So that’s how I ended up agreeing to do “side work” for Sunday. The same night Than took that ambulance ride, I got word to Sunday through Blalock and heard back quickly that he was happy I’d seen the light. I was told Grunt would call on me when my services were needed. Tuesday and Wednesday I waited, trying to prepare for Santana’s fight as best I could on my own. Each day I forced myself to stop by the hospital, pushing my anxieties down. The nurses let Khajee linger long past official visiting hours, keeping vigil by his side. She told me Than came around a couple times, sweaty and delirious, but he never showed any sign that he recognized her or knew where he was. According to Dr. Ngoyo, his condition hadn’t gotten worse, and we tried to see this as good news. “He’s too stubborn to die,” Khajee told me. She wasn’t happy when I explained that Sunday and I had reached an arrangement regarding the hospital bill, but she was too exhausted to really fight me about it.

Late that Wednesday night, I left Khajee to let Rosie out, and when I got back to the apartment, eager for sleep, Grunt was standing on the front steps, jacket buttoned, arms crossed. We made eye contact and he nodded solemnly before walking without comment to a black van. On its side were the words, “Home Improvements, Renovations, Demolition. Free Estimates.”

I let Rosie back inside, then followed and climbed into the passenger seat. Without saying a word, he drove off. After a few miles I asked, “So what’s the deal? Where are we going?” In response, Grunt reached one hand across my lap and popped open the glove box. Inside, I saw the gray metal of a gun.

I reached for the weapon, and it felt cool in my palm. When I pulled it out, I was surprised at how light it was. During a middle school stint in Boy Scouts encouraged by one of my mom’s temporary boyfriends, I’d learned how to shoot a rifle. Part of the safety program involved pistols like this one. I popped out the magazine and saw that it was empty.

“No bullets?” I asked.

Grunt smirked and shook his head. This was no mistake. Maybe I wasn’t trusted yet, and they just wanted me to have a prop for whatever errand we were on. Or maybe they’d never think I was worthy. Regardless, I knew it was a slam on me, but I really didn’t care. In fact, I was relieved. I’d been awake the last two nights, bathroom door cracked pretty wide, thinking about the boxcar and my father’s genes, worried about what Sunday might ask me to do.

Grunt drove us to a truck stop off Route 83, and we parked in the darkness beyond the gas pumps. Before we got out, he showed me his gun, tucked down inside his beltline under his coat. I did the same and zipped up my jacket. He nodded and we headed inside. As we crossed the black asphalt, I said low, “So what’s up? What am I supposed to do?”

He glanced back at me and said nothing.

Inside we moved through the convenience store, where two old ladies held up the line bickering about which lottery tickets to buy, a gray-bearded trucker considered the hot dogs rotating beneath a plastic lid, and a father yelled at his kids to hurry up and pick out snacks because “all the jackholes I passed are passing us now.”

Grunt led me down a long, thin hallway, past a refrigerator with a vault-like door. We had to step around a mop tilted into a yellow bucket on wheels. The water was gray and foul.

At the end of the hallway was an office with the door open. When we walked in, a stubby man with a grease-stained white shirt rose up from behind a desk covered in papers. He and Grunt shook and he eyed me up, not extending a hand. “Mr. Sunday’s getting them kind of young these days, eh?”

Grunt shrugged, and the man returned to his desk, pulled back a drawer, and withdrew an envelope. He gave it to Grunt, who passed it to me and rubbed his thumb into two fingers.

“Come on,” the clerk said. “You can trust me.”

I cleared a corner on the desk and laid out the twenties, counting as I went. I made three stacks of five and then announced, “Three hundred even.”

Grunt reached out for the man’s shoulder and patted it, then turned. I collected the bills and fell into his wake. Behind us, the man said, “Okay, guys. Take care. Listen, you want some of those taquitos or a drink or something, it’s on the house. Anything at all. Just tell Lucy I said.”

