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 down and I could breathe.
I showered and pulled on jeans and a V-necked black sweater, the morning so still and cold outside, I felt ice cubes in my gut.
I met Janie downstairs. She was wearing a pink skirt, white blouse, and white tennis shoes, with her hair in two braids wrapped around the back of her head to complete her frumpiness.
“You look like a cupcake.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Nothing wrong with a clean, crisp outfit.”
“You look like a clean, crisp cupcake.”
She put her nose up a fraction. “I like my clothes.”
“Me, too. Tasty.”
“Funny. You’re hilarious, Isabelle. Hilarious.” She stomped toward the door. “We don’t all want to dress with suggestiveness!”
I took a gander down my shirt. There wasn’t that much cleavage showing.
Before we left the house, Janie checked the stove and the iron and the hair dryers. She locked the front door, got in the car, then ran back and rechecked all her checking, locked the door, tapped it four times, and ran to the car.
“Tap tap tap,” I sang out, starting her Porsche.
“Shut up, Isabelle. At least I don’t lay naked on my counters when I’m upset.”
“I lay naked on my counters when I’m happy, too, so there, tap tap tap.”
“You’re never happy, and at least I don’t show people in skyscrapers my boobs.”
“They like my boobs.”
“At least I don’t drink Kahlúa for breakfast.”
“Kahlúa is yummy.”
She put on Vivaldi.
We drove toward town, no one else up and around at this time because they are sane. The sun even seemed tired, the golden globe slowly rising, as if she was getting out of bed and only now starting to slough off her hangover and begin thinking about the colors she would spread across the morning sky.
Trees arched over the road and I saw familiar homes, remembering who lived where when I was in high school. Nice kids and mean kids and kids who got in trouble and kids who were trouble.
It had been a long time since I was here for any length of time. I had run far and long in my work as a photographer. I’d lived for years in France, Israel, Lebanon, and London, with stints in various war-torn, war-crushed, war-raped, war-demoralized countries in the serenity of Africa and the sweet tranquility of the Middle East.
Seeing people’s bodies blown apart in different directions—a foot here, a head there—because a few men have decided they can’t sit down at a table and figure things out isn’t pleasant.
Arriving in a village that’s been obliterated by a tsunami isn’t, either, with mothers screaming that they can’t find their children and children screaming they can’t find their mothers. Running from the Janjaweed as they swish the jungles with their machetes is a heart-stopper. Famine offers up an especially lovely glimpse of how other people wait on the porch of death, barely able to stand, their stomachs swollen as if they’ve ingested a watermelon whole.
Strange diseases that we never see here thrive in other countries, their symptoms cruel, debilitating.
I’d photographed all of it.
And it was actually here that I’d come to love photography.
There was a photography class at school and only nerds took it. I took it because I thought it would be easy.
The teacher was a nerd, too. His name was Mr. Sands. He had a friend named Mr. Reynolds.
We all knew they were gay.
I thought they were the nicest men, besides Father Mike, that I’d ever met. Mr. Sands gave me a camera and told me how to take photos. I used to go with Mr. Sands and Mr. Reynolds to take photos in the mountains and by the river. Cecilia and Janie tagged along, too.
From an old, battle-weary perspective, I now realized they “got”