On the cusp of her terrifying twenties, Della sat near a frosted-over windowpane. The hole through the mesh screen had allowed a family of ladybugs to crawl in and die upon her boyfriend’s windowsill. She poked at them now, drawing her warm fingers from the coffee mug, tracing their cold, hard backs as if she might be able to resuscitate them. “I’m sorry you had to die here, I think I might die here too,” she thought as she continued to poke.
Early in the relationship, he’d recounted the story of how the hole came to be. In a Xanax-fueled breakdown, he’d thrown his roommate’s rusted box fan out of the window and onto their car below. He’d told her he had been clean for a while now, that substance abuse was a thing of the past, and it’s not something Della should choose to ruminate on. “I know how you like to bury your… claws in these kinds of things,” he’d said, already fueled with annoyance by things Della hadn’t even chosen to speak of yet. “It’s different with us,” he promised a moment later. But Della knew – she'd spent what felt like a lifetime comparing all her relationships to those of her mother’s. She knew she’d face the truth of the matter soon enough, when she felt like it. Maybe on a blazing summer day when the world around her glared so beautifully that she’d see her lover for what he really was. Or maybe when she finished her degree and finally felt above these childish circles she’d been running in. She’d thought to herself she could stop at any time. She’d weighed different outcomes: Leave now and you’ll sooner meet someone who doesn’t make you fantasize about death. Stay for a year or two more, and you’ll be out of college, and the emotional damage won’t hurt your grades. But Della, despite the constant conflict that surrounded these trivial partnerships, knew this couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t be her life forever. She’d found peace in saying these words to herself, and with the peace that followed, she’d felt no real reason to make any kind of step toward actually removing herself from these situations.
Wash, rinse, repeat, like the beginning of a cavity she’d gotten during the month of her 8th birthday. Her mother had moved that year to what felt like the opposite side of the world, and in her mother’s absence, Della’s father and grandmother showered her with constant trips to her hometown’s bakery. Della would grow to associate creamhorns with her mother’s leaving, and she’d talk about the pastry like she’d die without them, but would recoil at the sight of them, talking herself down from buying them every time she passed them in a grocery store. Her mother would go on to recount her own upbringing: alcoholic parents, an abusive father, a strung-out brother. All of them addicts, she’d told Della. Her childhood had been filled with cautionary tales of addiction, love, and what really breaks a human, and Della wondered if a pastry addiction could kill her too.
It wasn’t until high school that she’d finally kicked the addiction, replaced on a whim by a scale she’d purchased at CVS. It started as a promise to stay far away from processed sugars and empty calories, but it morphed into a cruel beast that hammered images of nutrition labels into her mind, like pictures of war crimes she’d seen on her family’s desktop computer. She’d found a new outlet to pour herself into—a passion for health and nutrition. Her peers would comment on her changing appearance, complimenting the way her waist changed shapes and the distinct way her jawline broke away from her neck. On a visit to her mother’s house, she’d ask Della what she’d done, and Della, with a passion for terrorizing her mother, would tell her she’d simply stopped eating, like it was no big thing. Her mother would only give her a beaming smile and joke that maybe she should give it a try.
With Della’s newfound interest in her appearance, the men around her began finding interest in it too. She’d never been one to fall victim to instant attraction; it wasn’t something she had to offer. Her appearance was always a barrier—something you’d have to dig through or remove her from entirely to find a sexual being beneath. So, love didn’t come easy to her as she grew up. It was often men she’d loved as friends and trusted for years that, one day, would find interest in Della. And she’d be utterly repulsed by the confessions, like she’d had a betrayal laid in her lap in the form of someone she’d thought would never try to fuck her. But with strangers, the newfound attention from them fueled her desire even deeper to count, weigh, and log every change in her body and every plate she’d make for herself. She’d go on to fall in and out of various relationships, most of them remaining insignificant. She’d be cheated on, kicked out in the middle of the night, and screamed at incessantly for her wardrobe. And in turn, they would come to a long, drawn-out end, but Della thought the worst part wasn’t the way it felt to be treated this way, but instead the realization that she could see the way these relationships would play out before they even began, and finding herself too enamored by the idea of fresh love to care. Hurt me later, but love me now is how she saw it. And she accepted it with open arms as an essential part of life, sex, and love.
