Total pages in book: 44
Estimated words: 41577 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 208(@200wpm)___ 166(@250wpm)___ 139(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 41577 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 208(@200wpm)___ 166(@250wpm)___ 139(@300wpm)
My mother wrung her hands like she was trying to squeeze the blood from them.
“I knew you were sitting for him during the day,” she said. “I thought that was the extent of it. I got up to use the bathroom one night and noticed your door was closed. You always left it cracked. When I peeked inside, I found Henry sitting by the foot of your bed with a sketchpad. The thought of him alone with you in the dark while you were helpless made me…uncomfortable, to say the least.”
The bottom sketchbook was only halfway full. I recognized the sheets in the first drawing from the year I’d turned twelve—the same year my father had left without so much as a Catch you later.
“I asked Henry how long he’d been going into your room at night. He said not long, a few months. I told him I didn’t want it to happen again and he assured me it wouldn’t. A few weeks later, I stopped over at his place to pick something up and I found these. He’d lied to me.”
I flipped to the very last drawing: me on my stomach with my arm dangling off the edge of the bed and my hair fanned out across the pillow. Obviously, my father had been coming in to draw me a lot longer than just a few months, but that wasn’t enough of a reason to banish him forever. “I don’t see what this has to do with him leaving.”
My mother closed her eyes and pressed three fingers to her lips. She looked fragile, more so than usual, like she’d shatter if I tried to pick her up.
“Henry and I didn’t grow up like normal people. We didn’t have proper role models to teach us what a supportive family was supposed to look like.” She pressed a hand to her stomach, then took another bite of granola bar, chewed, and swallowed. “I was eleven the first time my father raped me. I told my mother and she refused to leave him. A doctor noticed the vaginal scarring. That’s how I ended up in the system.”
My whole body revolted at the thought of my mother being violated by the man who was supposed to protect her. I reached across the table. She let me take her hand. This was the most forthcoming she had ever been with me, and I could tell it had taken a lot for her to even share that much.
“It didn’t happen all at once. It started early, the slow chipping away at my boundaries.” She withdrew her hand from mine and flattened it over the pile of sketchbooks. “When I found these, I realized what I had thought was a healthy fascination was actually the makings of a sick obsession. I became afraid for you. I gave Henry an ultimatum. Either leave immediately and cut off all contact with you, or I would take these sketches to the police.”
Glancing back at the very last drawing, I tried to see it as anything other than a charcoal study of a sleeping figure. But I could find nothing sinister in this portrait, or in any of the others, nothing to differentiate them from the kind of drawings I’d be making in art school. It had to be the sheer volume of them—pages upon pages of sprawled limbs tangled in Hello Kitty sheets—that had struck a nerve.
To the untrained eye, these drawings could have looked criminal.
“Henry told me I was reading too much into things because of what my own father had done to me,” she said. “I told him, even if he hadn’t touched you, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t someday.”
My thoughts swirled like water circling a drain. As far as I could recall, my father had never abused me. If my mother was to be believed, the possibility had always been there, lurking in the dark beside my bed. That’s what she hoped to convince me of by showing me these drawings.
“You say genetic sexual attraction happens when relatives meet after they’ve been separated,” I said. “In theory, wouldn’t that mean the separation is what causes the attraction?”
“Are you suggesting this is my fault? That you and Henry wouldn’t be having sex now if I hadn’t made him leave?”
“We aren’t having sex.” I stacked my expression like bricks; no way was I going to let her talk me into a corner. Not even when I was slowly coming to that exact conclusion: in forcing my father out, my mother had made us mysteries to one another, and mysteries needed solving. Yes, I blamed her, and then I felt awful for blaming her, and then I didn’t know what to feel, so I felt nothing and then everything. I was a mess.
I closed the last sketchbook and stacked it on the pile. “Maddox told me the same thing earlier—”