When Smiles Fade

by Paige Dearth

  Ethan entered the bathroom while she was showering and ripped back the shower curtain. “What the fuck is this?” he demanded.

  Standing in the shower, wet, naked, and unprepared for yet another argument, Emma felt vulnerable. She focused on allowing her suddenly accelerated heart rate to slow down.

  “I don’t know what you have in your hand, Ethan,” she said calmly. “Let me get done here and then we can talk.”

  “Don’t make me lose my head!” Ethan warned. “I’m holding a bill for birth control pills. Ninety fucking dollars! Are you taking them so that none of the guys you’re fucking at the bar get you pregnant?”

  His expression was ugly as he shoved the bill at her. Then he pushed her face against the wall of the shower with brute force.

  “Fuck you, Ethan! You know I’m on birth control. That’s what we agreed on right from the start, remember? You know what? It doesn’t matter anymore. I want you out of here!” Emma demanded.

  Without a word, Ethan slammed her into the tile wall again. As Emma collapsed in the tub, nose bleeding, he yanked her up by the hair. “You’re a worthless piece of shit!” he snarled. “I don’t know what the fuck I see in you! Look at you, laying there like a wet animal!”

  Then as Ethan dragged her out of the tub, her defense mechanism kicked in and she rammed her elbow into his gut.

  “Get the fuck off me!” she yelled, her voice filled with malice. As he doubled over in pain, she stood before him, naked and wet. “Ethan,” she now said evenly, “I will kill you.”

  While Ethan had no clue as to what Emma was capable of doing to him, the way she had attacked him and announced with chilling calmness that if he didn’t back off she would kill him, he suspected that she was dead serious. But he still hadn’t gotten the message that he was being thrown out. He had underestimated Emma’s unwillingness to be controlled. In deep denial of the truth, he left the apartment a few minutes later to drink beer with his friend Pete and then go buy steaks so that he could cook her a special dinner. On his way to the market he thought to himself that she was one tough bitch who needed to be tamed.

  When Gracie came home from school hours later, she found Emma huddled on the sofa, drinking a cup of tea.

  “Are you feeling okay?” she asked. “You look sick.”

  “I’m fine,” Emma lied. “I just feel a little tired.”

  “Em, I know that you and Ethan aren’t getting along that good. I’ve heard him say some pretty mean things to you lately. He’s been a real dick to me too when you’re not around. I don’t understand why you’re still letting him stay here,” Gracie confided.

  “I know. You’re right. I told him today that he has to move out,” she explained.

  Gracie smiled with enthusiasm and hugged her sister. “Good! I was starting to worry that you were never gonna get rid of him. It’s going to be so much better without him here, like it was before he moved in with us. He’s such a dick!” she announced with great relief.

  When Ethan arrived home with his special steak dinner, he found the apartment empty. Emma and Gracie had purposely gone out so that they weren’t there when he came home. Annoyed that Emma had made a fool out of him, he threw the steaks in the sink and went into their bedroom and slept. That night, to avoid another fight, Emma slept in Gracie’s room.

  The next morning, after Gracie had left the apartment, she found Ethan. “Listen, Ethan. I wasn’t kidding. You need to pack your shit and get out of here…today!”

  Ethan smiled at her mockingly. “Oh, I’ll move out, but I warn you that you’ll need to keep a close eye on your precious little sister. You think you’re clever, Em. But you can’t be with her every minute of every day. I will find the right time and I will crush that little pathetic bitch,” he threatened.

  Emma thought about his threats, and realizing that he might be capable of hurting Gracie, she gave in and allowed him to stay, but just long enough for her to figure out how to get rid of him for good.

  Ethan smiled, thinking he had finally won.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  The following day Emma began contemplating how she could get rid of Ethan. She decided there were only two options: either she could leave him and hope he wouldn’t bother her again or she would have to kill him. She wouldn’t be held prisoner by him. She was now older and more resourceful and believed herself to be a true asshole for putting up with him for so long. Just imagining the various ways she could kill him made her feel powerful.

