Ten #2
“That won’t happen,” I assure him. “I’ve forgiven my mother for lots of things, but she crossed the line this time.”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he bows his head and looks at the floor, brooding on unknown dark thoughts.
“What’s wrong, Thomas?” I take his face in my hands and force him to look at me. A shadow moves over his features, as if he’s being tormented by something. After a few moments of silence, he answers me.
“Have you ever looked into your mother’s eyes and seen nothing but contempt for the daughter that you are?”
His question catches me off guard, and I feel a pain lancing through my heart, so intense and unexpected that, for a moment, I struggle to breathe.
“No…” I manage vaguely, my voice barely audible.
“Then believe me, you’re lucky.”
He pulls my hands from his face and stands up, ready to flee from me and this conversation, but I stop him. I pull him back down, my eyes glistening after what I just heard. “Did that happen to you, Thomas?”
He stares at me, more serious than I’ve ever seen him before. “A lot worse than that has happened to me.”
My mouth drops open, even though my lungs feel empty of air. My heart is pounding relentlessly, and I feel like my palms are starting to sweat.
“What happened to you?”
Thomas stares at me obliquely, letting only his mistrust show in his face. “Nothing you really want to hear about,” he argues, looking away.
“No, I want to.” I wrap my shaking hands around his arm. “I want to know everything about you.”
“Actually, I don’t think you do. Because if you knew the whole truth, you’d never look at me the same again. You’d see me for what I am. And what I am, Ness? You wouldn’t like it at all.”
“That could never happen.” I straddle the middle of his body and take his face in my hands again, staring into him.
“My eyes will always look at you just this way, do you understand? Always.” My voice trembles a little bit, but I continue: “You can talk to me about anything. Confide all your secrets in me, confess all your sins… I will be here, by your side. I promise you, Thomas. I promise you I won’t leave. ”
When he lowers his eyes, he looks so unexpectedly vulnerable that I feel a sudden urge to wrap my arms around him. But I resist that impulse, because I know that kind of gesture in this moment would make him feel pitied.
Thomas sighs, sliding a hand over his face, while I feel an unpleasant anguished sensation growing in my chest. Talk to me , I beg him silently. And then, to my enormous surprise, he actually does.
“Remember that night I came to the Marsy drunk?”
I nod, focused on him.
“That wasn’t an isolated incident.”
“What do you mean?”
He hesitates for just a moment but keeps talking. “I mean, I’ve been in that situation a lot in the past.”
“You’re someone who likes to drink, that’s obvious.”
Thomas shakes his head, running a hand across his forehead. “That’s not… It’s not just that… It’s more complicated than that.”
“Complicated?” I frown, trying to follow his train of thought.
He nods, giving me a dark look. “I’m an alcoholic, Ness,” he adds quickly, watching my face.
This revelation hits me like a bolt from the blue. Alcoholic , I repeat over and over in my mind as I stare at him unblinkingly.
Impossible…
Thomas is not an alcoholic. He likes a few beers every now and then, true, but he…he’s just not an alcoholic, I try to convince myself.
“That can’t be…”
Thomas just nods.
“H-how…how did it happen?” is all I can manage.
Thomas shrugs miserably, as if not even he can answer that question. “My sister claims I got my looks from our mother and my alcoholism from our father. A genetic defect,” he confesses.
“For as long as I can remember, he’s always been drunk. And he was a mean drunk, a real mean drunk. The clearest memories from my childhood are screams, begging, and pleading, and the terror that we felt whenever he’d come home.”
My God…
“Your father…he…did he hi…” The words die in my mouth, I can’t bring myself to say them. I can’t give voice to that monstrous possibility. Thomas nods, understanding without needing me to finish the sentence.
“I was four years old the first time it happened. My mother was in the living room, I remember that she was ironing something while I was on the floor, playing with these toy cars. My father came back late from work that night. He was hungry and he started a fight with my mother because he wasn’t happy with the dinner she’d made. ” His voice is heavy with resentment.
“He started yelling, so my mom made me go sit on the sofa and turned the TV up and she told me not to move from there, not for any reason in the world. The two of them shut themselves in the kitchen to argue, but the door was open a crack. I did everything I could to focus on the cartoon on TV instead of the deafening noise. Pans being thrown around, pounding on the walls, plates shattering, and then my mother’s whispered cries…
I was too little to understand what was happening and too scared to stay put like I’d been told.
” He lets out a sigh full of misery and keeps going.
“I remember running to the kitchen door, sticking my head in through the little crack and…I saw it. The worst thing I’d ever seen.
My mother was curled up on the ground with blood running down her temple, begging him to stop.
She was pregnant with my sister at the time.
And the more she screamed, the more he hurt her, until she couldn’t catch her breath. Until she passed out.
“My father realized I was there because I started crying. I was fucking terrified. And it was only then that he stopped. Ignoring everything I’d just witnessed, everything he’d just done, he just walked past my mother’s body on the floor, threw me aside on his way out of the kitchen, and left the house. ”
He holds on tight to my thighs as I blink away tears. “My God…all of that…it’s awful.”
“Over the years, episodes like that started to become almost normal. My father kept my mother at home and didn’t let her go out much so no one would get suspicious if they saw her.
For me, he’d explain away the bruises, saying that I was a troubled boy and that I was always getting into fights.
He didn’t touch my sister, probably because if people saw marks all over a little girl, they’d be alarmed.
Instead, he got in her head. He’d insult her every time he saw her.
