The story opens when Nicky Young, a woman coming of age, reflects on why relationships are so difficult for her. Shadow Heart is her story, created from the journals she’s kept all her life. We open as she reflects back to eight years old, as she and her sister are waiting for their father, an alcoholic, to prepare dinner for them.
EARLY LESSONS: NICKY YOUNG
I always prayed the same way at night: “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Please bless my mother, father, sister, everyone in the world, and me. And please make my father quit drinking.”
This is what I know as a child growing up in a family battling alcoholism:
Something bad is coming; it always does.
I can’t ask for help; I’m too ashamed.
I can’t talk about our secrets; no one else understands.
I can’t trust anyone; they always leave.
Fear rolls out before me like a red carpet. It’s stained red with the blood of my family’s secrets. My name is Nicky Young. My story begins when I am eight and my sister is eleven.
We were only trying to have dinner before he unraveled. Now I’m cowering as I pray under the dining room table that he won’t see my hiding place. My small body shakes as I watch my sister face the wrath of our father’s anger.
It’s as if the desert storms from our mother’s childhood have come to us, their thunder and lightning are crashing.
“Please God,” I beg. “Protect me from the monster in my house.”
As little girls we spend most of our nights, like tonight, trying hard to avoid our dad’s drunkenness and counting down the minutes until our mom comes home from her night shift at the Juvenile Hall in San Francisco.
Jenise and I are being wrapped in our father’s horror as if he’s become a spider and we’re in his web, ready to be harmed, all because of a can of creamed corn and my sister’s defiance.
“Once he’s done with Jenise,” I say only to myself. “When he’s whipped her enough so that her sobs become quiet hurt, I know he’ll turn to find me.
“Once he’s done . . . he’ll look for me. Once he’s done . . .” I say to myself over and over. The words weave into my prayers as I clench my teeth in fear and shake under the dining room table.
Before my escape here, before he tore his belt from the loops of his pants, before my sister told him what he did wasn’t good enough, we were waiting for dinner. I don’t understand how his daughters, only wanting to eat something we like, made him explode.
As I sit in the blue vinyl booth in our kitchen and my sister in my mother’s chair, even I can hear his silent screams; wretched, twisted, and in such despair.
“How come he’s mad at us?” I whisper to Jenise. “What did we do?”
“Shh,” she says to me, putting her finger to her lips.
It’s as if sparks are igniting around him, irritating his skin. A red, angry, face takes the place of the genius I once admired him to be. Tonight, he paces, walking the floor, back and forth. His silent explosions are loud.
Does he only care about his whiskey now?
Why won’t he choose us over his bottle?
How come he won’t stop?
Sometimes I feel like we’re all pushed to the edge of going crazy.
I’m taken over with the thought, “We’re in his way, and he hates us for it! Oh, God, our father hates us.”
QUESTION: HAVE YOU EVER FACED A RAGING PARENT? ALCOHOLISM OR ADDICTION REACHES MOST ALL OF US. WHAT DO THIS PASSAGE INVOKE FOR YOU? WHAT CHALLENGES DO YOU THINK NICKY MIGHT FACE WITH RELATIONSHIPS?
MAR
About the Author: