“Don’t you come near me!” she hissed. “I hate you! Do you hear me?
I never want to see your face again. You’re a monster and you can go to hell for all I care!”
Swearing and muttering under her breath as though she were possessed, Coco turned the tap on full and splashed cold water on her cheek to ease the pain.
When she finally calmed down, she remembered she had been talking to Greg on the phone. She went to the kitchen with a towel pressed to her face and found the phone hung up. On the table was a basket of untouched popcorn.
Coco wanted to cry. She tried to stifle the emotion but hot, angry tears poured down her cheeks as she took ice out of the freezer. Jesse had disappeared and she didn’t care where he had gone.
She spent the night with ice pressed against the side of her face, crying from the pain. Greg called again because he was worried about her, but she was so angry she could barely put two words together. She could no longer rationalize Jesse’s actions. He had scarred her face. Anywhere but her face! Her head reeled with despair.
The bond she had been working so hard to create between the two of them had snapped, and now Coco felt nothing but hatred for Jesse.
He was too immature to understand the kind of love where a smile could be rewarded with another smile.
Coco loathed Jesse with a passion.
The next morning, Coco was awakened by a large hand gently rocking her shoulder. She was exhausted because she had been crying all night and the ice had melted, leaving a large wet spot on the sheets.
“Hey, baby. How you doing?”
It was Rick. She heard him put his bag under the bed. She had longed for him to come back, but now that he was here, she was too exhausted even to smile.
“Rick…” she said weakly.
Tears began to well up in her eyes again, and as they poured down her face, she almost forgot why she was crying.
Rick thought she was crying because she was so happy to have him back, and taking her chin in his hand, he lifted her face toward his to kiss her.
“Jesus, what happened to you?” he exclaimed. “How’d you get that? Baby, are you okay?”
Somehow Coco managed to tell him what had happened. There was no other way to explain the hideous scar on her face.
If it had been one of my fingers, I could have covered for you, Jesse, she thought.
Rick’s face darkened with rage.
“Jesse!” he boomed.
At first Jesse didn’t respond but after a while, he hesitantly appeared still dressed in his pajamas.
Rick stood glaring down at him. Jesse didn’t look up.
“Why did you do it?”
“Don’t know.”
“It was an accident, wasn’t it? Tell me it was an accident.”
Jesse didn’t reply.
“You didn’t mean it, did you? It was just a mistake, wasn’t it?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
Goco could see Rick’s blood boiling over. Unable to speak, he took off his belt, made Jesse lie facedown on the floor, and started beating him. At first Jesse endured the pain in silence, but as the beating continued, he began to cry out, louder with each successive lash. Rick took no notice of his cries and swung the belt harder still.
Coco looked on dispassionately. She felt completely unconnected to what was happening. In fact, as far as she was concerned, the blame lay squarely with Rick and his ex-wife, who had never considered the con-sequences of their actions. She knew it must hurt Rick to beat Jesse, but she felt that his pain was compensation for his mistakes. As he swung the belt, Coco’s eyes were on Rick, not Jesse.
Keeping ice on the burn seemed to be working, and a few days later the scar on Coco’s face was beginning to fade. But each time she touched it, no matter how gently, she felt that deep inside there was a deeper wound that would take much longer to heal. Now that she had time to think about it, she understood that Jesse had been jealous when she was on the phone with Greg. But surely no one had the right to feel jealous about someone he could never have a physical relationship with.
Jesse knew nothing about her. And that made her hate him all the more.
Why couldn’t he have simply tried to get her attention by smiling and saying, Hey! Listen to me, too! He wasn’t a baby anymore; in another four or five years he would start going out with girls. Coco wondered if it was possible for kids who had been brought up by parents who hate each other to grow up normally. Since she had completely given up on Jesse, she just hoped that he would find himself a girlfriend and leave home as soon as possible.
A baby. That’s what she was. She wondered how much difference there was between a real baby and the way she acted when she was with Rick. Jesse hadn’t spoken a word to her since his beating, and that was just fine as far as Coco was concerned. She found that once she had decided to hate Jesse, she couldn’t stop. Everything he did annoyed her.
Even the sound of him locking the bathroom door to take a shower disgusted her. What was he thinking? Was he really stupid enough to believe that anyone in their right mind would want to see him naked? The more she hated Jesse the uglier she herself felt, but there was nothing she could do to stop it.
Rick was completely unaware of the way she felt. Coco and Jesse hadn’t been getting along together when he left for San Francisco, so as far as he knew, nothing had changed. He was oblivious to the fact that they had begun to understand each other a little while he had been away.
Rick had a childlike innocence that Coco found reassuring and comforting, but that same innocence meant he was quite insensitive to the atmosphere of hatred in the apartment. Maybe that was the reason he had been able to put up with living with his ex-wife for over ten years.
Coco couldn’t stand that atmosphere, but she knew it was impossible to get rid of Jesse, so to stop herself from going mad she clung to Rick more than ever. And because she was always hanging on him even when they were with other people, rumors started to spread that Rick had Coco on a leash. She wasn’t particularly happy when she heard what they were saying, but what could she do? Forcing Rick to keep his attention on her was the only way she could deal with her emotions and find any peace of mind.
Rick was more than happy with the situation: he had a beautiful woman fawning over him, much younger than he was, and he wore her like a medal. He seemed just as absorbed in her as she was in him and even his coworkers were jealous. From the outside, Rick and Coco looked like the perfect couple, but in reality her mind was always full of hate. She loved him, of course, but behaving like this had never been her way of loving men.
Jesse changed, too, possibly because of the way Rick and Coco behaved toward each other. He had been very quiet since the day Rick had beaten him, but when Coco was in the kitchen Jesse made an effort to stay close to his father.
One evening, tired of reading, Coco headed to the bedroom only to find Jesse and Rick sleeping in the bed. She felt a hot flash of rage and dropped the book she had been carrying. Rick was fast asleep and didn’t stir, but Jesse woke and watched her through half-open eyes, which she thought made him look sly and calculating.
“Hey, that’s my place!” she hissed.
Jesse got up very slowly and went back to his room without a word.
There was a dip in the mattress where he had been lying. Coco lay awake, trembling with anger and frustration. She didn’t know what Jesse was up to, but the bed was warm where he had been and that irritated her all the more.
Rick woke up to find Coco beside him and pulled her close.
“Jesse was sleeping here, you know,” she told him seriously, as though she were reporting a crime.
“Yeah?” he replied, disinterested.
Thinking about it, she realized it was quite normal for a boy to go to sleep next to his father. But this was Jesse. If it were any other child, maybe it wouldn’t have bothered her. But Jesse was different.