Content Warning: implied childhood sexual abuse.
My father can’t find the tie he wants to wear.
It doesn’t take much more than that. A missing shoe, an empty scotch tape holder, that’s all the reason he needs to go on a rampage. Ordinarily, I grab my little sister, Irene, and make an exit when he starts, but we have only ten minutes left to get ready for my cousin’s First Communion.
I pull Irene into my room and close the door, try to distract her from the arguing outside in the hall. I ask her what she thinks of my new backpack, which isn’t exactly new. She says she likes it as much as the first time I asked her, when I got it three weeks ago. When Dad barrels into Sean’s room next door, we both get quiet. Dad has made up his mind that Sean took his tie. Sean hasn’t worn a tie since his First Communion, but logic isn’t part of the picture when my father gets this way. The shouting gets louder, meaner, pushing Sean over the edge. Finally, Sean screams back, the moment Dad welcomes, because then he can use his self-righteous anger as a cover for what he wanted to do all along.
It’s a family ritual. He lashes out, leaves my brothers humiliated, bleeding sometimes. Mom washes their faces afterward, warns them not to start with him. But her voice trembles and I can tell she’s afraid of my father.
The fight quiets down and Mom opens my bedroom door, holding a shirt toward me. “I need you to iron this for Sean,” she says.
I take it and go out to the hall closet for the iron. Sean is in the bathroom, dabbing his nose with a wet towel. There’s blood on his shirt and a heaviness in his shoulders as he leans over the sink. In the reflection in the mirror, I see the familiar look of defeat on his face. When he notices me there, he kicks the door shut.
That’s the way my father leaves us feeling, like we’ve lost before we have a chance to fight, like we’ve lost ourselves— because when he’s done, we don’t get to lick our wounds. No pouting. We take our punishment and get back into the swing of things, as if the whole business was no more than a bad cramp. Sean says there’s an expression used to describe ruthless generals who kill even the wounded; they “take no prisoners,” he says. That’s my father; he leaves us with nothing.
I iron Sean’s shirt, he gets dressed, and we pile into the SUV and drive eleven miles without a word. I can hear my brother Brian cracking his knuckles. He’s sitting in front of Irene in the fold-down seat, staring out the window. Sean is next to me, breathing through his mouth, still dabbing at his nose.
Standing outside the church, Uncle Neal spots our car and walks up to greet us as we get out. Dad already has his great-guy mask in place. He hikes up his pants— the way men do when they’re about to talk about something they own— strides toward his brother, and says, “I’m telling you, it’s taking them longer and longer to make themselves beautiful these days. But you be the judge; tell me it’s not worth it. Are these girls prettier than ever?” Dad puts his arm around Irene and Mom. I stay out of reach.
Uncle Neal gives him an amen. “You’re a lucky man,” he says. He’s wearing a suit that doesn’t fit him anymore, and the tie around his neck is loose, like it’s there for form’s sake.
I climb the church steps with Irene, Sean and Brian close behind, all of us wanting distance from these phonies. Even church is preferable to standing there listening to grown-ups repeat their tired lies about how glad they are to see each other. One pew in the back of the church is half-empty, so we duck in, weaving clumsily around the knees of the people who won’t slide over. Mom and Dad come into the aisle, scope for seats up closer but give up, settling for spots across the aisle just ahead of us. Mom does her deep-knee-bend genuflection and a slow-motion sign of the cross before getting into the pew.
I hate when she does that. It’s laughable with gray-haired old ladies of the Rosary Society and the stray nun you see around sometimes, but when my mother does it, my stomach knots into a fist. Maybe it’s because the Church has nothing to do with our lives— or hers— except for the inconvenience it causes on Sundays. My mother has respect for all the wrong things. She treats her daughters like galley slaves, but faced with her bully of a husband or a church pew, she becomes suddenly reverent.
This isn’t going to be easy, having to watch my parents oooh and aaah at rows of angel-faced kids receiving the body of Christ. Because I know what my father is doing to Irene. I’m almost sure of it. I try not to leave her alone with him. It makes me feel edgy, as if I’ve left a hot iron facedown or a candle burning. It’s like that, but bigger, scarier.
Scary is never far off at our house; the air is charged with a low-grade panic. Anything can freak my father out. A fork dropping to the floor is enough to make us run for cover. I’m already sixteen, and I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t like that. It feels as if our lives are in danger. Like when you shake yourself out of a daydream to find a car coming at you, or glance toward the shore after you’ve gone out too far and the tide is pulling against you. That’s the feeling. But it’s more than a flash of terror; it’s a way of life.
