Town Limits

I left them a letter. Words scrawled hastily in red pen onto a bent sticky note. I’d pressed it onto the surface of one of the vases, knowing that they’d notice it there. Then, with my messenger back strapped across my chest, my ratty duffle bag slung over my shoulder, I’d left, not even bothering to gently close the screen door to prevent its squeal from startling them awake.

I had to try my best to not think about how much my mother would suffer because of my actions. He would hit her, I knew. Chase her until she was backed into a corner, then kick her down, knock her head violently against the wall. Drag her to somewhere quieter even though she wouldn’t scream, anyway.

Maybe I hated her because I thought she was weak. She stayed with that man and made me hang on with her, forced to endure the lashings. It’s not that she couldn’t leave, it’s that she wouldn’t. She loved him too much because sometimes he loved us too much, too.

As I walked along the boardwalk that morning, the memories flooded my mind. A young Nora Chadwick with strawberry ice cream smudged on her face, clasping the hands of her parents who stand on either side of her, smiling brighter than the sun. And once I pressed myself into the plush seat of the bus, I’d reached into my bag to grab my water bottle and instead found my hand brushing against the supple leather of my notebook. The one he’d gotten me for my seventeenth birthday.

He loved us sometimes, I said to Noah that day in the library. And he did. But loving someone is quite different than loving them enough.

Mom didn’t love us enough to leave. Dad didn’t love us enough to stop. I didn’t love them enough to stay. None of us did enough. Were enough. Had enough. A family of deficient weaklings collapsing beneath the weight of each other.

And now my legs are broken from the burden but at least I’m alive.

***

“Nora!”

My torso slaps against the cliff, a jagged edge indenting my cheek as I press it into the surface. My hair whips around my face like bandages being wrapped over a mummy, but I manage to regain my footing.

I realize now that I have two choices: go up or go down. Climb away from the conflict or face what I don’t understand. Embrace it. Fight it. Learn to control it.

Be weak or be strong.

I lower myself down a half a foot and then another and another until my toes find the sand. My arms give out and I stumble backwards into Liam. His hands cup my hips to steady me but he trips backwards, too, and then we’re hitting the ground together.

Together.

For so long it’s been just me and the dangers I force myself to face. Me and a bus ticket or a shard of glass or a cliff or the lies I feed to people. There is no shame in being alone. I still stand by that. But perhaps there is also no shame in needing someone by your side.

We lie on the packed surface. The wind lashes at us, licking up the bottoms of our jeans and throwing our hoods around. Liam’s chest rises and falls deeply, but also steadily. His arms remains around my ribcage and it tightens when I mumble, “I’m sorry,” against his collarbone. “Thanks for catching me.”