Price of Angels (16 page)

              Her mother was dead, and she belonged to the monsters.

Michael didn’t want her to continue; from this point, he could guess what she’d say. But her eyes were dry and there was a certain fierceness in her now. She wanted, needed, to keep going. It was strengthening her resolve, bringing it all back to the surface, replacing her fear with fury.

              “I was fifteen when these came,” she said, closing her hands over her full breasts, straining against her tank top. Her smile was bitter. “That was when they replaced Mom with me.”

She’d inherited her mother’s knack for cooking, and she’d made a big breakfast of bacon, eggs and hash. She’d fished all the shell from the eggs with her fingertips, because the last time Abraham had bitten down on a piece, he’d slapped her so hard she’d lost consciousness for a moment. She wouldn’t let that happen again.

              She stood at the kitchen sink, washing the skillet by hand, enjoying the sight of the little brown wrens hopping around on the windowsill outside.

              Then she heard the footsteps behind her, the heavy breathing. A hand landed on her waist. Jacob’s voice in her ear, his hot breath fanning her skin: “When you stand there, in the sun like that, I can see right through your shirt.”

              She shuddered, gooseflesh breaking out all down her arms and legs. “I–”

              The words were snatched out of her as she was spun around. Her hair whipped across her face and the room revolved as she struggled against the sudden loss of balance.

              When she tossed her hair back, Jacob’s hands were at the buttons of her cheap cotton blouse, and he was opening them with rough, excited movements, threads snapping and popping in his haste.

              “Uncle Jacob–”

              He slapped her mouth, jerking her head around on her neck, pain radiating up her throat to the back of her skull, merging with the stinging in her lips.

              “Keep your trap shut,” he ordered.

              And then her shirt was open, and the new feminine curves of her breasts were in his rough hands. He squeezed them hard, his tan fingers dark against her pale flesh.

              Face smarting, shaking all over, Holly stood rooted while he played with her a moment, his eyes glazed-over, his mouth hanging open in an absent smile as he molded her breasts and dug his fingertips deep into the soft round weights.

              Then he spun her again, pressed her stomach up against the edge of the sink, and he reached around her and tore at the fastenings of her cutoffs. Yanked them down to her ankles. He ripped her panties.

              “Now you just be a good girl, and you’ll like it.”

              She thought of her mother, lying cold and dead, tied to the bedposts upstairs, as she felt his hand go between her legs.

              She was fifteen, and it was no longer some abstract spectacle, as it had been when she’d witnessed him raping her mother. She knew what was happening, now, as he forced himself inside her.

              The pain painted the inside of her head white for a moment. White, consuming, blistering pain, too awful to put a name to, too intense and intimate to be believed.

              And as Jacob grunted and heaved against her, she realized she could see her dim reflection in the sun-glazed window. Her shirt open, her breasts swaying as she was rocked forward and back, forward and back. Wet tears tracked silently down her face, glinting like crystal.

             
I’m pretty now
, she thought.
Look at me, I turned out pretty. Just like my mama.

A Sunday, before bible study. The upstairs rooms were stuffy and humid, because the AC needed repairing, and Abraham had, as he’d said, other things on his mind besides that.

              Holly could hear the men gathering downstairs, the shuffle of feet and the low tumble of masculine voices. Someone laughed loudly, and it sounded like a pig snorting. She could already smell the sharp tang of all the cigarette smoke.

              Her father’s bed had been stripped down to a single white sheet, and he stood beside it, beckoning her forward with one hand, a length of rope held in the other.

              Holly stared at her bare toes a long moment. If she refused, there would be more slapping. She didn’t know how many more times she could be struck without suffering brain damage. There was no chance of escaping, not while the downstairs was so packed with Abraham’s friends.

              If she relented willingly, maybe it would be easier for her, she reasoned, and stepped toward her father.

              He tore her clothes from her, and he forced her down onto the bed. He tied the ropes tight to both her wrists, until her hands grew numb.

              She stared up at him, vision blurred by the bright sheen of the sun shining off her white naked skin. She could see the raised mounds of her breasts, lifting as she breathed, the knobs of her knees.

              Abraham stripped off his belt. And then unbuttoned his jeans.

              “It isn’t your fault that you’re full of sin, Holly,” he told her. “You’re a woman now, and your body was designed by Lucifer to draw the evil out of men.”

              And then he climbed over her.

              He left her tied, after, when he redressed and went to greet his bible study group.

              Holly grew exhausted and hungry, waiting, as the shadows lengthened across the ceiling. Her hands had lost all feeling hours ago. Her arms quivered and crawled with awful sensations, the nerves clamping against this constant strain. She dozed. Or maybe she blacked out.

              But then there were footsteps coming up the stairs, many sets of them. And Abraham came into the room followed by the men from the bible study. They all crowded inside, bunched in the corners, all of them staring down at her nakedness.

              One after the other they climbed up to settle between her thighs.

              She closed her eyes and thought of the woods, of the birds, of the deer, of the flowers scattered across her mother’s unmarked grave.

“Holly. Oh, Holly, Holly, Holly!”

              Dewey Jessup was her third or fourth cousin. The nephew of some step-something-or-other, a chain of relation Abraham had explained to her while she was drawn deep inside herself, and not listening. He was skinny, and he had clammy, pale skin, and his head was too big for his narrow neck, and his ears should have been pinned back when he was a boy.

