by Nate Kenyon
The slow progression of my mother’s disease didn’t seem to stop him either. I used to wonder whether it was the diagnosis itself that set him off in the first place. Maybe he felt she’d abandoned him in some way, or pushed the focus onto herself and the burden onto him. They both knew that she’d get progressively worse over time, and he would eventually have to bathe her and change her clothes, carry her from bed to chair and back again. My father was not a caregiver, and maybe he felt that he’d married her so that she could do all those things for him.
But as I grew older I realized that wasn’t entirely the case. There was something else between them, something that maybe used to be warmer but that had slowly shriveled up and turned black. And I was a part of it. I knew I looked like her, more than I did him, and that it drove him crazy: the lighter color of my hair, the freckles across my nose, the more delicate bone structure.
It did strike me later that perhaps I was not his child, although I had nothing firm to account for that. My mother didn’t have many real friends, certainly no male ones, and nobody came around asking about me after my father died in a way that might have been suspicious. I couldn’t imagine my mother having an affair, but then again she was my mother, and, of course, it wouldn’t have occurred to me back then that she was a sexual being.
Whatever it was about me, it speeded that darkness along. When my father looked at me, I could see the thing that lived inside him all coiled up and waiting to strike.
One of the worst moments of my life happened when I was only nine years old. This was before my mother’s wheelchair days, although I remember it was getting more difficult for her to get around, especially in the mornings, when she’d awaken stiff and clumsy and things she touched would tend to spill and break. This particular morning was a bad one, after a night of heavy drinking for my father and the dawn coming crisp and clear. The sun must have felt like shards of glass in his eyes, and I remember him shouting something about the curtains before my mother got up to pull them all the way closed.
I was up by then, an early riser in those days, listening outside their door. It was my way of testing the wind. I had become very good at telling his mood, just from hearing the tone of his voice when he woke up. That night I’d wet the bed, something that had been happening more and more frequently after the deer incident, and I was desperate for him not to find out. I had stripped off my sheets and hidden them in my closet, but the stain had bled through to my mattress, and my room smelled strongly of piss.
I thought I was lucky when my mother came out of the bedroom first and saw me crouching inside my open door as she began to try to navigate the stairs down to the kitchen. She followed me in there and saw my stripped bed, and I recognized the fear in her eyes as quickly as she tried to hide it.
“Give me the sheets,” she said. “Go.”
I opened the closet doors and she took the sheets in her arms and walked back out in the hallway to the stairs again in her stiffened, shuffling gait. She hadn’t closed the door to their bedroom fully, and we could both hear my father’s snoring.
Again, I thought that by some miracle I’d made it through, and started to relax.
When my mother reached the third-to-last step, an edge of the sheet slipped from her arms and caught her foot, and she fell.
She hit the floor so hard it shook the house. I heard her cry out and almost immediately stifle herself, but by then it was too late.
I shrunk back into the shadows of my room. My father cursed and came out of the bedroom a few moments later. He shuffled to the top of the stairs and stared down.
“The fuck you doing, Miriam?” he said, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Get off the goddamned floor.” Then he went down to her. I couldn’t see them from where I was, but I heard him mumble something to her, then a muffled slap. I crept out into the hall.
“No,” she said clearly.
“What’d you say to me?”
“I did it. It was my fault. I was cleaning his room and I fell and I…wet myself.”
“Fuck you did.”
I heard my mother sob once, and then another stinging slap.
“Where is he?”
Terrified, I scurried back to my room, turned out the lights and crouched in the closet, pulling the doors shut behind me. I sat there hugging my knees, the smell of piss from my underwear in my nostrils. I’d forgotten to change them and he would smell it for sure. I took them off, squeezed them into a ball and tucked them inside a box of old baby clothes.
When he opened the closet doors I was sitting naked in the corner, rocking back and forth, thumb in my mouth.
He reached down without a word and yanked me to my feet and into the room. “You pissed the bed again,” he said. His eyes were little slits, his mouth set in a thin line. “You’re making your mother do more laundry and you’re ruining another mattress but more importantly you woke me up. I told you to keep quiet in the mornings.”
He shoved me toward the bed. I stood and tried to cover myself with my hand. “You got nothing to hide there,” he said. “What kind of boy wets his bed every night? You some kind of faggot? You like guys’ dicks? That it? Jesus.” He spat against the wall, where it hung for a moment, a fat yellow blob, before dripping down. “Sucking your thumb. Christ. You’re spineless, boy, always have been. I got a splitting headache, and now I gotta teach you what it means when you wet the bed.” He approached me, hands at his sides, looking around the room for something appropriate.
I knew that look, and backed away, whimpering. When he got like this I knew he would hurt me, probably with a belt or strap, and I didn’t know when he would stop.
My mother appeared behind him and touched his arm. “Jeffrey, please—”
He didn’t even turn, just backhanded her into the wall, the sound of his hand hitting her face like a hammer against wood. She went down to her knees but got back up again as he came at me, jumping and clinging to his back and screaming at me to get out.
