The Way the Apple Falls

"Mommy, why are we here?” she asked again. She had asked that question so many times that I lost count a long time ago, but this time she added something new. “I miss Daddy.”

I knew, she was too young to understand, yet my heart still shattered into what felt like a million pieces. All I could do was reach out and take her in my arms as warm tears started rolling down my cheeks.

It was at that point that her older brother walked into the room, putting on a sweater to ward off the cold in the old apartment.

“Stop talking about him, Lulu,” he said. “We’re never gonna see him again”.

This, of course, made the little girl cry, and I squeezed her tighter to my chest as I looked up at my only son and shushed him.

“Don’t talk like that,” I said in a tone of voice that was harder than I had intended it to be.

“What?” True disbelief, but also a slight hint of the rebellion that every 12-year-old boy thinks is unique to just him, was on his face. “It’s the truth isn’t it?”

The truth. I had stopped believing anything was the truth. I had believed Thomas’ loving me to be the truth. I had believed it to be the truth when he told me he’d never do it again. I even believed him when he said that he’d never put a hand on any of our children. None of those things had turned out to be the truth.

And the fact was, I wasn’t even completely sure it was the truth that we would never see my ex-husband again. I mean, I wanted it to be, but hadn’t I seen my mother do the exact same thing with my dad - leaving him, staying gone for a couple of months, and then, after realizing how hard it was to be a single mother, convincing herself that she still loved him, and that he would have learned his lesson by then, before coming crawling back? Hadn’t I heard the stories of my grandmother doing the same?

The truth was that it was in my genes. My whole family tree was filled with women who had settled, believed they could change their boyfriends or husbands, and, finally completely changing themselves into empty shells, praying that if they just stayed quiet and took the punches as they came, their children would be spared and could grow up to lead whole, fulfilling lives, far away from that kind of violence. That kind of poison.

The difference was that I finally realized that I had never been spared my dad’s fists as a child, and then eventually, I saw my oldest daughter, just 15 at the time, taking her t-shirt off in the bathroom one morning, and what jumped out at me was not the fair, white skin, I remembered from when she was a child, but the bruised and battered skin of someone who should under no circumstances know such pain at her age.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I had demanded that day, and the answer she gave me could have just as easily come out of my own mouth 20 years earlier.

“He said, if I kept quiet about it, he wouldn’t touch Will or Lulu”.

I packed up our things immediately. Clothes, toys, and toiletries got thrown haphazardly into duffels and old shopping bags as these sprung into my vision. Just as I’d seen my mom do it. Finally, I herded my kids into the small family car, making them hold bags and teddy bears and blankets in their laps as we drove through the night and two whole states before I dared stop.

Now we’d been in that crummy apartment for almost a year. And every day I had to hear my youngest daughter ask why we couldn’t go home. And every day I had to listen to my only son complain about how the water in the shower never stayed warm. And every day I had to explain to my oldest how I couldn’t afford to buy her her own car yet. All while working two jobs just to keep what we did have, and continue to put food on the table.

But what kept me going was my hope that this hardship was worth it - that my children would come out of it better people, and, especially, that my son would know how to treat women, and that my daughters would know to not settle for any man that could hurt them even the slightest.

Yeah, the beginning had been hard, but as my bruises had started to fade, I had started to believe. Believe that we could get through this, and that my kids would be better off than I had been. Or my mother. Or my mother’s mother, or…

I looked into my youngest daughter’s eyes and smiled.

As I wiped the tears from her puffy cheeks, I said “I know it’s hard right now. I know you miss your dad. But believe me, some day you will look back at this and realize that this is good. For all of us”.

She sniffled a couple of times, and a tiny whisper escaped her. “Really?” she asked.

“Really,” I confirmed with a small nod.

The front door opened, and I looked to the hallway to see my oldest daughter hanging her coat on a hook next to the door.

“How is Chris?” I asked, genuinely interested.

“Fine,” she answered in her usual 16-year-old manner with a tiny shrug of her shoulders that I only noticed because I was her mother.

Then she turned her face towards me, and my whole world burst. I could feel the walls fall apart around me, and the ground opening up to let me fall through to what must surely have been hell. I felt my mouth fall open. I tried to speak, but my throat caught, and all that passed through was a tiny whimper.

A giant, dark bruise covered the top of her right cheek.