              He was a virgin the first time he came to join the bible study group, and he’d fumbled and blushed the first time Abraham had urged him up on the bed and given him instructions. Ever since, he’d been fascinated, obsessed, almost rabid in his need, awkward and clumsy still.

              “Oh, Holly,” he groaned, fingers digging into her hips as he gave one last thrust and spilled himself inside her. The orgasm stiffened him all over, locked his hands on her hipbones, drove him against her and held him there, still, quivering as the pulses overtook him.

              Then he relaxed, his shoulders slumping, so his sunken chest seemed to cave in even farther. He passed his clammy hands up the soft skin of her belly.

              “Thank you, Holly.” He lay down on top of her, most of his weight on the bed, his head cushioned on her breasts. “What you give me…it’s so special. Thank you, thank you.”

              Holly stared at the ceiling, silent.

              “Holly,” Dewey said. He petted her belly, her breasts.

              “Hurry up, boy,” one of the others said, impatient. The room was mostly dark, save for the lamp burning on the nightstand. The men were all the same, a blur to her. Only Abraham, Jacob, and Dewey were more than cocks and hands.

              “I want to be with you all the time,” Dewey continued, oblivious. “Holly…will you…will you marry me?”

“You’re lucky, just damn lucky is all,” Abraham told her, “that some sweet boy wants to marry you. Wants to give you his name.”

             
But it’s the same as my name
, she thought to herself.

              And as her head was forced to the side, and her father leaned over her, she was forced to watch what happened to her in the dressing table mirror.

“It wasn’t a real wedding,” Holly explained, taking another long gulp of Crown and dabbing the amber droplets off her lips with the back of her hand. “Obviously. There wasn’t a preacher for miles in those fucking backwoods.”

              It was the first time Michael had heard her cuss. The alcohol was loosening her up, allowing the emotion to shine through, glimmering in her eyes like fever.

              Her smile was more of a sneer, lips drawn back hard with pain. “My father presided. In the kitchen. Pronounced us man and wife.”

              Michael took the bottle from her, and took a long pull from it himself. The rim was slick with what had been left of her lipstick. He hated the awful taste of the Crown, but he needed some fortifying at this point.

              “Your own cousin,” he said, the words brittle with his closely-reined fury. He ground his molars together and passed the bottle back when she reached for it.

              “Yeah,” she said, sipping. Her eyes lifted to his, full of misery. “You’re wondering why I never ran away,” she said.

              Michael didn’t answer. Yeah, he’d been wondering. But at the same time, he understood how someone who’d been raised amid such violence would think there was no escaping. She might not have even conceived of a world in which there was anything besides slapping and raping and ropes tying her to beds. Too often, the lifelong abused grew dead to the hideousness of their lives, or they blamed themselves for their treatment.

              “I did run away,” Holly continued. “Once.”

It was when the mail came. Thank God for those long walks down the dirt track of the driveway to get the mail. If it weren’t for letters and bills, she wouldn’t know her own address, the town in which she lived, not even the state. Sometimes, she would hold an envelope to the sun and try to see the writing on the letters within, but never managed more than a word or two. Save the bible, the advertisement brochures for pest control companies and satellite TV installers were her only reading material, and she read those pamphlets front and back twice or three times on the walk back to the house.

              On the day she bolted, she went for the mail early, the three men of the house all asleep in front of the rabbit-eared TV, the evangelical spiel on their only functional channel babbling away to itself. So Holly pulled on her threadbare jacket with the holes in the elbows and walked out into the sunshine to get the mail.

              The mailman was still at the box, sitting in his white truck, sorting their letters.

              Holly had never encountered him before. He was a heavyset man, his stomach folding over the top of his belt, with a mustache like a push broom and fat, red cheeks that made his letter-carrier cap seem much too small on his head.

              She paused at the end of the driveway, watching his thick fingers tick through the basket of correspondence. He was a stranger, and he was a man. Holly had never met a strange man in her entire life who hadn’t shoved his cock inside her. So she was fearful and timid a moment, wondering what to do.

              And inside her chest, a pressure was building. Something was happening that she didn’t understand, this swelling, growing pulse that radiated into every finger and every toe. Her stomach felt tight, and full of living, pattering things. Things with wings that beat frantically.

              Excitement.

              Daring.

              Hope.

              Here was this person who wasn’t her blood, who wasn’t one of the smoking, faceless bible study men. Wasn’t her cousin-husband. Her father, her uncle. This person with a truck. This person who was about to drive away from this farm and go somewhere else. Someone where Abraham, and Jacob, and Dewey weren’t waiting for her.

              Did she dare? So many times she’d thought about bundling up a kerchief full of cheese and crackers and cooked bacon and setting off through the woods. She was so quiet and careful and small, she could slip off undetected, making her way through the forest like one of the animals. But always she hesitated because she didn’t know how deep and dark the woods were. She didn’t know if she’d ever reach civilization, or if she’d be lost, and run out of food, starving in the rain until Mother Nature ended her misery.

              But this wasn’t so chancy. This was a man and a truck and roads to travel on. This was her ticket to the outside world.

              Holly walked across the street, stepped in front of the mailbox, and smiled broadly when the mailman glanced up at her, clearly startled, his button eyes bugging.

              “Excuse me,” she said, “but do you think you could give me a ride into town?”