I Am My Own God

Feel free to edit the hell out of this. PLEASE.1

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[Tristessa]3

“Hello. Please sit down.”4

I nervously crossed the room as the woman who had brought me here closed the door behind me. The woman who had spoken from within the room, a woman with a nice, professional-looking suit on but causally loose, brown hair, sat in a swivel chair behind a wooden desk. Another comfy swivel chair sat opposite her. I sat down in that one, feeling even more small and fragile in the large chair than I already look.5

“There is a camera on over there.” The woman gestured to a corner of the room. There was a steady red light indicating that it was on. “Please don’t mind it. My name is Sarah Williams, and I’ll be interviewing you today.”6

She extended a hand and I took it awkwardly. People usually don’t shake hands with a fourteen-year-old, and even then, it’s usually only the men, so I was caught off-guard. “I will be asking you questions, and you will answer them to the best of your ability. Answer them directly, and please be honest. Shall we begin?”7

“Yes,” I replied, pulling a strand of my curly blonde hair down to my ear, a habit of mine when I’m uncomfortable. I hide behind my hair a lot.8

“Alright. Please state your name.”9

“Tristessa Lillian Campton.”10

“And how are you related to the defendant, Ms. Selphie Campton?”11

“She’s my si--my older sister.”12

“By how many years?”13

“Two.”14

“And how old are you?”15

“Fourteen,” I answered, self-consciously twirling a strand of hair between my fingers and biting my lip. “Selphie is sixteen.”16

“Yes,” the woman replied placidly. Sitting forward, she continued, “So, as you well know, your sister is now awaiting trial, accused of murdering your father. Could you please describe her growing up, her personality, and her relationship with your father?”17

I twitched and instinctively clutched the arm of my chair a little tighter. These last couple of weeks had been murder--well--yeah--on all of us. I didn’t like all of these questions people asked, questions coming from the police and the press and our neighbors, none of us did. I just wanted to forget it all. But I figured I could explain it maybe one last time, one thorough, final time, and then it would be recorded and I would never have to be asked about it again. I swallowed and took a deep breath. “C-can I talk about what my father was like, too?”18

“…If that’s necessary in describing your sister and the relationship between her and her father, yes.”19

“O-okay…” I still felt unsure if the woman was going to yell at me if I went too far off the subject, since she’d told me to answer the questions “directly.” So I continued slowly, “Well, my dad never went to college…And he was changing jobs all the time, sometimes because he didn’t get along with his bosses or his coworkers, but mostly because he was an alcoholic. I don’t remember it a whole lot myself, because that all happened when I was really young, because he stopped by the time I was five, when--when my--when--”20

“The accident happened,” the woman answered, smiling kindly for once, having recognized the first sign of pain in me, as if she had been the one to cause it and was now savoring it. She didn’t know, though, that the accident itself didn’t hold much pain for me…I had been too young then, so I’m kind of indifferent--not that I don’t feel bad, of course!! But it’s actually really only the pain that the event has caused other people that gives me discomfort…If anything, the feeling is more of…of reverence and awe, I guess, and maybe bitterness too, than it is pain or sorrow. But I’ve never admitted that to anyone, and only to Selphie partially.21

“Yeah,” I answered. “B-but anyway…We all knew when he’d been drinking, even me, I could tell when he was drunk even as a toddler. That’s what Ian and Selphie have told me. Ian Joshua Campton, I mean, my older brother who’s seventeen. He’s the oldest.” I glanced at the camera.22

“Yes.”23

“Uhm, so…I remember that he knocked us around a bit. He mostly hit Ian and Selphie because they were older and could take it, and they acted out more than I did. I only remember a few specific incidents, but I know he did it a lot. But most of the time dad just did little stuff, nothing big.” I stopped, seeing that the woman wanted to talk, and feeling relieved to allow her to do so. I felt like I was rambling on. I usually didn’t talk this much.24

“Can you specify as to what he did when he was drinking? For example, like spanking your bottom with a hand or an object, and did he hit you multiple times in a row, like beat you? Did he hit your face or punch your arms or your stomach or what, exactly?”25

I bit my lip again. “Uhm, well, yeah…He hit us on the head mostly, just swatted us usually. Sometimes he hit us multiple times. He kicked us too and sometimes threw stuff at us when we were being loud or acting out. He mostly just left bruises, and I think only once did he ever break anyone’s bones--he broke Ian’s arm when he was little, but dad was really sorry afterward. And I remember that he whipped Selphie with a lamp cord once, too, and it left marks on her…”26