  Shortly after Ethan threatened to hurt Gracie, Emma came across an article in the local newspaper. It was about a man who killed his wife by slipping antifreeze into her drinks. This was one way she could do it. Or she could use rat poison on him the way she had with Pepper. There was one problem with those two methods: his pesky mother and sister were always calling him for something. He would surely whine about feeling sick once the poison started to affect him. She needed something that would act much quicker.

  Knowing she needed a more clever way to kill Ethan, she made her way out into the living room and sat on the sofa next to Gracie. Her younger sister was maturing by the minute. She looked at the teen who had turned fifteen just three months prior. Gracie looked back at her sister, and having churned for days, she finally got up the nerve to tell Emma about her problem. The timing was the best she could have hoped for as it was rare for Ethan not to be in the apartment with them. His mother had awakened him early and asked him over to her house before the rain started that day to fix a fallen gutter.

  “Emma? I need to talk to you,” she said in a strained voice.

  Emma read the urgency in her tone and expression and knew she was about to learn something significant. “Sure, what’s up?”

  “Em, I’m…I’m pregnant,” Gracie blurted out, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  Emma wasn’t prepared for this at all. “Gracie, are you sure?” she asked anxiously. “How do you know you’re pregnant?”

  “I took a pregnancy test. My girlfriend stole one from her mom. It was positive,” Gracie whimpered.

  Emma stood up and put her arms around her little sister. “Who got you pregnant?”

  “Remember that boy on the football team that me and my friends always talk about? The one who wears braces?” Gracie asked.

  Emma nodded.

  “Him!” Gracie sobbed.

  “Okay,” Emma said, trying to arrange her thoughts rationally. “Well, calm down,” she told her weeping sibling. “We need to think about this. We should talk to Katie too. She might know what to do.”

  Emma felt out of her league. She had never thought of putting Gracie on birth control. She was only fifteen years old, for God’s sake!

  When the girls went over to Katie’s apartment and told her what had happened, their friend gasped at the news, making it worse for Gracie. “I’m sorry,” she said seeing the girl’s stricken expression. “I just wasn’t prepared for this. Then she said briskly, “I think we should go to the clinic and make sure you’re really pregnant. Sometimes those tests can be misleading. They say you’re pregnant when you’re not.”

  “Oh my God!” Gracie exclaimed. “I hope you’re right. Please be right. I don’t want to be pregnant.”

  Emma felt the same way, but was less optimistic about it. She thought back over the last several weeks and remembered Gracie laying around the apartment a lot and not wanting to eat certain foods that she normally liked. She recalled her sister saying how the smell of bananas, a fruit she had always loved, made her nauseous. Emma had assumed their living situation was making Gracie extremely moody, but now it was all starting to make sense.

  Katie drove them to the clinic. An hour later, the doctor who had examined Gracie confirmed she was pregnant. She appeared to be about two months along in her pregnancy, but there was no way of knowing for sure without an ultrasound.

  The three of them were unusually quiet when they left the clinic, each one trying to come to terms with the reality of a pregnancy. With Gracie being so yo
ung, Emma knew they were in for a hard time. The thought of raising a baby seemed a monumental task quite beyond what the two of them were capable of doing. Gracie stewed in the deep regret that overwhelmed her, feeling ashamed of what she had done. She was overwhelmed with guilt and hated herself, scared that one day soon her sister would hate her as well.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Later that day, Emma told Ethan about Gracie’s pregnancy. She hadn’t given any more thought to how she would get rid of him, being distracted with her sister’s news, but his reaction reinforced the need to think of ways for him to go.

  Ethan was livid. “How the fuck did you let this happen?” he snapped at Emma.

  “I didn’t let anything happen, Ethan,” she spat back at him. “I didn’t even know she was having sex.”

