TRIGGER WARNING: IMPLIED DOMESTIC ABUSE

Lydia made her way down the dim stairwell, unsteady on her feet. She leaned her shoulder against the railing and gingerly proceeded step by step. It was after 6, the sun had already set yet her father hadn’t turned on a single light between the upstairs hallway and the kitchen. Yet Lydia made no attempt to change this. She felt numb. Weeks ago she would have hated the feeling, but now she trudged forward to make it stay.

She moved through the living room, dyed blue by the remnants of sunlight that desperately tried to brighten the room before the night took them away. She entered the dining room, being careful of the narrow space between the dining table and the bookshelf, knowing that a swift touch could send searing pain up her body and into her already damaged mind.

She ignored the letters with names of universities on the table.

As she proceeded, the hardwood brightened as a beam of light emanated from the kitchen. It was muffled, but she could hear her father speaking to someone. Lydia creeped towards the kitchen. She ignored the dark, open doorway and stepped into the light of the kitchen.

Her father’s broad back was toward her. She listened as he spoke angrily into the phone.

“First you ruin your own life and now you’ve gone after our daughter’s! How dare you!” he says in a whisper-yell. “I should have made sure the courts terminated your rights the first time!……….That’s your excuse?! You’re really going to blame our daughter for this?! MY daughter?! You bi-!…”

Lydia saw her father tense up before slamming his fist into the kitchen counter.

“Janine, I don’t want to hear another word out of the cesspool you call a mouth! Next time hear from you better be through a lawyer!”

Her father slammed the phone onto the receiver. He ran a hand through his greying hair and slammed his fist into the counter once again.

“Dad?”

Her father whipped around. “Lydia!” he exclaimed.

She flinched.

He softened his voice.“I didn’t know you were there.” He approached her and gently touched her cast. He looked her in the eyes. “You heard all of that, didn’t you?”

She nodded, looking away. “It’s time for my medication,” she said quietly

He looked at her sadly before nodding and moving toward the cabinet and removing a yellow bottle of pills. With his strong and able hands, he unscrewed the cap,  and gave the pills to her.

She waited as he poured her a glass of water and placed a curly straw in it. When the glass was sat on the kitchen island. She opened her mouth and her father popped the pain killers into her mouth before she leaned forward to drink from her water.

“Thank you,” she said quietly when she finished.

Her father watched her as stepped back into the gloom of the dining room.

“I should have never let her go,” she heard him mutter as she left.

She moved away from the kitchen. She paused before the dark, gaping hallway. She should have asked her dad to close it. It would have given her a chance to ignore the pain. She lifted her foot to continue past the doorway but the room called to her, just as it called to her when her mother used to play in there, just as it called to her every day since she was a child.

She had refused the call so many times now, but today…

She took a step forward.

Despite her despair, she couldn’t resist.

She stepped into the room and for a moment, stood in its darkness. She took in deep breaths, taking in little traces of the room to brace herself for when its full impact came upon her.

Once she had gathered herself, she went to the wall and turned on the light switch with her shoulder.

Her practice room lit up before her.

She stepped over a fallen page of sheet music and brushed past the end table stacked high with music books of every genre, from jazz, to classical, to pop from beginner level to master’s, to stand in front of her old friend. 

Her brown upright piano squatted in the snug room, covered in dust for the first time since her father and his friends found it, fixed it up, and gave it to her. The piece she had been composing up until two weeks ago still sat in the stand, right next to her metronome. The piano had been her comfort when her mother left their family home for the last time. She played it every day and when she couldn’t sleep at night, she’d sneak downstairs and play it then too. 

She was about to sit on the piano bench when she noticed more university letters sitting on it, a mix of acceptance letters and scholarship packages. 

Lydia couldn’t accept them anymore

She tried to keep her mind off of them. Her attention went back to the piano proper

As Lydia stood in the room, she could vaguely remember the shiny black piano that was there previously. She remembered the yelling, the screaming, the shoving, the smell of alcohol on her mother’s breath. 

She remembered the wild banging and discordant cacophony as her mother raised a hammer to the piano again and again and again! The piano screaming for mercy as she splintered its wood and shattered its ivory, bone-like keys, wildly tearing it apart like an animal. 

Lydia gasped and leaned her back against the wall in an attempt to support her collapsing frame. She took deep breaths of air to keep herself from hyperventilating, but it was for not as her mother’s vicious, satisfied grin after she destroyed the family’s piano consumed her vision. No longer was her mother standing over the destroyed piano as her young daughter and soon-to-be-ex husband watched in horror, but her eighteen-year-old daughter as she held her hands down on the table and-

BAM! BAM! BAM!

Lydia banged her head against the wall as she began to wail. She wanted to lift her hands to protect herself, but her casts got in the way.

“NO! No! No! Mom! Please! Don’t!” she sobbed at the top of her lungs as she turned towards the wall and tensed her body against the phantom blows, in hope of protecting what was most precious to her.

“Lydia? Lydia!” her father called as he leaned into the room before rushing to her side. He grasped her shoulders and pulled her away from the wall. “Lydia! You’re at home! I’m here! You’re safe, Liddie!”

Lydia looked up at her father, slowly being pulled out of the attack by her father’s presence. “D-Daddy?” she asked.

He wiped her tearstained face before pulling her in close. “That’s right. Daddy’s here. This time, Daddy’s here.”

Lydia felt tears fall onto her hair as she buried her face in her father’s shirt and continued to sob.