Eventually Romeo gets bored, shoves the piece in his pocket, and drives off. Not in his panel truck either, Mariah’s Chevy Monza being the better getaway car. This is not the end of Mariah’s bad day. It’s the beginning. The front door he’s left standing open so she can see Matty in his playpen in the living room. She has to watch him getting hungry and scared out of his mind. He’s far from walking yet, barely sitting-up age, always-empty age, crying out his heart and looking through the white mesh of the playpen, his little sad eyes asking whymommywhy?
The first time, it’s two hours. Then Romeo comes back with his pretty smile and asks her if she’s sorry. She says yes, she runs to calm down and feed poor Matty, and that’s what passes for making up in this love nest.
Mariah can’t go begging her parents to let her come home, because she was warned. Plus stubborn as the day is long. She begs her sister for help. June is still living at home but in community college now, and a genius. The whole Peggot family in fact is a shed of sharp tools, all these gifteds and talenteds. The exception being Humvee, of the birdhouse, that recently brought disaster on the family by getting himself killed. Dark clouds over the Peggot house.
Things get worse. Romeo leaves for days at a time, only to come home demanding his dinner and sex if he feels like it, but generally so toasted he passes out facedown on the bed where he’ll sleep through hell, high water, and any number of pager beeps. Mariah looks forward to these times. Because he’s threatened her with all manner of shit by now, knocked out a tooth, and the tying-up thing gets to be a habit. Again one evening he leaves her outside where she can see Matty in his playpen crying himself apart. It’s winter now, cold, the door’s standing open, and Mariah is sure this time her child is going to die. She can yell for help all she wants, with nobody up there but the owls in the trees to answer. She’s yanked her wrists around till they’re cut and bleeding, but Romeo is a careful man and knows how to tie a knot.
The first hour, the baby cries till he’s lacquered his little red face with snot, eyelashes all stuck together, chin quavering. Second hour he goes quiet, lying still, looking at her with those eyes. Third hour, the eyes close and his little body’s shaking. She’s guessing on the time, it could have been three hours or thirty minutes, but once it starts to get dark, she knows, and this is the point where Mariah remembers how to pray. Something she’d forgotten how to do some while ago, around middle school where life gets mean and a girl starts to see how mad is better than sorry, and telling better than asking. Even where God is concerned.
Mariah is thrown back on her ass. Back to asking. Please God don’t let my baby die. Her boobs are rock hard and burning, she’s crying tears, crying milk, lowing like a cow. Matty starts to wail again in the dark, the special howl a baby keeps on reserve if the need should arise for exploding a mother’s heart. Mariah feels it like a knife in her rib cage, lifting skin from bone, but she’s thanking God her baby hasn’t died yet of hunger or cold or the bad luck of getting born in this shit family in their shit two-bedroom A-frame outside of Duffield. Romeo will not be back before morning. This is the night that will break and make Mariah.
She’s going to act real sorry, yes, to see him come back home with his big smile. She’ll put on a show, let this man believe he’s the answer to her prayers. But this night she remembers the other thing she was fool enough to forget: that mad is better than sorry.
Mariah will sneak a blade out of Romeo’s truck, one of those X-Actos, and duct-tape it to her body where she can reach it the next time she finds herself backhanded, in need of a cutting edge. Taped to her butt, below the butterflies-are-free tramp stamp that her parents still don’t know about. One more secret, this sweet blade she takes to wearing at all times. If she finds herself tied up again, this butterfly will get herself free.
It’s the edge she will use on him too. The day Romeo finally deals out one too many shitfaced fuck-you-alls to herself and the baby prior to passing out cold, deep enough that she can flip him faceup and go to work. Slicing into his cheek from the corner of his mouth till she hits jawbone, both sides, for a shit-eating smile he can wear the rest of his life. And a big heart carved into the skin of his chest. She lets no gushing blood stop her, nor the sight of yellow cheek fat falling in little chunks out of cut-open flesh, nor the screaming as he comes around. She stops short of Lorena Bobbiting him (which was maybe not invented yet), but she does enough. She can grab little Matty and light out of there knowing Daddy will not be modeling any khakis for any J. C. Penney’s.
It doesn’t cross her mind that he would press charges. She’s young, of course, raised around good people that aren’t perfect but always own up. Mariah was taught that you lie in the bed you’ve made. She’s sure this man knew what was coming to him, and will finally be sorry. After everything. But the wicked have a different head for numbers than most. Any bad they do will end up on the side of never-mind. What’s done to them weighs double.
Romeo Blevins lawyered up and gaslighted the jury like he’d gaslighted Mariah and every other soul ever to know him. Making himself out the good Samaritan, Mariah the crazy jealous bitch. That baby is not even his, says the lawyer in the alligator boots and the gold watch. Mr. Blevins was minding his own business till she came around stalking him. This is not the first time he’s had such trouble, young girls get notions and will try to pin down a man with means. These are other times, it’s the eighties, where they haven’t invented DNA all that much, and take a man on his word. And his means. Word was, Romeo took pity on a little single mother thrown out by her parents, with no place else to go. And then she got clingy. If he so much as went out at night to help some old lady with her Camry broken down on the interstate, Mariah would throw a fit. Too unstable herself to take decent care of a child, as the baby’s doctor testified. For on two occasions she’d brought the little fellow in all weak and sick from dehydration.
The more Mariah wept and wailed on the stand about tortured and tied to a deck railing overnight with the baby in the house, these far-fetched things, the crazier she was. He had ten witnesses to her none. The Peggots did their best for Mariah, but not to the extent of alligator-boot lawyers, such men walking a different cut of grass from the Peggots. They didn’t know what to think. All they’d ever heard was how Romeo hung up the moon and every damn star, Mariah being too proud to complain to anybody but her sister, and not even June knew the worst of it. Nobody ever saw her tied up. By the time Mariah got to the courtroom her scars were healed. Not his. If you’ve noticed, it’s the prettiest people that everybody wants to believe, and next after that, the most wrecked. Romeo was both. The jury decided Mariah disfigured him and ruined his life to keep other women away, so she’d have this prize all to herself.
This is a story that came to me in pieces, over years. People’s doubts and regrets flavored the stew along the way. They made much of how the assault with the deadly weapon occurred so soon after Mariah’s eighteenth birthday. No wishes were made on candles, you can bet. Romeo was not one for romance, and the shape Mariah was in, she probably forgot it herself. Still, a girl comes of age. If her pride had cracked sooner, the shacking-up-with-a-minor business would have played louder, and Mariah might not have been tried as an adult. She could have done some time in juvie and grown up into a whole other life, as Maggot’s mother. It’s all she wanted to be.