  “You’re the one who strips for other men. Maybe she learned how to be a slut from you,” he accused.

  Emma got away from him and ran into the kitchen. Ethan followed. Gracie stood in the doorway as he began shoving her sister into the wall and cabinets.

  “Stop it!” Gracie screamed. “This is not Emma’s fault. Just stop it!”

  Ethan turned abruptly to Gracie. “You’re getting an abortion. Do you hear me?”

  “No, I’m not!” she yelled back. “You’re not my father and you can’t tell me what to do!”

  Ethan started moving threateningly toward her, enraged at the way she had yelled at him. Just then, Emma pulled a knife from the butcher block on the counter.

  “Leave her the fuck alone, Ethan!” she told him, holding the knife out in front of her. “Get out of here! You’re just making everything worse. Just go.”

  Ethan eyed her. The resolve with which she gripped the knife was apparent and he was sure she would actually use it against him. In a bid for self-preservation, he decided quickly that he would leave the apartment for the night and come back the next morning, when everyone had settled down. But he would not forgive Emma for what she had just done. No one, especially not some tramp like her, could threaten him with a knife and expect to get away with it.

  With Ethan gone for the night, the two sisters sat on the sofa together and talked about the baby.

  “Emma, do think I should have an abortion?” Gracie asked.

  Her older sister sat for a moment in silence, “I don’t know sweetie. I mean, I definitely didn’t want you to get pregnant right now, that’s for sure. But you have to be the one to decide. I’ll be there for you no matter what you choose.”

  “Well, I was thinking that we don’t have much family. Actually, there’s only you and me. I don’t want to be pregnant at fifteen either. I just don’t know if I can go through with an abortion,” Gracie considered out loud.

  But hours later, they agreed that Gracie would keep the baby and Emma would help her raise it. They didn’t know yet how they would work out the details. For instance, someone would need to be there to look after the baby while Gracie was at school. Realizing it was just too soon to worry about such details, the siblings stayed up most of the night, discussing different names for the baby.

  Emma worried about how much everything was going to cost. She had hoarded a lot of money from her tips at Doubles and hidden it away so Ethan couldn’t get at it. Now she was grateful for having kept the stash secret. Neither of them could even begin to imagine how hard it was going to be to raise a child. While they had missed out on the carefree pleasures of childhood, they were still children themselves. But they agreed to stick together and make it work.

  The next morning, Ethan came back to the apartment and stood just inside the kitchen, watching Emma.

  She looked him over and finally said, “Why are you here?”

  “About last night,” Ethan began. “I left because I couldn’t stand the sight of you for another second. But I want you to know that this changes nothing. In fact, it makes it even better. If you force my hand I will kill that little cunt and her unborn kid. You got me?”

  As if he had punched her in the face, the reality of her abusive relationship with Ethan crashed in on her. She felt foolish and annoyed with herself that she hadn’t really recognized it before this moment. How had she momentarily forgotten all the pain she had suffered at the hands of her father?

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  In a few short months, Gracie’s belly had grown, making her pregnancy obvious and eliciting nasty stares from perfect strangers, the kind of stares that reminded her, over and over again, that she was no more than a dirty young slut of fifteen who had brought this condition on herself. Emma kept reminding her that the opinions of others didn’t matter one bit and that Gracie should ignore them, but it wasn’t easy. This didn’t keep the sisters from being excited about the baby. Emma had tried her best to prepare for her new niece or nephew.

  Ethan wasn’t happy at all that she was spending money on things for the baby. Soon after Emma had made a trip to the Salvation Army and bought a crib for fifty dollars, Ethan freaked out on her.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are, just going out and buying shit?” he yelled. “Did we ever talk about you spending fifty fucking bucks?” Then he added irrationally, “I bet you bought presents for your boyfriends at the bar too!”

  By now he had backed her into the corner of the living room. Emma had her arms up to protect her face and her mind reeled, trying to think of what she could use as a weapon against him.

