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The coffee was shit—weak, with more milk and sugar in it than healthy.
A couple sat in silence, the tension palpable, in the booth diagonal from Ophelia. The woman—brown hair, with eyes surrounded by a soft pink—looked towards a man in a muscle tee who refused eye contact, raking a nail against the wood of the table instead.
"Look, Trev, I know—" her voice began, dull-edged tongue and unreserved kindness.
"Don't call me that."
She tensed, the mapping of her back a signal flare of unease, before she let out a small sigh.
"Trevor, you can't just ignore your dad forever. He's being a dick—to me, to you, us. You can't let him get away with this."
It was only at her touch, a hand that dared to brush against his finger on the table, that he looked up. Ophelia watched the fight leak out from his body, as if it were a sieve for all his father's bad moods, given a place to escape in her company.
He didn't answer for a while. Then, in a voice so soft it was nigh impossible to make out in the shop's humdrum, he confessed.
"I'm scared, Deb."
The woman—Deb, apparently—allowed herself a soft smile. Those unbearable eyes of hers trained on him.
"I know. But I'm here, aren't I?"
Ophelia walked out of the building, its brown and brick interior, having left ta de drink practically untouched. It was inching towards late evening, with the sunset having diffused until it was just an impression of itself—more dark blue than it was a bleeding orange, beyond just a faint touch.
The sidewalk was an uninspired gray, with sparse cracks that revealed budding weeds. Ophelia walked, with no destination in mind, watching the other passersby. There was an older lady, carrying a heaping of plastic bags that formed grooves in her palms, with a young boy partaking in her burden. He was oddly quiet, but noticed Ophelia's eyes, and slowly blinked at her. The two brushed forward, seemingly intent on making it home.
Home.
Before she knew it, that was where their legs had taken her.
The door—a wood that looked like it had absorbed the sunset, more orange than was appealing—loomed over her, as if sizing up their audacity to return.
Ophelia made no sound when entering.
They moved briskly, not looking around the small kitchen, until a voice interjected.
"Where were ya, kid?"
She didn't glance back, just continued trudging a path towards their room. A calloused palm gripped her shoulder, uncaring at the strength it exerted. They bit down a surprised cry of pain, and turned to face their stepdad.
"Gonna waste my money—live under my roof—ya don't ignore me, ya hear?"
The hand tightened, hard enough to leave an outline of redness. His breath held the scent of smoke and beer—vices used to curb an edge, but not yet an indulgence that spelled trouble.
"Friend's place."
He raised an eyebrow, reading ta de face to see if they were lying—not that he was smart enough to tell, but truth was rarely a factor in how he chose to react. The thing about men like Richard was that reality bent to their whims of violence.
"Better not have been with that blonde girl—she's a whore just asking for it. Wouldn't be surprised if she ends up in the news for something bad one of these days."
Ophelia tuned out the rest of his comments, going on to list other teens he had seen around ta, nitpicking every detail he could think of. In actuality, none of these people were friends of ta—just strangers around her age that Richard had assumed the life stories about; he liked doing that, making unasked for comments—especially on appearance—as if his hair wasn't thinning and he didn't live in stained sweats all day.
"Did you have anything important to say?" She cut in with, to which he narrowed his eyes and sneered at her.
"Me and yer mom are going to dinner. Order pizza or something—ya got the cash, don't ask me for no handout."
Ophelia bit back their desire to point out that, no, she didn't have enough, considering he had recently persuaded ta de Ma to rat out where she had kept their savings, just so he could have enough to bet with some buddies of his.
All Ophelia got for an apology was her Ma's small smile and tired eyes, a silent offer of what could I do to stop him?
The dream of a new cello would stay a foolish one, better forgotten—if only Ophelia wasn't a fool, in every sense of the word.
Richard, satisfied with her obedience, let her walk to her room without another comment.
☆
If you were to ask Ophelia what they remembered of their father, she would tell you to fuck off.
The truth was that there was nothing to remember—no impact or collision of fist to skin, no stench of cigarettes or piled high aluminum cans, just an oblivion where there should be a person.
What do you do if your father is a black hole in your memory?
If you were to ask Ophelia if ta wished she knew her father, they would still tell you to fuck off.
The lack, the swirling vortex of a man, weighed heavily on her pen—in every hastily scrawled lyric on lined paper, a pocket journal with no decorations, or even a name, upon it. There was something ironic in absence as a muse, that the presence of a person may prove to be less worthwhile in the act of creating than the idea of a person; there was a part of her that wished they knew, that ta could find him and be given the answer to every question that had wormed its way into writing, and another that knew there would be no point in asking—it had already been seventeen years. If time could not wear down his refusal at meeting her, then what could she do, in all their sheer and unequivocal humanness?
There was a knock on her bedroom door, some half hour after Richard had accosted them, and Ophelia knew it was their Ma—Richard didn't knock, after all, just banged and screamed about being locked out until he wore himself or the door down.
After the click of a latch bolt, the turning of a knob, the permission granted, a coward in an emerald dress walked in.
She slipped a twenty dollar bill to her daughter, gazed around the small room—at the desk, with the journal open, and a picture frame that had been left faced down—and smiled, that sad and quiet thing, like she was afraid anything else would mean giving away all that she had left to keep wholly for herself, like she was grieving a million other lives in that fracture of a moment.
