Family Love

“Angel, where are you? I’ll come and get you. I’m not mad, just worried, I promise. Please, don’t leave me hanging.”

I glared at that, still feeling the effects of his beating the night before.

“Fetish, my ass,” I mumbled, tipping the bottle up and realizing it was empty. But I touched his name. When the question: “Call Daniel?” popped up I thought about it long enough to acknowledge that I was lonely and wanted his attention. He was so hot, and sweet when he wanted to be. He cared about me, which was more than I could say for a lot of people in my life.

“Hello? Angel, that you? Oh, God, please tell me you’re all right. This weather, and the roads and …” He stopped. I covered my mouth and made the biggest mistake of my life to that point—quite the feat, considering my history.

“Yes. I’m fine. Come get me Daniel. Please.”

I ran out into the snow and jumped into his SUV when he showed up about an hour later. He didn’t look at me or speak, merely put the truck in reverse and drove us toward his subdivision.

The wipers barely kept up with the snow, but the tires of his heavy vehicle gripped the road. I let myself float in the warm interior, dreaming of a wedding with lots of flowers and all my brothers, happy for me.

But when I turned to see if my mother was smiling, she wasn’t. She was standing up in the pew, yelling at me. Her mouth was moving and her face red, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

I reached for her. “Mama,” my dream self said. “Mama, what’s wrong?”

“Look out, Angelique! He’s going to hurt you!” Her voice was so loud then that I slapped my hands over my ears.

“Mama,” I said, waking myself up by speaking. I blinked, trying to sort out where in the hell I was. In Daniel’s car, I recalled. Driving home, to his house.

But we seemed to be stopped, and the wipers were off. Snow covered the windshield. Disoriented and still very drunk, I turned my head slowly toward what I finally realized was an open car door and came eye to eye with him.

He stood there, glaring at me. Then he was dragging me out, down into the snow. Confused and cold, I tried to protest, but a quick slap to my mouth shut me up. He dragged me along to the open lift gate at the back of his vehicle, tossed me inside, and crawled in after me.

They told me later that I was lucky to be so drunk that I didn’t really have full knowledge of what happened after that.

I hated to burst their bubble, all those nice doctors and, later, therapists. But I did know. I felt it all. Every blow, every break, every insertion, every thrust. And I heard every word he said, too. That’s what stuck with me most, really, what he said while he raped and beat me so badly I was unrecognizable, even to myself, for weeks afterward.

Playing dead saved my life. He was so worked up he didn’t think to check my pulse when he left my half-naked, lifeless body in a snow bank.

Chapter Eighteen

The pain that burned and hammered into my consciousness pissed me off. I’d been perfectly content in the snow, after all. It had cooled the agony, and I’d been fine there, sans pain, headed toward a nice nap.

But when I came to in the ambulance with a couple of guys working me over with needles and God knows what, I tried to sit up, and screamed so loud one of them jumped away. Then I must have fainted, because when I opened my eyes again, I saw a blank white ceiling.

My brothers all filed in, making pissed-off noises. My father sat by my bed almost twenty-four/seven. I barely remember my mother’s presence, or maybe I ignored her. It was, understandably, a blur.

The one time I floated above the painkillers long enough to see a person other than my father sitting by me, I burst into tears. Kieran crawled into the bed beside me, waving away the nurses fussing at him.

“Why didn’t you call me?” I remember him asking over and over again as he held me close. But I had no answer. “We took care of him,” he whispered, his lips touching my hair. “There wasn’t much left for Mark to arrest,” he said, naming their childhood friend Mark Garner, now a county sheriff’s deputy.

I got drunk. I let him put me in his car and drive me to the middle of nowhere. My fault. The words floated, unspoken, through my head as I stared down at my brother’s large, roughed-up knuckles.

Some stranger visited me a lot.

Daddy told me it was the EMT guy who found me when he stopped to take a leak at the park, by the river where Daniel had left me. His name was Cal, and he was handsome, in a boy-next-door way, best as I could tell, but I was higher than a kite on morphine for at least a week, and when I was weaning off it, I got combative, so everyone left me alone.

When the doctors claimed I was ready to be released, Daddy appeared, making his fussy sounds and plans to get me home and under his control.

“I want to go out to Diana’s,” I said, crossing my arms. “I don’t want to be around Mama. She thinks this is all my fault, and I can’t stand her harping at me about it all day long.”

Daddy sighed and patted my shoulder. The fact that he didn’t disagree was the most depressing thing I’d ever not heard.

After a couple of weeks letting me lie around, recuperating in body, but feeling nothing but sorry for myself, Diana put her foot down.

“Get up,” she said, yanking the blinds open. “Let’s go, Angel. I’m not ru

I glared at her, then swung my feet to the floor, got up, took a shower, and launched myself headlong into whatever task she assigned me. I helped with her recipes, stirring and chopping and dicing and pouring and dishing out pounds of food for her sister to sell. Dom had me painting walls when I wasn’t doing that. I learned how to milk goats in between the rest of my chores.

I saw my father and brothers, but my mother never once came out to see me. I didn’t care. I was busy.

And one of the things that took the most energy? Rebuffing the persistent attentions of Calvin Morrison, the EMT who turned out to be Diana’s sister’s brother-in-law or some such convolution. Whoever he was, the guy refused to take no for an answer. He showed up at least every other day, and had eaten di

Diana and the veterinarian, Lee, got engaged, finally. Dom moved out to the new barn they’d built for her livestock, out of sight of the older one that they’d almost finished converting into a party space. I took over Diana’s old room upstairs. She and Lee shared her parents’ former bedroom.

Life moved forward.

I took it twenty-four hours at a time, no more, no less. But the silent days piling up between my mother and me were getting pretty high. I wanted to ask after her, but didn’t. I wanted her to hold me, to smooth my hair and kiss my forehead. But she’d never done that before. Why would she start now?

It took Diana Brantley’s no-nonsense confrontation to put an end to that. I found out later that it was less confrontation than compromise. Mama had come out to tell Diana that, once he’d figured out Dom wasn’t going to communicate with him, Kent, the man Dominic had been with, had gone to New York to track down Dom’s son.

He’d found the boy—Jace—in a halfway house, more feral dog than a little boy, thanks to years of neglect and abuse. And he was bringing him home, to Dom. Mama wanted Diana to be the one to tell him. She agreed to do it, but only if my mother agreed to take me home.

When I heard her calling my name that morning from the bottom of the steps, I’ll admit I cried. And I let her hold me. And, out of deference for Diana’s attempts to get on with her life sans the Love family underfoot, I went with her to my childhood home with its familiar smells, shapes and memories, back to my old room with its faded pink canopy bed.