“Can you blame yourself for that?” she asks. “You were his princess.”
“He’s a monster, isn’t he?” I say, the words sounding foreign to my ears. “All of you knew that, but I didn’t see it. Refused to see it.” I feel like a fool. “I was his girl, the special one.” Glimpses of that night filter through my memory like dandelion seeds floating through the air. Just as I hold on to one, another floats by, grabbing my attention but causing me to lose sight of the one I just saw.
“When I was little, I was so scared of monsters under my bed,” Sonya says. “But when friends started describing the monsters they thought lived under their beds, I realized my description was of Dad. He was the monster I feared,” she reveals. She lets go of my hand and rises up on her elbow, leaning her head on her palm. Her hair flows around her. She had come back home late and was surprised to see me and Mama sitting in the hallway, our faces drawn from grief and shock. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. In a matter of weeks, my entire life has changed from what it was, what I knew. I’m drained, exhausted, and helpless to find an answer. “I still don’t remember everything,” I admit, almost ashamed. I wonder how far I’ve gone to protect myself from pain.
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Sonya muses, lying back down. “The mind is very powerful. It knows what we can’t handle, what we can’t process.” She twines her fingers with mine again. “What he did to you, Trisha, why would you want to remember?”
“You know what’s crazy?” I hesitate to say the words, to say out loud what I feel. “I still love him. I can’t relate the father I remember with the glimpses of memory of that night. It feels like a movie reel, like it’s not really me it’s happening to.”
“You disassociated,” Sonya says. “It’s pretty common in cases of abuse.” She speaks slowly, hesitantly. “You separate from the incident or situation; convince yourself it’s not you. It’s a protective measure. A survival instinct.”
“Is that what you did?” I ask, for the first time wondering how she survived a lifetime of horror when I barely survived one night of it. “Disassociated?”
“Sometimes I wish I had,” Sonya says after a long pause. “Maybe it would have made it easier, I don’t know.” She gets off the bed, taking a sip of water from the glass she brought in for me. “I stayed in the moment, absorbing everything he did, making it mine.”
“How do you know so much?” I ask, wondering again what she did with her time when she was away from us. “When did you become so brilliant?”
“I’m not,” Sonya says, showing me a glimpse of vulnerability. “I just did some research, learned a few fancy words.” She offers me the glass of water. I take a healthy swallow before setting it down on the end table next to the bed.
“You must hate me,” I say, my throat feeling like sandpaper. “When we were growing up. Everything all of you had to face”—I pause—“while I stood by, untouched.”
“Sometimes I thought I did,” Sonya admits, her words not surprising. “But you weren’t doing the hitting, were you?” She stares at the ceiling, fighting tears. “You were always in the same boat as us, just standing on the other side.”
“I blamed you,” I admit, shame coursing through me. She turns to me in shock. “All of you. Maybe if you were just more of what he needed . . .” I admit. “Am I a monster? Like him?” The fear rears up from deep within me. It’s what drove me to create my perfect life. To hide from Eric all my truths. The reason I refused to have children. “Maybe that’s why I was his favorite. Why he loved”—I nearly choke on the word and his definition of it—“me. Because I’m just like him.”
“Is that what you think?” Sonya asks quietly. Sitting down next to me, she takes my hand in hers. “You think if you had a child, you would hurt him or her like he hurt us?”