“Okay. So how did he act with Selphie, specifically? Did he treat her any worse or better than he did to you and your brother?”27

“Well…When we were little, I didn’t notice any difference between how he treated her versus Ian, I just remember that they both got punished more than I did. He stopped when I was five, but when I was eleven--Selphie was thirteen, and Ian was fourteen then--he started to hit us again. He did it because he said we were acting out--it was when we wanted to do things, like go out places with friends, and he wouldn’t let us. At first, he punished both Ian and Selphie equally--he didn’t punish me a lot, because I’m not the type to act out, I’m kinda shy….But after a while Ian didn’t act out as much or fight with him, it was mostly Selphie. He didn’t like her clothes or her makeup--she wore a lot of black and stuff, like….like rock and metal singers, like, well….goth--and he didn’t like her attitude, he said. He called her a ‘selfish brat’ and he called her narcissistic and egotistical too. They got in fights, like verbal fights, arguments all the time. Sometimes those would lead to him hitting her.”28

“Can you describe Selphie’s personality?”29

“Uh, when she was little she was always really strong-willed. As she got older, she was kind of…rebellious, I guess you could say. But not in a bad way. She’d mostly rebel against things that were stupid or unfair or superficial, or mean, or illogical, or biased…My dad’s really biased, and also like I said not very educated, which is why they didn’t get along. Selphie’s always been very smart, though--she’s the smartest of the three of us, though Ian’s grades are very close. She has straight A’s almost always. On rare occasions she got in trouble at school--only two or three fights with other kids, and a few arguments with teachers--but she never fought with a person a second time. I know she had enemies, some kids hated her, but she didn’t hate them or hold grudges. She wasn’t afraid to speak up, she wasn’t shy like, like me. She stood for what she believed in.” I was sitting upright in her seat, desperate to try to describe Selphie accurately. It was hard for people to understand her, but I was one of the few that did. I wanted others to understand her too. “I wish I could be more like her…”30

“You admired Selphie?”31

“Yes. We, we shared a bedroom, so we’re pretty close, I guess. Well, I’d tell her my problems and my thoughts a lot of times, and she’d help me out. She never told me about her own problems, if she even had any, because she’s older than me and knows more and so I wouldn’t be any help anyway. But she talked to me about things and I just listened, she talked about what SHE thought of the world and life and how things should be and why they are the way they are. Stuff like that.”32

The woman nodded noncommittally. “So you said that your father called her selfish and narcissistic. Was she?”33

“Uhm--narcissistic means like vain and stuff, right?”34

“Mmhm.”35

“Well, she wasn’t selfish…She helped other people out when they asked for it and she wouldn’t purposely hurt people. But…she wouldn’t take orders from other people if she saw no sense to them and she wouldn’t let others push her around. She…she valued herself. But she wasn’t perfect, wasn’t a perfect goody two-shoes, wasn’t…I don’t know. Like, she wasn’t subservient to people. But she didn’t try to rule them, either. She was proud, she liked herself, but she wasn’t arrogant. I guess you could call her vain, but again, not in a bad way. Like…” I struggled to find the words.36

“One time, when dad was working late--Ian was gone too, working at the ice cream store, so it was just me and her there. And it was summer too, school was out, and we had nothing to do, so we were both bored. I walked into the living room, and she was just lying there, stretched out on the couch. She-she mostly wore black, like longs pants and most of the time long sleeves, but that day she had on some really short black shorts. Her legs were long, pale, but not skimpy as I always thought they were, but I guess…shapely? and they were stretched out, and her head was flung back against the arm and back of the couch, neck tipped up. And her arms were spread out too, one of them draped sort of carelessly along the back of the couch. But it wasn’t exactly careless, and there was a way she still held herself, with a little bit of tension in the limbs; it wasn’t laziness, but deliberate ease; it wasn’t haphazard because she was fully conscious of the placement of her limbs and her body.37

“And normally, Selphie’s always busy, always, with SOMETHING. Even if she isn’t moving, just sitting there, she’s always reading or playing her Gameboy or doing a puzzle or homework or sewing a pair of pants or something. But right then, she wasn’t doing anything, yet she still held a purpose--her purpose was to rest. I guess…that’s what I think of when I try to describe her. She’s never blind or stupid, never lost or confused or in need of a ton of guidance, she was always in control. She wasn’t self-obsessed, just content with herself. And she was pretty--IS pretty--but she’s not conceited about it, she doesn’t use it for or against anybody. She just enjoys it…”38

