When Smiles Fade (2 page)

Emma remained sprawled on the floor, paralyzed by the depth of her own despair, her eight-year-old mind trying to recover from what her father had just done to her. Then she scolded herself for failing to wash that one dirty fork that Valerie had left in the sink when she had gotten home from school. Maybe if she had washed it, none of this would have happened, she tried to rationalize, looking for some reason why she deserved such harsh punishment. She sat staring at her blistered, deformed palm. The pain the burn caused was only secondary to her overwhelming despair at being unloved.

This year of her life was when Emma became acutely aware of the possibility that Pepper might actually kill her. The years prior had been hard for her, but now that she was getting older her thoughts and senses were on high alert and she could no longer deny them. She grappled with finding different ways to behave that would stop the abuse, not because she was afraid of dying, but because she was afraid to leave Gracie alone with her parents.

After Pepper had burned her hand on the stove, she did everything in her power to fly below his radar. She made sure to clean the house after school every day and took special care in making his meals. But nothing lightened his fury. It was a Wednesday night and Emma was sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework after she had finished cleaning up from dinner. Her father staggered back into the kitchen to get himself another beer. He opened the can and took a long, hard swig. His head hung as if it were too heavy for his neck to hold as he eyed her with disgust. “I don’t know why you bother with dat school shit; you’re never gonna ’mount to nuttin’ no matter how hard you try,” he babbled through his drunken daze.

Emma looked up at him, her heart pounding in her chest. “My math teacher thinks I’m really smart. She told me that if I wanted to, I could be an accountant someday,” Emma said, hoping to make him feel proud of her.

Pepper stomped over to the table and picked up one of her pencils and thrust the point into her forearm. The pencil stood at attention as she looked on in shock. She quickly yanked the pencil out of her arm and ran to the sink to wash off the blood with soap and water. “See dat! Now you’re not so worried ’bout pretending like you understand anything in those books of yours. Let that be a lesson not to leave your stuff all over my kitchen table. Now get this shit out of here!” he bellowed.

Pepper was tireless in his violent treatment of Emma. To her, the slaps, punches, and kicks came from a bottomless pit of hate that burrowed deep in her father’s soul. The endless bruises he left on her made Emma feel hopeless and ashamed. Alone in the bathroom, Emma would study the wounds and scars that Pepper gave her. She was consumed by her sense of loneliness and lack of power to change her circumstances. She was completely at his mercy and knew he could do whatever he wanted to her, regardless of how broken she became.

It was a warm morning in August and the two girls were jumping rope in the backyard. Pepper got annoyed because they were making too much noise while he was nursing a burning hangover with vodka. He flung open the back door and stood holding his aching head. “You two shut the fuck up. You hear?”

They immediately went silent and stood perfectly still. He turned and went back into the house, and Emma was lulled into a false sense of security as they began running through the yard, playing tag. Moments later, the rotted screen door burst open and Pepper barreled down the cement steps into the yard. He grabbed Emma under her arm and pulled her into the house. She began to plead with him, knowing she was in for something terrible. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she cried, “I swear, we’ll be quiet. OK, Daddy? Please don’t hurt me,” she cried.

Pepper grabbed the soft flesh under her upper arm and pinched as hard as he could. Emma went to her knees as she tried to get him to release his hold. He dragged her into the living room where there was an old wooden trunk. “You want to disobey me? Well then, there is a price for that,” he said calmly.

Pepper pushed the glass vase filled with dusty plastic flowers off the chest. It slammed to the floor and shattered into a million pieces. Emma’s eyes bulged as she frantically wondered what he was going to do to her. As her father lifted the lid to the trunk, she shrunk away from him trying to run and escape. He lifted her around the waist, her feet flailing as she tried to break away from his tight grip. Her movements made it impossible for him to get her legs into the trunk. Growing more irrational by the moment, he clamped his teeth on her shoulder until he could taste her blood in his mouth. Then he twisted her arm behind her back until he heard the pop as it dislocated at the shoulder. With excruciating pain in both shoulders she stopped fighting and sank into the trunk. After he slammed the lid shut and locked it, he left her and went to find Gracie. Ignoring her own painful injuries, Emma’s gut twisted as she heard her father slapping Gracie around the living room.
I wish I were a superhero
, she thought,
so that I can break out of here and help my sister
.

