I wouldn’t find out that day because my father only sliced it fluidly across my braid.
My hair unraveled and hung shoulder-length. He threw my twelve inches of braid into the trash and the knife into the sink.
The sounds of the metal hitting ceramic and the knife ricocheting forcefully around the sink drew my focus to the sharpness of the blade. How quickly it sliced through every strand of the hair. Gone, it was all gone.
"Don'tblubber in my house," my father yelled andslammed his open hand upside the back of my head. I flew forward, seeingblack. Just barely, Icaught myself on the countertop.
The blade was closer now, my teeth just inches from the side of the sink.
My father, such a smart, successful man. People said we were lucky to have him. He’d saved my mother, Tala, from that home she’d lived in on the reservation.
That home though was my mother’s sanctuary. Father didn’t let her talk much about it but she shared with me how it saved her when her own mother vanished. One night, her mother went to work and the next she was gone like a beautiful star burning out in the galaxy.
"Go clean up your mother. She's in the office," he grumbled as he pulled the keys from his slacks and threw them at me.
I stood there wondering what he would do if I said no. If I didn’t back down and pushed him just a little further.
My father, such a smart man. He never hit us where it would leave a mark for anyone to see.
His eyebrows raised.
My shoulders sank.
Control was my friend and my enemy. I hated it for making me a coward and loved it for saving my mother and me from more pain.
My mother laid like a wounded animal on the floor when I opened the door. I hurried to her and smoothed her hair back. I slid my hands over her face as she cried and ran her fingers through my hair. “Oh, my little dreamer. All your dreams have been cut away.”
Yes, every strand of my hair held another dream, another identity, another hope. My mother taught me those sorts of things about our heritage behind closed doors when my father wasn’t around to listen. How the wind whispered to me to make me strong, how the water could wash away most anything, how my hair held a piece of me that connected me to every part of those before me, to her. A part of me I would never ever get back.
She cried for my loss.
I cried when I saw what he’d done to her ribs.
She cleaned up my hair that night as best she could.
I cleaned up her back and ribs.
Nights like those, we were the closest and furthest from each other. No other person in the world could know exactly what we were going through in those moments. We were also so lost in our own nightmares, we were too scared to speak them out loud to one another.
I always thought our bond was indestructible, a desolate pair who would always make it through the worst trauma together.