At first, my fears about what he might be doing to Irene were just inklings, stuff I could ignore. Maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe I didn’t want to know for sure. But she just turned eleven, and he started with me when I was nine.
I hardly think about him anymore, or about what he used to do. He hasn’t come near me in three years, hardly even looks at me. When I was little, we used to do a lot of stuff together. We went places. I was his favorite. Sugar and spice, he called me. Everything nice. He even played dolls with me. We’d pretend I couldn’t get the baby to sleep and he’d rock the doll in his arms, sing songs about Irish freedom in a voice that made me think being oppressed was romantic. Later, when there were no more songs, when I knew something was wrong, when I woke with my eyes crusted from tears, my stuffed animals crushed into the foot of the bed, nobody asked any questions. Nobody looked out for me.
Irene became his sweetie. She sat in the front seat with him almost everywhere we went. He took her to his job sites to show her off to the other construction workers. Not even my brothers got that treatment. At Christmas, only the Santa at Macy’s in New York was good enough for Irene. Until then, the rest of us had settled for the skinny guys at the mall. She seemed special to him in a completely different way. That’s why I felt sure it would never happen to her. I thought he loved her.
The procession starts. The kids’ steps are awkward and uneven, and they look like they wish they could scratch their noses or get out of their stiff new shoes, or at least make everyone stop staring at them. But no one can resist. They’re perfect: the shine on their faces, the innocence, and the look in their eyes that shows they have no clue what they’re innocent of. I pay attention to the girls, trying to catch a glimpse of each little face, to see if I can recognize one like me, one who already knows what guilty feels like. I glance at my parents again, knowing they’ll be cooing at every child that goes by. My mother is in tears from it, but Dad isn’t looking at the children. He’s searching my face, looking all sad and blue. Maybe he can’t find what he’s looking for there, maybe he’s beginning to see that whatever connection he thought he had with me is lost for good.
But I doubt that he ever thinks about us, about what he used to do. I hate thinking about it.
There are lots of times when I don’t. Some days seem so normal: school, friends, chores, homework, a great chocolate cake, a good movie. But normal never lasts long. I’ll remember a feeling, a smell. The details are never all that clear. They’re disconnected, and mostly I can’t put them together. But the fact of it is always there. And I go back to being someone in hiding, someone at fault, afraid people will figure it out. Even when it finally ended, the hiding didn’t. After a long while, when I was convinced it was really over, I tried to act normal again, to pick up where I’d left off that first night he came into my room. But I couldn’t remember who that person was. I’d forgotten what it felt like not to have to pretend, not to have to slip off my panties when I heard him on the stairs, so he wouldn’t tear them.
***
We get home from the Communion party much later than we were supposed to. Every party in my family ends with a we-really-should-get-together phase, and this one took longer than usual for my parents to worm out of. Plus my father had just enough to drink to be downright chatty by the time the party ended. I stood a distance away, by the car, saying nothing, desperate to figure out what I should do.
I’d been watching him for the whole party, even following him around from a distance. The party was in the hall of a rescue squad building. You can’t fit my father’s family into anybody’s house anymore. Same for my mother’s. Too many cousins and aunts and now their husbands and wives and little kids. But even all those people weren’t enough to keep Irene safe. On the second floor, above the hall, there’s a room with big couches and chairs, where the squad hangs out when they want to relax. I didn’t know what was up there until I saw Irene coming down the stairs, looking red-faced and sweaty. I asked her what was wrong, but she walked past me, mumbling something about a toothache. I started after her but someone whisked her away to dance before I could get to her.
I didn’t know where my father was until I turned and saw him walking from the direction of the staircase. I didn’t know for sure that he was up there with her, not at first, but I went up to see what was there. As soon as I saw the huge couch, my skin went cold. Her party balloon, the one my aunt had given each of the kids, was suspended against the low ceiling, the long white ribbon hanging limp, the shiny white oval tilted against the beam, as if on a noose.
Mary Ann McGuigan’s short stories appear in The Sun, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, and many other journals. Her collection PIECES includes stories named for the Pushcart Prize and Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net. THAT VERY PLACE, her new collection, is due in 2025. You’ll find her creative nonfiction in The Rumpus, Pithead Chapel, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. The Junior Library Guild and the New York Public Library rank Mary Ann’s young-adult novels among the best books for teens, and WHERE YOU BELONG was a finalist for the National Book Award. For more, visit her website.
Featured Artwork:
Underwater Storm
Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas. She has an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella GOODBYE TO THE OCEAN won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her short prose and poetry have appeared in over fifty different publications. Find more at her website.