I hold my shins tighter and push my closed eyes into my knees so hard that I see white spots. I’m five years old again. I can’t control my breathing.
I can’t believe this is happening.
Gary’s timing is freaking impeccable. Mom is going to be all bruised at graduation. She’ll be back in long sleeves, for sure, and it will take months for her to be as happy and whole as she was last night at dinner. I am so tired of my parents’ shit. Let them duke it out.
Why does this keep happening to us? Why can’t we have a normal life?
Gary bangs the wall and snarls. “I have had enough of your bullshit and that kid’s bullshit and I swear to god I will kill him for this. He has fucked with my life one too many times. I deserve to be happy.”
Mom makes a squeaky sort of sound and something pounds furiously against the wall.
“Do you hear me? Do you have anything to say, Helen? I am going to wipe him off the face of the earth. I deserve to be happy. I deserve to be happy.”
Mom is probably curled up on the floor at this point. The best defense is making Gary believe he’s won.
“Oh, goddammit,” Gary says, and the house is quiet.
Jill stares at my hands, which grip hers so tightly my knuckles are white.
I am not in the mood to clean up my mother’s wounds today. I am not in the mood for drama when I am meant to be graduating and moving—
Jill presses herself to the back of the house, wide-eyed.
I hear it, too: Gary’s breathing is so heavy and close that I hold my own breath. He’s looking out onto the deck, just a few feet above our heads. I look up and see only my mom’s window boxes, the poppies’ petals spilling over the edge.
Please don’t see us. Please.
Jill’s book lays fanned open in full sun. She cries silently and I mouth the words, “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” she mouths back. She is brave enough not to run down the deck stairs and back to her own home.
A minute later, we can no longer hear Gary’s breathing.
When his engine rumbles, Jill starts sobbing. “I thought it was over!” She still grips my hands in terror.
I wish it were over.
“What if he had found us?” she asks.
I don’t know. Gary must know that Jill’s family is aware of the abuse already, but he would have freaked if Jill saw him in action. Or maybe he wouldn’t have hit Mom at all if he’d known we were there. Jill, at least. If he’d seen me, I’d have had my share, for sure. He wouldn’t really kill me, would he? He’s just pissed.
Jill stands up and peeks into the kitchen. “What can I do to help?”
Mom will be mortified that Jill was around for this.
“You know, it’s going to take a while to get Mom ready for tonight. I can handle this. You go home and read and calm down before it’s time to go. I’ll see you at the music hall.”
Jill peeks into the kitchen again, unsure. “She might need moral support.”
“I can handle it. I’ll bandage her body and galvanize her spirits for graduation. You go home and let music put you in the right mood for the night.”
Halfway to the steps, Jill says, “I want the computer back by five.”
“Roger.”
Jill runs down the back staircase, crosses through our neighbor’s backyard, and heads into her own house.
Better Jill than Gretchen, because there are some things I would never in a million years share with a girlfriend.
I am so beyond the bullshit of my parents’ relationship. At least we aren’t lying about it anymore. For years, Mom totally bought into Gary’s excuse that he beat her because he loved her, and he beat me to keep me in line. We don’t accept his lame apologies anymore. We just acknowledge that he’s a jerk and leave it at that.
So, this changes our plans for the evening. I’ll offer to accompany her to the hospital and she’ll refuse. She’ll sit through my speech in extreme pain—pain that will forever be attached to her memory of this night—and afterward we’ll spend the night in the boring confines of the emergency room. I say a silent prayer she won’t require stitches this time.
I want to move forward—with Gretchen, with this summer, with school a thousand miles away—and Gary has just set my mind back ten years.
Here I am again, cleaning up a mess my parents made. No one else has to put up with this shit.
Heaving a huge sigh, I slide the screen door open. Inside the dining room, I bend to work on a hangnail and think about how I want to play this. I need to strike the right tone or she’ll rescind the sixty bucks and car offer. I need to come off as light. Maybe: I guess Renee spilled the beans, huh? Mom is always talking like that: spill the beans, Bob’s your uncle, don’t teach your grandma to suck eggs.
