When Smiles Fade

by Paige Dearth

  Valerie and Pepper earned so little money that putting food on the table took great effort. The family rarely owned anything new and relied on handouts that were offered at local churches. Of the little that the couple earned, a major chunk went toward supporting Pepper’s addiction to booze. The financial strain that the couple lived under only brought more tension into the home. Pepper knew they were destined to be poor white trash and for this he despised his family.

  Emma and Gracie were submerged in dreariness day after day. They didn’t enjoy the small gestures of affection like most other children that didn’t cost anything to give, like a hug or a tender pat on the back. With no relief from their dismal circumstances in sight, they clung to each other to save themselves from the misery that threatened to swallow them alive.

  Chapter Four

  Over the next three years of Emma’s life, Pepper’s brutal beatings had become an almost daily occurrence. By the time she was twelve years old, Emma had suffered three concussions, two broken arms, three fractured ankles, and 250 stitches over her body. She bore several scars, all inflicted by her father, including the one on her left palm, a memento from the time he had held it forcibly against the hot burner of the stove when she was eight.

  In that same period of time, Gracie had to be taken to the hospital twice. The first time was because she had left a dab of toothpaste in the bathroom sink. As a punishment Pepper bit the top of her hand until a deep purple bruise appeared. He was further annoyed with her when she wouldn’t stop crying because of the throbbing pain he had caused. As she descended the stair case, with Pepper closely following, he kicked her down the last three steps breaking her ankle. Gracie’s second visit to the hospital was to get stitches because he had shoved her into a wall face first with such force that her two front teeth tore through her lip. Other, less severe injuries sustained by Gracie and Emma were sneakily tended to by their mother.

  Valerie was always ready with a stream of concocted explanations for the nurses and doctors who tended to her daughters’ frequent injuries. She claimed that her girls were little tomboys who liked playing rough. A variation of that lie was her argument that their innate clumsiness led to “accidents.” The most inventive fabrication of all was when Emma broke her ankle for the third time. Valerie insisted that the child had been playing dress-up and had fallen when she attempted to walk in her mother’s high heels. Valerie never took the girls to the same hospital within the same year. She would drive for hours, when it was necessary, to bring them to a different hospital in order to harness their dirty little secret.

  The daily violence that Emma endured seemed all too normal, no more than a routine part of her life—until the night that changed her forever. It was Christmas Eve and their father was drunk, as usual. “Embracing the yuletide spirit,” he had slurred as he tried to coordinate his tangled feet into a celebratory dance. Their mother had made them TV dinners for supper and they sat in the living room, watching the blinking colored lights on their small aluminum Christmas tree. Nothing else mattered to the two little girls and for that night, at least, they were happy.

  Once dinner was over, Valerie called her older daughter into the kitchen to help her clean the dishes.

  “Emma,” she told her, “this is going to be a great Christmas, so don’t fuck it up. After we finish cleaning up here, I want you to take Gracie upstairs so the two of you can take a bath. Daddy’s been drinking and I don’t want anything to piss him off tonight. I’m looking to make this a great night for him and me, so don’t fuck it up.”

  As instructed, Emma quietly led her sister upstairs and prepared for their bath. The two girls bathed together, splashing about in the water and chattering excitedly in anticipation of Santa’s arrival. They were hopeful that Santa wouldn’t skip their house again this year, as he had in previous years because they were “rotten little shits,” as their father had put it.

  When Emma and Gracie came out of the bathroom, they heard their father screaming and Valerie trying to calm him down. She didn’t want to spend her time mending her daughter’s wounds on Christmas Eve.

  “Pepper, please!” they heard her beg, “It’s Christmas Eve. Please, not tonight.”

  He yelled, “I don’t give a shit what night it is! Get your ass out to the store and get me a six-pack of beer or someone is gonna get it!”

  Emma knew that “someone” was her. It always had been.

