The erotic thrill of the sea hadn’t wained in the eight months I’d lived in Ships Peake. The town had slowed to a trickle of tourism since the boardwalk opened up an hour South; and I’d gone to the boardwalk as a little girl. It was a community of broken in-potholed roads and Americano bars. The type of lawless fever town that takes cops twenty minutes to get into, and which no one ever gets out of. It was a place of isolation.
The kind of isolation that a single mother grasps onto harder than her child’s hand. The kind of isolation perfect for those running from something, not towards something. The kind of isolation I needed.
It was very difficult to escape from my previous life. I didn’t have much money, even after ransacking my husband’s house. When I left with my daughter, I didn’t know where I was going, but I found a cheap house in a town without violence. It didn’t look bad, so I considered us lucky.
The house my daughter and I lived in was, on the surface, beautiful. It was right next to the water, on a coast of rocks. One of those Southern, pre-Civil War gems that never got destroyed in the 120 years of ensuing chaos. Rent there was cheap, because it was rather a mess inside: chipping paint, broken floorboards, uninsulated. It was also away from any schools, or parks, or neighborhood children. I felt bad for my daughter; this wasn’t the place for a little girl who deserved something good in her life. But we simply couldn’t afford anywhere else. With tears in my eyes, I begged the landlord to let us stay.
We’ll be silent; we’re just girls.
And we were silent.
A few weeks in, my daughter had developed agoraphobic tendencies, not for herself, but for me. Though she was barely tall enough to grab my hand, she held my legs back more like a tiger than a toddler. She didn’t like me leaving her and going outside. She would get frantic when I wandered out to the beach, just to watch the water swell and recede. The salty water seeped into my fantasies and made me think dark, sinful thoughts.
I hadn’t always been so pensive, so amatory, so willing to be swept away by anything erotic and adult. Before we’d moved I hadn’t considered the sea anything to yearn for. But there was no one in the sleepy town worth turning over and examining, and trying to create some kind of spark for. Besides, I had been leaving less and less, so friendships and relationships became difficult to make.
The sea was only a few feet away from my back porch, yet after the first month passed and she got worse, I hadn’t even felt the crisp morning water. The waves called to me, commanded me to jump in and forget the world around me. I wanted to. I needed to, but I couldn’t. She wouldn’t let me.
As much as I wanted to take even one midday swim, she stopped me every…single…time. There would always be a bathroom accident, a tantrum, or some other nuisance. Everything was so innocent. I couldn’t exactly accuse my damn toddler of sabotaging my social life. But as the weeks moved on, the problem became unavoidable.
Whenever I tried to go out for a walk, she’d run crying of hunger or thirst or fear. If I wanted to go grocery shopping, with or without her, my daughter’s nimble fingers would steal the keys to my dinged-up car. She made messes, yelled, locked doors, and did whatever it took to keep me home. If I went out without her knowledge, she would quickly appear at my feet, pleading for me to stay in. She always knew how to get me locked in the gloomy, creaky house.
Once, about five weeks into our stay, I tried to sneak out at night. She’d been put to bed hours before. I left on my tiptoes, irrationally scared of waking her. I pulled the front door shut; heard the lock click. I turned around to see her right behind me, crying with a self-inflicted stab wound. A trickle of blood had pooled on the ground from her calf. It was only a surface-level injury. But I didn’t care; neither blood stains nor memories can be cleaned up perfectly. I screamed at her.
You wicked little-
Why did you do it?
She refused to answer. But the way she glared at me was the only answer I needed. I didn’t try to leave again.
For a while it was fine. I didn’t need to be watching my daughter, as long as she knew I was there. We built up a rhyme; mornings were together time, afternoons were for her alone. She’d come back at dinner as if nothing had happened and the rest of the night was for us again. Originally I worried about my toddler’s safety, but it became clear that my concerns were ill founded. She never got even a bruise when she was alone. Nor did she ever talk about what she did.
I only knew she went outside because of the continuous noise the backdoor made. I protested, of course, but she always shut me down. Sometimes she brought me relics from my forgotten world: a dried up worm, crushed bird eggs, animal bones. Whenever she brought me them, she put on a cutesy little girl act, an “I’m doing this because I love Mommy” act. It felt more like bragging.
My time alone became more of a refresher. There was the T.V., the landline, and occasional magazines that came through the mail. I began to sew a lot: scarves, dresses, hats. With a needle and thread, I feigned happiness but, in the back of my mind the image of Hester Prynne embroidering a red A inevitably popped up. I too was a Puritan prisoner. The sun was hot, and I was in a jail cell.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how my life had turned down this path. I realized that my husband had much more to do with it than I would’ve been able to admit to anyone else. With the weeks of reflective time, I’d figured out a lot. I just didn’t know why I was so scared of my daughter, why she felt so threatening, where she got her power from. Why was our dynamic so unequal when I was the fucking parent? I hated that bitch, hated spending time with her.
Of course I still tried to be a good mother, even as my patience was frying up in a summer without air conditioning. I decided not to let our time together be a waste. I wanted to give her a head start for the school year, a warning that she would be forced out of the house every single day once summer was over, no matter how painful it would be. She covered her ears and sang the lala song every time I’d mention it, but she knew what would happen. Using hand made cards, I taught her how the alphabet worked. Then how to write. Then how to make paragraphs. Then literary techniques and essay formats. She was a quick study. Biding my time, I switched her to math, though she seemed just as fluent. In six weeks, she learned every elementary concept I could teach her.
