Ellen.
I just . . .
He was on top of her.
They were on the couch and he had his hand around her throat, but his other hand was pulling up her dress. She was trying to fight him off and I just stood there, frozen. She kept begging him to get off her and then he hit her right across the face and told her to shut up. I’ll never forget his words when he said, “You want attention? I’ll give you some fucking attention.” And that’s when she got real still and stopped fighting him. I heard her crying, and then she said, “Please be quiet. Lily is here.”
She said, “Please be quiet.”
Please be quiet while you rape me, dear.
Ellen, I didn’t know one human was capable of feeling so much hate inside one heart. And I’m not even talking about my father. I’m talking about me.
I walked straight to the kitchen and I opened a drawer. I grabbed the biggest knife I could find and . . . I don’t know how to explain it. It was like I wasn’t even in my own body. I could see myself walking across the kitchen with the knife in my hand, and I knew I wasn’t going to use it. I just wanted something bigger than myself that could scare him away from her. But right before I made it out of the kitchen, two arms went around my waist and picked me up from behind. I dropped the knife, and my father didn’t hear it but my mother did. We locked eyes as Atlas carried me back to my bedroom. When we were back inside my room, I just started hitting him in the chest, trying to get back out there to her. I was crying and doing everything I could to get him out of my way, but he wouldn’t move.
He just wrapped his arms around me and said, “Lily, calm down.” He kept saying it over and over, and he held me there for a long time until I accepted that he wasn’t gonna let me go back out there. He wasn’t gonna let me have that knife.
He walked over to the bed and grabbed his jacket and started putting on his shoes. “We’ll go next door,” he said. “We’ll call the police.”
The police.
My mother had warned me not to call the police in the past. She said it could jeopardize my father’s career. But in all honesty, I didn’t care at that point. I didn’t care that he was the mayor or that everyone who loved him didn’t know the awful side of him. The only thing I cared about was helping my mother, so I pulled on my jacket and went to the closet for a pair of shoes. When I stepped out of my closet, Atlas was staring at my bedroom door.
It was opening.
My mother stepped inside and quickly shut it, locking it behind her. I’ll never forget what she looked like. She had blood coming down from her lip. Her eye was already starting to swell, and she had a clump of hair just resting on her shoulder. She looked at Atlas and then me.
I didn’t even take a moment to feel scared that she caught me in my room with a boy. I didn’t care about that. I was just worried about her. I walked over to her and grabbed her hands and walked her to my bed. I brushed the hair off her shoulder and then from her forehead.
“He’s gonna go call the police, Mom. Okay?”
Her eyes grew real wide and she started shaking her head. “No,” she said. She looked over at Atlas and said, “You can’t. No.”
He was already at the window about to leave, so he stopped and looked at me.
“He’s drunk, Lily,” she said. “He heard your door shut, so he went to our bedroom. He stopped. If you call the police, it’ll just make it worse, believe me. Just let him sleep it off, it’ll be better tomorrow.”
I shook my head and could feel the tears stinging my eyes. “Mom, he was trying to rape you!”
She ducked her head and winced when I said that. She shook her head again and said, “It’s not like that, Lily. We’re married, and sometimes marriage is just . . . you’re too young to understand it.”
It got really quiet for a minute, and then I said. “I hope to hell I never do.”
That’s when she started to cry. She just held her head in her hands and she started to sob and all I could do was wrap my arms around her and cry with her. I’d never seen her this upset. Or this hurt. Or this scared. It broke my heart, Ellen.
It broke me.
When she was finished crying, I looked around the room and Atlas had left. We went to the kitchen and I helped her clean up her lip and her eye. She never did say anything about him being there. Not one thing. I waited for her to tell me I was grounded, but she never did. I realized that maybe she didn’t acknowledge it because that’s what she does. Things that hurt her just get swept under the rug, never to be brought up again.
—Lily
Dear Ellen,
I think I’m ready to talk about Boston now.
He left today.
I’ve shuffled my deck of cards so many times, my hands hurt. I’m scared if I don’t get out how I feel on paper, I’ll go crazy holding it all in.
Our last night didn’t go over so well. We kissed a lot at first, but we were both too sad to really care about it. For the second time in two days, he told me he changed his mind and that he wasn’t leaving. He didn’t want to leave me alone in this house. But I’ve lived with these parents for almost sixteen years. It was silly of him to turn down a home in favor of being homeless, just because of me. We both knew that, but it still hurt.
I tried to not be so sad about it, so when we were lying there, I asked him to tell me about Boston. I told him maybe one day when I got out of school, I could go there.
He got this look in his eye when he started talking about it. A look I’d never seen. Sort of like he was talking about heaven. He told me about how everyone has the greatest accents there. Instead of car, they say cah. He must not realize that he sometimes says his r’s like that, too. He said he lived there from the ages of nine until he was fourteen, so I guess maybe he picked up a little bit of the accent.
He told me about how his uncle lives in an apartment building with the coolest rooftop deck.
“A lot of apartments have them,” he said. “Some even have pools.”
Plethora, Maine, probably didn’t even have a building that was tall enough for a rooftop deck. I wondered what it would feel like to be that high up. I asked him if he ever went up there and he said yes. That when he was younger, sometimes he would go to the roof and just sit up there and think while he looked out over the city.
He told me about the food. I already knew he liked to cook but I had no idea how much passion he had for it. I guess because he doesn’t have a stove or a kitchen, so other than the cookies he baked me, he’s never really talked about cooking before.
He told me about the harbor and how, before his mother remarried, she used to take him fishing out there. “I mean, Boston isn’t any different from any other big city, I guess,” he said. “There’s not a lot that makes it stand out. It’s just . . . I don’t know. There’s a vibe. A really good energy. When people say they live in Boston, they’re proud of it. I miss that sometimes.”
I ran my fingers through his hair and said, “Well, you make it sound like the best place in the world. Like everything is better in Boston.”
He looked at me and his eyes were sad when he said. “Everything is almost better in Boston. Except the girls. Boston doesn’t have you.”
