“Harry can’t,” I say. “He’s already on his way back to Portland with his dad so they can get his car running—I’ll call Isaac.”

I stand here, waiting for Uncle Carl to say something, or even just show an expression that’ll give me the go-ahead. I’m too anxious and feel like I need to leave right now.

Uncle Carl thinks about it for a second longer and finally starts nodding. “Alright,” he says, “see if Isaac will go with you.”

I hug Uncle Carl tight and rush upstairs. As I’m re-packing my duffle bag, tossing whatever clean clothes I happen to see first down inside of it, I consider Isaac again and start to think that taking him with me isn’t such a great idea, after all.

Isaac would kill Jeff. He already hates him just for being what he is and what he put me through growing up.

No, I can’t take Isaac.

Things just got a lot more complicated.

But I don’t have time for the phone call, trying to explain to Isaac that this is something I need to do alone, or risk him rushing to the airport to stop me, or force himself onto the plane.

I just need to go and I need to do it now before anyone else finds out that I’m leaving and it gets around to Isaac.

Beverlee comes into my room. “Did you talk to him?”

I hesitate and look away, throwing my toothbrush back inside my bag so I’m not looking her in the eyes when I say, “He didn’t pick up his phone, but I’ll be alright. It’s probably better I do this by myself anyway.”

Beverlee looks wary; she knows I’m lying to her.

“I’ll take you to the airport,” she says, smiling faintly and I thank her by smiling back for not only her faith in me, but also her discretion.

When the plane touches down in Georgia, I can hardly contain myself in the seat waiting for them to let us off. And when they finally do, I step off to the instant feel of familiarity. I lived in Georgia all my life and no matter how long I’m away from it, it will always feel somewhat like home.

I catch a cab to Athens Regional and it lets me off in the front under the hospital’s towering glass walls. It’s definitely going to be strange seeing my mom again after nearly a year and not one phone call from her, but I don’t care how much she’s hurt me, she’s my mom and I’ll always love her.

I enter the hospital through the Emergency area with my purse and the small duffle bag over the same shoulder. The woman behind the counter gives me directions to the part of the hospital where inpatients are housed. I follow a series of hallways that all look alike and then find an elevator to take me up to the second floor where I just end up walking in circles until I stop and ask a housekeeper for directions the rest of the way. “All the way to the end of the hall. Swing a left and it’s right down that way, darlin’.” I thank her and walk a little faster. It’s nice to hear that familiar southern accent I’m so used to. Mainers have such a distinct accent next to the southern drawl.

Finally, I come upon the room. I stand outside the large beige door with my hand barely touching the silver lever knob. I’m hoping that Jeff isn’t inside because I need to visit my mom without having to see his face, or smell the thirty-year’s worth of vomit-inducing beer emanating from his pores.

He needs to be rotting in jail right now, but I know it’s not likely.

I pull the handle down and the door clicks open.

“How’d y’know I was here?” my mom says in a strained voice as I come around the corner.

From the waist down she’s covered in a heavy blue knit hospital blanket. Her hair looks freshly washed; odd against the rest of her horrific features that I instantly want to shut my eyes to, but I can’t do anything but stare across at her. My heart is breaking and I’m motionless, afraid at first to walk the rest of the way to her bedside. Her eyes are so swollen the skin can be mistaken for blisters filled with blood. The left side of her face, her chin, and upward along her jaw, is bigger than the right. I can’t tell if she’s biting down on gauze like when you get teeth cut out, or if it’s just the swelling.

I let a long, heavy breath out slowly through my parted lips and walk toward her, taking a seat in the chair next to her bed, putting my purse and duffle bag on the floor at my feet. I reach out to hold her hand, but she moves it, laying it across her stomach. She looks away from me.

“You don’t need to be here, Adria,” she says in a chagrined, distant voice. “You don’t need to see me like this.”

I look her over carefully, warily, scanning the rest of the damage even though I can’t stand to see her this way.

I hate that man.

This is the worst it’s ever been. Both of her arms are pockmarked by purple and grayish-blue bruises. There’s still blood in her nose and I wonder if it’s from before, or if she’s having nosebleeds again. The last time Jeff hit her in the face, her nose bled off and on for a week. There’s an IV machine on the other side of the bed, but they must’ve removed it recently because there are no little tubes running from it to her, and I notice the bend of her arm has been taped with gauze and dressing tape.

Her swollen head falls to the side so she can look at me, but she doesn’t make eye contact. She stares toward the wall instead.

“How did this happen, Mom?”

I know how it happened, but I want her to say it. I want her to tell me the truth because if she does, if she can find the courage to admit it, it could mean that she’s finally had enough. And I would do anything to help her. All of my savings, the money I have left on the credit card Aunt Bev gave to me—I would use it all to move her away from Jeff, even if I had to find her a place near me in Maine. And if it came down to it, I would ask Uncle Carl and Aunt Bev to let her stay with us just long enough to get her on her feet.

