When an officer took me home after I beat that stranger on the street, my father stood at the door. I walked past him into the kitchen as they spoke softly. Eventually, I heard the door close and he walked into the room. I was petrified to the point of numbness, but I remember being surprised when Drew followed behind him.
“Stand up,” my father snapped.
I don’t know where I found the strength, but I rose out of the chair. My legs shook, so I shifted my weight from right to left and then back. I tried to keep my eyes on him but my vision tunneled. As the blackness crept toward the center, the lines of his face faded, but his eyes flared like black fire.
“What did you do?” he said.
“I . . . I—”
My father cut off any defense I may have attempted, not with words but with his hand. He lunged at me, his fingers wrapping around my throat. He squeezed so hard that I felt like my spine might snap. Then he pushed me across the kitchen, slamming me into the far wall.
“What did you do?” he screamed at me, his face not an inch from mine.
For the first time, I thought he might kill me. As my lungs burned and my eyes bulged, I resigned myself, in a way. I didn’t fight back. I didn’t cry tears of fear or pain. But I did think about my mother, and how I might not see her again. When I did that, the sadness felt as crushing as my father’s hand.
To my surprise, though, he let go of me. Coughing, my neck feeling like it had been crushed beyond repair, I fell to the kitchen floor. But I saw him turn on Drew. When he spoke, I went silent.
“What is wrong with you?” he hissed at my brother. For the first time in our lives, his tone to Drew matched the one he’d previously saved for me.
I sat up. In a way, I was perversely fascinated. I half expected my father to lunge at Drew now, grab him by the throat, too. But he didn’t. In fact, he looked wary of touching my brother. But he laid into him with words, a scalpel in the deft hands of a practiced surgeon.
“I told you to fix your brother, didn’t I? I told you to make sure he stops embarrassing this family. Make him less pathetic. And you couldn’t do that. Just too hard for my little prima donna. Too busy with his lacrosse. You suck, by the way. Do you know that? All the other goddamn parents tell me that all the time. Every time I have to watch you ride the bench.”
Drew just stood there. That smile, so like my father’s, drained from his face. And I liked it. I liked not being the target. I liked the feeling that I was no longer utterly and completely alone. So much so that I failed to hear his words. To understand them. But when my father continued, everything changed. His words cut both ways, deeper than they ever had before.
“Well, I guess at least now I know. I can’t trust either of you. There’s just too much of your mother in both of you. Too much of her weakness. And her stupidity. Maybe I always knew that. Understand this, both of you: If I could go back in time and do things over, neither of you would exist. I’d never make that fucking mistake twice. Believe me.”
My father left us then. He walked out of the kitchen and down into the basement. I got up to my knees, looking at my brother.
“You okay?” I whispered.
“Shut the fuck up,” my brother snapped, and walked away.
I WENT BACK to school and, as I sat in that art class, Steinmetz’s words came back to me.
Paint whatever’s in here.
I remember closing my eyes, reaching into my heart, and seeing my mother lying in her bed. I saw her sallow face, her clawing fingers. The stains on her blanket and the thickness of the air. The darkness that hung over her for almost my entire life became a living, breathing thing. And I captured it on that canvas, perfectly, in shades of green and blue and black and gray and yellow. In swirls and lines and dips and cuts. I felt something in me, traveling through me, out onto the edge of every brush I touched. My pain etched and stroked and finished until I stood spent and staring at what I had done.
“Wow,” Steinmetz said.
I wouldn’t speak. He wanted me to. He told me about an after-school program. A contest in the coming months. I nodded but didn’t listen to a word. When the bell rang, I took the painting under my arm. Ignoring his protest, I carried it home with me that day, leaving it in the kitchen, waiting for my brother to get home from practice.
When the front door opened, my mouth went dry. I sat in the family room alone, listening to his footsteps. They stopped in the kitchen and my heart raced. I forced myself up. I moved to the doorway and saw him looking at my work.
“What the fuck?” he said.
It felt like something struck me. All that emotion rushed up, catching in my throat. I didn’t know what I expected. Or even what I wanted. But when my brother looked at me, I felt so empty and alone.
“Are you stupid?” he asked.
“What?”
“Did people see it?”
“Just my art teacher.”
“Great. You want Dad to see it?”
“No, I just . . .”
“You just don’t think,” he said.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
He shook his head. “Get rid of it before Dad sees it. Understand?”
Drew walked away. His words infected me, turning the passion that birthed my art into a festering blackness at my very core. I stared at what I’d done. Those same lines and curves and swirls became cuts and gashes and gaping wounds. Every brushstroke became razor claws tearing through my chest and gouging my heart.
I started to shake. Once again, my vision tunneled, turning red at the center. My fists balled, the fingernails cutting into my palms. Then I lashed out. My first strike tearing a jagged hole through the canvas. I grabbed it, throwing it against the wall. The wood frame splintered and the remains fell to the tile floor. I stomped it, grinding it into the ground with my boot.
When it was all spent, I stared at what I had done. And I swear I heard my brother laughing at me in the other room. I stormed into the garage and buried what remained deep in one of the trash cans. I would not touch a paintbrush again for a very long time.