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From the outside looking in, it seemed like we were just a normal family having dinner, my stepfather placed prominently at the head of the table, my mother at the other end.
All the delicious food—chicken parmesan, green beans, and garlic bread—lined neatly in the middle. My two sisters, my brother, and I were strategically seated on either side, two on the left-hand side of my stepfather, and me and my other sibling on his right. After the platters of food were passed around, my mother pressed me to say the blessing. Losing faith in the words I mumbled, I ended with a barely audible “Amen.”
My stepfather tore into the food on his plate, shoveling it into his mouth. While my siblings talked about school, I watched the man who preyed on menightly consume his meal. For a moment our eyes locked, and then his pupils grew big and he opened his mouth as if he was going to say something, but no words came out. I noticed the veins on the side of his neck pop out, lines of blue against caramel-colored skin. His nostrils flared open, as if they would suck all the air out of the room. His hands reached for his throat, covering the scar from his attempted suicide months earlier. I looked around to see if anyone else noticed that he was choking. They didn’t.
In that moment, I thought about how he lied to my mom. Lied about abusing me, telling her I was making up stories to tear them apart. I thought about his attempted suicide, wondered if the choking was another attempt at killing himself—but this time in front of all of us, a collective punishment for telling the truth. His newfound relationship with God. How he testified in church. How he spoke against the devil, said the devil tried to break up his family. All of these thoughts kept me in my seat.
If I didn’t move, the late night visits would stop. I would be able to sleep. But if I didn’t do anything, his death could make him a parental martyr, a righteous man who died with his family around him, a story that would be used for Sunday sermons. As his light brown skin began to turn blue around his cheeks, I knew then—in order to save myself, I had to save him.
I pushed my chair back so hard that the wooden legs screeched and got everyone’s attention. I wrapped my arms around him, and pressed as hard as my fourteen-year-old hands could into the space below his chest. Imitating the video I watched in health class, I squeezed and squeezed. The remains of his meal dribbled out of his mouth and onto his plate, and my siblings left the table in disgust. My mother ran to her husband, wrapping him in her arms, asking him over and over if he was all right.
While he coughed and sucked in the life-giving air, he looked over at me, as I returned to my seat and cut the contents of my meal into smaller pieces. I smiled at him, and feasted. He knew I had the power, like God, if only for a few seconds, to take as well as give life. The day I got my life back, I discovered the god in me, and that she had the power to love, hate, and be oh-so benevolent.
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