Encounters

When Laura left the room, I turned to Papa and stared at him, at the lines that created his face and the colors that blurred like blue marbles to make his eyes, and I didn’t recognize him.
He shifted under my gaze, glancing up at me briefly before turning away and towards the door.
“Papa?” I asked, stepping after him quickly, shifting Avi on to the ground where he immediately grabbed on to my legs and turned his head into me.
Papa paused and the room seemed to freeze with him. The air seemed to hold a stillness, a waiting in it that it had not before and I turned and glanced around me expecting someone else to be waiting and watching with me, but we were alone.
“What, Martha?” Papa’s words came between clenched teeth and squared lips.
I moved towards him then, placing my hand on his back, that shuddered into stone beneath my fingers. The silence stretched out around me shutting me into a sorrow that throbbed through me and pressed at my lips and eyes. Sobs welled in my mouth, around my tongue and escaped my lips in a blubbering sound that contained no words.
Papa turned back to me, glanced at my face, guilt etched in the corners of his eyes and the shadow of his mouth. “Stop it, Martha. Stop it.” He reached down and grabbed Avi who clutched me even harder, his own little body racked with tears. Papa wrenched Avi from me and tossed him up into his arms as if he weighed nothing, Avi cowered into him, his round hands gripping Papa’s neck, Papa’s hands gently stroking circles on his back.
“Papa.” I said, again and reached out towards him. “Why? Why?” I could feel my face contorting with the words that whined out of me in their self pitying sobs and watched Papa’s look of guilt turn to one of disgust. I quickly tried to control my sobs, swallowing the emotion that was errupting out of me and attempting to straighten my face out of its pleading expression.
“Stop it, Martha. We will talk about this later, when you are calm.” His voice held the same patronizing slide that it had held so often with Mama, when she would come crying to him at times, and he would shake his head and run from her clinging hands and weeping eyes.
When she had done that I had pitied her, had shaken my head as Papa had done at her, but now as the emotions racked through me I knew what she had felt. The emptiness that he could create in one, the feeling that one was not good enough for him no matter what they did.