“She was bipolar,” I offered.
Isaac nodded. “It wasn’t until I was maybe fourteen that I realized she was sick. She’d go on and off her meds all the time. She didn’t even tell me she was pregnant until she was almost six months along. I don’t think she even realized it herself.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
“And Newt’s father? Was he around?”
I felt Isaac stiffen. “Gary. He’d been living with us for almost two years at that point.” Isaac hesitated for a moment and then said, “She had really bad luck with guys. She usually found them when she was manic, so she wasn’t exactly picking winners, if you know what I mean.”
“Did they hurt her?”
“Some did,” Isaac admitted.
“And you?”
He shrugged. “A few. They’d knock me around here and there, but they usually weren’t around long enough to do any real damage.”
My heart dropped out at his words. He was just so nonchalant about it…
“What about Gary?”
“Gary was different. Smarter. More manipulative. My mom made good money at MIT and despite all her crazy behavior, she didn’t spend a lot of it. So I guess he saw her as a cash cow.”
“And you?” I asked. “How did Gary treat you?”
Isaac drew in a deep breath. “Gary was not my biggest fan. Not of the clothes or the makeup or the hair or pretty much anything I did. But he treated my mother decently, even though he was using her. He made sure she stayed on her meds. He was just doing it because he wanted to make sure the money kept coming in, but me… he didn’t mince words with me.”
“He hurt you?”
Isaac nodded.
“Your mother didn’t notice?” I asked as I tried to quell the growing rage inside of me.
“My mother was a genius, but she wasn’t good at picking up on social cues. She couldn’t really read other people and sometimes even when you told her something, she didn’t necessarily understand it. Numbers were the only things that really made sense to her. But she did her best.”
I didn’t exactly agree with him, but I didn’t want to argue the point since he was finally talking to me.
“Sometimes I think Gary got her pregnant on purpose,” Isaac said. “As a way to bind her to him. It wasn’t that he wanted Newt, though. He just wanted something that would guarantee his supply of beer was never-ending and there was always cash in his wallet. I heard him and my mom arguing about the pregnancy when my mom finally did learn she was pregnant–it wasn’t until a doctor at an ER told her after she slipped and twisted her ankle. Like I said, she was really smart, but some of the most basic things about life stumped her.”
Isaac shifted so he was facing sideways. He snuggled into my arms and rested his head on my chest. “I’d always planned to leave as soon as I graduated high school. I loved my mom, but I couldn’t keep sharing a roof with Gary. Not if I wanted to be myself.”
I took that to mean that to avoid Gary’s fists, Isaac had been forced to forgo the things that made him so uniquely him. I couldn’t even imagine what that had been like for him.
“Once Newt came along, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. Gary wasn’t interested in taking care of him and my mom was too busy with work or dealing with the occasional manic-depressive episode.”
“So you raised him,” I said.
Isaac nodded. “It wasn’t a hardship,” he added. “I fell in love with him the first time I held him.” There was a long pause and then Isaac said, “I did everything for him. Fed him, changed him, played with him, took care of him when he was sick, made sure he got regular checkups. All of it. After our mom died when Newt was two, I thought for sure Gary would take off and just leave me and Newt alone.”
“He didn’t?”
“No,” Isaac said with a shake of his head. “I tried to take Newt and leave one day, but he told me I could go, but Newt wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t understand why at first.”
“But you found out?”
“Yeah, he wanted Newt because my mom left behind a life insurance policy naming Newt as the primary beneficiary. She and Gary were never married. Since my mom understood numbers, she calculated that Newt would need the majority of the money, since he was only two. I was over eighteen, so she saw that as me being able to earn my own income. Gary too. So Newt pretty much got all the money. I told you, my mom understood numbers.”
My heart broke for him as I considered what that must have felt like. To know his mother had made plans for Newt to be financially taken care of, but not him.