“Was she religious?”39

“What?”40

“Was she religious?”41

“No, she wasn’t religious. I don’t know what she believed in…”42

---43

[Selphie]44

My dad tried to kill me because I didn’t like his god. I killed him because he tried to kill mine.45

To understand why, you’d have to know about our family from the beginning.46

My father grew up fairly poor. He had neither the money, nor the intelligence, nor the drive to go to college. He barely finished high school, I think, and that was it. He kept changing jobs all the time. Some of them he quit because he didn’t like how he was treated or paid, others because he didn’t like his bosses. He was arrogant. But most of the time he was fired from his jobs, mostly because he’d drink at night and forget to come to work the next day, or he’d come to work drunk. After being fired from a job for drinking, he’d come home and bitch about it and drink more. It was ironic. But anyway, he got violent when this happened, and we learned to stay out of his way for the most part.47

I say “we” as in my mother, my older brother Ian who is a year older than me, and my sister Tristessa, who is two years younger than me. My name’s Selphie, by the way--Selphie Lillian Campton.48

So anyway, my mother met my father at a bar--typical--and somehow he charmed her, they fell in love, married, and had us. My mother wouldn’t leave him--perhaps she was the only one who saw the good in him, and perhaps this little trace of goodness blinded the overwhelming bad in him--even though he was an abusive alcoholic. He hit her sometimes, though rarely (usually it was just yelling and throwing things), always apologizing a day or two later. He hit me and my siblings a lot too, more often than he hit her, when we were being too loud or too happy, or fighting over toys, or not listening to him or my mother. Sometimes he’d hit us repeatedly, and then my mom would tell him off or yell at him and snatch us away. We knew that she’d let him punish us when we deserved it, but only up to a certain point. She was our savior.49

He kicked us a lot too, threw stuff at us or in our paths if we were running through the house. He broke Ian’s arm once, and he broke my nose when he tripped me when I was little. Once he whipped me with a lamp cord, leaving plug-shaped marks on my skin where you could clearly see the shape of the prongs and the head of the plug. It was frightening sometimes when he got extremely mad, but it was a way of life that we were accustomed to.50

I was seven (Ian was eight, Tristessa was barely five) when he started to get really bad. He’d just lost a really good job and he was furious. It was summer and school was out, so we were home all day and couldn’t avoid him. That evening, I was eating cereal for dinner at 10 o’clock and Ian and Tristessa were playing on the floor. The jug of milk had just been opened so it was full and very heavy, so when I went to pour it, it slipped, bursting everywhere and tipping my bowl so that the cereal catapulted out. By the time I flipped the jug back up, half the gallon was on the table and my lap, milk dripping onto the wood floor. Dad shrieked at me from the TV couch, got up, walked over to me and grabbed a fistful of my hair while pointing to the mess on the floor, blabbering half-coherent obscenities. I grabbed at his hands and then he shoved me out of the chair and I fell into the puddle on the floor. Tristessa started crying from across the room. Dad kicked at my chair and I jerked away from it, afraid of it hitting me. He turned and swiftly shoved the entire table over so that it slammed down on my ribs and I let out a cry. The rest of the plastic milk jug fell onto my head and cracked open.51

I heard a shriek accompanied by the explosion of the bathroom door as my mother came running out. My dad picked up my spilled orange juice glass and chucked it at the floor near my head and I cringed as it shattered in my face.52

After that, I remember mom half-screaming, half-crying at dad, gesturing violently toward me and Tristessa, who was full-out bawling. Mom slapped dad and he shoved her aside and stalked off to their bedroom or maybe outside, and then it got quieter. Mom picked me up and gave me a bath (even though I was seven and I’d been taking my own showers since I was six) and then put me to bed. The next morning, she left to go get more band-aids and some ice packs. That morning changed our lives forever.53

When I woke up, Ian and Tristessa were confused. Ian was asking dad a lot of questions and Tristessa was whining and asking why Ian was asking these questions. But dad--dad, he was distraught, pacing, trying to act calm for us and explain to us that “it” was “okay.” He left us home alone and came back an hour later, eyes red, beside himself. He kept pacing, eating, trying to watch TV, making phone calls and asking about mom. I’d never seen him so scared before--and it made all three of us terrified, the fact that dad, this powerful man who could terrify US, could be so upset and lost. We knew it had to have been bad, then.54