At the cooler, Grunt paused. He pulled out a Yoo-hoo, then looked at me. I shook my head, and he let the door close. As we brushed past the line at the checkout, Grunt twisted the top and guzzled the drink. I glanced over at the woman behind the register, frozen. Her eyes trailed Grunt. On her shirt, a worn name tag read, “Lucinda.” I wanted to say, I’m sorry, but I knew I had a part to play, and that didn’t involve apologies.

After that first stop, we made a few more. There was a pool hall in Harrisburg, a VFW club in Enola, a steakhouse along the river, even a funeral parlor down in Mechanicsburg. Each place was about the same. Lots of nervous eyes and shaky hands, a kind of courtesy that felt false. Equally phony was the calm I projected as I stood behind Grunt with a steely gaze, a mask of pure badassery that covered my turning stomach.

Between jobs, Grunt listened to AM radio. He never stayed on one station for more than a few minutes. One program had a conspiracy nut ranting about the government putting passivity chemicals in bottled water, then a call-in show where the host gave financial advice. We listened to a twangy country singer lament his lost love and then Grunt settled on a rock station. I recognized David Lee Roth’s voice belting out the chorus of “Running with the Devil” and I anticipated the upcoming lyrics about living life like there’s no tomorrow, but Grunt abruptly shifted to some preacher. Through the static of a distant station, he proclaimed, “None of us can fully know the love and grace of Jesus. But He tells us that salvation comes to those who seek Him. You need only walk the path of righteousness, and in that holy pursuit, you will find Christ!”

Grunt snapped the station off, and we drove for a while listening only to the tires hum on the highway.

Halfway to Carlisle, we pulled up to a warehouse as big as an airplane hangar. Inside we were greeted by a trio of muscle-headed goons. They looked like the type who’d played offensive line together in high school and were okay with that being their lives’ crowning achievement. Two crossed their arms like Grunt did, shoulders back, chin up. The third held a gun at his side. If Grunt noticed, he showed no concern. They brought us to a huge room with crates stacked thirty feet up. A woman drove a forklift past us, and we came upon a geeky-looking man, complete with pencil tucked behind one ear and clipboard. Like all of them, he acted happy to see Grunt, shaking his hand with a big grin. “So listen,” he began. “I’ve got a bit of a situation.”

Flanked by his stony henchmen, the geek went on to tell a long story about a truck breaking down in Scranton, a supplier getting nervous about local cops, and his wife being sick with the flu. How they all connected to each other wasn’t entirely clear to me, but somehow his conclusion was that, as he put it, “I’m a little short this time. Tell Mr. Sunday I’ll make it up to him. He knows I cover my debts.”

Along with his excuse, he offered Grunt an envelope. Emotionless, he passed it on to me and nodded. I counted what was inside and said, “Twenty-seven hundred.”

Grunt’s eyebrows rose up a bit, and the man said, “You’ll tell Mr. Sunday my unusual circumstances, right? This is a once and done situation.”

Grunt lifted a paw and dropped it hard on the guy’s shoulder, then gripped it till he winced. The bodyguards looked at each other, like they weren’t sure what to do, and I was right with them, uncertain of my role. Instinctively, I took half a step closer to the one with the gun. I unzipped my jacket, just enough to expose the handle of my own, a total bluff. I figured if he lifted his weapon, I might double-leg him, take him to the ground and see what happened next.

But Grunt released his grip and grinned, and I breathed again. When we walked away, everything seemed copacetic. Only then, sitting behind the van’s steering wheel, Grunt took out his phone and texted somebody, I presumed Sunday. It was a long text, and I wondered if he was telling him how I was doing, and if so, what he thought of me. If I was handling myself or not.

There was silence, followed by the ding of a new message. Grunt stared at the screen grim-faced, then tucked the phone back into his pocket. He didn’t start the van like I expected. Instead he climbed out and went around to the back. I met him in the rear as he opened the big back doors, and he bent into the dark interior, reaching with both hands. He straightened, holding a sledgehammer in one hand and a crowbar in the other. Extending his arms, he offered them to me, and I stared at my choice. “What are we going to do?” I asked, trying not to sound rattled.

