I was twelve. And my mother was dead. That’s what he’d told me the night before. I awoke that next morning with Drew’s words ringing in my head. Nothing else seemed grounded. I had no idea when I’d left the woods, or how I’d made it back to my bedroom. When I opened my eyes again, the sunlight set my head to throbbing. I felt spent, like I’d run a marathon in my sleep. But a deep and angry restlessness tingled above that, forcing my eyes to stay open.
Quietly, I got out of bed and slipped from my room. The house was eerily still. Both Drew’s room and my parents’ were empty. So I went downstairs, and found no one in the living room or the kitchen. I sat at the table, my head in my hands, but heard no movement anywhere in the house. I even went down into the basement and checked his workshop.
He wasn’t there, so I walked into the cool, dry room, listening to the sound of a dehumidifier rumbling in the corner. My eyes fixated on the model atop the table. It was a navy ship, but I don’t know the exact kind. The detail was amazing. Perfect miniature guns bristled across shining decking. The windows of the tiny bridge appeared to be real glass. The red stripe painted at the waterline looked perfectly worn, like the sailors had just returned from traveling across the world.
I stared at that horrid ship, through the plastic and glass and paint and glue, deep into what it truly meant. Time did not slow. Nor did I linger over that thing, troubled by my urges. Instead, the thin plastic of the crow’s nest snapped as I grabbed the model and yanked it off the table. Holding it in two hands over my head, I turned and reared back. A primal sound rumbled in my throat and I let it fly through the open door of the workshop, out into the main room of the basement. It clattered across the cement floor, parts flying away like shrapnel.
“It’s your fault!” I screamed, maybe for the hundredth time since Drew had told me.
Storming out, I ran at the model and kicked it, sending it jetting through the air and against the far wall. The remaining hull snapped in two. When I drove to give one last kick, I hesitated, losing my balance and falling to the floor.
“Mom,” I whispered helplessly.
Pain radiated up my back and into my shoulder, so bad that it hurt to breathe. I slapped a hand onto the floor in frustration as tears filled my eyes. Honestly, though, I didn’t cry from the pain. I just sat on the floor and cried for everything else.
YEARS LATER, I would rent the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It was funny and I liked it, but when that scene came on of Cameron Frye beating the crap out of his father’s 1961 Ferrari 250 GT, I fell off the couch onto my knees. I crawled closer to the television, transfixed, feeling like somehow whoever it was who came up with the idea for the scene had somehow stolen my life away.
I could barely breathe when he kept kicking the bumper over and over again. And the car teetered on the jack. I knew it would topple, that the car would careen through the glass and fall stories to the forest floor. When it did, when it happened, it felt like an awful and wonderful release. I felt at once more normal and more crippled by my own memories.
Later, though, when Ferris and Cameron talked about what happened, and Cameron’s neck stiffened as he decided he would stand up to his father, I turned off the movie. And I never watched it again. Because that’s not how it goes. Ever.
I was still on the floor in the basement when they came home. I heard the rush of air through the house when the front door opened. Without even thinking about what my father would do, or what I had done, I sprang to my feet. I ran up the stairs, the pain suddenly gone. I nearly slipped on the kitchen floor as well.
For a split second before I turned into the doorway to the foyer, I thought about my father. I thought about what I had just done. It wasn’t that I was going to have some penultimate moment of confrontation. There was no way I would stand up to him, toe-to-toe, and rewrite the future. Neither of us had that in us. Instead, what I realized, what I felt, was that I didn’t care anymore. My mother was dead. I was alone now. Part of me didn’t want to be alive, either.
I had no idea of the concept then, but I do now. It was like the guy who, surrounded by police, pulls his gun and steps away from cover. He walks up to the officers, begging them to shoot. Suicide by police. I think I was committing my own version.
I didn’t care, not at all. I remember it so clearly. I grabbed the doorjamb as I rounded the corner. I saw my dad first, his dark eyes cutting into mine, and all I felt was anger as he walked toward me, and eventually past me toward the basement.
I saw my brother next. For a split second, I felt an almost unbearable dread at the thought of living without my mother. Then, like some kind of dream, she appeared behind him. Her back was hunched and a dark stain marred the white bandage around her head. Yet she stood in the foyer looking back at me, her eyes sharper than I’d seen them in years.
“Mom,” I stammered.
My legs felt numb. My vision fluttered. I looked to Drew, but he acted like nothing had happened. Like he’d done nothing. Then, shaking, I ran to her.
“Easy,” she said, her voice strong and clear.
I stopped before touching her. For a time, no one else existed. Drew vanished. And my mom and I were alone in the foyer.
She moved first. Her arms opened and she hugged me. I buried my head into her chest, feeling every one of her ribs. She ran a hand through my unruly hair.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“It’s—”
The rest of my words drowned in my father’s scream.
“Liam!”
The sound of it made both my mother and me quake.