۲۷-۰۳-۹۴، ۱۲:۵۸ ب.ظ
Naomi shuffled into the kitchen, eyelids too heavy to lift. Thank God she’d remembered to set the timer on the coffee maker last night, despite everything. She yawned and winced at the pain this caused. Damn, but Wally had clocked her good. First time he’d ever hit her and he sobbed in her arms for the rest of the night, swearing it would be the last. He made all the usual excuses men make; it was the booze, it was the stress of slow business at his tattoo parlor, it was the way his Daddy treated his Mama. Naomi had whispered her forgiveness, had accepted his drunken caresses as a peace offering. Still, it hurt like hell. Her jaw was swollen and locked and she couldn’t open it more than an inch. There was a bottle of muscle relaxants in the bathroom cabinet left over from the time Wally threw his back out. Maybe they would help.
Naomi poured her coffee. She glanced out the window over the sink which looked out upon the backyard. What she saw there was so terrible it did not immediately register on her slightly hungover mind. She did a goggling double-take, the carafe slipping from her hand. It exploded on the linoleum floor, showering her bare feet with scalding black coffee and slicing shards of hot glass. She didn’t feel it at all.
Wally swung from a high branch on the white oak tree in the backyard, a kicked-away lawn chair beneath his feet. The clothesline about his neck was so taut Naomi could almost hear it, vibrating like a plucked guitar string. Wally’s face was black and purple. His eyes were open, surprised and bloody red, but they didn’t see anything. Not anymore. He was naked to the waist and the thorny-crowned Christ tattoo over his heart was splattered now with real blood, more vivid red than the faded ink. His tongue swelled from his mouth and there was a dark wet patch at the front of his jeans. He was swollen there, too.
“Oh God,” Naomi moaned. “Not again.”
Her husband was not the type of man to hang himself in guilt any more than her own Daddy had been. Naomi knew what had really happened, to both of them, though it was too awful to admit into the day-lit chambers of her mind. The truth resonated in a darker recess of her consciousness, and here Naomi could not pretend surprise.
It was Magda’s tree. Naomi’s great-grandmother. She had been murdered beneath its branches; her black throat slit for the crime of demanding that her white lover acknowledge the daughter she’d borne him. Her blood had soaked into its roots. The same blood flowed in Naomi’s veins, though it had been diluted by three generations of white fathers. The taste for bad-boy white men was an inherited weakness. Naomi’s own Daddy had been a singer in a rock band, who had beaten her Mom bloody blue until Magda put an end to it.
Naomi’s hands went to her belly, to the life growing there. The ultra-sound had told her what she’d already known. She was having a girl. Naomi smiled with the knowledge that her daughter would be kept safe. No man could ever harm her, as long as she was raised in the protective shade of the Magda tree.
و دیگر آسمان را نخواهی دید...