He pumped his hands and looked toward the warehouse, where I could see a second-story window with the light on. We were being watched and had to move quickly. I closed my fingers around the cool shaft of the crowbar and felt its flaky metal.

Grunt left the rear doors open and strolled away from the van, along the other vehicles in the parking lot. We passed a souped-up Camaro with huge back wheels, a pickup truck, and a Jeep. Next to them, though, closest to the door and just beneath that lit window, was a hot little Miata. It was red, immaculately clean in the mix of moonlight and shine from the industrial lamps above the lot. With one hand, Grunt brought the sledge up and drove it down onto the center of the hood, crunching it like the lid of a cardboard box. Adjusting his grip to both hands, he eyed up the windshield but I beat him to it, shattering the glass with the curved tip of the crowbar. This sort of mayhem felt familiar, even comfortable. Bright jewels exploded into the air, like water cascading from a fountain. We moved along either side, taking out the windows and then the taillights, and it felt as if we’d rehearsed all this elegant devastation. Grunt and I acted in concert, mirror images of destruction.

The warehouse door opened and we turned together. A figure was silhouetted by the light from inside, but whoever it was didn’t take a step in our direction. Grunt’s hand had slid inside his jacket. After a tense few moments, the door closed and we got back in our van, drove away.

My blood was pumping from the thrill of what we’d done. I didn’t know if that dude deserved to have his car trashed and I didn’t care. His problem, not mine. There’s something about just unloading, letting it all rip, that nothing can compare to. That’s always been the satisfaction of wrestling for me. You don’t have to hold back. All the anger that nobody wants to see can come out, and suddenly you’re rewarded for channeling all the dark ugliness inside. There’s no rush like it. I wanted to celebrate with Grunt, at least talk about what had happened, but he was as silent as ever.

After the warehouse, I thought for sure we were finished, but it turned out we had two more stops. The first was in Dillsburg. We pulled into a strip mall that housed a barbershop, a bagel joint, and a place called “Battery Galaxy!!” that somehow stayed open. How many nine volts and double Ds do people need to buy?

Grunt rolled past the empty anchor store, which had a big “Will Remodel for New Lease” banner across the front. He drove around back and parked by a huge loading door. Grunt turned the radio on. Some talk show had a former NASA specialist discussing the possibility of life on Mars. Grunt glanced starward and changed to some music.

Sitting there with the radio on, I thought again of those rock ’n’ roll marathon drives with my mom, crisscrossing the network of Harrisburg highways when I was a boy. Looking back, I doubted some of those hazy recollections. Were there really nights she tossed a suitcase in the trunk? Did she really slow down at unfamiliar exits, activating the turn signal then racing on without taking the ramp? Maybe she was flirting with an escape from my dad. I can’t be sure. The mom of my memory was as unreadable to me in the back seat of that Subaru as Grunt was next to me in his van. Who knows what the heck was going on in the depths of his squared skull? Nothing seemed to bother him.

Take for example the police cruiser that appeared at the other end of the alley behind that strip mall. It slowed as it neared us. We both had guns and Grunt had a bag stuffed with cash we couldn’t account for legally. But Grunt just stared at the cop over the dashboard as he parked fifteen feet away. “Let’s bolt!” I said under my breath. “Go! Go! Go!”

Grunt didn’t move, so when the cop got out and strode in our direction, I opened my door, ready to make a break for it. But Grunt’s right hand latched down hard on my left thigh, locking me in place. He lowered his window, making it easy for the cop, who aimed a flashlight inside the van. It landed on me and stayed there for a few long breaths, long enough for me to assume he’d recognized my face from some APB. The ball of illumination swung to Grunt, and the cop said, “License and registration.”

