Salena Vertolomo
When the Bow Breaks

_____I killed my daughter. She was three and a half, and her green eyes were so clear that I swore she could see into the future; swore she knew what I would do. You’re thinking: this woman is the evilest kind of evil and God will punish her someday. I’m thinking that on Wednesdays I would dress her in a purple leotard, tie her golden hair in two ribboned pigtails and take her to tumbling class at the Y. She tumbled and twirled and laughed a high pitched laugh that bubbled through the glass enclosed waiting room where I sat waiting for the class to be over.
_____You’re thinking: how did you do it? I know that’s what you’re asking because no matter how terrible something is, everyone wants to know the gruesome details first. When you read about car accidents in the paper, a million different images run through your head and you ponder (silently in your own mind, so that no one will think you are a sadistic freak) whether the victim’s head was clearly decapitated at the neck or whether it hung on a hinge or how exactly a steering wheel goes about slicing a grown man’s flesh right in half. So right now you’re wondering how I did it. I’ll just tell you, so that we can get it over with first thing and you don’t have to go on listening just to get to the gory part of the story. It’s like watching the sex scene in a movie first, that way you can stop anticipating and just pay attention to the rest of the movie. You’re thinking: she just compared murdering her daughter to a sex scene in a movie. I’m thinking about all of the nights that I checked on her after she was sound asleep, warm, tiny body snug in Elmo sheets, and I would trace the tiny shell of her ear with my fingertip. Sometimes it’s so unimaginable to imagine yourself creating another human being, and such a perfectly beautiful one at that.
_____By now you’re thinking: she killed her daughter to spare her from the pain and suffering of a fatal disease that would take her life anyway. Thanks. That’s kind of you. You know, I appreciate every little benefit of the doubt that is ever doled out to me. When I’m sitting in diners, sitting on cracked vinyl seats, I watch for the people who haven’t received the benefit of the doubt in decades. There’s always the guy with the unshaven jaw and tousled, uncut hair, drinking coffee black and smoking cigarette after cigarette. I can tell by the way the waitresses look at him that they are making up all types of stories to justify their repulsion of him: he’s a pervert, a cheater, a thief, a lowlife, a scum to society. I sit there, eating my slice of banana crème pie, and I think about how it simply comes down to the fact that he gives everyone the heebie jeebies because he looks unstable, unclean, untrustworthy and all of the other uns that make people walk the extra five or six feet away from a fellow human being.
_____I’m not at all un. I mean, when you look at me, I’m not any of those things. People stand close to me all the time in public places. My daughter’s preschool teacher tells me that I look just like Ashley Judd’s sister. I mean, not the sister she actually has, not Wynona, but her nonexistent imaginary other sister. In any case, Ashley Judd isn’t un. Neither am I.
_____Oh right. You’re thinking: don’t change the subject, just tell me how you killed your own child, and tell me specifically. Well, specifically, I induced an unconscious state and then I intravenously injected her with a large dose of barbituric acid derivatives, which caused a deep anesthesia, followed by the depression of her respiratory centre, which led to cardiac arrest, which led to death. More simply, I gave her two adult doses of NyQuil, and when she was completely asleep, I euthanized her. She always hated needles, and you know how horribly painful it is to watch your child scream in terror and pain when the doctor is trying immunize them, so I wanted to make sure she was sound asleep before I injected anything into her. I wanted her last memories to be of me tucking her into her bed, turning on her Dora the Explorer night light, and kissing her all over her face while she squirmed and laughed the hysterical laughter that makes me laugh out loud myself.
_____You’re thinking: how could you do that? I’m thinking you have no idea.