Instead, I say, “He probably only needs one ticket for graduation, now, huh?” I turn to find Mom lying face-up on the fake linoleum tile, her eyes wide open.
What am I supposed to do? I grab her wrist. Do I use my thumb or absolutely not use my thumb to check for a pulse? I can’t remember. I use my fingers on her neck instead, but feel nothing.
Must be the wrong spot.
I run my fingers up and down her neck and finally yank down her T-shirt and lay my ear over her bare chest.
Nothing.
Seventh-grade CPR was ages ago. Something about ABCs?
Pushing on her chest, I’m terrified I will break her.
Blow into Mom’s mouth and I swear I feel air leave her lungs.
I blow again. Nothing.
“Somebody help me!” My scream incites a sense of urgency and I pull out my cheap phone to dial 9-1-1.
Balancing the stupid phone on my shoulder, I get instructions for real CPR: straight arms, full weight behind each thrust.
Her ribs don’t crack.
I tilt her head, plug her nose—of course! Plug the nose!—and force air into her lungs.
My phone falls and lands on Mom’s face as I beg her heart to respond.
The dispatcher tells me to keep the rhythm of “Staying Alive” and she starts singing it. Mom raised me on disco, so I don’t need the help. I sing under my breath as I press and press and press and press and press and press and press and pray.
Someone yells through the front screen: “EMT!”
I yell down. “Here!”
Huge hands reach for my mother’s wrist. He doesn’t use his thumb. “I’ll take it from here, Alex.”
That’s not my name. I don’t correct him. I keep pounding on Mom’s chest. “Come on! Come on! Come on.”
Another EMT—a woman—touches my shoulder and says, “He does a good job. Let him work.”
I sit back on my heels as he starts compressions. He is much stronger than I am. More confident, too.
“Helen?” Jill’s mom hollers through the screen door.
SEVEN
Jill’s mom, Janice, follows the ambulance at a brisk pace.
I’ve ridden this stretch of Route 46 dozens of times, hundreds. Every time we go to the courthouse or the good library or the Hot Dog Shoppe.
Right now nothing is registering. “He was looking for me,” I say about a thousand times.
Janice keeps her eyes on the road as we speed. “Gary was looking for you?”
“Yeah, Gary. He said he wanted to kill me. Mom told him I wasn’t there and they fought. He hit her, I think? Maybe he punched her out? Maybe that’s why she’s unconscious?”
_______
The EMT from the house sits with us in the waiting area. Janice recognizes him as Derrick Rhymes. She colors his mother’s hair and has heard his whole life story in monthly installments.
Derrick holds Janice’s hand.
Derrick asks how I am.
Derrick keeps Janice talking about anything outside this hospital.
And every time I ask him to, he walks through the swinging STAFF ONLY doors and inquires about Mom. He swears he got a faint pulse out of her on the drive to the hospital. He promises doctors are d
oing everything they can. He says there’s a chance she’ll pull through.
She doesn’t.
EIGHT
An hour after Jill walked across the stage to accept her diploma, police officers interrogate the two of us relentlessly. Separately, they ask us hundreds of questions to nail down our story and recreate a timeline.
Mom’s gone.
I sound like a coward. Every time I tell the story—and I’m on Retelling Number Seven right now—the person asking the questions says the same thing: You heard them fighting, but you stayed outside?
I sound like a coward and an asshole.
Some squat, balding police officer who reeks of tobacco repeats the question twice.
“Yes. I stayed outside. I didn’t see anything.”
He wants to know why I hung out in a seated fetal position for a few minutes after Gary had gone and why I sauntered into the house and gave myself a pedicure while my mother died on the floor.
My mother died on the floor.
Coward.
But what can I say? That I was too disgusted with my parents? That I wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening? That I was terrified?
