“If you’re going to tell lies about me, I want to hear them. You stay right where you are.”
Dad shrugs. “Have it your way, then.” His eyes seek out Marley, and he talks as if she’s the only person in the room who matters. “She meant to take you both. First thing you need to know, she was hurt. He’d battered at her sense of self for years already. First time he hit her, she was pregnant with the two of you. And only sixteen. No parents effective enough to intervene.
“So on that day—the day she left you behind, Marley, there are things you have to know about her. She raised both of you pretty much by herself, sleep-deprived and hurt half the time, while your father went out partying.
“On the day she managed to get away, she had broken ribs—he’d kicked her after he knocked her down. There were two of you, and she couldn’t carry you both.”
“Now, Marley,” Boots protests. “Don’t you listen to this pack of lies. Not a word of it is true. If Leah had broken bones, then he’s the one who gave them to her.”
“The journal,” I say, the lights coming on all at once. “You read the journal. I thought you burned it.”
“God help me, I had to read it first,” Dad says. “I know she trusted me to destroy it, but I wondered, too. How could the strong woman I knew have left a baby behind? I couldn’t reconcile it in my head. And so I read everything she wrote.”
“Do you still have it?” I lean forward, hoping. I want to read it for myself. Maybe it would help Marley in some way.
Dad shakes his head. “I burned it. After the shredder jammed, I threw it on the fire.”
For the first time since I’ve met her, Marley’s control cracks. “So she chose Maisey.” Tears flow down her cheeks, and she scrubs them away, roughly. “I can see why she left. But you’re not helping. How could a mother leave her child with a . . . a . . . monster?”
“She didn’t have a choice,” Dad says, and his voice has gone so cold, a shiver skates up my spine and settles at the base of my skull.
Leah’s Journal
“You can go,” Boots said, “but you have to leave one of the girls.”
Horror crawled all over me. Like ants, it felt. Ants in my belly and my heart and crawling in and out of my lungs.
“You’re crazy. What would you do with a child?”
“That’s my business, isn’t it?” he said. “You were leaving. Anything that happens here is of no concern to you.”
“I can’t—how could I do that?”
“Should have thought about that a little sooner. Pick one.”
“No. Please.” I actually clasped my hands to him. I let go of the girls and crawled to him on my knees. “Don’t do this, Boots. I’ll do anything you want. Just let me come back.”
He loved that. Made him feel powerful and godlike. I could see it on his face. But he was not a benevolent god.
A kick to the side of my head knocked me over onto the sidewalk. I lay there, the world spinning, pain blazing, and I couldn’t think. His words kept hammering at me.
“Pick one, Leah. Do it before I count to ten, or I get both of them.”
I couldn’t even see straight, Walter, let alone think. I was afraid he’d just shoot us all, he was so crazy in that moment.
He started counting, his voice bludgeoning my brain, my emotions, my heart. Every number leading up to the absolute disaster. I was paralyzed.
But then he got to eight. Nine.
“Maisey,” I said. “I choose Maisey.” She wasn’t as strong as Marley. That was what did it in the end. She was sick a lot. She was sensitive. I guess I figured that if one of them was likely to survive life with Boots, it would be Marley.
I also told myself I’d come back for her. It wasn’t forever. Only just right now. Today. I’d go to the police. I’d find money somewhere and get a lawyer. I’d get her back.
“Perfect,” he says. “So like you. You get the runt, I get the strong one. Marley, come here.”
I’d managed to sit up by then. She didn’t want to go to him. She locked her arms around my neck and half strangled me, holding on. Marley never was much of a crier, but she started wailing at the top of her lungs. I thought he might hit her to shut her up, but it seemed like maybe he liked to hear her cry, or at least enjoyed the effect it was having on me.
He came over to us and grabbed her around the middle. She screamed and kicked and held on, but he yanked her off me.
I’ll never forget that moment when her little hands let go, the sudden coolness on my neck, my face, the sound of her screaming. He held her tight, and then he put that gun against the side of her head.
People talk about slow motion, but I’m telling you this: In that moment, all the world went still. Nothing moved. Everything was a series of snapshots.
Boots holding Marley. Her tear-streaked face. The gun pressed to her head. Maisey sitting on the sidewalk, wailing.
“If you come looking for her, I’ll kill her,” Boots said. “If you talk to the cops or hire an attorney, I’ll kill her. You will not make contact with her or me or your parents or anybody in this town. If you do, after I kill Marley, I’ll come looking for you and Maisey. Do you understand?”
I couldn’t even begin to breathe. It still feels like a nightmare, writing this. Every day since it happened I’ve tried to wake up, to change the way the dream ends. Back then, kneeling in the street, I thought maybe I could appeal to his better self somehow.
“You don’t mean that,” I said. “You’re her father.”
“Do I look like a man who doesn’t mean it?”
He looked like the devil himself. There was a grin on his face. The sun came out just then and turned his hair gold. He was beautiful and evil and all the reason had been burned out of him by the drugs and alcohol.
I wanted to kill him. I think I would have, if I’d been the one holding a gun.
But the gun was aimed at my baby. I was sick with pain and terror, and I believed him. I believed he had the power to know if I was following his instructions. I believed he would do what he said.
And so I managed to get up onto my feet, the world spinning, every breath an agony because of my ribs. I picked up the suitcase. I picked up Maisey. And I walked away from him and from my beautiful Marley still screaming in his arms.
Chapter Thirty-One
Dad’s voice falters into silence as he chokes on his own emotions.
Even Boots looks subdued, smaller. He’s not one to give up easily, though. “It’s not true,” he says. “Don’t you listen to him, Marley. Don’t you believe a word he says. These people are trying to poison you against me.”
Marley doesn’t seem to hear him. She stands like a statue in the middle of the room. And then, “I remember,” she whispers.
“Oh, that’s just ridiculous,” Boots scoffs. “You were barely more than a baby.”
She turns, slowly, as if just waking from a trance, to face him. “I’ve always remembered. I just thought it must be a dream. A nightmare. I still dream it sometimes, but I only remember flashes. A woman on the ground. A boot kicking her in the head. A gun. Me screaming, screaming, screaming, trying to hold on to something that is torn away. It all happened, didn’t it? It’s real.”
Elle buries her face in Mia’s shoulder and starts to sob. Tony gets up and turns his back to us, staring out the window. Dad looks exhausted.
As for me, I feel like my heart has swollen so big that it’s occupying all my insides. I want to hug the child that Marley was and the woman that she is now. I want to hug my father—not the devil father, Boots, but the man who raised me as his own, the man who helped to heal my mother.
I want, more than anything, for my mother to be alive so that I can tell her that I understand now. I can see why she pushed me so hard to be better, to do more, why nothing I did was ever enough for her. She needed me to make up for Marley, to be enough for two girls even though I was only one.
For me, it’s too big for tears.