"My baby girl! I'm so sorry, please, you can't die!" I hear my mother scream through hysterical sobs.

An EMT unloads the gurney I'm lying on from the back of the ambulance and says, "ma'am, you have to step back!" He barks a few orders at some other EMTs, and they begin to wheel the gurney across concrete and over the threshold of two, open automatic doors.

The temperature increases as I'm brought inside from the winds of an unforgivingly cold night. Passing bright lights above rhythmically blind me and send pains shooting straight into my already fiercely aching head. I can feel my eyes trying to roll back as one of the EMT's shouts at me to keep them open. A few seconds later, the atmosphere changes again, and I can feel that I'm finally brought to a halt. A man in white swiftly approaches me with a group outfitted in blue scrubs. They hover over me and devolve into unrecognizable, smeared blobs as I lose the fight to keep my eyes open. I can hear a panic break out and my eyes roll to the back of my head. Within seconds, I'm out of it.

My name is Jennifer Dooley, and this is how my night ended.

So, then, how did it begin? The same way it always had—with the piece of shit I call a father, Eric, screaming at my mother.

According to Eric, his food was ice cold by the time my mother, Nina, had served it to him. It wasn't. It never was. But my mother knew that. She knew it for longer than the seventeen years I've been alive. Yet, she did what she always did when he manufactured some reason to bully her—she apologized. She begged for his forgiveness, promising to take it back to the kitchen and bring it back piping hot. The only way a plate with so much steam billowing from its contents could get any hotter is if she set it on fire. He knew that, which is why instead of handing the food to her, he knocked it to the floor.

It was rare, but every now and again, my mother would find a reservoir of self-worth deep within. When that happened, an argument would erupt, and this time was no different. I excused myself, as I always did. Nothing sickened me more than listening to the same, formulaic bullshit that always ended with him getting his way and her acquiescing to him. During these situations, I tended to retreat to my room and lose myself in the deafening blares of my music. But this time, as I was halfway up the stairs, I heard my mother make a sound that turned my stomach. It was an abrupt gurgle, the kind someone makes when they suddenly lose the capacity to breathe.

It had become my personal rule after years of being berated and slapped for interfering in their arguments that I would never get involved unless I feared for my mother's life. Well, hearing my mother make that awful sound triggered that exact fear inside me, and for that reason, I darted back down the stairs and into the kitchen to find Eric with his hands wrapped around my mother's neck, choking her. He had always been an angry, violent asshole that wasn't above striking me and my mother, but he had never escalated beyond slaps. I wasn't prepared for what I saw, and I froze for a second as I processed that for the first time, Eric was actually trying to kill my mother.

"Don't you ever talk to me like that again!" he had yelled at her. He was squeezing her throat so hard the veins were beginning to bulge from the back of his huge, hairy hands.

I snapped out of my trance when my mother choked out a pained, meek whimper that sent me into a frenzy. I grabbed his arms, trying to pry them off my mother while I rapidly cursed the bastard. I couldn't even get my hands all the way around the asshole's forearms, and mom was starting to turn red. In furious desperation, I sunk my teeth into his arm, which made him howl like the animal he is. It worked, and he released my mother from his iron grip as thin rivers of his blood began to seep from the sides of my mouth.

"You fucking bitch!" he roared.

And that's when it happened.

With the arm I wasn't biting, he balled up his huge hand into a fist, and punched me in the face with such force that I flew backwards. I hit the back of my head, first on the sharp edge of the table, then on the hardwood floor. I heard a disgusting crack, and then my vision went dark. When I opened my eyes again, my mother was kneeling over me, screaming into her phone, eyes wide and pouring tears. Eric was pacing back and forth, pulling his hair with an empty, thousand-yard stare in his bloodshot eyes. My head rolled to the side involuntarily and my heart jumped when I noticed the blood that had pooled around my skull. It was like I had laid my head down in a crimson rain puddle—the sight alone was enough to make me sick. I found myself unable to control my body as it began to twitch and convulse on its own accord.

"You killed my baby girl, you fucking bastard!" I heard my mother cry, and then I blacked out.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

And that's how my night began and ended. Not exactly a heartwarming story, now, is it?

For the third time, I feel my eyes slowly flutter open. Immediately, the repetitive beep of a heart rate monitor fills my ears. As my vision comes into focus, I ascertain the obvious. I'm in a hospital room, lying in a bed with machines hooked up to me left and right. The first thing I notice is my mom, she's seated in a chair next to my bed, her head laid beside my legs, fast asleep.

A television in the top right corner of the room plays The Price is Right at a low volume, and I can see at the bottom corner of the screen that it's eleven A.M., the next morning. A wave of pain courses through my head and I groan, causing my mom to abruptly rise out of the heap of mid-length, brown hair that had masked her sleeping features.

