As I was strapped, I would plead with my mother, at first with words and later, as I grew older, with just my eyes. I would beg her to help me, to get him off me. And I would watch as the light of consciousness left her. Staring straight at me, brazenly, as if in a dare, I could see my mother vacate. It was an oddly intimate moment, almost obscene, as if she were showing me some wanton part of herself I had no business glimpsing. Where did she go? That question plagued me. When she decided to abandon me to him, when the light in her eyes went out like that, where did she go?