  Still wrapped in their towels, the girls heard Valerie leave the house. Frightened at being home alone with their sloshed father, they rushed into their bedroom. Emma quickly helped her sister into her pajamas. After getting dressed for bed herself, she drew Gracie into the closet and there the two children sat in tense silence, pretending to be invisible as they waited for their mother to come home. Just moments later, they heard the stamp of angry feet on the stairs. Both girls knew at once that it wasn’t their mother.

  Terrified, they clung to each other, the magic of Christmas Eve quickly fading away. Although they anticipated the inevitable, the girls couldn’t suppress an audible gasp as the closet door abruptly swung open. Pepper stood there, scowling at them. His hair stood on end and his jaw was clenched so tight that the sharp angles of the bones below the skin’s surface were clearly visible. Sensing her father’s fury, Gracie peed on the floor in fright. Pepper grasped her by the arm and hauled her to her feet. She was so tiny and fragile that Emma feared he might break her in two pieces. Instinctively she held onto Gracie’s other arm as their father tried to yank her younger sister out of the closet.

  “Who do you think you are, pissing on my floor, you little brat?” Pepper yelled.

  Seized by terror, Gracie screamed and sobbed, trying to break free of his grip.

  Emma grasped her sister tightly around the waist in a desperate attempt to resist their father’s efforts to drag them both out into the hallway. Having managed to have his way, Pepper paused as he reached the top of the stairs and stood staring at Gracie with revulsion.

  Through her sobs, the little girl pleaded, “Please, Daddy, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to pee on the floor!”

  Pepper looked at her, then at Emma. His eyes blazed with unadulterated rage. “I didn’t mean to pee on the floor, Daddy!” he mimicked his younger child, distorting his voice to sound absurd and menacing. “Wah! Wah! Waaah!” He looked at Emma again. “The problem with the two of you is that you’re spoiled rotten!”

  With mounting dread at what their father might do to Gracie, Emma forgot herself. “Leave her alone!” she screamed at him. “I hate you! You’re nothing but a stupid drunk! We both hate you!”

  Temporarily oblivious to Gracie’s presence and his urge to punish her, Pepper scurried over to his older daughter, clamped a hand on her thick blond hair, and dragged her down the steps. Without uttering another word, her father took her down to the basement. Then he turned and, without warning, punched her in the temple. She fell to the floor, half-conscious. Despite the pain she silently wondered what she had done to deserve the parents she had been given. Why had God let her be born if she wasn’t wanted? No matter how well behaved she was, Pepper always found a reason to show how much he hated her. He continued to beat her until she was senseless, her mind enveloped by blackness.

  When she came to an hour later, she found herself sitting on a damp dirt floor, stripped naked, her arms tied to a pole behind her back. After several moments, she realized where she was: in the center of their basement. She could hear rats scurrying around her in the dark. Her bare bottom was chilled by the damp dirt floor. She opened her mouth to scream, but her voice came out muffled. She had been gagged. Scared and utterly alone, she focused on her breathing. She tried to pretend she was at Mrs. Tisdale’s making the apple pie she loved so much. But Emma’s mind kept going back to the dark, hazy space where something had happened before she fell unconscious. What had happened to Gracie? Where was her mother? Did anyone know she was down here? Why was she naked?

  Chapter Five

  As
her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, Emma noticed the slightest of movements in the corner of the basement. Then she saw a cigarette tip glow bright as Pepper took a long, hard drag from its other end. The short hair on her forearms stood on end as she watched him make his way over to the spot where she had been tied up. Without a word, he bent down and stubbed out the cigarette on his daughter’s upper thigh. Emma flinched violently and reeled back as the hot ash seared her exposed flesh. Her father relit his cigarette and poked it into her flesh again. Only, this time, he targeted her right nipple. He repeated his version of torture again and again, choosing a different spot on his daughter’s body to singe each time before he stopped.

  Pepper threw the light switch on. The bulb, which hung from two wires, cast an eerie glow over everything. He turned to the sink that sat next to the washer and dryer that hadn’t worked in over five years and pulled from it a bucket of cold water to which he added several capfuls of bleach. A second later, he flung the contents on Emma’s body.