"Oh my god, you're awake!" she says, nearly leaping to her feet. The chair skids back an inch on the floor, creating an annoying screech that makes my eye twitch, something I can tell she notices immediately. "I'm sorry! N-Nurse, my baby is awake!"

The squishy clacking of shoe on tile approaches my room, and in a few seconds, a man wearing navy scrubs appears in the doorway. He steps over to me and smiles at me. "Good morning, it's good to see you're awake. You had us all scared last night, Jennifer."

"Oh," I say. My voice sounds hoarse and exhausted.

"Can I call you Jen?" he asks. I reply with a nod. "Great! Well, Jen, you cracked your skull and have a pretty bad concussion to boot. We want to run some more tests and keep you here to watch over you until we feel confident that you'll be okay. Head injuries are nothing to mess around with."

I didn't crack my skull, Eric did. That fucking bastard.

The memory of last night slowly returns to me, and the beeps on my heart rate monitor increase as a result.

"Is she okay?" my mom asks, worry in her words.

"Don't worry, Ms. Dooley. She's fine, the pain is probably just setting in again. I'll be back with some more medicine."

The nurse exits the room, and my mother flashes a forced, tired smile at me.

"Show me what I look like," I ask my mother. She frowns.

"Why do you want to see yourself right now, baby?"

"Please, just show me, mom."

She sighs and retrieves her phone from her purse. She turns the device on in selfie mode and holds it up to me. The image the camera and screen reveals is a far cry from the picture my brain is familiar with. An unrepentant punk girl through and through, I typically fashioned my clavicle-length, dark hair into two pigtails, leaving my blunt bangs to frame my features which usually wore dark makeup. Mom always jokes that I look like Pauley Perrette, the actress that played the forensic scientist on that show NCIS, and yeah, I guess she's not wrong. But at the moment, I looked nothing like myself. My face was bare and swollen, bruised where Eric's fist made contact. My hair was clipped back and framed with thick bandaging that stretched the circumference of my head. I looked awful, and I knew I would. But I needed to see myself. More specifically, I needed to see the result of what I always knew that monster was capable of.

"Where is he?" I asked, bluntly.

Mom put the phone back in her purse and looked at me with a firm expression. "Jail. I'm pressing charges against him for assaulting both of us."

"Oh, so you're not covering for him this time?"

Mom hangs her head and shuts her brown eyes tightly. Her lips quiver and she begins to sniffle and cry immediately.

I shouldn't have said that...

"Mom, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"

"No, you're right," she interrupts. Her voice hitches as she speaks. "Y-You've always been right. I did cover for him. I made excuses for his behavior and looked the other way when he hit us. I groveled when he demanded apologies from me, and I hopped on your case when you called me out for all of it. And the worst part of it all is that I still would have been doing the same thing if he hadn't gone as far as he did..."

I feel tears begin streaming down my own cheeks as I watch my mother tormented by her guilt. Guilt that he above anyone else is responsible for.

"But he went too far this time," mom says, clenching her fist tightly—something I've never seen her do. "He almost killed my baby girl. God, I was so scared I would lose you!"

"He almost killed you too, mom. Please don't forget that."

"You come before anything, Jen. I'm your mother, that's how it's supposed to be. I failed you so many times... too many times. But not anymore. I decided that I'm going to divorce him."

My heart did a backflip with joy inside my chest at the words coming out of her mouth.

"Seriously?!"

"Yes," she confirmed. "Enough is enough."

"I wish I could hug you right now," I said, the words falling out of my mouth with a hoarse chuckle.

"So do I, baby. But I'm afraid I'll hurt you!"

We shared a laugh as the nurse returned to the room. He seemed happy to see us in higher spirits than he left us. He once again stepped out after medicating me and speaking with my mother about what the next couple of days would entail for me. After he left, mom sat beside me again and held my hand.

"I don't want to upset you, Jen, but I do have something that I have to tell you that might make you not so happy with me anymore."

This medicine has me feeling too good to be upset, I thought.

"What is it, mom?"

"Well," she started. "Given everything that's happened, I don't think it's a good idea to stay in that house anymore. The neighbors will talk, and I don't want all that negative attention following you to school. Plus, too much of Eric's family lives close by, and you know what they're like. They already hate me; they'll blame us for everything and try to make our lives hell."

"So, you want to move?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Well, okay, I guess. But where would we go?"

Mom took a breath and bit her lip, as if she was bracing for my reaction. Releasing her lips from the sharp grip of her teeth, she spoke. "Redville."

You've got to be shitting me.