When Smiles Fade (6 page)

Pepper slammed the front door shut and walked into the living room.

“Valerie!” he yelled. “Bring me a fucking beer—and be quick about it!”

Valerie hurried off to the kitchen, boiling over with annoyance at Emma for having gone to their bitch neighbor and telling her all their personal business. She thought about waking her eldest daughter so that she could tell her what an idiot she was, but decided to stew on it some more and tell Emma in the morning.

Mrs. Tisdale kept the incident to herself, never telling her sons, but kept a closer eye on Emma and Gracie. It seemed to her as though Pepper Murphy didn’t beat his older daughter after she had confronted him, for the child was more upbeat and happy. Emma’s back was healing nicely and the honey treatments had worked like a charm. She and Gracie were spending an hour every day at Mrs. Tisdale’s after school. The old woman gave them homemade cake or cookies she baked for them every morning. It was her own way of doing what she could to make the girls feel loved and wanted.

Over the next three months, Pepper seemed to back off from beating his daughters. While he still slapped Emma around, he refrained from indulging in the brutal beatings she had come to dread, especially after Mrs. Tisdale had, unbeknownst to Emma, confronted him. She still hated her father with a passion, and the daily slaps and blows were an ever-present reminder to her of the evil spirit that had infested his heart, mind, and soul.

On the Tuesday before Christmas break, as the girls strolled down to Mrs. Tisdale’s house from the school bus stop, Emma was surprised to not see her neighbor waiting on her porch for them as usual.
She must be inside
, she thought,
busy getting a snack ready for us
. The girls climbed the porch steps and knocked at her door. One of Mrs. Tisdale’s sons answered it. He looked disheveled and lost.

“Is Mrs. Tisdale here?” Emma asked.

“No, Emma,” was the reply. “My mama died last night in her sleep. She had a heart attack. The doctor said it was massive. She probably didn’t see it coming.”

Emma stared at him. She willed him to take back the words he’d just spoken. She wasn’t prepared to lose the old woman. Rejecting the thought that Mrs. Tisdale was gone, she took a small step toward the front door, but the large man blocked her from entering. “No, baby. She’s gone,” he said gently, “Mama ain’t here no more.”

Emma’s eyes fixed on his for several moments, and time stood perfectly still, then she dropped to her knees at his feet and burst into tears. She began to rock back and forth. She felt as though someone had reached down her throat and ripped out her heart. Gracie dropped next to her, and the young sisters clung to each other for a long time, feeling utterly lost, as if they had been orphaned. Finally Emma looked up at Mrs. Tisdale’s son whose eyes also glistened with tears from the deep loss they all shared and feeling useless in his ability to ease their pain.

“Listen, girls,” he said after composing himself, “I know things ain’t right for you with your papa, but you need to stay strong. My mama tried to help you as best she could, but now it’s up to you. Mama loved you a whole lot and she’d want you to be brave. Now go on home and do the best you can. Make my mama proud of you.”

Then he stepped inside the house and gently closed the door, leaving the two girls drenched in sorrow. Emma felt a hollowness inside that she had never known before. Mrs. Tisdale had provided her with the courage to face her demon and now she was left to battle him alone. The emptiness in the pit of her stomach made her long for the comforting arms of the old woman who had stood by them through thick and thin. Emma’s deep sadness filled every space inside of her as she realized that she had just lost the only person who loved her, apart from Gracie. In many ways, Mrs. Tisdale had been the mother she never had.

After slowly coming to her senses, Emma took Gracie by the hand and went home to start dinner. When their parents came home, Emma told them what had happened to Mrs. Tisdale.

“Decrepit old fool!” Pepper gurgled through a swig of beer. “I couldn’t stand that old bat!” Then, as he noticed Emma’s grief over their neighbor’s death, her father started to laugh, loud and hard. The sound grated on Emma’s nerves and made her want to stab him with the blunt butter knife she was holding.

“You brainless moron!” her father taunted her. “What, did you think that ancient hag was going to live forever and protect you from me?”

