Chapter 17: Like You Mean It

By the third week I stopped waiting for the knock.

I’d hear the stair — the fourth one from the top, the one that gave under his weight, the same warning every night — and I’d be gone before his knuckles touched the wood. Not out of the room. There was no out of the room. Back behind my own eyes, into the place I’d found the weekend my mother was in Napa, where the body he used did the being-used and I watched it happen from a long way back.

That first weekend it had taken work to get there, a climb down into it a piece at a time. Now it took nothing. The stair gave and I went, the way your hand comes off a hot pan before you’ve decided anything. That was what frightened whatever was left awake in me — not the knock. How little the knock cost me now.

He’d come in in his sweatpants and do it to me quiet, one hand loose over my mouth, and set the chair back under the handle after, considerate, and I’d lie in the dark and not be able to tell you if it was the ninth night or the fifteenth. I’d stopped counting them. I used to count everything.

I still counted one thing.

My mother had decided, once I’d gone to Dahlia’s and come back in one piece, that the cure for whatever ailed me was more of the same, so I was out of the house again — a movie, the mall, somebody’s pool, Maya texting where ARE you until I went. And on a Slurpee run with a car full of them, I walked into the CVS, and while Maya argued about candy I took a pink-and-white box off the shelf — the same one he’d bought and made me earn on my knees — and paid for it with folded birthday money at the machine where nobody has to look at you.

Fourteen, buying it myself, and not one person blinked. Nobody stopped me. Nobody there had ever imagined they’d need to.

I already had one stolen thing hidden in that house. The sleeve I’d taken off his bench was still at the bottom of my closet, under the winter things — he’d known within a day that I had it, said so across a plate of potatoes, and then never once come for it. All summer I’d carried that around like a win. It wasn’t one. It was a thing he’d let me keep because losing it cost him nothing — he bought them by the box. The pill was the first thing I’d ever taken off him that mattered, and it needed a place that could beat him.

I hid it at the bottom of the tampon carton in the bathroom cabinet, under everything, in the one kind of place his hand would never go. And I counted the days on my fingers in the dark the way I’d once timed his updates, and I found my next bad week, and I told myself: not that week. That week I had the pill, and it was mine, and he didn’t know it was in the house.

That was the one thing I hadn’t handed over. He could have the rest. He could have me on the stair every night the summer was long. He was not going to put a baby in me, because I’d finally gotten a step ahead of him on the only thing that couldn’t be undone — and for about a week that was enough to walk around on.

My body had stopped closing.

That was the other thing the summer left me, and unlike his stink it never wound back down. The first-morning swelling had gone after a few days, the way he’d said it would — but it never went back to what it was before him. Months of him had worn me the way a whole summer of him had worn out his sleeves: I didn’t shut anymore. Not at rest, not clenching down as hard as I could make myself, not for anything. I’d put my fingers to it in the shower and find the give still there, a slack parted softness where a girl was meant to be closed, and in the mirror I could see up into the dark of myself the same as you could see up into the worn mouth of one of those sleeves on the basement floor. He’d used me open into the same shape he’d used them.

It never once made him fit any easier, and that should have been a mercy and never was. There was always more of him than there was give in me — there’d been more of him than the sleeves could take, too; it was why he went through them by the box — so worn as I was, ruined as I was, every single time he pushed in it still stretched me white to the edge and rammed the end of me, because a body that wouldn’t close was still a body far too small for a thing built like that.

There was one thing from the start of it I did finally take back.

The bag was still behind the dryer. I’d known it was there all summer and left it there, the way you leave shut a door you don’t want to walk through. One afternoon while he was out I pulled it out and washed the whole thing — the stiff crusted pairs, the ones gone hard as a shell, months of him — twice on hot, and folded it all back into my own drawer, mine again. I didn’t know what I’d thought taking it back would do.