And she jabs the cigarette out in my palm and it hurts so much and I cry and try to pull away, but she holds my hand tight.
There now, she says. Stay. Good boy. All done. She lets my hand go and smiles at me and shrugs as if it were no big deal. She puts the cigarette butt in the toilet, then flushes it away. Of course I understand. And then she’s running my hand under cool water, putting salve on it, and bandaging it up. I’m forgiven. All done.
There’ll be a mark, but it’ll be our secret, she says. You were so good. You’re my little soldier. She kisses me on the head and smiles so prettily at me, and we drink hot chocolate. Though my hand hurts, the rest of the day seems like a party.
At dinnertime, Dad doesn’t seem furious at all. She has made it better.
Four more times this happens. The second because I make a bad choice in kindergarten and take a little girl’s crayons and make her cry. The third because I won’t sit still and practice writing my letters. The fourth because, at a friend’s birthday party, I say trains are dumb, even though he loves trains and has a train birthday cake and we’ve gotten him a train puzzle as a present.
The fifth one is the deepest and does the most damage. This one is because I break my sister’s tiara with the pink gem and my sister cries and cries, and no amount of glue can put it back together.
Then the pretty blonde turns on me with that look on her face, and I know I will have to be her little soldier once again. This time I am afraid because even though she has trained me, I know she is mad. I don’t want to be a soldier. I don’t want to be forgiven. I want her to leave me alone.
But the training holds. She burns me, leaving the cigarette in the valley between my thumb and forefinger extra-long. I don’t jerk away. I don’t cry. But for the first time, I can tell that she wants me to. And finally comes the All done, which sounds more and more hollow, and then the salve, and then the ice, which lasts longer and longer. I begin to think she is made of ice herself.
I stop there. There’s too much shame in what happened next. I don’t like revealing it to myself, let alone Pixie.
“So you told your parents, and they canned her ass, right?” Pixie said, examining the worst scar, the one in the valley of flesh between my thumb and forefinger. It’s bleeding now because I’ve been picking at it so much.
“We got a different nanny,” I said.
We were in the sunroom, surrounded by windows. Windows on three sides and on the ceiling. Thin coverage against the wind and rain, which were now so strong they seemed to have a mood. They were pissed at something. Might as well be me. The betrayal all those years ago was mine. The least I deserved was a squall.
Because here was what I didn’t tell Pixie. Here was what I didn’t even like to tell myself:
When my dad discovered the burns and asked me who’d done them, I said, “Mom,” because that was what I’d been trained to say.
We’d practiced it so much, I didn’t even flinch.
The abuse stopped; the nanny got a promotion that took her away from my sister and me; Mom got a divorce and a restraining order.
Sitting in the sunroom, I felt like everything blew through me, but not this knowledge. Nothing could keep it from sitting like a boulder at the bottom of my gut. Even after twelve years, the whole thing sickened me. Why had I sat at the dinner table and sold Mom out?
That had kicked up a storm that made the one raging around us look like a mild summer breeze. I hadn’t realized how bad it would be until a different rainy day, the drizzly kind, when I watched her from the safety of the attic playroom, the new nanny arranging coloring books and juice on short worktables behind us. Below, in the circular drive, while cherubs frolicked in the fountain, my mom packed thin cardboard boxes of clothes in the trunk of her car, and drove off.
I remember how she took one last look up at the attic. I remember her lobbing the words I love you up at us, and I remember feeling as though I’d caught them.
That’s when I understood what I’d done.
That’s when I understood she wasn’t coming back.
Now I felt sick. It was as though all that had been happening in the past couple of days was nothing compared with what I’d been through twelve years ago. I had to get my head on straight; otherwise, I’d be no use to anyone.
I took my hand from Pixie’s. She was a smart girl. She could never know. It’d been a mistake to reveal this much.
“I need to get home,” I said, shaking myself out of her grasp.
“Right,” she said, looking almost hurt, which surprised me, because sometimes I forget girls her size have feelings. Tall girls were almost bestowed honorary dude-hood. “It’s been a long day. We should all get some rest. Maybe tomorrow we’ll remember something about Grant that we’ve forgotten.”