Disgusted by the words he had spewed, Emma couldn’t help retorting, “How could you be so mean? She was the only person who ever cared about Gracie and me!”

The look of fury that came over her father’s face prompted Emma to try and flee from the kitchen and race up to her bedroom. But Pepper was already blocking the doorway. Emma recognized the familiar evil look on her father’s face. She suspected that with Mrs. Tisdale gone, things would go back to the way they had been earlier. As Pepper towered over her, she tried her best to stand tall against the bogeyman who threatened to destroy her. But her bravery was short-lived. His first blow was aimed at her temple.

She awoke a short while later on her bed, naked, face down, arms and legs tied to her bedposts.

Pepper waited until she was fully awake so that she could see him pull his belt from the bucket of water he had placed beside her bed. With each thrashing, he dipped the belt into the water, getting ready for the next lash. When he was done, he grabbed a handful of her long blond hair and hacked it off close to her head. She watched in a stupor as he scattered the strands across the room. As he finished, he sat on the floor next to her bed, breathing hard as he took several long swigs from his coveted bottle of vodka.

He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and struggled to his feet again. She watched as, swaying drunkenly, he began to move closer to her. When he was right next to her bed, Pepper unzipped his pants and stepped out of them. As he removed his boxers, her heart began to pound so hard in her chest she thought she, too, was having a heart attack. She considered calling out to Gracie for help, but stopped short, fearing that their father might harm her sister. Emma screamed in pain as Pepper climbed on top of her and raped her, his fingers digging roughly into the open flesh on her back. She knew her mother heard her screaming and had no hope that she would rescue her from the madman.

When he was done, Pepper rolled off the bed, got back into his clothes, and guzzled more vodka.

“You just remember who the boss is around here, girlie!” he warned. “You’re a fucking little whore! All you care about is making men do whatever you want. Well, we’ll see about that, you filthy pig!”

When he had left, Gracie snuck into their bedroom and untied her sister, who was in a state of shock and could barely speak. As the memory of what Pepper had just done to her plagued her thoughts, Emma raced over to the trashcan in the corner and vomited. Unaware of what had happened, Gracie looked at her, bewildered. She noticed that Emma’s beautiful hair had been hacked off from the back of her head.

“What the fuck did he do to your hair?” she asked her sister. Then she saw the trail of blood running down the inside of Emma’s legs. “Emma? Emma, what can I do? Oh, Emma, what did Daddy
do
to you?”

Emma remained silent. She had nothing to say and certainly didn’t want Gracie to know what had just happened. She felt humiliated and afraid. To make matters worse, Mrs. Tisdale was now dead, leaving her on her own to face this fiend and his new form of torture. Her breathing became labored and she felt dizzy. She couldn’t bring herself to believe what the devil had just done to her. Until that horrifying moment, Emma hadn’t imagined her father could cause more trauma in her life than he already had. Now she knew there was no end in sight—unless she herself did something about it. But what could she do to stop him?

Mrs. Tisdale and Gracie were the only friends Emma had ever known. Partly because she was an outsider among her peers and worked to keep a low profile, but also because the other kids just didn’t seem to like her. She wanted more than anything to have a friend her own age. She watched the other girls at school sharing their clothes and gossiping about which of the boys they liked. She longed for a relationship with someone she could laugh and share secrets with. Someone she could call her best friend.

Her classmates enjoyed tormenting her, because with her higher level of tolerance for bullying, acquired through the ordeals she endured at home, Emma seemed an easy target. The kids in her class picked on her because she wore all the wrong clothes and was socially inadequate. She sat by herself at lunch and was pummeled by morsels of food her schoolmates threw at her when the aides weren’t looking. Eventually she started eating her lunch in the girls’ bathroom. She locked herself in a stall and sat on the toilet seat, gobbling down whatever sparse meal she managed to bring to school.

As the months passed, Pepper’s abuse escalated in new and different ways. Emma’s detachment from the people around her grew. She felt it was taking forever for her to turn fourteen. Finally she did, and with her new birthday came a glimmer of hope. A woman and her daughter moved into Mrs. Tisdale’s old house. Brianna and her mother, Pam, had moved to Chain Street from New York City. Emma was really excited at the opportunity of getting to know someone from a place like New York. To her, it seemed like another country.