The thing is, I never—not in a million years—thought he was killing her. I thought it was just another fight. He could have beaten her or beaten us both, and I didn’t want that. Not on graduation day. Not when I was going to stand in front of my entire graduating class and everyone else I’ve ever met. I couldn’t do that with a black eye and newly broken bones.
So, yes, I was craven. But I didn’t know he was going to kill her.
He killed her. Forever. She’s gone forever.
We now know that Gary strangled my mother after—presumably after—inflicting a few final scrapes on the left side of her face. I’ve had several run-ins with his gargantuan class ring before, so I’m guessing it was that. And at some point—either by Gary’s doing, or on her way to the floor after she stopped breathing—her left wrist was broken. This time her bones won’t heal.
After enduring a half dozen interviews, I don’t want to talk to anyone. About anything. Fact is, they still have that thick file about my family’s domestic violence. What more can anyone say?
Instead of waiting for the hospital to release Mom, I’m waiting for the police to release me. I excuse myself to the hospital bathroom, which is far down a sterile, white corridor. Lucky me, it’s empty.
I can’t even look in the mirror. Coward!
The handicapped door is swung open next to the sinks. I push it out of my way and it swings open again. It hurts when I punch it, but the hurt is good. I punch it again and again, dozens of times, until I’m so close that it can’t open anymore. The door is closed and I keep punching and the pain feels so good. So real.
I’m alive. My hand aches, but I can’t stop. I am alive.
When I have nothing left, I slide to the floor in a puddle.
It starts in my belly—a long, low wail.
Deep breath. Wail.
Deep breath. Wail.
It builds until I am screaming at the top of my lungs, “You killed my mother! You freaking coward!”
My hand throbs. Damn, it hurts. And I’m crying. Not for my hand. For my mother. For my stupid fucking family. For my life, which never started at all.
For Mom.
For Mom.
My mom.
_______
The whole thing is my fault. He flat-out said he was looking for me. And he was looking for me because Renee had emptied their apartment an hour after I shared all those gruesome pictures of my mother.
My fault.
Hell, it’s my fault my parents were together in the first place. They married in February and I was born that August; I’ve done the math.
If you look at it that way, the marriage, the beatings, and the murder are all my fault.
There’s no one else to blame, really.
What am I going to do without her?
_______
Planning a funeral is like one of those ridiculous icebreaker exercises: if you were a tree, which species would you be? Except the trees in question have been carved into coffins. I choose poplar because it’s the cheapest. The tall, lanky guy at the funeral home, who looks just like Ichabod Crane, tells me to call it a casket.
It’s a coffin.
Next icebreaker: if you could wear only one outfit for the rest of your life, what would you wear?
Ichabod Crane says we’re choosing clothes for Mom’s “final rest.” Someone else should be doing this. Mom’s parents have been estranged for years, but I’m pretty sure they’re alive and out there somewhere. Choosing clothes for all eternity should be their job.
Except it’s not. It’s mine. I am my mother’s next-of-kin, so I take a huge dose of grow-the-fuck-up and choose Mom’s green dress. It’s not exactly clean, but maybe she would have appreciated the faint Olive Garden scent.
Mom loved those breadsticks. She loved this dress. It made her feel beautiful. It made her sashay. How can something so annoying three days ago now seem charming? Between her divorce from Gary and her death at his hands, Mom had a little peace and happiness, a sliver of light in her otherwise gray life.
I smell the shoulder of the dress. It’s not just Olive Garden; it’s Mom. She always smelled faintly of sawed-apart cardboard from the warehouse. And Ivory soap—the white bars, always the white bars. And something else that’s distinctly Mom. Her skin.
That skin doesn’t exist anymore. Well, not alive. It’s cold and rigid now instead of soft and squishy. Mom’s hugs are soft and squishy. Were.
She won’t cradle my face in her hands ever again. I hated that so much, but I want it so badly. I just want to go back.