"Call if something happens, baby."
Ophelia nodded, and watched as the woman dressed up for her own execution walked through the sunset-stained doors.
She tucked the cash away, rolled up and stuck inside a pen, ignoring the clawing of ta de stomach. Though they were intent on returning to their writing, her eyes caught on the picture frame; how its black backing was glossy, reflecting slightly from the circular ceiling light. There was no reason to indulge in the urge which demanded the picture be held up, and so Ophelia did not touch it.
All it would've depicted were two strangers, an older woman and her son, with chocolate stained fingers and a smudge on his cheek.
There were some memories which required partitioning, a delineated line of before and after.
It was too much, too heavy in the hands, to throw away—to ask for the past, an enclosed portion of it at least, to disappear was to ask a person to do the same. Ma, in her accented English, learned to say sorry first in this new language; it did not matter that it was part of a larger sentence, that there was a whole it was once a part of, not when she herself had become only a piece of her home country.
There was nothing shocking in the fact that her child, her son, the first thing he learned was forgiveness; how a person could hear the word sorry so much it became like blood, a sequence of letters transferred in the womb, in DNA, in nucleotides, down to the individual phosphate groups, the very atoms of a person. It was so painfully part of you, so inextricable that to excavate it was too dangerous compared to just living with it.
And so the two lived with it—their borrowed apologies in a language that was never meant to be theirs, which had burrowed so deep into both of them, much deeper than it ever had into the body of a man like Richard, who had known America for generations longer than the Yuyis had.
What an irony it all was.
That black hole father and his paper crane wife, the birth of a son eating his bitterness, and an American stepdad that could never be as American.
☆
Ophelia woke up to the sound of a plate being shattered, and did not move—even as an angry man shouted, who only shouted because otherwise he would be wracked with sobs, an ugly thing of femininity's not made for his face.
The front door, after some ten or fifteen minutes, clicked open again, but slammed shut a second after.
She counted—one, two, a minute—before the sound of porcelain bumped against each other, landing in one of the trash cans. That was when Ophelia stood up and walked towards the door, hesitating for a moment before twisting the knob, allowing a sliver of the kitchen's hollowness to seep into her bedroom.
Their Ma only looked up when the hinges creaked, a low and throaty song cutting through the steady hum of a city in the cover of ink.
"Baby, it too late."
Ma was referring to the time—the blue, 8-bit time display embedded into the stove that read 2:53 AM—and she wasn't, too. Ophelia made her way closer to the paper crane woman, crumpled upon the floor, with shards of alabaster fanning around her body. There were a few light cuts that dribbled crimson onto the white tiling, and a raw bruise that had yet to purple—still a miasma of pink, a perverted blush dappling her cheeks, which would turn into flowers within a day or two, once the trapped blood had lost its oxygen and began to break down.
An appropriate gift—from a man like Richard.
Ophelia pivoted into the bathroom for the cabinet under the sink, looking for an old bag that contained medical supplies—a shoddy first aid kit, but enough.
By then, all the evidence of an incident was in the trash, except for the woman more an unfinished edge than a person.
There was no sound made when cleaning the cuts—how a human body could get so used to poison, a disinfectant which killed without discernment, the sting of your own cells dying in order to protect.
In stillness, a daughter would always be the first to break.
"Why?"
A car with a broken muffler drove down the street, the roar of its masculinity, that unbridled anger which pierced all that could be made sacred of the night.
"I made him lose face. Embarrassed. Spilled dish on guest—important one, black clothes kind."
Ophelia filled in the scene from there: the wine of those tablecloths, the accessory women on either side, how two men peacocked for the other's attention, that table soon full of small and perfectly identical plates, how one jutting of the arm could cascade down and into the puffed feathers of a boy that had never stopped playing as his father.
"We have to leave, Ma. You can't let him get away with this."
In a year—maybe two, if they were unlucky—that couple would break up, and Trevor would have continued as his father's lap dog, that leather leash of fear now comfortable around his neck, and Deb would have simply gotten away, wise enough to not sting when it would mean to die.
"Leave where? Who want, ah?"
There was no answer given. Ophelia was not Richard, had never learned to bend the universe until it fit whatever shape was needed. The truth was an ugly thing of femininity's, that there was nowhere but this shitty apartment that had opened itself up to fit two women the rest of the country could not bear to love.
And so, in that kitchen of all its loneliness, a son patched up his mother, became the olive branch extended out from a tree, a mother—this more complete and complex version of forgiveness, before that son would be known as help.
Perhaps, those two at the cafe wouldn't turn out to be another tragedy. Even if the statistics didn't agree. For what was love, if not smiling at the smallest of odds?
Ophelia would never know—and so, what did it matter?
All she did know was that in three years, ta would watch Richard drive off, a new woman in the passenger seat with a ring that had never made its way onto Ma's hands. All she did know was that, later that day, she abandoned a woman made of sorries in a small apartment, and left—a promise to stay away, to not return the calls, to allow a portion of the past to disappear, even at the risk of a body going with it.
Neither women had ever learned how to not sting, to not die in order to protect yourself.