Gradually I learned that mom had been in a car accident, a head-on collision. She was in critical condition. It was 10 PM by the time dad finally got word that we were allowed to go see her at the hospital, so we all got into the car--Tristessa was already in her pajamas and everything--and went to the hospital.55

When one of the nurses finally let us in (after many warnings of what we were to see and what we shouldn’t do), we saw that mom was hooked up to a whole bunch of tubes and wires, and that she was asleep. She had tubes in her arms, tubes up her nose, and some suction-cup looking things on her temples. Her head was wrapped in a bandage that had a clean, dark red spot on it and her nose and chin had huge red scabs and scrapes. One of her ears looked bloody, but I couldn’t tell because the bandage covered most of it.56

“Mom?” Ian said, setting a hand on her arm.57

“Shh!” the nurse, a young African-American woman, said to him.58

“Ian,” dad warned, though it was unnecessary.59

“Is she sleeping?” Ian whispered as quietly as he could.60

“Yeah,” dad answered.61

The woman glanced at him. “She’s suffered a great deal of bleeding, including some internal bleeding,” she whispered. “She’s on a lot of pain medication, too, and we’re keeping her sedated. Her feet were both crushed, and she also has a concussion and possible brain damage…Mr. Campton, you do understand that, right?”62

Dad was holding Tristessa’s hand, gazing at mom with such a soft look that I knew that he must truly love her--something that I’d doubted all my life until that moment.63

“Yes,” he said absently.64

“Once she stabilizes, we can take her off the sedation and some of the medications so she’ll wake up. But we don’t know how much damage was done to her brain. She might not wake up.”65

Tristessa made a squeak and looked up at dad. My heart skipped a beat. Ian and I looked at the woman. She was looking at dad, her lips pursed grimly. We looked at dad, then back to her, then dad again. He nodded slightly, eyes locked on mom’s beautiful, albeit scarred, face. Her curly blonde hair was limp and wet-looking and stringy behind her head. I looked at Tristessa, who had curly blonde hair too, unlike Ian and I who had brown like dad’s. Tristessa started to cry.66

We stayed for a while, looking at her and talking to nurses and the occasional doctor that came in. Dad stood by mom’s pillow, stroking a lock of her hair and running a finger along one of her open palms and entwining his fingers with hers. Ian took one of her hands too, and didn’t let go the whole time. I just gazed at her because dad seemed to only be allowing Ian to touch her because he was the oldest and dad was probably afraid that we’d disturb her, so I didn’t touch her. Tristessa eventually cried herself out and stood between dad and I, not really knowing what to do. Eventually she crawled into a chair and fell asleep.67

The African-American nurse returned later and told us that we had to leave.68

“Wake her up,” dad told me. I shook Tristessa awake and she sat up, looking around blearily.69

“Say goodnight to mommy,” dad told us.70

“Goodnight, mom,” Ian said. “I love you.” He reached way over the bed to kiss her hair.71

“I love you,” I said.72

“I lo-ove you, mom,” Tristessa repeated, the sound of some fresh tears in her voice.73

Dad gently kissed mom’s bandaged head. “Come on,” he told us. We followed him to the doorway where the nurse stood watching. “Blow her a kiss,” he instructed. The three of us did so, and only then did we leave.74

The next day, after we ate breakfast (cereal, because dad was gone at the hospital), dad came back for us and we all returned to the hospital. Mom had just gone through another surgery, he said. When we went in her room, she looked basically the same as before, still sleeping. Dad spoke with the nurses and doctors who came in while Ian and Tristessa held mom’s hands and Tristessa played with her hair as she’d seen Ian and dad doing last night, until I told her to stop.75

I was paying attention to the nurses. They came in and cooed about how cute we were, and the African-American nurse gave us all lollipops. I started to hear the nurses say the word “acoma” when talking with dad. Over the next several days, I learned to divide the word--mom was in “a coma”. She was in a comatose state, a vegetative state, they said. She wouldn’t wake up and wouldn’t respond to us, so they gave her food through a feeding tube and hooked her up to a ventilator so she could breathe. I asked what kind of food was in the tube, having never heard of a feeding tube in my life. I asked if they mashed up like cheeseburgers and pizza and stuff and put it in there. They laughed and told me that it was kind of like that, only her food was even better for her, even though it didn’t taste as good as pizza does.76

We went up to the hospital twice a day and stayed for hours. When dad got a new job, we went once a day. We went to a babysitter’s for the day, and when he got home we’d go to the hospital and stay until nine. On the weekends we went up there twice a day still.77

