I was watching her as she slept, her body tired out from the chills and fever. I listened to her weak moans as she slept in a cavernous, dim place that smelled of sweat and misery. I watched from my corner within the shadows, unable to help or give comfort as she cried out, curled into a ball on the battered and filthy mattress. The stress of the sickness tore through her frail bones like thunder. I always desperately wanted to shield my daughter from the worst that life can bring, but in the end I was helpless to change the inevitable. I came back at the time when she needed someone the most and I was witnessing her death unfold in flashes. All I could do was remember who the both of us used to be many years ago.
When she was a child, we would go to the church in our neighborhood just a few blocks from the house that had become my prison and just a bit of time away so that we could escape his rages and have a little freedom. We looked forward to it all week long and he knew that. If he was in a bad mood or if I had done or said something that he disliked, it could be taken away from us in an instant. Me and my daughter would often seek safety within the hallway closet, listening out for his loud snores in our small apartment, so I could quietly creep into his bed and wait for what tomorrow would bring. But on Sundays...the good ones...we were free. I never had a dollar to my name but after church we'd go to the park across the street and have a picnic. One afternoon before the evening that would decide both of our destinies, her big brown eyes locked on mine, and she tilted her head a little, asking me the question which I never knew how to answer.
Mama, why does Daddy hurt you?
She pointed to the bruising on my arm, pushing up the long sleeve of her yellow dress she'd gotten as a birthday present from my mother, who I hadn't been able to visit since he had moved us two states away. Her eyes started to well up and I wanted to start crying right there with her in the park, just thinking about how much pain and how much anger she must've heard all those horrible nights.
It was alright. Jesus sees everything and he's going to help us, make our lives better.
When?
She had asked so softly that I could barely hear her.
Sooner than you think.
I hadn't told her that that night, we were going to make our escape.
Without even realizing it, I'd closed my eyes thinking about the past, and those memories that still haunt me from time to time. I opened them to my daughter having lost control on the mattress, crying.
"It's okay, Mama's here." I spoke to her from the shadows. One of her eyes cocked open in surprise at my voice and she weakly searched the darkness for the presence she felt but couldn't see. After a few moments, she laid back down, mumbling something I couldn't hear. She was going in and out of consciousness now. The cold that had so easily turned into the flu had beaten her.
That night years ago, I had slipped out of the bed, away from his snoring body, and grabbed the keys to the car from his pocket. It was the keys he was too drunk that night to remember to hide.
We're getting out of here.
I had shaken her awake and clamped my hand over her mouth. Those huge eyes of hers had fixed on mine, the terror in them gleaming. She knew how dangerous this was and the price I would have to pay if we got caught. She knew exactly what her father was.
The front door seemed like a hundred miles away. There was an almost unnatural silence that night. The sound of the chirping crickets was gone. There wasn't a single car which drove by in the street. It was as if me and my daughter were frozen in the moment, trying to get through to the land of the living.
She put all of her trust in me. All of her hopes and fears, I could feel them like an electric charge. This was our last chance.
I was opening the door. We felt the warm night air on our faces and the sounds of the night returned. His car was in front of the house. The keys dug into my palm.
I remember turning to her with a smile.
But I saw the panic in her face and heard her scream. I felt the blinding pain of my hair being yanked out by his rough hands. Then I saw the kitchen knife he was holding.
I snapped out of my recollection of that night, to see my daughter struggling to breathe now, choking from the fluid in her lungs. I took my daughter's hands in my own and prepared for her to see me.
I reached out to touch the gray strands of her hair that had fallen in sweaty clumps on her worn, prematurely aged face and hoped that she would be going to the same place with me. She had had a hard life, the kind that's been shaped by the colors of death. I'd watched her through the addictions, the endless self-inflicted punishment of her body, the violence from the men who hung around her like bad odors, the kind of pain I had gone through, and I'd longed to push her in the opposite direction. Save her the trouble. But there was never anything I could do. The dead could not interfere with the living.
I didn't know how to give her any more comfort. I didn't know exactly when the end was coming but I knew it was probably soon. I had watched as she had fallen apart, seen the illness consuming her and bringing her only moments from seeing me again.
I watched as the last breath left her body.
She was standing before me now, as she was when she was a little girl. Her gray hair was thick brown curls again, her eyes were gleaming with youth and vitality, and she was wearing the same yellow dress that she wore the day my husband killed me.
Wordlessly, she held out her small hand to mine and we walked together out of the crack house she had spent her last days in, past the semi-conscious addicts, the broken glass, and out into the fresh afternoon sunlight.
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