He raised his head.
She hugged herself more tightly. The shaking had faded, but the adrenaline lingered. She felt weak and scared but also empowered. She’d survived. Wasn’t that the good news? She’d survived and this wasn’t the first time the odds had been against her.
She raised her chin and drew in a breath. “My dad was a mean drunk. When I was little he went on binges every few months. When he did, he beat the crap out of my mom and me, but mostly her. Sometimes he just bruised her and sometimes he put her in the hospital. We lived in Los Angeles. There are a lot of hospitals, so she always saw a different doctor. She didn’t tell anyone what had really happened and no one else put the pieces together.”
Angel dropped the satellite phone back into the box and watched her. She tried to figure out what he was thinking but couldn’t. She knew there was no point in trying. If he didn’t want her to know what was in his head, there was no way she could guess. Better to simply get it all out while she could.
“He didn’t hit me much,” she continued, switching her attention to the ground. That was better, she thought. Safer. Dirt and old leaves, a few branches. “At least not at first. But when I was ten, she left. I came home from school and she was gone.”
Taryn remembered the shock of going through their small house and seeing all her mother’s things were missing. It was as if she’d never been there at all. She’d been crying when her father had walked in the door. She’d gone to him, expecting comfort.
“That was the first night he beat me,” she said quietly. “I was terrified. I knew what he was capable of. I knew what was going to happen next.”
“How often?” Angel asked.
She kept her attention on the dirt below. “A couple times a month. Mostly he bruised me, but every now and then it was worse and I had to go to the emergency room. As I got older, it was easier. If the doctor guessed I hadn’t fallen down the stairs, I said it was my boyfriend.”
She swallowed, remembering the pain, the humiliation. Trying to disguise how much she was hurting.
“I ran away when I was fifteen. He found me in a day and dragged me back home. Then he beat me until I couldn’t walk and tied me to my bed for nearly a week. He said if I ran away again, he’d find me and kill me. I believed him.”
There were so many other things to say, she thought. How her father was well liked by the neighbors. How he wasn’t one of those crazy men who went ballistic over unwashed dishes in the sink. That he’d never sexually abused her and didn’t keep track of whether or not she’d done her homework. That when he didn’t drink he watched sports and mowed the lawn and went to church. But when he went on a binge, he turned into the devil.
“When I was nearly seventeen, he was up on the roof, repairing some shingles. He asked me to bring him a box of nails.” She remembered that she’d felt safe because she didn’t think he was drinking. It was still early on a Saturday morning. He had plans with his friends to go to a Dodgers game later. So she knew everything was going to be all right.
She’d climbed the ladder with the nails. But as she’d reached the top, she’d seen the beer bottles next to her father. The fear had been instinctive. She hadn’t known what to do and her indecision had made her start to slip.
She remembered screaming. She remembered trying to stay on the ladder, and she remembered reaching out her hand to her father. So he could catch her.
He’d reached out, but instead of grabbing her hand or her wrist, he’d picked up his beer bottle and taken a long drink. Then she’d fallen to the ground and had landed hard on her arm. She’d both felt and heard the break.
Their neighbor across the street had seen the fall and had insisted on taking Taryn to the hospital. The woman, older and a widow, had stayed with her, claiming to be an aunt. Later, when Taryn’s arm had been put in a cast, the woman—Lena—had given Taryn five hundred dollars in cash.
This is your chance, Lena had told her. Disappear, child. Disappear before he kills you.
Taryn had stared at her. You know?
We all know. But we’re as afraid of him as you are. Go while you can. Go and never come back.
Taryn returned to the present and gave Angel the bare facts of that final day.
“I did what she said. I disappeared. I hitchhiked to San Francisco and got a series of low-paying jobs that barely supported me. Every week, I went to the library and read the paper. One day there was an article about a man who’d shot himself in the head. He was my father.”