I’d give her a chance to ask questions, which ranged from cute, to endearing, to funny, to alarming, to just flat out weird. On the weirder side, she asked repeatedly about dead things, the process of death, drownings, riptides, and Tsunamis. No matter how I answered (or ignored) her morbid questions, she’d always follow it up with a question about her father, as if the two were related.
Never speak about that again. If you don’t want your dear mother to slip away into cuckoo land and leave you all alone in this crumbling house, you’d do best to can it.
By that time I wasn’t allowed outside under any circumstances. All of our doors were locked. Our landlord was kind enough to drop off groceries and transfer mail. It was a touching sort of empathy, and an embarrassing one. She assured me that it was no problem, that she’d once been in my situation, that my daughter was just in a phase. My girl couldn’t articulate her trauma now, but soon we could talk this through and live normally. She claimed the weekly trip wasn’t a burden. Still, I felt bad that I was making another adult woman bend over backwards out of cowardice.
And it didn’t solve the problem of dentist and doctor appointments for my little one. Before I quit to start a family, I’d been a nurse. The rudimentary skills of bandaging a child were easy enough to remember. The vitamin deficiencies, vaccine requirements, and crooked teeth were harder to get around. There was only one doctor in our sleepy little town, and he had all out refused to make a house visit. I tried to call him.
You asshole. This is a little girl we’re talking about. But go ahead and prioritize your eighteenth century superstitions over a single mother and her toddler.
See if you can live with yourself.
It did not go well. Nothing would convince him, nor any other medical professional in a fifty mile radius, to come over to our insular household. I knew that my girl wasn’t doing as well as other children her age-socially or physically. It worried me to the core. But, until she grew out of her little territorial phase, nothing could be done. Her outbursts were only worsening, and her isolation tactics were becoming dangerous. She had a stubborn streak that I couldn’t match; born with the anger of her father. She was violent.
I should’ve put a stop to it sooner, but deep down my gut knew it was because she remembered a time where I had no chance to escape. Babies remember not with sights or sounds, but with feelings. She wasn’t born with stability, so maybe this was a way of ensuring it never went away again. Thoughts like that kept me going, prevented me from matching her in violence, and made me ignore how her eyes had grown to look like her father’s. I wanted so badly to swim in the ocean or do anything to combat the sweltering coastal heat.
Then fall started. The landlady agreed to drive her to school. It broke my heart that I couldn’t see my child off on her first day. I hadn’t wanted to miss that moment, but it wasn’t my choice. When she was out, it took me two hours to gather up the courage to leave. In that damned house. It felt as though she were my mother, and I was the grounded child sneaking out. But it was my fucking house. It was my damn sea.
Tentatively I slid one foot into the sand, then the other. I took off the conservative dress my daughter demanded I wear. There was a slight breeze, but the sun shone through the clouds. The fresh air shocked me awake. How had I missed this for so long? I deserved this, and my toddler would NOT be allowed to bully me back inside. Fuck her and the man she came from.
Mommy, why aren’t you wearing your dress?
I froze.
It’s too cold to be outside, Mother.
I turned around. She was standing at the back door. My little girl’s auburn hair looked dingy brown and greasy. Her eyes, which had already begun to grow beady, were scrunched into slits. Her face was wrinkled and oily and evil. Her teeth were visibly yellow, even at a distance. She was the spitting image of her father. I couldn’t pretend anything was normal anymore.
What are you? Why can’t I live? Give me my baby girl back.
At this, my daughter began sprinting toward me.
I am more my father than you thought. I am the revenge.
I ran sideways, around the house, hoping to get to my car before this man-child thing caught up to me. She was clearly much stronger and faster than a little girl, and I had to run toward her as I toward the house. Even still, I had longer legs. As I was rounding the corner of the house, I realized I didn’t have the keys to start my car once I got in. It would be a waiting game, and I’d lose. My daughter was following me exactly to the car, so when I sidestepped, she stumbled. I headed around to the back door, which was the only entrance that was unlocked. She bolted in before I could latch it.
Panicking, I grabbed a knife from the block where she couldn’t reach.
Come near me and I swear to god I will fucking murder you.
She responded with equal fierceness.
You did the same thing to him, didn’t you, bitch? You killed him. You killed my father. You tried to escape, and no one suspected a thing. But I knew. He told me.
She pinned me to the wall, with all the strength my husband had had. She pressed deeper and deeper on my torso. I suppose I was in a daze, because it wasn’t until I heard a pop that I thought to protect myself. I stabbed her, easily slicing into her skin like butter. Over and over and over again. Stab. Squish. Squelch. She tried to reach out for the knife, but I was, of course, much taller. After only a minute of struggle between us, my daughter was well and truly dead. I definitely had a broken rib, although that’s not nearly as important.
Since I had almost nothing of value, one little match made all of the mess go away. Just like it did at her father’s house. Before leaving town, I decided to finally take the swim I deserved and let the waves wash the blood away.