The nurses there loved us, the female nurses especially. They knew us all by name, and I knew most of their names. They brought us candy and cookies sometimes. We got stickers, too, with different animals on them. After a few months, though, the nurses didn’t bring us stuff as often and they stopped fussing over us.78

By then, we were spending three hours a day or more at the hospital. It became a regular routine. We ate dinner there, too, and even though there was a cafeteria downstairs, we ate in mom’s room. We ate the cafeteria food for a while, but then we started bringing food from home. Sometimes we got fast food. While we ate, dad would have us tell mom about our day. He told her about his too, and we all talked about the good times we’d had together with her, like when we’d go to the park or on a few rare vacations to some cheap theme parks.79

One time, Tristessa asked, “How come we’re remembering all this stuff and telling her? Does she forget? Can she even hear us? Is she dead?” She didn’t understand what “comatose” meant, really. She was too young to comprehend it.80

“No, she’s not dead,” dad said for the hundredth time. “It’s just probably pretty boring for her laying in bed all day, not doing anything, don’t you think?”81

“Yes.”82

“Well, then it might brighten up her day and make it more interesting for her if we tell her about our day and stuff we used to do,” he told her.83

“Oh.”84

“Yeah,” Ian agreed, nodding solemnly. Then he added quietly, “…I miss her, though.”85

Dad looked at him abruptly. “We all do. But we must keep up hope and be happy. She was always happy, wasn’t she? We should stay happy for her sake, then.”86

“Mmhm,” Ian said, biting the inside of his lip and nodding vigorously. Tristessa and I nodded as well. I don’t actually remember her always happy, though, not like some obsessively-cheerful ball of sunshine. She’d always seemed….normally happy to me, about the same amount of happiness other people had. Maybe a little less. But who could say that about a comatose woman? At funerals, people always say how happy and wonderful the person was. It’s not right to also talk about the times when they WEREN’T wonderful. But I let it slide.87

“We can’t forget what a beautiful, amazing person mom wa--is,” dad continued. “And all the wonderful things she’s done for us.”88

“Yeah,” Ian agreed wholeheartedly.89

“Ian, what was one nice thing that mom did for you that you remember the most?” dad asked.90

“Uhm…Well, one time when I dropped my ice cream cone…”91

So it began.92

Dad didn’t drink after mom fell into her coma. He didn’t yell, didn’t hit us. At first, we were scared and uneasy--who would protect us from him with mom gone? But then we started to trust him, to like him. He loved us, he loved mom, as any perfect father and husband should. He wasn’t losing his jobs anymore. It was strange how much he’d changed. I’m not sure why he did, though. Maybe he felt guilty--if he hadn’t hurt me that night, mom wouldn’t have gone to get bandages. Or maybe he had suddenly realized how much he loved mom, how much he valued life, and how horribly he’d been wasting it. Maybe it had been a wake-up call.93

When we were younger like that, we wholeheartedly believed mom would come out of her coma, even after six months, a year, two years had passed. Ian had researched it on the internet--people could be in a coma for thirty years and still wake up. This gave us hope for a while. We adored dad for holding onto her like that, believing in her recovery. We were inspired.94

But as the years passed and we got older, we started to lose hope. Dad didn’t though, or showed no signs of it at least. We still visited her every single day. We held Thanksgiving in her room, and Christmas, and New Year’s. We baked a cake for her birthday and showed it to her, and we all ate it. We brought her flowers and made her cards for Mother’s Day. Ian wrote her poems and songs, hoping she’d get well soon.95

Since I shared a room with Tristessa, we talked a lot. One day, I finally found out that she didn’t believe that mom would ever wake up, and that she’d stay that way forever until she died. Tristessa had been afraid of admitting that to anybody until I coaxed it out of her. I told her that I didn’t think mom would ever wake up either. After that, Tristessa was terrified for the both of us. She made me promise not to tell anybody what we really thought. I wasn’t as afraid as she was, but I gave in and agreed. After that, it was our mission to figure out what Ian thought.96

We’d both try to interrogate him or causally mention mom’s recovery, and when we managed to get even the slightest amount of information, we’d excitedly tell each other later. Eventually Ian directly told us that he didn’t think mom would recover either.97

The difference between us and him, though, was that he still believed in the importance of visiting her every day.98

Life started changing when I was thirteen. It could’ve been those “raging teen hormones,” but that excuse just makes it sound petty. I like to call it an awakening. I started to see things more clearly. I observed others, asked them questions, learned about them. I observed my family a lot in particular, but most of all I studied myself.99

I’ve always been sort of “rebellious,” as they say, but they never realized that it wasn’t a blind “teen” sort of rebellion, but that I fought against things that were wrong. I didn’t like how people held themselves above others. I didn’t like how they could say nasty things to others and then turn around and devote themselves to church and charity and community service and helping others, and then use that all as an excuse to call themselves “good.” But I wasn’t perfectly “good” either, and neither was I on a crusade to vanquish all evil or anything. I ignored those who sought to please others unless I had to pay attention to them. When they confronted me about my “arrogance,” it usually led to a fight. I won the fistfights most of the time. I won the arguments all the time, though some of them at first thought they had won. Most of the time, they couldn’t understand my reasoning and logic, so the fact that I’d won sometimes went way over their heads. They left an argument with a feeling of satisfaction, and so did I. I, however, retained my happiness--and when they saw this, they lost theirs and came crawling back to try to figure out why.100

It’s hard to explain, but I didn’t hate people. I did when I was little, but then I started to realize that when I disliked someone, it wasn’t the person that I hated, but their ideas. Most of a person’s ideas and values were weak, I found. They held them without much conviction--the values were learned from parents usually. I could forgive these people a little for having such wrong principles, because at least they weren’t militant about them, but I still found it pathetic that their morality was so weak. But there were a few people who held tightly to some values that were biased and cruel, people like anti-gay Christians and racists and misogynists, for example. Their ideas became rooted in them, in who they were. They embodied these hateful values and thus became hateful people. When I hated those values, I hated the person, because the person could not be separated from the values. That’s the only time I ever hated people. There was nothing wrong with people who embodied their values, of course, only people who became hateful and overzealous because of them.101

I found that not many people really thought like me. Only a few understood me, or at least even a little, my sister among them. Most people saw me, as I said, as arrogant and stuck-up and bratty and self-centered.102

It took all up until now to be able to word exactly what I thought. I’ve learned a lot in the past three years. I went through a rough time when I was thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, as well, and dad certainly didn’t help any. In fact, he made it much, much worse…though in the end, he suffered the more for it.103

As we got older, we started hanging out with friends more--you know, going to the movies, the mall, joining clubs, watching football games, just doing whatever. Dad wouldn’t let us do most of these things, though, and he would absolutely NEVER allow us to skip out on visiting mom. Mom was everything. Family was everything, he told us, family is the only thing that will always be there for you. I couldn’t see how mom could still be “there” for me anymore, but for the most part I abided by dad’s wishes. One day, however, I stayed after school and my cell phone died. My friends had already left, so it took me a while to find someone who had a phone. By then it was “mom time.” When I finally got a hold of dad, he cussed at me through the phone and I could hear tires screeching in the background.104

Ten minutes later, he was up at the school, Ian sitting in the front seat and Tristessa holding on for dear life in the back seat of the car.105

“Where the HELL have you been??” dad demanded as he jerked to a halt, his tire half-riding on the curb.106

“HERE. My cell phone died!”107

“Get in the car,” he growled. “You KNOW that you have to visit mom at this time. We’ve been doing it for years. Don’t say you forgot.”108

“I DIDN’T forget, dad,” I spat, getting into the car. “Besides, she’s not GOING anywhere anytime soon. She’ll LIVE.”109

Dad slid his arm behind Ian’s seat and turned to stare at me. “What’s THAT supposed to mean???”110

“Well visiting her every freaking day obviously isn’t doing anything to help her. Besides, the nurses already think we’re freaks for going up there so often to visit a HALF-DEAD woman. Why can’t we have our own lives too, without devoting it to someone who doesn’t HAVE one anymore?” I was sick of staring at mom’s blankness and telling her and the rest of the family about my day. I was sixteen and I wanted to have my own life too, one that didn’t involve an obsessive father and a comatose mother. I didn’t mind visiting her SOMETIMES, but every day was ridiculous.111

“WHAT did you say??”112

I said nothing, knowing full well that he’d heard me. Ian and Tristessa sat rigid in their seats, not looking at me but listening.113

Dad reached back and struck me in the face. He turned, rammed the car into drive, and sped off to the hospital.114

When we got in mom’s room, he closed the door behind us, per usual. There were blinds on the windows--he’d put the blinds up, lavender ones, mom’s old favorite color I guess--so no one could see us from the hallway. He grabbed my neck and squeezed and steered me over to her bedside.115

“Tell her,” he growled.116

“What?”117

“Tell her what you said about her today.”118

“What’s the point?”119

Dad only hit me again. So I confessed my sins. She didn’t move.120

“Okay, Ian, you go. What are your thoughts on the situation?”121

“I think Selphie should be more considerate…Mom did a lot of things for us, and we owe her. I guess we might not have to be here EVERY day, like if we can’t make it, but…” He glanced at dad, seeing his disapproval. “Selphie should be less selfish.”122

Dad seemed satisfied. “Tristessa?”123

Tristessa fidgeted. “I love mom more than anything. Selphie shouldn’t have said all that…But it IS kind of frustrating, you know, after seven or eight years…” she added, trying to save me. “I wish she’d wake up,” Tristessa added sadly, trying to save herself too.124

“See Selphie? Your siblings are fine with it. What is asking just a few hours each day? How would YOU like it if YOU were in a coma and WE didn’t come visit you everyday?”125

“I’d be in a coma, so I wouldn’t be able to care,” I mumbled.126

Dad gave me one of his long, (fake) thoughtful looks, as if trying to decide what best to say to me while simultaneously controlling his anger. “Ian, Tristessa, out.”127

They left, shutting the door all the way. Dad and I were alone.128

“If you EVER say that again, you’re gonna be in a HELL of a lot more trouble than this,” dad growled. “Don’t you EVER talk that away around your brother and sister again. Got it?”129

“Dad, we’re all tired of this,” I said wearily in a calm voice. “It’s getting old. We’re all getting old. Why can’t we visit her every other day, or maybe on the weekends? We all love mom--” I said this, only half-really-meaning-it now, just to calm him--“but worshipping her like this is ridiculous.”130

That night at home, dad gave us another speech about mom. When we started to resist in our answers slightly, he flung shit at us and hit me. I didn’t cry, though I know he wanted me to. After that, he started beating us again like before the accident. He kicked my ribs and tripped me and pinched me when I walked by him. He punched my breasts and once, when he was drunk--he finally picked up the bottle again after eight years and drank as hard as ever--I think he tried to rape me (although he was far too drunk to manage to hold me down). Furious, I left and stayed at a homeless shelter for two weeks, until I was forced to return home.131

Dad didn’t talk to me after that, and Ian and Tristessa were more horribly silent than I’d ever seen them in years. Tristessa told me that dad had taken it out on them, which I felt a little guilty for. She told me in terrified whispers about how she thought that he was going insane.132

Of course, we still visited mom every day. I’d left and came back, but it was the same old routine. On the third day of my return home, dad called and told Ian that he was being forced to work late and that he couldn’t come visit mom. This had happened a few times before, but it was yet again another hypocritical thing dad did. Ian, who was seventeen and had his license, drove us all up there. We stayed there for the minimum of an hour and a half, not talking, then left.133

The next morning, Saturday morning, when we were all eating breakfast, we got a phone call. Dad answered it.134

---135

[Ian]136

“Selphie can be a bitch sometimes. She’s a little stuck-up and overly self-righteous. But whatever. The fact is, she’s never really thought much past herself. Tristessa too, Tristessa is a lot like Selphie, she’s just quieter about it. You should see how much Tristessa hangs onto her every word. But anyway, you wanted to hear my own thoughts, right?” I looked up at Ms. Williams.137

“Yes, please,” she said politely.138

“Okay, well, the difference between me and Selphie is that I appreciate what mom did for us when she was alive. We owe her. Without her, we might all have been dead. She protected us, and I think the LEAST she deserved was a little of our respect and gratitude, and maybe an hour of our company a day. I know it wasn’t really helping her, but maybe she really could hear us…”139

“Did you believe your mother would ever wake up?”140

“No, not really. But that didn’t matter, really. She still deserved better than how Selphie treated her.”141

“So…Please clear this up for me. Do you think that Selphie is guilty for killing your dad?”142

“She did it, all right. So yes, she’s guilty. She provoked him, yes, she’s guilty of that too. But he came after her first, so in that sense, she’ll get off with self-defense.”143

“You think she should get off with self-defense?”144

“She hardly deserves it, but yes.”145

“One last question…There’s a mystery surrounding the circumstances of your mother’s death…Do you think Selphie did it so that you all wouldn’t have to keep visiting your mother?”146

“I wouldn’t have put it past her. But no, she never went near mother the day we visited her alone. She didn’t kill her.”147

