moved into his path.
So she stayed out of it.
"She was a monster. A fucking monster. She beat me senseless for the
hell of it as often as when she figured she had a reason."
"Oh, Ethan." Helpless to do otherwise, she reached out for him.
"Don't touch me now." He wasn't sure what he might do if he put his
hands on her just then. And it frightened him. "Don't touch me now," he
repeated.
She let her empty arms fall to her sides, battled back the tears that
wanted to come.
"She had to take me to the hospital once," he continued. "I guess she
was afraid I was going to die on her. That's when we moved from D.C. to
Baltimore. The doctor asked too many questions about how I fell down the
steps and gave myself a concussion and a couple cracked ribs. I used to
wonder why she didn't just leave me behind. But then, she got some
welfare money because of me and had a live-in punching bag, so I guess
that was reason enough. Until I was eight."
He stopped pacing and stood still, stood facing her. There was so much
rage inside him he could all but feel it searing his pores. And the
bitter rise of it stung his throat. "That was when she figured I'd
better start earning my keep. She'd been in the life long enough to know
where to go to find men who didn't much care for women. Men who would
pay for children."
She couldn't speak, even when she pressed a hand to her throat as if to
push words, any words, out. She could only stand there, her face
bone-white in the light of the rising moon and her eyes huge and
horrified.
"The first time, you fight. You fight like your life depends on it, and
part of you doesn't believe it's really going to happen. It just can't
happen. Doesn't matter that you know what sex is because you've been
around the ugly edge of it all your life. You don't know what this is,
can't believe it's possible. Until it's happening. Until you can't stop
it from happening."
"Oh, Ethan. Oh, God. Oh, God." She began to weep, for him, for the
little boy, for a world where such horrors could exist.
"She made twenty dollars, gave me two. And made a whore of me."
"No," Grace said, helpless and sobbing. "No."
"I burned the money, but that didn't change anything. She gave me a
couple of weeks, then she sold me again. You fight the second time, too.
Harder even than the first, because now you know, and now you believe.
And you keep fighting, every time, over and over through the same
nightmare until you just give up. You take the money and you hide it
because one day you'll have enough. Then you'll kill her and get out.
God knows you want to kill her maybe even more than you want to get
out."
She closed her eyes. "Did you?"
He heard the raspiness in her voice, took it for disgust rather than the
sick fury it was. A fury for him, underscored with a vicious hope that
he had. Oh, that he had.
"No. After a while it's just your life. That's all. Nothing more,