Grunt reached into the bag, which was resting on the floor between our seats. He selected one envelope, counted its contents, then pulled a few bills from another and added them to the first. This he handed to the cop, who took it with a grin and used the envelope to give a little half salute. “Tell Mr. Sunday we all appreciate the steady tithing.”

He disappeared from the window and walked around the rear of the van, pacing slow as if he were inspecting it for clues. When he came to my side, the door was still cracked open, and he swung it wide. “And who the hell are you now?” he asked.

I looked at Grunt, who stared my way impassively. The cop said, “Don’t worry, boy, I’m not out to make trouble. I just like to know who I’m doing business with.” Up close, and without the light in my eyes, I could see the cop was on the far side of middle age. He was pudgy and had a mustache in bad need of a trim. Taking my cue from Grunt, I said nothing.

“Don’t tell me Sunday’s gone and hired himself another damn mute! What’s your name?”

I couldn’t tell if he didn’t recognize me or was testing me, seeing what I’d say. But he wouldn’t quit eyeing me up, so finally I turned, got into my role as fully as I could, and told him, “Call me Wild Child.”

He laughed. “One of those,” he said. “Shoulda figured.” With that, he walked back to his car and drove off. I wondered just how far Sunday’s circle of friends extended.

By our final stop, it must’ve been nearing 3 a.m. After sending a quick text, Grunt followed tree-lined side streets from that strip mall through suburban neighborhoods. We passed a school and a playground, lots of picket fences and minivans, the promised land of book clubs and low-interest second mortgages. My eyes lingered on one house with a “For Sale” sign out front.

Finally Grunt pulled into the driveway of a nice-looking Colonial. It seemed a lot like every other middle-class house on the street, hard to even distinguish one from the next. All the windows were dark.

Grunt killed the engine, and a row of stepping-stones in the lawn led us to the front door. A ceramic leprechaun grinned at us from under a hedge. All around us there was only quiet. Grunt thumbed the doorbell and the chime echoed really loud. He waited just a few seconds and then banged his fist into the door, and now a light flashed on inside. The door swung open to reveal a sleepy-eyed guy in his thirties. He was wearing a Penn State T-shirt and zipping up a pair of jeans. He stopped when his eyes found Grunt’s face, and he’d barely gotten out, “You!” when Grunt pushed in the door and stepped inside. I followed.

“Come on now,” the guy said. “This is my home. This is where I live.” All the while, he was backing up and Grunt was advancing. I stayed in his shadow.

The guy retreated to the bottom of a blue-carpeted staircase and bumped into the banister. His face was white and sweat dotted his forehead. “I explained this to Mr. Sunday. I explained!” he said. His voice trembled and his eyes, hopeless with dread, reminded me of Leonard from the boxcar.

At the head of the stairs, a woman appeared in a white nightgown. She held a phone in one hand, and as she came down the steps, she said, “Get the hell out of here, whoever you are.”

The man said, “Melissa, no! Put that down.”

She paused, midway down the flight, and Grunt jabbed a thick finger at me and then at her. I understood. A couple quick strides brought me to her, and I snatched the phone away. I smashed it into the wall, and only after it burst into a thousand plastic pieces did I ask myself why. It simply seemed the thing to do, the next action in the script I’d somehow committed to.

The wife went to run upstairs, but she only made it up a few steps before I snagged her one wrist. She twisted and tugged, and I thought of my mom on the hill outside Perkins. “Quit struggling,” I snapped quietly. “I don’t want to hurt you.” This was totally true. Yet something in my tone when those words came out, something whispering even in the back of my head, promised to us both, but I will if I have to.

The wife, sufficiently freaked out, stopped squirming and asked, “Marty, what the hell’s going on?”

Marty held both hands up, then rubbed one through his hair. “I can handle this. Please.”

I couldn’t be sure if he was pleading with Melissa, Grunt, or both.