_____The Sunday morning before today, I woke up because I had sweated right through the sheets, right into the down baffle-box that makes every night’s sleep a dream. It was my dreams that made me wake up like that. I saw it, so clear, my own hands stripping away her flesh with the black scissors that came with the knife set that I bought off an infomercial at 2 a.m. I saw me stripping the flesh off, and then cutting the bones in her wrists, in her ankles. I cut off her ears, one flat, fleshy little surface at a time. I held the scissors open the way you do when you curl ribbon on presents, wide open, only using one of the blades to pull down. Except, instead of the ribbons, I peeled away her skin. She was still alive. The screaming woke me up and that’s when I felt how wet the bed had gotten, how my hair had soaked through my pillowcase and stuck to the back of my neck.
_____I got up and had a cup of tea. My hands shook as I put the mug of water in the microwave, and I crept into her room as the numbers went down to the beep. She was asleep, breathing heavily the way kids do when they are sleeping too soundly to ever notice anything around them. I drank my tea and calmed myself.
_____On Monday morning I was cleaning off the booster seat that she loves to sit on even though she’s tall for her age and can sit on a normal chair just fine. I swiped at the crumbs, and just like that, my mind turned on like a reel movie, the kind that my mother has from the 50s, the kind that show people laughing silently and sledding down hills in a fuzzy, black and white kind of way. My mind turned on just like that, except full color, and there I was, smashing her head into the faucet of the bathtub. I held it like a melon, and slammed, slammed, slammed it into the spout until she didn’t cry anymore. She didn’t do anything anymore, and her freshly washed blonde hair was matted with blood and brain and bone pieces from her skull, which still hadn’t fully hardened.
_____I dropped the booster seat and slid down against the cupboards. I held my knees against my chest and shook, trying to clear my eyes of the sight that I just saw, but how do you clear something that is in your own head? I sat like that for a long time, until she came down and asked me what was wrong, and if I had a belly ache, and if I wanted her to rub it for me. I made her cereal, but I couldn’t calm myself as quickly as the last time.
On Monday night I deliberately put her in the bathtub, and we played with her Barbies while I washed her hair. See, I told nobody but myself, see, you sick psychopathic bitch. You can give your kid a bath just like normal. I toweled her off and put her to bed.
_____While I was driving to pick up some apple juice on Wednesday afternoon, with her singing to herself in the back seat, I mentally thought about what else I could get while I was there: some potato bread for the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that she likes with the crusts cut off, milk, conditioner for myself, apple juice, apple juice, apple juice. The kid drinks apple juice like it’s spouting from the Fountain of Youth. I stopped at the light, and right as I did, the reel turned on again, and she was there, crying in that really hard way that makes no sound coming out, holding her bloody arm against her. I watched as she pressed against the wall and curled into a ball, holding her arm, crying the no-sound cry and gasping, and then I walked up to her and swung the hammer at her knee. When it struck, she screamed, and the reel went dark, and she was in the backseat crying for real because I had just swerved onto the side of the road like a maniac and the yank of the car had scared her.
_____I leaned my forehead against the cool of the steering wheel and gently shushed her until she stopped asking what was wrong. Mommy’s sick, I said silently. Mommy is a sick mommy. She needs a doctor. I waited a long time to finish the errands.
_____On Thursday morning when I woke up, I was holding something soft and squishy, which turned out to be her neck. Her eyes were bulging, and she made no sound from her open mouth. I screamed until my throat felt raw, and she cried on her bed, holding tightly to the hoard of stuffed animals that she insisted on keeping with her overnight. When she carefully climbed off the bed and hugged herself against my legs, I dug my fingernails into my hands to keep from touching her. We watched Disney movies together all day, wrapped in a blanket on the couch, and neither of us said anything about anything.
_____Friday, right around noon, I broke one of my fine crystal goblets over the edge of the countertop and carried the pieces into the playroom, where she sat in her yellow sundress, arranging plastic zoo animals into neat little lines. I picked the sharpest piece I could find and then sliced a long bloody trail down her arm. She cried out in pain and then saw the blood and started screaming. I didn’t scream though. I just put the piece of glass down and held her against me, telling her how sorry I was over and over again, until the words choked me and I just held her in silence.

_____So here I am.
_____I sit here, holding her little wrists in my hands, pressing my fingers until there is no more breathing and no more heartbeat. I kiss her once on the forehead – I give myself this as a gift. I kiss her once in the same place that I kissed her when she was handed to me, wrapped in pink fuzziness and smelling like new.
_____And then I pick up the phone and dial.
_____“Send the police,” I say. “I just saved my daughter.”