Henry's Sisters. Cathy Lamb

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СКАЧАТЬ you think, Momma?” I sneered.

      That did it. Looking back, I’m surprised she didn’t pound me into the wall. She was not known for her restraint.

      “You think I’m a slut?”

      “I think you’re acting like one!”

      Janie whimpered.

      “You’re judging me, Isabelle Bommarito? You, who has never had to work a day in her life? You who has never had to worry about supporting four kids, on your own?” she shot back, her bright green eyes with the light in back of them filling with tears.

      Henry made a moaning sound in his bedroom.

      “Yeah, Momma, I am. That’s disgusting! You’re disgusting.”

      “Isabelle, stop—” Cecilia pleaded.

      Her whole body shook. “Then you do it, Isabelle. You support this family.”

      “I can’t, Momma, I’m fourteen!”

      Momma charged right up to my face. “Do you know why I have this job, you little snot? Do you have any clue? It’s because I had to take it. I don’t have any skills. I don’t have an education. I don’t have a husband. Waitressing, you obnoxious brat, did not pay our bills. Do you think you all were eating crackers for lunch because I wanted you to eat crackers? Do you think we had noodles all weekend because you liked them? We ate them because that’s all I could afford.”

      She pulled away from me as if she couldn’t bear to be near, then picked up the nearest item on a table—a clay imprint of my hand I’d made her as a kid—and hurled it across the room. It smashed a mirror and both the hand and the mirror shattered into a thousand pieces. I felt the blood draining from my face like liquid through a sieve.

      “Do you know how much Henry’s stomach medicine is each month?” she rasped out. “His asthma medicine?”

      I shook my head.

      I could hear Henry sobbing.

      She picked up another item. It was a ceramic sculpture Janie had made last year. It was supposed to be a dog. It looked like a snake with a porcupine back. It went flying over the couch and crashed into a lamp. The lamp toppled and broke.

      Janie moaned. Cecilia sucked in her breath.

      “Do you know how much I owe the hospital and doctors for Henry? Do you?” She named an enormous sum. “I will never, ever be able to pay that back, but they’re suing me anyhow. At least I can keep the lights on.”

      The third item that went flying was a framed photo of the four of us plus Momma.

      Janie covered her face with her hands and talked to herself.

      Cecilia trembled, red, flushed, scared.

      Momma shoved her face, twisted with anger, one inch from mine. “I hate stripping, you get that? I hate it. I do it for us. Even you, you judgmental, stupid child. I do it because you’re the only ones who can take care of Henry. I do it because he’s sick so much and needs one of us with him all the time. I don’t have a choice. Do you think I like taking off my clothes in front of leering, sick, gross men?”

      She screamed then, in frustration, in defeat.

      In humiliation.

      “Oh, Momma,” Janie wailed.

      “Momma, we love you—” Cecilia started.

      Henry shouted, “Help me! Help!”

      I crossed my arms. “There’s got to be a different way, Momma, than being naked.”

      I could still hear those words in my head. The biting tone, the condescension, the harshness.

      To this day I hate myself for that.

      “Get out of my sight,” she raged. “And don’t you ever open your snotty mouth and bring this up again!”

      “We should move,” I drawled. “Our momma is little more than a hooker.”

      That did it. Her arm arched, like the curve of a bow, whipping me across the face. It knocked me to the ground.

      “God, I think I hate you,” she seethed.

      “Momma—” I stayed on the ground, crushed, stunned by her words. Cecelia had stapled the back strap of my bra together and I felt it snap.

      Henry shouted again, “Help me! Help!”

      She cracked me again and my head whipped back. My neck would hurt for days, the bruises purple, then greenish-beige.

      “Get out! Get out!” she yelled. She moved toward me again and at first I crawled, then Cecilia and Janie hauled me up and yanked me to our room.

      Henry’s wails grew to a pitch. They softened only when Momma went to his room. In the darkness I could hear her soothing him, calming him.

      I knew she was hugging him until he went to sleep, like a mother bear protecting a cub.

      For a second I hated Henry.

      I wished Momma would hug me to sleep.

      I crawled to my closet and cried until my tears were dried up, shriveled, gone. Left in their place was a hollow void.

      I still have that void.

      The Bommarito girls were never invited over to anyone’s house or to a birthday party.

      Not once.

      People can be unforgiving and unaccepting, and that easily extends to the offender’s children. Especially when the mother is gorgeous and often naked, and when their husbands whisper out, “River,” when atop their wives, they’re not moaning about water.

      We never talked about Momma’s work again but we continued to fight our way through childhood, literally.

      Momma collapsed on a fairly regular basis into a downward, whirling spiral. When she did, essentials like food and electricity were often not there. Cecilia got rashes that wouldn’t go away and Janie had migraines, but we couldn’t afford the medication for either. Henry’s health was shaky.

      An incident with a lot of blood still replays in my head like a red, vibrating vision. Another time, with evil waiting on the deck of a dilapidated house, I thought we’d sunk to the bottom of fear and poverty. But there was more devastation working its way toward us, insidious, unstoppable, shattering.

      That time, though, it came for Henry.

       7

       A t five o’clock in the morning, my alarm went off. It sounded like a torpedoing bomb and I leaped out of bed. Too many nights in war-torn cities will set your feet on fire when awoken from a deep sleep by high-pitched buzzing.

      I sank back onto my bed and held my head until my heart pittered back СКАЧАТЬ