He grunted and stumbled slightly as her weight hit him. I slipped past my father’s grasp, and the last thing I saw before I left the room was him holding her by the hair with one hand and punching her in the face.
I hid in the trees in the backyard for two hours. The black flies swarmed around my naked body, but I didn’t dare go near the house. I was covered in bites and pinpricks of blood. I went to the shallow stream to wash it off, but that only made them worse. Eventually I saw my mother coming out the rear door, walking with a limp. One eye was swollen shut and her lower lip was split in the middle.
She was holding my clothes in one hand, the other arm bent close to her chest. I ran to her.
“Your father’s gone out,” she said. “There’ll be a doctor coming. I fell down the stairs, you understand me? I fell down the stairs with some washing and got hurt, bad.”
“He hit you.” I shook my head, trembling all over, my eyes spilling over with tears.
She took me by the arm with her good hand and shook it hard enough that a day later, I had bruises there from her fingers. She dropped down heavily to her knees and looked me in the face. “Petey, listen to me. I fell. That’s all. You didn’t see what you think you saw. Your daddy, he…he loves me. He wouldn’t do that. He was angry, but he stopped. He didn’t let it get out of hand.”
I shook my head again, tears streaming down my face. My entire body ached inside. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to, Momma.” I started sobbing and she gathered me to her chest, holding me close and rocking me gently.
“I know you didn’t, baby,” she said. “Shhh, now, it’s okay. It’s not your fault. Everything’s fine. You’ll see.”
She got me cleaned up and dressed, and when the doctor arrived the laundry was done and she was lying on the couch with an icepack and I was sitting with her. My father acted like I weren’t there. He had been deflated in some way by the violence, and now just looked like a tired old man. I often noticed that with him; it was as if some charge built up
over time, a spring winding him ever tighter until the explosion, and then it would begin all over again.
The doctor treated my mother’s injuries, spoke to her and my father for a few minutes longer, and left. He never talked to me.
If he had, I don’t know what I would have said. I kept out of my father’s way for a few days after that and started wearing rubber shorts to bed, and things were better for a while. But even at nine years old, I had a feeling that things were only going to get worse. I sensed a moment coming when everything would come to a head, and my world would change in some explosive, life-altering way.
It took another six years, but the day did come when my father’s luck ran out. The fact that I was there to witness it mattered more to the police who came to the house than it did to me, or at least that’s what I told myself. He was dead, and our family and the entire world was better for it.
Tessa told me once that I was in denial, that discovering such a thing had to have been a terribly traumatic experience for me and that I needed help to deal with it. This was after we’d gotten to know each other well enough that she could say those types of things to me. I guess she was probably right. Tessa was always right. But back then I wanted only to lock it all away and move on with my life, forgetting my father and all the emotional baggage that came along with him and letting my mother finally breathe without fear.
If I was anything like him, it was just this: I was unable to see my own blind spots, and when I finally came upon them it was with great surprise, as if someone else had been walking in my shoes and only at that moment had I been plopped down into them and begun to see things as they truly were.
My anger ran deep, second only to my denial, and both things together would eventually rise up and drown me in a great sweeping wave of blood, violence and shame.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
For about a week after the incident with the ants, it seemed as if Jimmie would recover fully. He got up and started limping around the shelter, using a mop handle that Sue had adapted as a makeshift crutch, then abandoning that shortly after, complaining that it hurt his arm too much.
As funny as it sounds, the complaining made me think the real Jimmie was back again, and I welcomed it. Tessa wasn’t so sure. “Sometimes I want to crack his skull,” she said, after we all spent hours cleaning up the mess of puke and blood in the bedroom while he sat and watched and occasionally gave us instructions. The smell faded but a ghost of it settled in permanently, leaving the air feeling heavier and slightly polluted. Maybe it was the ventilation system.
The idea of Tessa cracking anyone’s skull made me laugh, and she punched me in the arm lightly and smiled when I did. I sensed a change in her lately, and I knew I’d changed too. The laughter was still there, but whatever it had been hiding was bubbling closer to the surface. It was as if several protective layers had been stripped away during the trauma of the past couple of weeks, and we were all feeling raw and exposed. One crack and everything would explode upward like liquid under some tectonic shift.
Those next few days, we continued sleeping in stages, watching for any sign that the insects had returned. We had to assume that they would only attack the wounded; they would have been all over us already if that wasn’t the case. But Jimmie was still a target. We kept his wound clean and changed the bandages twice a day, which meant we had to start washing the gauze wrapping or we would have run out before long.
After a while it was easy to slip back into a more relaxed routine. Dan was the last to give up his watch, but even he finally fell asleep in his chair, and nothing happened that night, or the next night either.
We kept living. I wish I could say something significant, how we learned to adapt, how we learned the Great Lesson; but life just went on. Sometimes—now this is funny—I felt like I were alone down there. I mean, I was living in four rooms with a couple of girls and three guys and we couldn’t get away from each other if we tried. But every once in a while the walls just seemed to fall away and there was distance, great distance, and nothing but emptiness.
