Back To Your Roots

Part 1 Chapter 2

Alison and her brother Brian loathed their father. He was cold and calculating and never gave them the time of day. The day they came home from school and found their mother gone was the day their lives changed. Changed for the worst.

Dr. Mark Tanner went from cold and calculating to explosive and unpredictably angry. He would lash out at unexpected times. There became many nights that Alison and Brian would come home from school and go straight to their rooms and not come out until the next morning.

As time moved on, Brian was able to hang out with his friends and escape the situation through sporting events and sleep overs. Alison, however, was left most nights alone with her father. It was the nights alone that she feared the most.

It was a Friday night when her father came into her room, she was twelve. She didn't fully understand what was going on. She had smelled the alcohol on her father's breath and had known he was drunk. She had screamed for help at the top of her lungs before he muffled her cries with his hand. When he had finished, he had left her by herself broken, bruised, and bloody. This was how Brian had found her the following morning.

Alison didn't register that the sun had risen. Time stood still for her after the night's events. She heard Brian come home and knock on her door, but she didn't have any energy to answer him. All feeling had left her body.

"Oh my god! Ally what happened?" Brian was by her side stroking her hair.

"I couldn't stop him." She stared back at him with empty eyes. "I wasn't strong enough."

"Ally you're not making sense. Who did this? Does father know?" She saw the concern on his face. At the mention of their father, she felt like she was going to be sick.

She mimed to her brother that she was about to throw up everywhere. He scrambled to retrieve the waste basket that she kept in her room and placed it under her chin as she got sick.

Brian rubbed her back in soothing circles while she continued to throw up until there wasn't an ounce of anything left in her body.

"Ally, does our father know." He asked her calmly.

All she could do was nod her head. She didn't know how to tell her brother he was the cause of it. She saw Brian's face harden as he gathered his thoughts.

"Come with me. We need to get you help." He wrapped a blanket around her and gently lifted her into his arms. He carried her throughout the house and out to his car. Silently sending thanks to the heavens above that he had just turned sixteen a week prior prompting their father to buy him a car.

He slid his sister into the passenger seat and buckled her in. She still had an empty look in her eyes and in his gut, he was pretty sure he knows why. Their father had crossed a line. A very dangerous line.

Brian set his jaw as he turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of the driveway. The local hospital was only a few miles away. He held his sister's hand the entire drive hoping to keep her as conscious as possible.

When he pulled into the hospital parking lot, he threw the car in park and yanked the keys out. Rushing around the car, he opened Ally's door and picked her up bridal style. He didn't get more than three steps inside the lobby before he was shouting for help.

A nearby nurse gasped and rushed over. She was quick and competent to assess the situation as she guided Brian down a hallway and into a room with a bed and an assortment of machines. As instructed, he very gently placed his sister on the bed.

The nurse started firing off questions that he didn't have the answers to. The wind was knocked out of him when he felt Ally clutch at his hand and stare up at him with nothing but terror in her eyes.