  “Just a little solution to help with those burns you have there, you pathetic animal!” he screamed at her. “Haven’t you learned yet that you should keep your fucking mouth shut? You want to be the fucking hero of this family? No problem! How’s it feel to be the hero now? Huh? How’s it feel to be the hero now?”

  Having had his say, Pepper turned, his feet pounding on every step as his went upstairs, but not before shutting off the light and plunging Emma into darkness. She spent the remainder of Christmas Eve tied to the pole, wet and cold, the cigarette burns throbbing with an acidy pain as the bleach solution ravaged the raw wounds. Throughout the long, silent hours, the rats and bugs in the basement tormented her. She kept kicking out with her feet to keep them at bay, but by morning, she was no longer able to fight them off. Overpowered by sheer exhaustion, she drifted into an uneasy slumber.

  It was noon when Pepper brought Gracie down to the basement with Valerie lagging behind.

  “Gracie,” he said menacingly, “take a good, long look at her. This is what will happen to you if you think about giving me any back talk.”

  Gracie’s eyes welled up with tears and her face crumpled as her horrified gaze swept over the cigarette burns that freckled Emma’s body. Her impulse was to run back up the stairs as she watched the large insects dancing on the open wounds, stopping only to take a nibble of her sister’s burned tissue.

  Emma drifted in and out of consciousness, but at one point, she looked to her mother for help. “Please, Mommy,” she pleaded in a cracked voice, “please help me!”

  Valerie silently turned away and headed back up the stairs, dragging Gracie with her.

  Pepper sneered, “Remember who the boss is around here! This is nothing compared to what I can do to you!”

  Bending down, he untied Emma’s hands, forcefully pulling her limp body up the stairs, and left her lying on the floor in the middle of the living room. Shortly after one o’clock that afternoon, Valerie approached Pepper, who had just finished his Christmas lunch of two shots of cheap whiskey and three beers. “Pepper,” she said hesitantly, “I’d like to take Emma upstairs, clean her up, and get her into bed. Can I have your permission to do that?”

  Valerie was shrewd and always worked to keep Pepper on her good side. Besides, she was tired of having to step over Emma’s lifeless body as she ran to the kitchen to fetch her husband his beer.

  Pepper eyed her for several moments. His hesitation made sweat break out on Valerie’s body. “Yeah,” he finally said. “What the fuck! Given it’s Christmas and all, I guess it’s okay.” Then he added threateningly, “Don’t any of you bitches ever say I’m cruel! See what I’m letting you do for that little shit stain after what she said to me? Who the fuck does she think she is, calling me a drunk?”

  “Of course you’re not a drunk,” Valerie said quickly, trying to appease him. “You’re a good father and husband. Okay, Pepper? Now I’m gonna get her out of here so you don’t have to look at her anymore. I wouldn’t want our Christmas to be spoiled because of her.”

  With Gracie’s help, Valerie quickly got Emma upstairs and put her into a warm bath. The piercing sting of the warm water and soap against her fresh burns made her jump, but her mother held her in the tub, rubbing each of the sores until they were raw.

  “You need to be still, Emma,” she stated coldly. “We have to get these wounds cleaned out. There were bugs and rats in the basement and we wouldn’t want you to get an infection. I don’t want to have to bring you to the hospital looking like this. Besides, that would really piss off your father.”

  Weak and broken though she was at that moment Emma couldn’t help asking, “What really pisses you off, Mom? What else would he have to do to me to really piss you off?”

  Valerie averted her gaze, ignoring her question, and rubbed harder at the open wounds, hoping the increased pain would make her daughter shut her filthy mouth. Emma was always trying to make her feel guilty. She hated that about her oldest daughter, among other things.

  It was Gracie who broke the silence. “I’m sorry, Emma,” she said in a voice just above a whisper. “I’m so sorry he did this to you. It was all my fault. If I hadn’t peed on the floor, he would never have hurt you.” Gracie reached into the water and hugged her big sister, whispering in her ear, “No one loves me like you do, Emma. I hate him too. I hate him just as much as you do.”

