Mallicks_Back to the Beginning Read online

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  - ONE

  - TWO

  - THREE

  - FOUR

  - FIVE

  - SIX

  - SEVEN

  - EIGHT

  - NINE

  - TEN

  - EPILOGUE

  - RECIPE

  - DON'T FORGET!

  - ALSO BY JESSICA GADZIALA

  - ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  - STALK HER!

  Copyright © 2018 Jessica Gadziala

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for brief quotations used in a book review.

  "This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental."

  Cover image credit: Shutterstock .com/Lightfield Studios

  MALLICKS

  Back to the Beginning

  -

  Jessica Gadziala

  DEDICATION:

  To everyone who has always loved

  this fierce mama-bear and the man she

  shares her life with.

  Without you, this book never would have been written.

  And that would be a shame.

  ONE

  Helen

  I was five years old when I realized I was surrounded by monsters.

  It had been late, but summer late, when the sky wasn't dark yet even though it was after bedtime.

  Some noise woke me up, eyes blinking at the fluffy white clouds in the bright blue sky that my mom had painted there for me, illuminated in an otherwise dark bedroom by a pretty princess nightlight she left up for me even though Daddy told her I needed to get over my fear of the dark.

  I lay there for a long moment, heart beating a bit frantically, wondering if it was safe to swing my legs over the bed, if the monster spray Mommy spritzed under there before I went to sleep was still working.

  But then I heard it again, what woke me up.

  Daddy yelling.

  Daddy yelled a lot.

  Sometimes, it was hard to remember what his inside voice sounded like.

  And I didn't like when he yelled; it made my insides feel funny, even if he wasn't yelling at me.

  Mommy said to stay away from Daddy when he was grumpy.

  So I was just pulling my blankets up to my chin, figuring I could pretend to be asleep if he came in to yell at me about my tea set that I was pretty sure I left in the kitchen after I had a tea party with Helga, our housekeeper. She'd even made Earl Grey madeleines for us, my favorite. She told me that when I was big enough, she would show me how to make them for myself. She told me I could make them for my husband and babies someday.

  I told her that I didn't want a husband and babies. I was going to be a mermaid princess as soon as my tail came in.

  Daddy didn't like when my toys were left around.

  I really didn't want to be yelled at again.

  I always cried then he always yelled at me for crying which always made me cry harder.

  I wasn't going to get up to see what he was yelling about.

  But then I heard something else.

  I heard Mommy crying.

  She cried sometimes, but always pretended she didn't, told me the wind got in her eyes even when it wasn't windy out, or that a dandelion seed got stuck in her lashes, making them water because she was allergic to dandelions.

  But sometimes there weren't even any dandelions around, but the tears would pool in her eyes and pour out down her cheeks.

  But this was different.

  This was loud crying.

  Like when I lost my balance and hit my head on the edge of the table in the hall, cutting my forehead open.

  I forgot all about monsters as I threw off the blankets, swung my legs over the bed and into my slippers, the edge of my favorite white nightgown with little red roses on it skimming the tops of my feet as I rushed across my bedroom, worried that maybe Mommy had hit her head on the table too, that maybe she had gotten blood on it too, making Daddy yell at her like he had yelled at me about it.

  I could tell him that I would clean it up like Mommy had, so he would stop yelling.

  I knew where Helga kept the spray and rags.

  My slippers made a scratchy sound across the tile floor as I rushed toward the back of the house where the sound was coming from, finding two of Daddy's friends there because Daddy's friends were always around. Dressed in suits like they were going to church, but every day of the week like Daddy; I always thought it was because they must have all been very important people.

  They were standing outside in the hallway by Daddy's office where the yelling and crying were coming from.

  I was about to move forward, even though walking past them as they flanked the doorway made my belly wobble when suddenly, the noises got closer.

  Because Daddy was walking out into the hallway.

  Dragging Mommy by her hair.

  She must have fallen down.

  Her nose was all red like it was bleeding, and there were big bruises on her cheek.

  She was in the middle of trying to say something to Daddy, her words all funny because of the crying, "Fine. Fine. I won't go," she sobbed, her eyes suddenly finding me as Daddy dragged her past me toward the front of the house. "Baby, go back to bed. Go to bed."

  "You're crying. Did you get hurt?" I'd asked, hearing my voice shaking as I ran to try to keep up with them.

  "I'm fine. Mommy's fine. Go back to bed."

  "But..."

  "Go back to fucking bed, Helen," my Daddy had snapped. Roared, really. So loud that I felt the sound move through my whole body.

  I felt it then.

  The warm trickle down my legs that said I hadn't been able to hold it.

  He would yell at me about that too.