Grunt pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and gave it to Marty, who read it and said, “He can’t be serious. There’s no way I can make this happen. It would mean —”

The slap came swift and fast, Grunt’s open hand snapping Marty’s face sideways. He looked shocked and his wife screamed his name, but Grunt did it again anyway. I thought it was especially insulting, to be slapped instead of punched. But if Grunt unloaded on a guy like Marty, there would be permanent damage. Marty hunched and held a hand to his cheek. “Beat me all you want,” he said. “I can’t make money appear from thin air.”

After a quick scan of the foyer, Grunt took hold of one of the wooden spindles of the banister. He snapped it free and held it in both hands, a yardstick-long rod of carved curves. With a backhand swat, he drove a hole in the drywall above Marty’s head, and now Melissa said, “Oh God.” Something in her tone turned my head, and I followed her eyes to the second floor.

There, out on the landing, looking through the railing, stood a girl in footy pajamas. Her feet poked through the spindles, toes over the edge. She gripped an upside-down stuffed animal by a leg and said, “My throat is still scratchy.”

Her mother tried to pull away from me, stretching her arm and leaning up the stairs, but I anchored her. And then Grunt was plodding our way, boot by boot, eyes on the child. The mom screamed and blocked his path, and there was a second when I could’ve gotten in his way, but I didn’t. I let him pass me and he latched a huge paw on the mom’s face and shoved her down, hard, so hard her head banged on a step with a sickening crack.

“Mom?” the little girl asked, and the woman began crawling up the steps after Grunt, still gripping the splintered wood.

I froze.

The husband cried out, “Okay! Okay! Tell Sunday it’s a deal. I’ll find a way. I have no freakin’ idea how, but I’ll find a way damn it.”

Grunt smiled. He stepped over Melissa and deposited the broken banister spindle in a tall bucket that held umbrellas just inside the door. Then he looked at me and tipped his head toward the exit. I started down the steps. The little girl bumped past me, joining her father on the ground by Melissa, who had begun to sob.

Again I felt the urge to apologize, but doing so would’ve opened up something inside me I knew I couldn’t touch, not with who I had to be then. So when I spoke, it was with a voice I didn’t recognize. “This is all your daddy’s fault,” I said. The little girl looked up at me, and I told her, “He needs to take care of things better.”

Grunt opened the door and I walked out into the cooler night air. We drove away from the family, and Grunt turned off the radio. It was clear that we were finished for the evening and heading back, and I was grateful we were done. So we rode in silence, back to the highway and then down toward Camp Hill. All the while I couldn’t stop thinking about that little girl, how lodged now in her brain was a memory of two scary men who invaded her home while she was sleeping and attacked her parents. She’d never get back to sleep that night. She’d lie in bed between her parents, clinging to that stuffed animal, and wonder who the men were, why they came, and if they’d come back. Decades from now, maybe the memory would fade, or perhaps she’d categorize it as a nightmare. But for now, that child knew something more about grim reality, and I’d helped introduce her to it. And what would’ve happened, I wondered, if Grunt had signaled me to climb those stairs? What if he’d sent me after the girl? Sunday’s line came to me, the one about wolves and sheep.

“Pull over,” I told Grunt just as we approached the exit ramp for Camp Hill. “Now.”

Maybe something in my voice told him what was up, because he did what I asked. The van came to rest just before the overpass, and I lurched out onto the shoulder. I made it to a patch of weeds, just in time to double over, grip my thighs, and retch. My gut clenched and I threw up again, hard enough that I dropped to one knee. A truck roared by overhead, thundering, and my vision swam. A last spasm emptied my stomach and then I just stayed there, trying to gather myself. When I finally rose to return to the van, I nearly passed out, but soon enough my steps grew steady. At the open door, I leaned into the roof, but I didn’t want to get back in. “Go on,” I told Grunt. “I’m going to walk. The fresh air will do me good.”

