There are twelve slats of wood under my bed. I know this because I count them over and over. Onetwothree fourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelve. I whisper the numbers to myself and the sound of it comforts me as I'm sure a prayer would comfort someone who believes in God. It's amazing how loud a whisper can be. Surrounded down there by the white glow of my bed skirt, the sound of my own voice in my ears, I can almost block out the screaming, the horrible keening. And then there's the silence, which is so much worse.
In the quiet, which falls like a sudden night, I can hear the beating of my own heart, feel it thudding in my chest. I lie very still, willing myself to sink into the pile of the carpet lower and lower until I don't exist at all. There is movement downstairs. I hear the sound of something heavy scraping across the dining room floor. What is he doing?
I have come to this place before. Here, I have hidden from the frequent and terrible storms of my parents' miserable marriage. And I have listened as their voices break through the thick walls and the heavy, closed doors.
But usually I can only hear the angry cadence of their voices, and very rarely their words, which I know to be hateful and spiked with old hurts and bitter resentments. It is a poison in the air, a toxic cloud. One twothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelve. Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can break your heart.
Tonight it is different. My palms feel hot and sticky. I lift them up and look to see they are covered in blood, the lines on my hands in stark white relief against the red black. I am overcome by a panicked confusion. What happened? Already, it's slipping from my grasp, the last few hours. I have a kind of amnesia when it comes to my parents' battles. I try to forget them and often succeed. Everything okay at home? my teacher asked recently. Great, I said. Fine. And the surface me meant it, even though the deep and buried part knew it wasn't true. I should have been sending up flares, instead I was offering smiles. I just wanted so badly for things to be normal. I had worked so hard for that.
Downstairs, my father issues a grunt of effort. What happened? I push hard into my own memory, but a big part of me is shutting down. I can see my own hand (clean) reaching for the front door, hear the hiss of the school bus moving away, and my friend Joelle knocking on her bus window. I turned to wave; she motioned for me to call her.
I had the familiar stone of dread in my chest as I pushed inside. My dad has been out of work, a journalist in the age of digital media. His department got smaller and smaller and smaller, until he, too, was called into the editor's office. He kept a good outlook at first. But as the months turned into a year, his attitude grew ever more sour. And my parents were home together, all day long. I never knew what I was going to come home to, as they swung between poles of giddy optimism and bleak despair.