Inside the trunk her body was twisted in an unnatural position. Her legs were folded at the knees behind her and her torso was bent at the waist so that her nose touched her knees. There was not enough room in the small space for her to reposition herself, and after a couple of hours her limbs went numb.

After the first twenty-four hours had passed and he hadn’t let her out, all she wanted was to die. She reveled in the idea of leaving her measly existence and finally being free of her tormentor, believing that death was a much more appealing option than her current living conditions.

During her imprisonment, every so often her father would flip the trunk on different sides, smashing her dislocated shoulder and twisted body against the walls of the wooden box. Two days later, when he finally opened the lid and let her out, Emma could barely walk.

She literally crawled, with Gracie’s help, over to the sofa where she lay for another four hours. Finally she managed to get to her feet. As she headed toward the foot of the stairs to go up to her room, Pepper put his foot in front of her. Unsteady on her feet, she crashed down onto the floor. She broke her fall with her hands before her face hit the floor and she scurried like a wounded animal to get away from her father. He stood over her and began to laugh. He laughed so hard that tears streamed down his face as his daughter watched him, humiliated and defeated.

Then, without warning, her stomach twisted into a tight knot as disgust for her father overcame her anguish. She felt a surge of hatred so profound that no one could stop it from taking complete control of her. It shook her entire being. Emma grappled with an idea so horrifying that it took her a while to accept it: she now believed that her father was the devil himself in a man’s body. This conviction would mark a new beginning for her, eventually determining who she would become. The seed had been planted.

It was a cold November night a little more than a year later and the temperature had dipped into the low thirties. The family was having dinner in the small, dimly lit kitchen. Valerie’s eyes were fixed on her plate as Pepper grumbled about his boss and how much he despised the man. That evening, like most others, his drinking had started before he even got home and only ramped up the moment he walked through the front door.

Emma had just spooned some peas onto Gracie’s plate. The six-year-old reached for her glass of water and accidentally caught her father’s freshly opened can of beer with her small arm. Pepper erupted. His face looked like a twisted mass of bumpy, pulsating flesh as the veins in his temples stood out and he turned bright red. Clenching his fists, he put them up against Gracie’s dainty face and yelled, “You fucking little
whore
! You
spilled
my beer! You’re an
idiot
, just like your sister!”

Without warning, he yanked the terrified child out of her chair and flung her down on the floor. Before she could recover from the shock, he bent down and slapped her in the face, sending her flying across the kitchen floor. Her body seemed weightless, like a rag doll, as she tumbled head over heels and landed on the other side of the room. Pepper trudged over to her, buried his fingers in her hair, and closed his fist over a handful of strands. Then he pulled her upright until she was standing. Gracie’s face twisted with pain as she let out a blood-curdling shriek.

Her father ground his nose against hers. “You
fucking
maggot!” he yelled. “I
never
wanted you! You belong to that
stupid
bitch over there!” He gestured toward Valerie. As Pepper released his daughter’s hair, she fell back to the floor.

Stunned by what had happened, Emma ran to her little sister. She desperately hoped her mother would protect them, even though Valerie had proven time and again that she wouldn’t. She now snapped at her father. “Why don’t you leave her alone? You bully!” she screamed.

Outraged by what he considered to be the ultimate form of disrespect, Pepper snatched a frying pan from the top of the stove and whacked the side of her face with it, knocking her unconscious. When Emma woke up, she found herself lying on the cement steps that led from the back of the house into their small yard. Dressed only in the jeans and sweater she had worn to school that day, she felt the cold seeping into her bones, clearing the cobwebs of confusion that had clouded her mind. Emma picked herself up and knocked softly on the back door.