If he saw her leaving the house in clothes he considered too short or tight or whatever, he’d say, ‘You’re growing up to be a whore,’ and throw condoms at her.
That was how he talked to a ten-year-old girl.
Ten fucking years old,” he repeats angrily.
Horror and disgust sweep over me, taking my breath away.
“My sister spent years fighting panic attacks and self-loathing. She got so ashamed that she wouldn’t even leave the house anymore. She’d just stay locked in her room, while downstairs, our father drank and drank until he exploded, taking it out on Mom and me.”
“Did you ever report him?” I murmur brokenly.
Thomas shakes his head.
“My father is a cop, and the county sheriff is his good friend. And obviously the sheriff believed every single lie my asshole father fed him. And if that wasn’t enough, my mother was scared of the repercussions a complaint might have had.”
“Oh my God. Did she ever consider taking the two of you and just making a run for it?”
“Of course she did. But she knew that he would kill her if she ever tried. She’s got a scar on her neck to remind her.”
The gravity of these confessions makes me feel lightheaded. But I need to prove to him that I can be strong. “I can’t imagine the hell that must have been…”
“The worst kind. That house became a cage with no escape route for my mother and my sister. I, on the other hand, spent as little time there as possible. But all that time out in the world without any sort of guidance, constantly searching for some way to push down all the anger I had inside…I was adrift. By the time I was fourteen, I was on a dark path. Feeling so pissed off all the time made me look for conflict everywhere. I would get into fights just because I wanted to hit someone and get hit. I wanted to suffer and make other people suffer too. It made me feel alive. If people refused to attack me, then I’d start something.
And I remember it so clearly; with every punch I threw, it was his face that I pictured hitting, beating until my hands were bloody.
It was always my father’s face. But it was never enough.
“The torment was eating me up more each day, and I only found one way to soothe it: alcohol and drugs. They gave me the relief I needed. My pain and my rage toward that bastard faded, and the sense of impotence that ran in my veins, constantly reminding me of how useless I was, how I couldn’t do anything to change things…
it disappeared. Life was still shit, but it hurt less. It was more bearable.”
I can sense the shame he feels as he tells me this truth, and my heart aches for him.
“I can’t remember a single day in the next four years when I didn’t get high or blind drunk.
Nothing mattered to me anymore. Not my mother or my father or even Leila.
Not even myself. In fact, I’d had it with all of them.
I was mad at my mother for giving us such a shitty father and for not being able to get rid of him.
I was mad at my sister for continuing to believe that, sooner or later, it was all going to stop, that he was going to repent his ways and get his head on straight.
And I was angry at myself because, out of all of us, I was the most like him.
So much that it scared me. And then, instead of staying with my mom and protecting her, I did nothing but add to her worries.
As if living with my father every day wasn’t enough to earn her a break.
No…she had to deal with me too. My fuckups, the constant fights that broke out between my father and me.
And with every day that passed, each time I’d come home so high I could hardly stand up straight, I would see a little more pain and disappointment fill her eyes.
She had tears in her eyes and hatred in her voice, and all she would say to me was, ‘You’re just like him.
’ Like him , the animal that had ruined her life; ruined all of our lives.
And do you know what the worst part was?
Deep down, there was a part of me that knew she was right. ”
I scowl, feeling his pain.
“You haven’t heard the worst part yet. Maybe you’ll think differently once you do,” he says with a bitterness that I’ve never heard in his voice before.
“One night four years ago…everything changed,” he continues.
“There’d been yet another fight at home that night.
I got physical with my father in a way I hadn’t before.
The neighbors called the police about the screams. My mother had completely given up, Leila was horrified by our bloody, swollen faces.
“So before I did something that I would have regretted probably for the rest of my life, I ran out of the house. I was headed for the only place where I could go to vent the way I wanted.” He pauses and I look at him, urging him to continue, grasping his hands tightly.
“I knew this guy who organized underground fights. I was so out of my mind that night that I managed to beat three huge guys in a row. I didn’t escape unscathed—I was actually in really bad shape—but I felt euphoric.
I was riding high on adrenaline, but the anger was still there too.
It never gave me a moment’s peace. The only way to truly stifle it was to… ”
“Drink,” I finish for him, and he nods.
“I chugged whatever shit was being passed around in the back room before I left…then I got on my bike and headed home. It was on my way back…when the accident happened.”
I flinch. “The accident where you got the scar on your side?”
He nods. “The road was dark and empty. It had been raining all night, and the asphalt was wet. By the time I saw it coming, it was too late. This truck came out of nowhere, or maybe it was there the whole time, and I was just too drunk to see it. I remember that he was going fast, but I wasn’t fucking around either.
The truck swerved into my lane just for a split second, and when I tried to dodge him, the wheels went out from under my motorcycle, and I crashed right into the guardrail.
It happened in a snap. When I opened my eyes up again, there he was, lying on the road a few feet away from me, dying. ”
I flinch again. “He?”
“That’s what I didn’t tell you before: I wasn’t alone that night. It wasn’t just me on that bike.”
A chill runs down my spine. “Who else was there?”
Thomas doesn’t answer me. His stare is fixed on our entangled legs. Absent. Gone.
“Thomas.” I touch his fingers to his cheek, shaking him. “Tell me: Who was with you?”
It seems like an eternity, the seconds that pass before he gathers the strength to look me in the eye and speak again. But, when he finally does, I’m frozen.
“My brother.”