It was miles, though Grunt clearly didn’t care. He shrugged and tapped his own belt, and I pulled the gun from my waist, returned it to the glove box. I asked him, “Will you need to tell Mr. Sunday about this, or can we keep it between us?”

Grunt’s impassive face gave me no answer, and I wondered when I would learn to stop trying to communicate with him. I leaned back and slammed the door. He merged into traffic and drove off.

On foot, I followed the swoop of the exit ramp, walking along the solid white line. In the darkness, I couldn’t make out the roadway beneath it, and it felt as if I were balancing on a thin beam, treading over a bottomless black chasm. I found myself trying to remember some poet’s line from DJ’s class, something about gazing into the abyss. Another line came to me too, from some British guy, about how when we wear a mask, sometimes our face grows to fit it.

For a long stretch my legs carried me through Camp Hill, and I didn’t care that I had no destination. In fact, wandering felt just right. Up on the bypass, I drifted past the Panera where Mom always got me smoothies after a trip to the dentist when I was a kid. Without pausing to pray, I crossed the moon shadow cast by the steeples of St. Sebastian’s, where Mom had surely been praying for me for weeks. Block to block, I zigzagged through the sleepy neighborhoods. I went by that fancy house for sale, where we’d pretended for the last time. At the high school it’s true, I wished it were open. Not so much so I could hit the weights, just so I could walk the halls again, go back to my locker, get jostled in the rush of students in the hallway. I wanted to bitch with Shrimp about the horrible cafeteria food, debate LeQuan about music, worry about the atomic number of palladium. Having lost the life I had, I didn’t find it quite so miserable. Maybe that’s called nostalgia.

And I guess it was this sense that drew me to the yellow house on Seventeenth Street. I had to lean into the steeply slanted hill it’s near the top of, but this reminded me of the sloping yard behind it, perfect for a young boy’s sledding adventures. When I stood in front of the house, I saw that not much had changed. The front porch still had a swing, the azaleas were even more overgrown. The new owners had the fractured sidewalk fixed, so my old bike ramp had been flattened out.

Just like at the high school, I felt the impulse to go inside. I wanted to walk into the basement, with its dehumidifier rumbling and musty smell and tableful of LEGOs. I wanted to climb into my old bed and set my cheek on my mom’s chest, feel her heart beat as she read to me about Narnia or Hogwarts. And when I didn’t know a word, I wanted her to reach for the dog-eared paperback dictionary. I wanted to feel the cool linoleum floor in the kitchen pulse with bass as my mom paused from cleaning dishes to crank the classic rock station and spin me around in an impromptu dance party. I wanted to be alone with my father in the garage, my chin barely reaching the workbench, and have him hand me each tool, listen to him explain the difference between a socket wrench and needle-nose pliers. “You can’t do a job right with the wrong tool,” he told me, and I remembered thinking, I will never forget this simple moment.

As I climbed the wooden stairs, even the creaks felt familiar and perfect. It was like I was walking back in time. And the screen door’s whiny protest told me no one had WD-40ed the hinges in forever. I gripped the smooth doorknob and took the deepest of breaths. What exactly was I doing? I didn’t know. But I found myself in the grasp of the strangest of fantasies. Because what I imagined then was that I would open the door and stride not just into my old home, but into the past itself. I would walk into the living room, where the Civil War documentary would be playing on the TV and my father’s beer would be on the coffee table. He would be in his armchair and my mom and me on the couch. She would have already asked what year the war began and if Lincoln really wrote the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope, not noticing his rising irritation. When she asks the third question, something about why all the generals had such long beards, the boy I was will have his first prophetic vision. He will know with certainty that his father is about to upturn the coffee table, that our mom will flee from his rage, down the hallway, hoping to lock the bedroom door behind her. The boy will see that she will be too slow.

And he’ll be powerless to stop it. Everything will happen just as he foresaw, and the screams will be horrible.