  But he was opening the door, and tossing Mommy out onto the front steps, reaching into his jacket, and pulling out something black.

  But why did he have one of my brother's toy guns?

  I didn't get a chance to ask as the door slammed, as my head turned to find my brother on the stairs.

  "If she was good, Daddy wouldn't have to hit her," he said in a practiced way, a way that said Daddy had said it to him - or around him - before.

  But he was older than me. Only by a year, but older. So he must have known what he was talking about.

  "Fucking pissed herself," I heard one of Daddy's friends laugh even as it happened.

  A big boom like thunder, but not.

  Loud enough to make me jump back.

  A shriek moved out of me when I felt frantic hands on my shoulders.

  "It's me, herzchen," Helga's voice said, soothing, yet frantic. Little heart, as she always called me. "Come on. Let's go get you cleaned up, okay?"

  That was what she did.

  And then put me back to bed.

  Sang me to sleep.

  I didn't see Mommy the next day.

  Or the next.

  I'd asked Daddy when he passed through the kitchen on his way out.

  But he just shot me a cold look. "Don't ask about that bitch again."

  And when Daddy talked like that, he meant it.

  Helga turned to me after the door slammed, wiping her big h
ands on a towel she always had hanging out of the pocket of her apron. She moved a few feet toward the doorway that led to the rest of the house, looking out, then coming toward me, brushing a hand down my dark hair.

  "Herzchen, your Mommy isn't coming back, okay? I know that is going to make you sad and scared. But I'm here for you, okay? You can come to me."

  "Instead of Daddy?" I'd asked.

  She had turned to look at the doorway again. "Yes, herzchen. Always, always come to me instead of your Daddy."

  "He yells a lot."

  "Yes, he does."

  "He yelled at Mommy. She was crying."

  "I know. I know. And that is why you will come to me. Helga never yells at you, does she?"

  "No," I'd agreed, smiling a little. "Michael says I have to be a good girl, so Daddy doesn't hit me."

  There had been a look on her face then, a look I didn't understand. But it almost seemed hard which was out of place in her soft face.

  "For now, baby, yes. You should try to be a good girl. Try not to make your Daddy mad."

  "For now only?"

  "Yes, for now. Until I tell you different, okay?"

  And with the only parental figure I had in my life, I had done what I needed to, even if I didn't fully understand.

  I'd agreed.

  It was years before I finally understood what happened to my mother.

  I had felt her absence every day of my young life, trapped in cold, lifeless walls with men who ignored or mocked me in equal turns, often finding Helga too busy to play with me the way my mother had, take me to the beach, the park, carefully braid my hair before bed.

  She'd been there for the big things.

  My school functions next to an empty seat for my father who never showed, whose presence I did crave even though I feared him more than loved him.

  She had pulled me aside when I was eleven to explain in awkward, painstaking detail that I was going to be a woman soon. I had blushed at the mechanics of it, at the explanations about how I was to handle it.

  But it was more than that.

  "You're going to be so beautiful Helen. Just like your Mama," she had told me, her eyes and voice sad at the idea even if I delighted at the prospect of looking like my mother. Or, at least, what I remembered of her at that point because there wasn't a single photo of her in the house. Helga didn't even have one for me. My father had wiped her away like she had never existed in the first place.

  "Thank you."

  "No. No, don't thank me. This will be your curse. To be so beautiful. In this house. It is full of ugly men with ugly hearts. And now, now they will start to look at you. They will look at you, and they will think things. And those things you don't want them to think."

  Young, naive, I hadn't understood the implication. I wouldn't. Not for another few years anyway.

  "You listen to me. You keep your head ducked down when you see your father's friends. You don't look at them or talk to them. And you don't ever get stuck in a room with them. Okay?"

  Again, just like when I had been a confused little girl, she was all I had. And even if I didn't understand, I had agreed.

  I was fifteen the first time I felt a hand grab at me, sinking into the soft, rounded flesh of my butt cheek by a man old enough to be my grandfather as I passed him by in the hall on my way to the kitchen to help Helga with dinner because she had broken her wrist, a fact she was keeping from my father out of fear of losing her job.

  I don't have papers anymore, Helen, she had told me, worry dripping from the words.

  I knew my place.

  I knew my roll in this house.

  Invisible.

  That was what was expected of me.

  More and more as time went by.

  I existed.

  My basic needs were met.

  But my father did not want to see me, didn't want to hear my problems, didn't want to have anything to do with me.

  I knew Helga wanted me to shuffle on, ignore it, avoid the touch, but the argument as well.

  I couldn't tell you where the urge came from.

  I couldn't say what had overcome me in that moment.

  Years of pent-up frustrations, maybe.

