“I’m sorry. For leaving.”
“I know, Ty. You’ve said it already. It’s done.”
“Is it?” I ask nervously.
“That part? Yes. It is.”
“And the next part?”
He says nothing, and I think I’ve pushed him too far. I hear how pathetic I sound, like a little kid begging for something that isn’t his to begin with. God, could I be any more ridiculous? Here he is, saying these nice things, and I’m saying now, now, now, and more, more, more. It’s not fair to him. Especially since he’s already driving with me to Idaho on a fool’s errand toward something that can only cause more hurt. He shouldn’t be here. He should be at home with the life he’s had over the past four years. The life he made for himself after I walked away with only thoughts of myself.
But then he speaks. Oh God, how he speaks.
“I woke up,” he says, “because I’d heard something shatter, and I was sure someone was breaking into the house. At least, that’s what I thought when I was still half-asleep. But then I heard the little scream my mother gave and the sound of my father striking her, speaking to her in that way he did when he was drunk and pissed off. You’d be surprised how it sounded. It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t shouting. It was almost conversational, like he was asking you about your day. He’d say things like, ‘You know what you did,’ and, ‘This is all your fault,’ and, ‘It’ll be over before you know it.’
“He was a big man, my father. And he might have done great things with his life. He might have learned gentleness. But he fell into drink like his dad did and found a woman who wouldn’t walk away, no matter how hard he hit her. They exist, as hard as it is to believe. People like him. People like her. I’ve seen it since, and I’m sure I’ll see it again. I thought maybe I could help stop it, but there’s always going to be someone who likes to hit. There’s always going to be someone who walks back into getting hit.
“There was a dish. It’d broken on the kitchen floor. That was the first thing I saw. Pieces of it were all over the floor. Some near my bare foot. The rest of it was sitting in red paint. At least that’s what I told myself. That she’d spilled red paint when the dish had broken. But then I heard my father say, ‘It’ll be over before you know it,’ and he started hitting her. She was lying on the floor covered in red paint and he was hitting her over and over again in the face. Again and again and I knew it wasn’t red paint. I knew it wasn’t. It was her. It was my mom all over the floor. My mom, who had told me once to be a better man than my father. Who had told me to grow up and be better than him, and she was lying on the floor and she wasn’t moving aside from her head knocking to the side every time he hit her in the face.
“I screamed at him to stop. He ignored me. I tried hitting him on the back. On the head. Even though I was supposed to be a better man, I still hit him, even though I told myself I would never hit anyone like he hit her. Like he hit me.”
“Dom—”
“Listen.”
I do.
HE THOUGHT his mother was already dead, and it was the first grown-up thought he could ever remember having. There was something cold about it, something strangely clinical, and it crossed his mind the moment his father had knocked him down to the floor, telling him and his mother that it’d be over before they knew it.
He doesn’t remember much about what happened next. Little flashes, maybe. Pieces, like the plate broken on the floor, and for this I’m thankful. It’s like his mind wanted to protect him from the horror. There were scissors in one of the drawers. His mother used them for the scrapbooks she used to make. He remembers grabbing them, pleading with his father to stop. His father did not stop.
He was told later he stabbed his father in the side seven times. Surely it stopped the savage beating. Surely it saved his own life, because his father could have come after him next. Surely he was a hero. This is what he was told.
He was also told it was too late to save her. This, of course, came much later.
It came much later because after he’d stabbed his own father, a thing he cannot remember, he was sticky. He knows he was sticky and it was on his hands and his face. His arms. His feet. Especially his feet. He tried to step, but it was like his feet were stuck to the floor. He tried again, and his foot came up, but it was sticky.
He looked down. There was so much red paint. It was everywhere.
It covered his father too. And the floor. And it covered the thing on the floor dressed in his mother’s clothes, but which no longer looked like his mother. She was painted too.
And it hit him then. His mind then tried to protect itself in the best way it knew how, by making him believe he was dreaming, that it was all a dream, and he should just go back to bed, and in the morning he would wake up and everything would be okay again, and he would remember this as nothing but an awful nightmare that would fade with the hours, and soon, he’d forget it ever happened.
It almost worked. Except when he turned to go back to bed, he slipped in the paint, and he went down on one knee and a little broken piece of plate cut the palm of his hand he used to catch himself. It hurt, the pain sharp. And he wasn’t a stupid boy. He knew he couldn’t feel pain in a dream.
If it wasn’t a dream, then it was real.
And if it was real, then that was his father lying before him.
And if that was his father, then the thing dressed like his mother could only be his mother.
He screamed, then. He screamed.
He screamed even when other people came to his house. He screamed when they picked him up. He screamed when they took him away. He screamed when they drove him to the hospital and put him in a room with smiling zoo animals painted on the walls. He screamed when they tried to hold him. He screamed when they tried to quiet him. He screamed when they injected something in his arm.
He only stopped screaming when he felt something shatter in his throat. Shatter, like a plate on the floor.
He didn’t talk for a long time after that. Not because he didn’t want to or because it hurt to, but because he didn’t have anything to say. His world had changed, the shape unrecognizable, and he watched it warily, waiting for it to be drenched in red paint.