As it happened that fateful evening, he’ll try to help. But tonight, he won’t be alone. Because as my fourth-grade self, gangly and awkward, charges down that slim corridor, I’ll be at his side. Together we’ll barge into their bedroom and see the dresser mirror already smashed, the nightstand toppled. The boy I was will jump onto the bed, and from there he’ll see what’s on the other side, our father’s hulking shape on top of our mom. Her face is already half covered in blood, and she’s wailing and contorting, but our father’s one hand has a hold of her hair, pinning her to the ground, and his other is shaped into a fist, and he’s raising it up and bringing it down, deaf to the cries of his wife and son.

I know from memory, from the hundreds of times this scene visited me in my nightmares, that the boy is about to leap onto his father’s back. I know he’ll wrap his skinny arms around his father’s thick neck, try in mighty desperation to pull him off his mom. And I know that when the father rears back like a bucking bronco, he’ll toss the boy across the room, that he’ll crash in a heap in the corner near the upturned nightstand. When his father faces him, with his eyes wild and his teeth bared, Mac will see him as part man, part beast.

Rather than trying again to stop this creature, he’ll run and hide in his boyhood closet. Plenty of times he’s seen his father lose his temper before, and more than once his mom’s had black-and-blue marks she explained away as falling down the stairs or being clumsy. Little by little as he got older, the boy had learned. At six, he’d seen him slap her hard in the garage. At eight, coming back from a Christmas party, the boy had sat in the back seat cowering as his father pulled the car over and banged her head into the window. So by ten, he knew the truth behind his mom’s bruises — and he’d faced his wrath himself. There were plenty of nights he could feel things escalating, and he’d try to defuse the bomb by acting goofy or even draw fire to himself by acting bad. Sometimes it worked. But many times he’d wake from sleep to sounds straight from the land of nightmares. His headboard was up against the wall to their room, so he’d leave behind the warm blankets, drag his pillow to the darkness of his closet, crouch amidst his snow boots and old stuffed animals and try to pray. The darkness stank of mothballs.

So now, he’ll rise from the corner with the overturned nightstand, and he’ll flee. In the mothball dark of the closet, he’ll hear his mother crying out for her husband to stop, crying out for help, and the boy won’t run to the kitchen phone and punch three simple digits. Instead he’ll quiver and feel that shameful release, the warm wetness soaking his pants.

Some random neighbor will do what he couldn’t, and that call will summon sirens and Officer Harrow and an ambulance and everything will change forever, but the boy will never escape the truth. The truth that he is a coward.

In my fantasy though, the dreadful script is revised. I fix history. The boy never leaps from the bed. I am there, and I set a hand on his frail chest to steady him, and I nod to let him know I’ll take care of everything. I say, “Don’t worry. I got this.”

I grab the overturned nightstand with two hands, heft it over my head and crash it down on the back of my father’s skull. He collapses on my bleeding mom, and when I roll his body off her, he is groggy and helpless. And I can feel it now, the power I never had then, swelling in my blood and filling me with a calming rage I can’t describe. She is safe now and he can’t defend himself, but I know I am not done. The act is not yet complete. There must be something else. I don’t care if Khajee calls it revenge or retribution or violence. But I will punish this man, and he will know it is me. I’m trying to decide the exact nature of his pain when a sleepy female voice from the other side of the yellow house’s front door says, “Who are you? What do you want?”

I released the doorknob and stepped back on the porch, shocked to be in the present.

The tired woman asked me more questions, threatened the police, but I was already retreating, down the steps and down the hill. The foolishness of my fantasy made me feel silly. It’s the dream of that ten-year-old boy, paralyzed with fear of his father’s wrath.

That night, huddled in the bitter stink of my own soaked clothes, I vowed to myself to become stronger, strong enough so no one could hurt me or threaten my mom. We would be safe and I would be her hero. My plan was to fix everything. That’s what was supposed to happen. But instead, I found myself now running away from the yellow house and my past, with no clear idea of where the hell I was supposed to be going.