“Is that all you wish to say?”148

“Yeah, I guess.”149

---150

[Selphie]151

“Mom was dead.152

“At first, dad was devastated. We could tell from the phone conversation what had happened. He didn’t explain, but we did hear the words ‘someone pulled one of her plugs.’ He didn’t talk the rest of the day, and spent it alone in his room.”153

“What abut your siblings and you? How did you react to the news?” Ms. Williams asked before I was able to answer her question anyway.154

“Ian was stricken. I don’t know why he bothered to show emotion, because dad wasn’t around to approve of it. Tristessa was nervous. She voiced the worry that maybe dad had gone back in his room to kill himself, and that maybe we should go check on him. None of us did, though, not even her. She looked skittish and lost the entire day, looking as if she was a deer in the headlights or something, caught between the fear of dad’s emotions and our relative lack of emotion. As for what I felt, of course I felt bad that mom had died, but I didn’t care a whole lot. She had died well before then, so I had already grieved for her loss years ago. It was a relief to have her dead, actually.”155

“You…wanted her dead?”156

“No.” I frowned at her. “And I didn’t kill her, either. Ian and Tristessa would have seen me. We still don’t know how the plug got pulled on her. We suspect that it was one of the nurses, maybe bumping into it on accident. I don’t know.157

“Anyway, Dad came out of his room that night, drunk as hell but not falling over himself yet. He kicked Ian in the crotch and kicked Tristessa in the head when she bent down to help Ian. But he headed straight for me.158

“He raised his arm to smack me, and I flung my arms up and kind of kicked at him to defend myself, but he got through my defense anyway. The giant bruise on my face that I have on my mug shots was from that first hit,” I added.159

The woman nodded, and shuffled with a manila folder that probably had the pictures in it, though why she bothered to have it out right then beat me.160

“So…he proceeded to hit me, and he dragged me off the couch and started stomping on me before I could get out from beneath him. He started screaming, ‘YOU KILLED HER!! YOU KILLED MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE! ALL OF YOU DID IT!!’ Tristessa was desperately pleading with him to stop, but she wouldn’t touch or come near him. I told him, ‘No we didn’t!!’ and Tristessa gave him a bunch of reasons why we didn’t do it, but he was so drunk he couldn’t be reasoned with.161

“At some point, he took a lamp and smashed it against my head. Then he next thing I knew, he was sitting half on my stomach, trying to strangle me. Tristessa finally jumped in and tried to pull him off, but he was too big, especially for her, so she dug her nails into his back. He turned to swipe at her, knocking her back, and I was able to scramble up and away. That put Tristessa closer to him than I was, so then next thing we knew he was after her, squeezing his hands in on her neck. Ian tackled him and held on, so dad swung him around and flung him off his back. Tristessa lay gasping and crying on the floor, so dad turned back to me.162

“‘You fucking little beast!’ he spat in my face. ‘You scheming, self-centered little murderer!’163

“‘GO TO HELL!’ I shouted, choking. My head was half-propped up against the couch, so my neck was all contorted and I could barely breathe. With the addition of dad’s weight on my stomach and his hands on my neck, I could no longer speak or breathe. He pressed down on my neck and I made gurgling noises. I couldn't see at all, but I could hear Tristessa screaming and knew that she was beating at dad’s back. Desperately, I felt around dad’s back pockets--his hands were too busy trying to kill me to stop me, and he wasn’t thinking about what I was doing--and I pulled out his pocket knife. I couldn’t see it well, but I started flipping things open, and I stabbed him in the arm. He screamed and immediately let go of me. He stared at the blood for a few seconds, then he looked back at me, his face contorted into some horrible, inhuman rage that I knew would not be stopped or calmed, and he bashed me in the head.164

“I started crying by then. I started flailing around and kicking him. I stabbed at him repeatedly, stabbing him in the face, arms, and chest, anything that got in my way or anything he tried to hurt me with. He tried to bite my face. I managed to free a leg from underneath him, and I kicked up into his crotch before finally sinking the little blade into his neck. He stayed alive for a while, but he stopped fighting me after that. Then he died. I killed him.”165

The woman struggled to remain impassive. She looked at her notes, shuffling them around to buy herself some time. Finally, she put them down and asked, “You said earlier that you didn’t like God, which is why he tried to kill you. What did you mean by that?”166

“Not God, with a capital G,” I answered. “Dad’s god. Our mom became the family god.”167

“What?”168

“We worshipped her. Well, he did, at least. She became more important than anything, she became our god. But she isn’t MY god.”169

“Then what is?”170

“Not her.” I sat thinking. “…Not her.”171

I am my own god.172

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