I often dreamed about the way it was up top, as I guess maybe I’ve said. Sometimes my dreams were about nothing but water—great wide stretches of it as far as you could see. I used to love watching the sailboats when I was a kid, it was a freedom thing, when my father came down a little hard and I yearned for some open space and a way to escape. But now my memories were fading away like fog on a summer morning, and the colors often seemed wrong, as if the ocean in my dreams was just a little too blue.
I didn’t want it to be that way. I wanted to remember.
The insects did not return, and Jimmie’s hives didn’t get any worse, but they didn’t fade away. I took to calling him pepperoni for the way they looked scattered across his legs and stomach, until he told me to stop. For some reason I didn’t quite understand, I listened. Maybe I felt sorry for him. His hair loss slowed but didn’t stop completely, and we all avoided talking about that. I think maybe we felt that with what we were facing aboveground, it could happen to any of us at any moment. After all, Dan and I had been exposed at the beginning and we’d all gone into that tunnel. Even if we weren’t showing symptoms now, who knew when they might start appearing?
Dan marked the wall when he woke up, and listened to the radio every morning and every night for about twenty minutes at a sitting—the same schedule he’d kept pretty much since the beginning—checking the emergency broadcast frequency, then dialing up and down the bands looking for anything but static. I don’t think any of us actually thought he’d hear something, but it was one of the few possible beacons of hope for us, so we gave him that time and space willingly, and sometimes listened in too.
Those were a few of the things that concerned us as we tried to settle back into some kind of routine. But what I worried about the most was Jay. He was acting more erratic by the day, moving with a kind of frenzied energy, his eyes wild and darting like a trapped animal’s, and he kept digging into every corner and closet in the shelter, pulling things out of boxes as if searching for something, although when confronted, he refused to admit it. I often came upon him and Sue engaged in a heated but whispered conversation that stopped as soon as I entered the room. There was clearly something going on between them that was making things worse, but whenever I tried to bring up the subject to Sue, she passed it off as his increasingly paranoid delusions and her efforts to talk some sense into him.
Maybe that was really all it was, but I doubted it. Jay was wound pretty tight, but he’d always given off a kind of honest intent even when talking about the wildest theories. And the look in Sue’s eyes was one of guilt, as if she were hiding something too painful or explosive to say.
I did try to speak to Jay about the situation, his meds and how he felt. But he brushed me off time after time, making up things to do, and finally avoiding me completely. At least until the following week, when everything unraveled.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I’d sensed Jay building up steam earlier that day (watching him reminded me a little bit of my father before one of his explosions), and during that evening it came to a head. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard him having an argument with Sue in the kitchen, their voices muffled, but clearly strained and raised in anger or fear. That time of night was pretty much the only time anyone could get any privacy. We were all on top of each other, and I think the stress was making us all a little stir-crazy.
The lights in the bedroom were dim. I could hear Dan snoring lightly to my right and could just make out his huddled, still form. I glanced at the bed to my left and found Jimmie fast asleep. But Tessa had rolled over onto her side and was staring at me from the top bunk. “You hear them?” I whispered.
She nodded. “I think he’s about to lose it. You should do something before things get worse.”
I’d explained the situation to Tessa earlier, so she understood everything. I knew I could count on her to be discreet with Dan, who, while well-intentioned, was like
a bull in a china shop when it came to things like human psychology.
I was determined to confront Jay now, no excuses. Sue was right. Something had to be done. But there was a right and wrong way to handle a situation like this, and I only hoped I would know which was which when the time came.
The two of us dressed in the semidark and crept into the kitchen. Sue was standing near the pantry door, arms crossed, while Jay paced back and forth before the sink in a black sweatshirt and sweatpants. He was sweating heavily and scratching at his arm again, and his blinking had become more exaggerated as if he was trying to clear his sight. His hands were trembling. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn he was on some kind of stimulant like meth or coke. We didn’t have a lot of the heavy drugs in our high school, but there were always a few users in any school, and I’d seen them high once or twice and knew what those drugs could do.
At first, neither of them saw us, but when they did they both stopped short as if caught in something indecent.
“He can’t sleep,” Sue said finally, as if that explained it. “Nerves.”
“I can’t sleep because—”
“You need air,” she said. “You need space. I know.”
Jay stared at her for a long moment and then looked away, shaking his head. “My sister would be ashamed,” he muttered. “You know our little dog?”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again, shocked into silence by this sudden change in direction.
“Sure,” Tessa said “T-Bone, right?”
Jay just continued as if he hadn’t heard, his voice high-pitched and shaky, the words running together as he paced back and forth in his socks. “My sister, she picked that dog out at the pound—we all went, I was maybe nine or ten and she was a teenager—I wanted a black Lab because our neighbor Holly had one and I loved that dog, played with it when I went to her house on the weekends.”