”

  “He’s gone, baby,” Mom said. “We shared our lives for just long enough to make you, my work of art. Then my life had to go one way, and his life had to go the other.”

  My brain worked to understand this. In my mind’s eye, I saw Mom and my white daddy standing at a stop sign. I was the stop sign. Beyond me, the road split. Mom had to go right, and my white daddy had to go left. It was simple as that.

  “Is he ever going to go our way?” I asked. Even as the stop sign, I was following Mom on the right road but looking longingly at my white daddy on the left road.

  Mom shook her head and smiled at me, and I knew in the way that children can sometimes know things that I shouldn’t ask any more questions about him.

  I was always happy with Mom. She kept a calm and safe home, keeping me from knowing things I didn’t need to. It wasn’t until I was in middle school that I even realized we were poor. She struggled to make ends meet, but our home was always a joyful one—wherever it was.

  When rent was too much to bear sometimes, Mom would wake me up and quietly tell me to pack my things. We didn’t have many material possessions, so it never took too long. With my school backpack stuffed with shirts and jeans and pajamas and my little suitcase carrying the rest, we’d slip out like ghosts into the night. Mom would smile at my squinty eyes as she used some of her precious coins on bus fare and settled down for the night.

  We’d ride the route and sleep, covering and recovering familiar landmarks and corners until the sun was up and Mom could see about signing a new lease.

  “I’ll pay the other place back,” she said every time that we moved into a new furnished apartment. “I’ll send them a few dollars every week until we’re settled up.”

  I’m not sure that she ever did, but I appreciated the thought—the illusion, if that’s what it was.

  But moving around felt like an adventure. I was glad to share it with Mom.

  The adventure ended when she met him.

  Mom was holding steady work at a call center and he was her supervisor. Jack. Even his name was abrasive, setting my teeth on edge whenever I had the misfortune of hearing or uttering it.

  Jack.

  I first met him in middle school when Mom had us pack up again and move. But instead of yet another shady apartment, it was a house—a real house. There was even a tree in the yard. None of our old complexes had so much as a square of grass beyond the front door. The house was small but neat, its outside painted a cheerful yellow I would grow to hate.

  “How is this possible?” I asked her, old enough to understand that this was well beyond her means. At this point, I was making bracelets and wallets out of duct tape, selling them at school to help earn a little extra cash to supplement Mom’s meager paycheck.

  “Because we’re moving in with Jack,” she said, her eyes shining as we climbed the steps to the little front porch and its lone rocking chair.

  Jack.

  Mom had talked about Jack before. About how nice he was, how he’d brought her Starbucks at the beginning of the shift. How he’d ask her to come outside with her on his smoke breaks to keep him company. How they’d gone to lunch together and he’d paid for her sandwich or soup or taco or whatever they’d gone for.

  I stopped short of the stairs at the little house. It felt wrong. Something was definitely off about it—the suddenness of the situation, the shape of the house, Mom’s eagerness.

  Mom turned around when I didn’t follow. “What are you doing?” she asked, her brow furrowed in consternation. “I don’t want to keep Jack waiting.”

  Jack.

  “I’ve never even seen him,” I said, dumbfounded. “You’re asking me to move in with someone I don’t even know.”

  Mom walked down the stairs again. “This is good for us, Jasmine,” she said. “Jack is good to me. You’ll see. He’ll be good to you, too. He’s excited to meet you. Just wait.”

  All I wanted was to make Mom happy. That’s why I walked up those stairs.

  But I still wondered sometimes what would’ve happened if I’d refused to enter that hell house. Would it have altered anything? All I had left from those next few years were doubts and regrets.

  And scars.

  I joined Mom on the porch, eyeing the rocking chair. An enormous ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts rested on the concrete next to it. It looked like Jack spent a lot of time out here.

  The door opened.

  “Fiona,” the man said, grinning. “Looks like you didn’t have any trouble finding the place.”

  “Oh no, we didn’t,” Mom said, beaming and giving him a long peck on the cheek. “It was just where you said it would be.”

  I couldn’t help but staring at Jack. His skin was milky white, white as clouds, with sand-colored hair. Could he be my white daddy, come to walk our path at last?

  “Hello,” I said eagerly. “My name is Jasmine.”

  “It’s rude for little girls to speak without being spoken to,” Jack said, his ice blue eyes looking past me and out onto the road.

  “Be polite, Jasmine,” Mom said. “Lord knows I’ve tried to teach this child manners, but I do leave her alone too much.”

  What had I done wrong? I was 14 years old. I knew how to behave and what to do to misbehave. Was Mom insane?

  It was a struggle to straighten out the scowl that wanted possession of my face.

  This milky white man wasn’t my white daddy. And he never would be. I decided that immediately.