  After her bath, Emma dressed and settled into her bed, pulling the covers up over her head in a feeble attempt to block out the world. When dinner was over that night, Gracie came up to their bedroom, reached into her jeans pocket, and pulled out a crumbling slice of bread. She handed it to Emma. “I snuck this in my pocket for you.”

  Without a word Emma grabbed the bread from her sister’s hand and gobbled it down. Afterward, Emma managed to give her sister a small smile. Gracie went into the bathroom and got a cup of water for her sister to drink. When she had finished the last drop, she turned to her frail baby sister.

  “It’s going to be all right, Gracie,” she whispered reassuringly. “I’ll figure something out. And it wasn’t your fault. He’s the one to blame for this, okay?”

  Gracie nodded, tears of guilt rolling down her cheeks. Emma was the only one who was willing to protect her. Emma loved Gracie as fiercely as she hated her father, for instinct told the twelve-year-old that what had been done to her sister and her over the years was not only cruel but perverse. They had to escape.

  Chapter Six

  By the time Christmas break was over and school started again, Emma’s burns had healed enough to be barely noticeable. Emotionally, however, she was mentally damaged and still recovering from the torment her father had put her through in the basement.

  Over time, the girl seemed to grow numb to all feeling toward her parents, except for the seed of animosity that had been sown years earlier and had blossomed into an intense hatred for them. She found herself slipping into a morbid frame of mind. She felt isolated from the rest of humanity, and each morning she woke disappointed that God had allowed her to live another day. She often sat on her bed, where Gracie played next to her, wondering what it was about her that made her father hate her so much. She searched for an answer that would make Pepper see that she was worth loving.

  Emma still spent what precious free time she had with Mrs. Tisdale, often taking Gracie along with her so that she, too, could enjoy the comfort and love the old woman so generously provided them. Mrs. Tisdale continued to instill in Emma the courage to go on, and when the child mentioned her hatred for her father, she heard her out patiently. In her infinite wisdom, Mrs. Tisdale did not try to persuade Emma to love a man who caused her such grief just because he happened to be her father. Of course, Emma kept much of her suffering to herself. Had she divulged the gory details of all the cruelties inflicted on her, Mrs. Tisdale might have felt compelled to alert the authorities. Aware of this risk, Emma disclosed only as much information as was necessary to explain the fresh bruises on her body to a concer
ned Mrs. Tisdale.

  During an unusually long winter, Emma came down with a violent case of the flu. The virus was going around school and most of the kids were affected. Annoyed that she had allowed herself to get sick, Pepper started picking on her as she lay in bed with nausea and high fever. Listening to his ranting, Emma was suddenly overcome by a wave of nausea and jumped off the bed, stumbling over her father as she made a run for the bathroom to vomit. She was just short of the toilet bowl when her insides heaved. Unable to hold back any longer, she puked all over the bathroom floor.

  Furious with her, Pepper demanded she clean the mess immediately. Gracie tried to step in and clean up for her sister, but their father pushed her out of the doorway and warned her not to intervene. Pepper stepped inside the bathroom, grabbed Emma by the hair, and pushed her face toward the pile of warm, smelly vomit.

  “If you don’t clean it up, you dirty little scumbag,” he snarled, “I’ll make you lick this floor clean!”

  Emma’s hands slid in the vomit as she tried to back away. Losing the battle against her father’s brute strength, her arms slipped out from under her. Her face slammed down onto the tile and into the pile of puke. She knew from the searing pain that shot up her nose that it was broken; the pain from the fracture was more intense now than her nausea. Blood streamed from her nose and into her mouth, its sour taste mingling with that of vomit and threatening to make her throw up again. In a panic, she lunged at a towel from the rack and began to wipe up the puke with it.

  “Alright, Daddy,” she whimpered. “I’ll take care of this mess. I’m really sorry for being such a pig and throwing up on the floor. I swear it won’t happen again. I’m just going to clean up the bathroom. Then I’ll go downstairs and make you dinner. I swear, Daddy? Is that okay?” she crooned, trying to make her voice sound as sweet as possible in an attempt to get her father to back off.