Two weeks before the start of her junior year of high school, Della’s yearly trip to her mother’s house on the coast of North Carolina was coming to a close. In the final days of every visit, Della would be flooded with conflicting feelings about going home. Here is my mother, she’d think. I am her daughter, she’d declare. We are together now, and I hate it and what it has become, but I can touch her and she’s real, and I’m in her arms again. Della would count down the hours until she was away from home. Her stepfather had gotten crueler with each year, and her mother would make excuses. He got laid off, Della. His kids won’t talk to him, baby. He’s just having a hard time. And her mother would be a human shield, the same way she had been since she left Della’s father. There’d always be an excuse for the dark bruises rimming her mother’s suntanned skin. “I fell from the boat and hit the ladder.” “I fell from the back of his motorcycle on the way home from the bar last night.” “I fell, I fell, I fell.” But Della noted each time, the memory of being a young girl in a gymnastics class, mesmerized by her mother prancing across the balance beams like she’d been standing on solid ground. It was this trip that Della thought would be the final time she’d ever come back here, though it wasn’t. Over the summer break, Della had a bowl hurled at her head, a plate smashed in front of her, and a friction burn on her shoulder from a grown man trying to rip her out of the driver’s seat of her mother’s Volkswagen, seatbelt still on. All these things boiled over like a screaming tea kettle, and Della’s mother snapped. In a drunken frenzy, the married pair took to each other like wild animals fighting over the last piece of steaming, hot carcass. It came to an abrupt close when, in the heat of the moment, Della called the police. She’d heard screams about a gun from outside the home where she sat, and she imagined herself walking back into a silent room, her mother’s brain matter pasted to the yellow walls. There was no firing of the gun, but when the police arrived, they’d taken Della’s mother into custody instead of her stepfather. Della, confused by this, fell to her knees and told them they had the wrong person. “He beats her,” she screamed, but the people hauling her mother to the cop car wouldn’t give her a second look. She’d find out weeks later, through her mother’s friend, that the indoor cameras around the home had recorded her mother leaving the married couple’s bedroom with two shotguns on her hips, poised to shoot. Della’s mom, once released from her holding cell, would go on to tell her that this was the last bad thing that ever had to happen to them. She was staying in a hotel; she had her friends close by, making sure she wasn’t found. Weeks went by, and the story her mother had told her of triumph and escape turned into something of an excuse, and this time, it will be different. “I just need to make nice, pretend everything is okay while I get my affairs in order to leave.” It took Della’s mother three more years to get those affairs in order.
Now, back in her boyfriend’s bedroom, Della remained folded tightly in herself before the window, the ladybugs, and the hole. The guy she had been dating on and off again for the past three years was in a fitful sleep upon the bed beside her. She’d woken early from a bad dream. One she was having trouble shaking from her mind. In her dream, she’d walked in on him making love to the girl he’d cheated on her with last year. She held a cold expression, and he watched her intently as she made her way over to the bed they were lying in. No words were exchanged, but horror filled the other woman’s face. Della climbed atop the mattress, calmly pulling her boyfriend down onto his back. She climbed on top of him and watched as his eyes turned hungry, likely imagining the girl had found interest in joining the pair. But Della did not reach to remove his clothes, or her own, or even to retaliate with fists. Instead, her hands wrapped tenderly around his throat, tightening her grip ever so slightly. He watched in horror but made no movement to stop Della. The girl he had been making love to moments before remained still but let out loud, wailing sobs. Della, too, began to cry, repeatedly panting, I’m so sorry, I hate you, I’m sorry. She squeezed and squeezed as she horrifically watched the life vacate from his eyes, his form go limp under her thighs and wrists. Della had woken the moment he had died, and she shivered and shook as she peeled his arms from the spot on her waist where they now rested. She had found herself more stuck than usual. She’d always been one to forgive, desperate to go back to playing house, but she never let things get this bad. She’d thought each time she left him, certainly this will be the last time. But it never was, and she cruelly recalled her mother and her husbands, and the way Della had felt disgusted by the woman’s weakness in love. In turn, Della had vowed she would never be so stupid as to stay with a man who hit her. But Della was not there, nor here, and he had certainly hit her. He’d played it off each time with an unusual amount of grace. I was only reacting to your anger, Della. Della, you keep pushing someone, and they’re going to snap. No, this has nothing to do with my drinking. The pill bottles are old, and shame on you for accusing me of relapse. She’d taken his defenses as truth and exclaimed to herself that she’d have to kill him or herself to get out of this mess.
As she peered into the gray January sky, she thought maybe she was doomed from the start to live a life such as this one, with the tales her mother told her of pain and loss taking the place of eccentric bedtime stories of princesses, flowing long hair, and a brave knight. She thought maybe it was part of her DNA. The Branch girls were cursed to find men who loved to hurt them more than they loved to hold them. Her destiny was predetermined long before her, or her mother had even been an idea or a hope. She imagined calling her mother and blaming her for every wrong thing Della had ever done and every cruel man she’d let touch her. Maybe if my mother had been stronger, maybe if my grandma left, maybe if my great-grandmother married someone who had a life outside of the coal mine, it could’ve all stopped there, and here Della would be married to a man with a degree and an aptitude for soft touches.
Before Della had a moment to second-guess herself, she rose from the chair, turning away from the window, the ladybugs, and the hole. She tiptoed quietly from the bedroom, trying not to wake the sleeping man. She perched upon the bottom step of the stairs leading to the living room and pulled out her phone. A few rings, and then a click.
“Mama?” Della whispered.
A long pause. “Della?” Her mother answered. Della remained silent on the other end of the phone, digging her teeth into her bottom lip.
“Is everything okay, honey? You’re scaring me.” Concern filled her mother’s voice.
“I understand it now. I think I do. I think I understand.” Della spoke breathlessly. Her pulse had quickened at the confession, at laying herself bare to a woman she’d felt she’d known as well as a stranger in the supermarket.