  When we got inside, I couldn’t help but appreciate the surroundings. Everything was clean and straight—practically sterile—and supremely organized. There was no spread of magazines or newspapers on his coffee table in the sitting room. Publications were organized by type and date and neatly stacked in bins. A rug that looked like it had never been walked on covered a portion of a pristine tile floor.

  Even the pillows on the couch were arranged precisely. Every couch we’d ever claimed ownership of had permanently haphazard pillows, some ending up in a bedroom, others tumbling across the floor.

  Jack kept a running commentary of the furnishings in each room, talking about where and how he’d acquired each one. This one was by this designer and that one was by another. His obsession
was more than apparent. I realized that he might tolerate Mom sitting on his precious furniture, but there would be none of that for me. No. I was not welcome.

  “This is your—and my—room,” Jack was saying. The furnishings in the master bedroom matched the niceness of everything else in the house. The bed coverings seemed to be some sort of silky satin, maroon to match the color on the walls.

  “It’s beautiful,” Mom breathed, covering her chest with her hand. “But where will Jasmine sleep?”

  In all of our apartments that we’d collected over the years, I’d never had my own room. As a child, I’d slept with Mom, tangling my limbs with hers in slumber. Now that I was getting older, I preferred the privacy of the couch.

  “Your daughter has her own room upstairs,” Jack said without looking at me. It wasn’t lost on me that he emphasized “your.”

  “How about that?” Mom exclaimed, smiling at me. “Your very own room. Go check it out. I’ll be up in a minute.”

  “Stairs through the kitchen,” Jack said, the tone of voice telling me I shouldn’t be wandering around anywhere else.

  Still toting my backpack and suitcase, as I had done so many times before, I walked into the kitchen. Where were the stairs? I definitely didn’t want to have to ask Jack that and have him ridicule me in front of Mom. I eased open what I thought might be a cupboard and was surprised by a dusty, neglected set of stairs.

  I climbed them and set my suitcase down with a thump that I hoped they heard downstairs. This was a joke. It had to be.

  My room was nothing more than an attic.

  The floor was plywood and the exposed rafters were my ceiling. A round window at one end was the only light in the room besides a naked light bulb.

  At least Jack had done me the favor of shoving some of the boxes and old trunks aside to make room for a box spring and mattress in the middle of the floor. I sat down heavily on my bed and tried not to cry. What had Mom gotten us into? I would’ve taken another couch that sagged in the middle over this.

  I looked up at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Mom’s head popped into the room, her smile only faltering for a fraction of a second.

  “Well, look at this,” she said carefully. “What do you think?”

  She sat on the bed with me, the ice in the glass she held tinkling. I reached out to get a sip but Mom held it away from me.

  “Sorry, baby, adult beverage,” she said. “We can get you some water when we go downstairs.”

  It was the first cocktail I’d ever seen in my mother’s hand. It certainly wouldn’t be the last.

  “That’s okay,” I lied. “I’m not thirsty. I’m actually a little tired.”

  “Maybe you should take a nap,” Mom said, smoothing my hair away from my eyes. “You can’t be staying up so late, you know.”

  Mom patted my knee and stood to go.

  “How long are we going to be here with Jack?” I asked.

  I hated myself for the hurt on her face, but I had to know.

  “A long time, I hope, Jasmine,” Mom said, sipping from her drink. “I love him.”

  She walked back downstairs and I fell onto my back, counting and recounting the rafters. How much could Mom love a man who would put me in his attic? How long would she endure me being up here for him?

  It ended up being a very long time.

  Mom started drinking more and more. Soon, it became a rare sight to see her without a glass in her hand. She seemed to walk around like she was in a dream. The alcohol drove a wedge between us, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I couldn’t trust her.

  I was alone in that house of neglect.

  One day, at dawn, perhaps a month or two after we’d moved in, I woke up in my attic room. It was a Saturday morning in late autumn, the last of the leaves clinging to the branches for dear life.

  Something felt different. The atmosphere was thicker, somehow. I chalked it up to the chilly weather.

  I threw on my robe and belted it before making my way downstairs. In the kitchen, I stopped dead in my tracks. Jack was at the table reading the newspaper. He raised his gaze from the sports results and met my eyes for what could’ve been the first time since I’d been there.

  My first inclination was to blurt sorry, but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t understand why I had to continuously apologize for my existence. Also, the sound of my voice seemed to irritate him. I knew it was better to wait until Jack asked me a question.

  His eyes hadn’t left mine. “Your mother had to go in to work for a while,” Jack said. “You will clean the house.”

  It wasn’t a statement or even a command. It was just a fact. Mom was gone. I’d be doing her work. She usually teetered around the house with a feather duster in one hand and a cocktail in the other, but she got it done.