NINE
Jill’s parents, Janice and Dale, are letting me stay indefinitely. We’ve rolled out a sleeping bag—not that one—on Jill’s bedroom floor.
And Jill is amazing. She holds my hand through the whole blur of events. I’m doing it all with a police escort because everyone is pretty scared for my life.
Janice rarely leaves us alone, and when she does it’s to buy me a black suit for the funeral or drop off the obituary at The Vindicator or pick up donuts for breakfast even though I don’t want donuts.
I don’t want anything.
They think Gary will steer clear of calling hours and the funeral, but there’s a huge police presence anyway. At the funeral home, I stand by a closed coffin that allegedly has my mother in it. Why was her outfit so important if no one will see it?
It feels like I’m watching an underwater movie of my life, on mute; everything moves in slow motion, and I can’t hear a sound.
Lots of people hug and kiss me.
Where’s Gary?
Every time I close my eyes, I hear him breathing out the kitchen window. I’m still cowering beneath it.
I can’t close my eyes anymore.
The nights are long, and my brain is just as bad when I’m awake. Dinner with Renee runs over and over in my head. I shouldn’t have done it. My parents’ last argument plays on continuous loop. I should have run in. I could have saved her.
Or we both could be dead, I guess.
There was no way for us to win against Gary. One or both of us was bound to lose.
Where is he?
Is he coming?
When?
_______
Some of Dale’s officers are here for Wednesday dinner. Just, you know, casually.
“You haven’t touched your pasta,” the fat smoker cop says.
“Full.” Grief and dread have permeated every last cell in my body. I am so full that my stomach can’t take on any food right now. Also, I’m not hungry.
Despite not having any more questions for me or Jill, the cops hang around, keeping watch. After years of Dale’s police stories, all I can think is You’re welcome for the overtime, because this is ridiculous. Gary won’t come after me when I’m surrounded by friends.
Dale and Janice forbid us to leave windows open, thou
gh the weather is perfect. They pile on more rules: No dates outside the house. No errands without an adult. No trip to the Adirondacks.
Nothing that can put my life in danger.
Privately, Jill and I refer to our captivity as Dale Jail.
Still, this is a million times better than the emotional imprisonment of the Gary years. And this time, I have a cellmate.
_______
Two days after the funeral, Mom is a mere anecdote to everyone else: just another ancestor gone, no big deal.
Jill says the whole thing is surreal, but it’s not surreal to me. I was there. I saw my mother. I tried to revive her.
It’s almost too freaking real.
Janice is sort of force-feeding me a few bites a day, but I’m really not hungry. It’s as if my body stopped when Mom died. My belly is full. My days are empty. I am full and empty. My life is one big dichotomy.
The only thing heavier than Mom’s death is my own imminent danger. Gary is out there, waiting. I can’t leave the house without panicking, so here we sit. Jill and I used to spend long summer hours inside the house listening to music, but that was by choice. Now we’re imprisoned.
Jill still tries to escape. “Movies, Mom? The new Spiderman opened today.”
Janice sighs. “We’ve been over this. I don’t want to sit around somewhere. I want to go do what we need to do and come back home. It’s the safest place for Xander right now.”
I hate that she blames me. “Maybe today you two can go, and I’ll stay here. No danger for you.”
Janice shakes her head. “I can’t leave you here alone.”
“Who’s alone? There’s a cop on the front porch. Gary isn’t sitting across the street with a sniper rifle or something.”
The second it comes out of my mouth, I realize he could be. He could be hiding in the neighborhood. That would take balls the size of watermelons, but I wouldn’t put it past him.
Our little Olive Garden encounter really spooked Renee. The life she and Gary were building together evaporated so, really, Gary now has nothing to lose. Maybe he’s on the run. I sure as hell would run if I were him. Gary could be anywhere in the world right now, but I’m betting he’s still here. He’s never really been anywhere else.
Life Before Page 5