Brianna was bold and sassy, to say the least. Although she was tiny, standing five feet tall and weighing just one hundred pounds, she wasn’t afraid of anything and didn’t take shit from anyone. Emma liked that about her. Brianna had brown hair that fell to her shoulders and brown eyes that seemed able to cut through all the bullshit in the world. She was a ballsy fourteen-year-old who had grown up in New York with an alcoholic mother who made her money selling her body. She had learned to defend herself against predators and to tolerate her mother, who stumbled through life, drowning herself in liquor with men who were willing to pay for sex. Other than that, Brianna’s mother was harmless. In fact, Pam’s lifestyle had put Brianna in a position of power in her own house.

Brianna took to Emma right away, partly because she was so enamored by her ways, but mostly because she connected with Emma on so many levels. Brianna, who was quick-witted and capable of losing her temper in less than a second, could tell there was trouble brewing inside of her new friend. It wasn’t difficult to see; Emma looked the part—a torn-down, shattered girl.

They started eating lunch together at school. Emma was thrilled to have someone to sit with. After school, Emma and Gracie hung with Brianna at her house until it was time for Emma to go back across the street to Hell Central and cook for Satan and his wife. For Emma, being friends with Brianna was almost like having Mrs. Tisdale back again. She made Emma feel special. She said things that made her feel as if she wasn’t the piece of shit her parents always told her she was. She made her feel normal.

A month after Brianna moved into Mrs. Tisdale’s house, and after spending every free moment with her, Emma was granted her wish: she finally had a best friend.

After school one day, the two girls were sitting on the porch helping Gracie color in a poster board for a science project that was due the next day. Her crayons were in an old cigar box, stripped of their labels and broken into small pieces. The three of them were talking when Brianna lifted the blue crayon to her mouth and began scraping it against the inside of her lower teeth.

Emma looked on in horror. “What are you doing?” she said. “That’s
gross
!”

Brianna laughed. “Oh yeah? Have you ever tried it? I think it tastes great!”

Emma thought it a little odd, but went back to her chatter, simply accepting her friend as someone different from anyone she’d ever known and glad that she lived across the street from her now.

As the two sisters lay in bed that night, Emma told Gracie, “I think Mrs. Tisdale sent Brianna to us. She’s wild, isn’t she? I like her a lot.”

Gracie agreed with her, but deep inside, she was a little jealous that her sister liked another kid besides her. For the first time in her life, Emma had a friend and she basked in the fun they shared. The only thing that made their relationship uncomfortable for Emma was Brianna’s acute insight into people. She kept asking Emma to explain every fresh bruise and scar that appeared on her body. Brianna suspected that Pepper was a big asshole, and only three months into her friendship with Emma she had asked her, “So, Emma, what’s up with the bruises and shit, man? What the fuck is goin’ on?”

“Oh, I’m just clumsy, that’s all,” Emma had deflected somewhat weakly.

Brianna’s annoyance had flared at the obvious lie. “You’re not clumsy when you’re with me,” she declared. “How come you turn clumsy when you go home? Your father is a dick, isn’t he?”

Relieved that her friend had opened the door for her to trash Pepper, Emma, trusting Brianna, began to tell her everything. “See these marks on my hand? That’s where he pressed it down on a hot burner when I was eight. He has broken my bones so many times that I’ve lost count.” Then she explained in detail the horrifying Christmas Eve when Pepper had left her in the basement. “All these dark round marks are from the cigarette burns he gave me,” she explained, showing her arms and legs to Brianna. When she had finished, her friend sat back on the front step and looked at her.

“Who the fuck does your father think he is?” Brianna said indignantly. “You don’t have to put up with that shit!” She quieted down as she considered the life Emma was living, physically and verbally abused by her father on a daily basis. A mother who blamed all of his violence on her two daughters, telling both of them that it was their fault their father beat them. She addressed Gracie next. “So does that motherfucker do all the same stuff to you?”