  Or the understanding, now that I was older, what that hand wanted.

  And it wasn't just to touch my behind.

  I had put up with a lot under this roof.

  I decided right then and there that this? Yeah, this was not one of those things I would merely put up with.

  In fact, I wouldn't put up with it at all.

  To hell with the consequences.

  "If you want to leave this house with that hand intact, I suggest you take it off my ass," I had snapped, tone venom, pure, liquid death.

  He'd snatched his hand back immediately, looking taken aback like he had expected me to give into him immediately, give him whatever he wanted.

  Maybe he would tell my father I had threatened him.

  Maybe he would beat me, drag me through the house like he had my mother when she had tried to tell him she was leaving him all those years ago.

  Maybe that would be my fate.

  I'd spent my life cowering, terrified of his anger directed at me.

  I couldn't describe what had changed.

  Those hormones, herzchen, Helga had told me just a week before when I had been surly all morning.

  Maybe that was it.

  Maybe it was just my emotions being all over the place.

  Maybe it was just part of growing up.

  But I was done being afraid.

  I had braced myself for it.

  The backlash.

  The call to his office.

  The yelling.

  But it never came.

  That night, I had served dinner, claiming Helga had a finicky dessert in the oven that needed to be watched over, so he didn't think of anything as amiss.

  We - me, my father, and my brother - had sat down to eat.

  And I felt it.

  My father's gaze on me.

  Long and penetrative enough to make my head swivel in that direction, finding him watching me as I had expected, brows low and together, like I was a puzzle in which the pieces were not fitting together.

  I knew then that he knew.

  What had happened.

  But he said nothing.

  At least not about that.

  "Your birthday is next week, isn't it?" he'd asked when he caught me watching him watch me.

  I had to bite back a remark about how a father should know such things, and nodded instead.

  "You'll need a car," he had gone on. I had said nothing, worried that he was playing some cruel joke on me. "You can have the Firebird," he had added, making my brother open his mouth to object.

  The Firebird was, after all, his car.

  And, honestly, if there was someone I didn't want to get on the bad side of, it was my brother. I would turn down the offer before I would let that happen.

  Where my father just wanted to ignore me, my brother wanted to hurt me. Whenever and however he could. Mostly with words these days, though he had been much more violent when we had been kids.

  "It's time for an upgrade," he told my brother. "Did you see those Corvettes down in Hadlet?"

  So my brother was getting a brand new car, and I was getting his cast-offs.

  I should have been angry.

  But all I felt was relief.

  A car.

  A car meant freedom.

  A car meant a way out of this town when I was finally old enough.

  And until then, a car meant I could get a job without having to worry about walking home at night.

  My father had money.

  We lived in a giant house on sprawling grounds directly across from the beach.

  But we lived in the band end of Alberry Park. Which meant it was barely safe to walk around in the daylight, let alone night.

  "You wouldn't mind Helen getting the car, right?"

  "Not at all," my brother had said, bu
t his smile was wicked.

  A week and a half later, I got the car. Caked in mud with tree sap already starting to eat away at the paint, and a giant dent in the back right fender, rust taking over fast.

  He had expected disappointment. Being one for appearances much like our father, he couldn't grasp that I couldn't have cared less if it was Dad's car from when he was my age so long as it drove.

  Except, of course, I didn't get freedom when I turned eighteen like I had planned on.

  Helga got sick.

  Something chronic and debilitating, making her take to bed for days or weeks on end, terrified all the while of losing her job.

  Being the only mother I could even remotely remember, I had put my plans for escape on a back burner to step into her place when she was too unwell to do the work herself.

  Two years passed.

  And something was coming.

  I could feel it in the air.

  My ignorance of my father's dealings was long gone, replaced with a bone-deep understanding of what, exactly, his business was.

  Drug dealer.

  My father was a drug dealer.

  It explained the nice house, the new cars, the expensive dinners and furniture and the never-ending supply of new cufflinks and watches, all that cost more than I had saved in working at the local diner four nights a week since I was sixteen, and summers pulling a day shift at the concession stand on the boardwalk. And more recently, serving at a local bar.

  It also explained the guns.

  The ones no one even bothered to conceal around the house now that my brother and I were grown.

  And the white powder on random surfaces - the console table in the hallway, the bathroom counters, the edge of my father's desk.

  Cocaine.

  My father sold cocaine.

  And my father was a very dangerous man.

  Not just because he had murdered my mother right outside the door from where I was standing listening when I was a little girl.

  No.

  But because I heard that sound more times than I could say over the years.

  The boom I mistook for thunder at five, tried to convince myself was a car backfiring as a teen, but knew better as an adult.