  I turned and went back the way I came to get dressed, closing the door to the stairway behind me. Assuming that a chance at breakfast or even doing my homework was out of the question, I threw on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. It was strange that Jack wasn’t at work with her. Mom was hardly without him. The situation was strange, but not outside the realm of possibility.

  I descended the stairs again and opened the door. Jack was standing right in my path, making me stop short.

  “Don’t ever leave a room without me excusing you,” he said.

  Then, without even a hint of venom, as if it were the most natural thing to follow such a statement, he slapped me. Hard. On my face.

  Shocked nearly beyond words, I covered the spreading heat on my cheek with my hand. His blue eyes watched me impassively while the rest of my face colored as red as the cheek he’d slapped.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” I demanded, my vision slowly fading to red with rage. I’d never been so angry in my entire life. I didn’t choose to live here. I tried to stay out of his way. I was going to clean the house. What more did he want from me?

  All my anger—and color—drained away as Jack grabbed me by the throat. I hung onto his arm with both hands as he hauled me out of the stairwell, shut the door, and pushed me up against it.

  He got close enough to me for me to smell the coffee he had been drinking and cigarettes he had been smoking even as I coughed and gagged, trying to get air past the compression on my windpipe.

  “You are a slut and a freeloader,” Jack said in the same even tone he always used. It was so much worse than being shouted at. “You are ungrateful for my charity. You get in my way. And the only reason you are alive right now is because of me.”

  He squeezed my windpipe even tighter, making me squeak out a hoarse gasp. Helpless tears ran down my face, making his pale face blurry.

  “You will do exactly what I say at all times,” Jack continued conversationally. “You will do away with your sullen attitude. You will talk to your mother less. She is mine. Not yours. You are mine, and I keep you alive simply because your mother would be disconsolate if you weren’t.”

  Everything that I could see had taken on a faint gray cast. I tried desperately to send air to my lungs through my nose, but it just wasn’t enough. He had to let go of me. Please, God. Let go of me.

  “Now, you’re going to have bruises on your neck,” Jack continued. “If your mother notices—and I doubt she will—you’re to tell her they’re hickeys from some gang banger at school. You’re a slut, so it’ll make sense.”

  In a last ditch effort to get him to let go of my throat, I dug my nails into Jack’s skin. He didn’t so much as flinch.

  “And if you ever try to tell your mother about this little conversation, I’ll toss you both out on the streets. You won’t survive. Your mother has developed an alcohol problem, if you haven’t noticed. Her body physically needs it. I supply it. It makes her easier to control, of course.”

  Without warning, Jack released his grip on my windpipe and walked out of the kitchen.

  I slid to the floor, coughing as sweet oxygen flowed to my aching lungs. The relief was so intense that I felt stupidly grateful to
Jack for simply letting me go.

  Jack.

  What was I going to do? What were we going to do?

  I numbly regained my feet, stumbling over to the sink and retrieving the cleaning supplies in the cabinet below. It took me three tries to pull on the yellow rubber gloves over my shaking hands.

  The kitchen looked immaculate, along with the rest of the house, but I knew better by now. There was a reason everything looked so clean all the time—it was because someone was always cleaning it.

  I wiped down the countertops, stove, and microwave with a wet rag before drying it. Next came the dishes. Then the sweeping. Then the mopping.

  Each action became the only thing to keep me going. The physical labor kept my mind from working, from trying to process what had just happened to me.

  I took out the furniture polish and another rag before moving my efforts to the sitting room. I removed the baskets of categorized magazines from the table and worked the oil into the wood, rubbing furiously until it shone in the light coming in from the window. I replaced the baskets and refolded the throw on the pale white couch. I washed the window, swept the floor, mopped the floor.

  I couldn’t stop working. It was the only thing keeping me going.

  It wasn’t until I got to the hall bathroom before everything caught up to me.

  I turned on the light and sobbed quietly at the finger marks on my neck. Already turning purple, I knew they’d be black before the day was over. A hickey? Sure. Mom would never believe that.

  I clung to the sink, paralyzed with desperation.

  It suddenly became clear to me what I was going to have to do. I’d have to get Mom alone and show her the bruises. I’d tell her exactly where they came from—not from some idiot at school. And if Jack threw us out, so what? We could survive. We could. We’d done it by ourselves for years before he ever slithered into our lives. We could do it again. I could drop out of school, get a job, help with the rent. It could happen.

  I turned on the water and washed my face. It was puffy, and I realized for the first time that it had a slightly blue tinge. Had Jack almost killed me?

  Staring into the mirror, my expression scared me. The whites of my eyes were bloodshot, making the green flecks of my hazel color stand out. I looked like a stranger, desperation coloring all of my features. I smoothed my hair and took a deep breath through my nose, trying to calm myself.