Pepper, who had been waiting for her to wake up, immediately flung open the door, startling her. “You think you’re smart?” he snapped. “You think you can talk to me like that?
Nobody
tells me what to do in my house! Tonight, you’ll sleep outside and learn
never
to talk back to me, girl!”

After he had slammed the door in her face, Emma huddled into herself, trying to keep warm. The wind slashed through her worn clothing, increasing her desperation to find shelter. Afraid to go too far, she decided to seek refuge on their front porch. There, she remembered, was a broken down sofa that had never made its way to the trash.

Mrs. Tisdale, her elderly neighbor who lived across the street, was looking out her window as Emma made her way to the front of their row home. The old woman watched the child move slowly up the front porch, trying to step as lightly as possible so that the creaky boards wouldn’t betray her presence. Then her eyes widened in alarm as the little girl crawled under the worn cushions on the sofa and completely vanished from sight.

Mrs. Tisdale kept her eyes glued to the sofa for more than fifteen minutes before she put on her coat and went across the street to find out what the hell was going on. She approached Emma with great care, so as not to startle her, and gently lifted the cushion covering her face. “Child,” she murmured, “why you out here in the cold? Where’s your mama?”

Her eyes red from crying, Emma replied, “My father is making me sleep outside tonight. He was hitting my little sister and I yelled at him to stop. So he hit me with a pan and put me outside. This is my punishment.”

“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit if a little child like you is gonna sleep out here in the cold!” the elderly neighbor said in a huff. “Come on, baby, you sleepin’ at my house tonight.”

Emma’s body stiffened with resistance. “No, Mrs. Tisdale,” she protested, “I have to stay here so I can get up in the morning and get out back before my father goes to work. If he finds out I didn’t stay on the back steps during the night, I don’t know what he’ll do to me.”

Mrs. Tisdale gave her concern due consideration. “Okay then,” she conceded, “you’ll come sleep at my house and we’ll set an alarm so that you can get up before he does. That way, you can go back on those steps before that bastard goes off to work. okay, baby?”

Comfortable with Mrs. Tisdale’s proposition, Emma dug herself out from beneath the cushions and followed her across the street. Once inside her own house, Mrs. Tisdale wrapped Emma in a warm blanket and made her a steaming cup of cocoa. The chocolaty milk warmed her insides, filling her with a sense of security. Emma was grateful for Mrs. Tisdale’s kindness as she lay, warm and cozy, on her neighbor’s sofa waiting for sleep to provide a temporary release from her life.

This was the first real encounter that Emma had with Mrs. Tisdale. From here on the relationship grew, and over time, the girl came to rely on her for the support she needed to make it through each treacherous day. Mrs. Tisdale was well aware of how Pepper treated his two daughters. As a result, she tried to compensate by showering the children with the love their parents couldn’t seem to find for them. Mrs. Tisdale failed to understand how Valerie could allow her husband to beat their own children. If it were her husband, the old lady told herself, she would surely have set things right.
Hell
, she thought,
I’m gonna try my best to set things right and I ain’t even married to that no-good dirty, rotten bastard.

A voluptuous black woman, Mrs. Tisdale had short salt-and-pepper hair that fell about her head in large curls. Her eyes were such a light brown that people mistook her eye color for hazel. Her bright smile lit up her jolly face, and her hands, although extremely large, gave Emma tender comfort when she needed it most. Mrs. Tisdale’s loving ways filled the girl with joy, and when the old woman laughed, a rumbling sound rose from deep within her belly, making the child’s heart soar and offering her a temporary reprieve from the darkness that enveloped her life.

From the time she had gotten to know Emma, Mrs. Tisdale often brought up the issue of Child Protective Services, explaining to the girl that they offered a way out of her predicament. The old lady wanted to alert them so they could take Emma and Gracie away from their brutal father, but the child had pleaded with her to keep the secret. Not understanding how the system worked, Emma feared that they would take her away and leave Gracie at home to become the new target of Pepper’s abuse.