My mom still can’t look at me.

“Oh, I was bein’ stupid; you know me and the outdoors.”

My heart sinks, but I just go along with it. I don’t want to upset her.

“Well, tell me what happened,” I say softly, feeling as though I’m just lying to myself for the sake of her mental well-being. “Where were you and who were you with?”

She looks fully at me now, letting her face rest against the pillow and I see a faint smile hiding in her eyes, feeling more confident that she has successfully misled me. She tries to smile more noticeably, but her face is so swollen that the slightest lifting of her lips causes discomfort.

“Me and Jeff,” she says, “We went out to Beezo’s place to camp for a few days. You know how them bluffs are, honey. I never did like doin’ that crazy stuff, but Jeff talked me into it. I jumped off the smallest one, but just because it’s small don’t mean nothin’.”

I know she’s lying. I’m used to it.

It takes everything in me to hold back the things I want to say, the things I’ve said to her so many times over the years she’s been with him. But as I look at her, I see nothing but resignation in her eyes, the same kind you see in the eyes of someone who has simply given up. They smile and seem at peace, completely accepting of the death that’ll soon claim them because they have no more fight left in them.

My mother lost her fight long ago. Only now, as I sit next to her and brush her dark, chocolate-colored hair just like mine away from her forehead, do I see it.

And I can’t fight her anymore because…when it comes to this, like her, I have no fight left.

Though my heart is shattered by my mom for the last time, I can’t do anything but let the pain and disappointment run its course.

“Where’s Alexandra?”

I look up at the television mounted on the wall and stare at the six o’clock news, watching the weatherman’s lips move as he points at Fulton County, smiling at the obvious rain-free radar.

I swallow the painful lump in my throat and say, “She’s with her new friends mostly these days.”

“Oh,” she says and her voice trails as if lost in some conflicting thought. “Well, what have you been doing? Is Carl treating you good?” I can easily detect how much pain she’s in when every few words the corners of her swollen eyes crinkle and she pauses to let the pain move through her.

“I’ve been great,” I say smiling down at her, hoping that maybe words of my life not being as bad as hers might make her feel better. “And Uncle Carl is wonderful. But he’s in a wheelchair now.”

“Really?” she says and it stings a little that she never knew about this sooner, that she has given up even her sense of caring and concern for family, for Jeff. “How’d that happen?”

“Car accident. Last November.”

“Oh,” she says again, as if it’s the only word she knows.

A tiny burning pain shoots through my jaw and I notice I’ve been sitting here grinding my teeth as I listen to my mother. Hearing nothing in her words that suggests love, nothing in her eyes screams out to me saying she’s a wounded soul trapped in that battered body. And it’s starting to infuriate me.

Nine months and not one phone call. Not a single one. Pictures of all the times in the past when my mother let Jeff get away with treating her like tossed-out trash moves through my memory. And when he would yell at Alex and me, taking his anger toward us out on the things that meant the most to us. Jeff was why Alex kept her Precious Moments collection from our great-grandmother hidden in that box. Because she knew Jeff would shatter them against the walls. And the few times that Jeff did put his hands on me and my sister, when he thought that we were as weak-minded as our mother and would let him get away with it. I fight back the urge to cry. Not because of Jeff. Not because he’s an abusive bastard that deserves to die a lonely, painful death from an eroded liver. Not because the entire life of my teenage years were stripped from me because of him.

I fight back the urge to cry because my mother let him get away with it all.

Jeff didn’t take my mother away from me.

She let me go.

“How’d you get here anyway?” she says weakly, but I’m not really hearing her.

I look back down at her and try to see if I can remember anything from my childhood, from before the time when things changed. And I do see it. I look past the bruises and the blood crusted in her nostrils. I see far beyond the black eyes and swollen skin and I see the Rhonda Dawson that used to love me. The mother that used to sit with me between her legs while she braided my long hair. When she used to set her old makeup out on the vanity on purpose so that I would be tempted to try it. Because I wanted to be as pretty as her. And she would laugh and snap pictures of my face covered in mascara and lipstick. And I see all the times she drove with me and Alex to the ocean in Savannah. We were strapped in our seatbelts in the back seat with coloring books in our laps, while she tortured us with Patti Smith and The Doors music that we pretended to hate, but secretly loved. Because she loved them.

I could never hate my mother, no matter what she’s done, or what she allowed my sister and me to go through. I could never hate her not only because she’s my mother, but because she has abused herself all these years and doesn’t know herself anymore. Because like any human being, all she’s ever wanted in her life was love and she did anything for it, even if it wasn’t right. Even if the love she was chasing wasn’t love at all, but something sinister only pretending to be love.