  Stalling to give herself some time, she mumbled, “The baby needs somewhere to sleep and the crib was only fifty dollars.”

  “How am I supposed to keep us on a budget when you go out and spend money whenever you want? What are you, an idiot? Are you that stupid?” he ground out through clenched teeth.

  Emma’s ability to control her temper was waning. If she had a knife in her hands, she would slit his throat with it. The very thought of his blood gushing out of his body delighted her and she yelled back at him, trying to cut him down to size and show him up for the lowlife he was.

  “How about you move the fuck out and leave us all alone?” she hurled at him. “How about that, huh? I earn all the money and I have a right to spend it any way I like!”

  Emma left him standing in the room screaming at her. When she came back she stood very close to him, holding a hammer from his toolbox. He stared at her in disbelief.

  “I want you out of here today,” Emma told him in a calm, serious voice. “I’m not kidding, Ethan. You have an hour to be out of here. There is nothing I’d like better than to plunge this hammer into your skull. So you better get moving, before it’s too late.”

  Gracie was eavesdropping from the other side of the door. Her insides were bursting with glee and she secretly wished her older sister would bash Ethan’s filthy brains in with the hammer. Finally, she thought, finally, the asshole will get out of the apartment for good and leave us to ourselves.

  Ethan was both intimidated and infuriated by the resolve with which Emma stood her ground. He had finally worked himself into her life and now she was throwing him out on the streets, not even worried about his threats to harm Gracie anymore.

  She faced him squarely. “This is no joke, Ethan,” she said. “I’m dead serious. You need to get your shit out quick or you’ll find everything scattered on the sidewalk. I have put up with more from you than I ever should have, which probably makes me an asshole. But it’s over now. Get out, and trust me, motherfucker, if you even have a thought about touching Gracie, I will kill you.”

  Ethan knew he’d lost her for now. He had threatened to kill Gracie, thinking that Emma would never have the balls to stand up against him with that threat looming over her head. He moved around the bedroom, packing his clothes. Fifteen minutes later, he walked into his mother’s house, bitching about Emma for throwing him out of the apartment for no good reason.

  “I know, honey,” his mother cooed, “I always knew there was something wrong with that girl. But you don’t have to worry about that girl anymore, you’re home now.”

 
Ethan took no comfort from his mother. In fact, he found the whore bitch even more annoying than before he moved out. He decided he’d wait it out for a while before trying to lure Emma back to him.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  For as long as Gracie could remember, she had a hard time expressing her feelings to people. Even with Emma, she couldn’t bare her heart. She was the polar opposite of her sister, who talked to everyone and told people exactly what she thought. Not even Gracie’s closest friends knew how she felt about things most of the time. In fact, her friends were a lot like her—introverts. With nothing but time on her hands, she had taken to writing in the journal Emma had given her the previous year.

  Gracie yearned to talk about her pregnancy, how it had happened, but couldn’t bring herself to do so. The first time she felt it move inside her, she wrote in her journal:

  I just felt my baby move in my belly. It feels like there’s an alien inside me. I’ve never felt so ashamed of myself. I want to love my baby, but am afraid of loving anyone but Emma. What if my baby ends up hating me? What if Emma hates me after the baby is born?

  Gracie was too young to understand all that was happening to her, and though Emma was there for her all the time, she knew just as much about babies as her younger sister did, which was absolutely nothing. Gracie worried about what would happen after the baby’s birth. Would she go back to being a teenager? Would she need to quit school and get a job? These questions ran through her mind all the time, but she never dared ask them out loud. All she could do was suffer as they continued to plague her.

  One week from her due date, Gracie’s water broke while she was helping Emma make breakfast. The girls looked at each other in panic as the water pooled on the kitchen floor. Gracie hurried to get the small duffle bag of clothes she had prepared for her stay in the hospital. Emma snatched up her car keys and called Katie.