Chapter 4 Martin
MARTIN
“Hello?”
I groggily greet whoever is at the other end of the line, exhaustion hanging heavy over my body. I woke to the sound of my phone ringing, and the pieces of last night have hardly had time to slot themselves back into place before my ex-wife’s voice bursts into my ear.
“Jesus, Martin, why haven’t you been answering your phone?” Martha demands.
Something is seriously stressing her out, I can tell—whenever she’s worried about something, she starts off the conversation picking holes in what everyone around her is doing, usually to make herself feel better in comparison.
“I was asleep.”
“This late?”
“Yeah. Long night.”
“Well,” she replies, and I can practically picture the way she waves her hand to dismiss me. “I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“About your son.”
The way she says it, it’s as though it should have been obvious. And in a way, I guess it should be.
I pinch my nose between my fingertips, letting out a long sigh.
I’d never admit it, but part of the reason I got this house so far from the city was because I didn’t want our son turning up on my doorstep any longer, drunk out of his mind and demanding money or help for one thing or another.
Didn’t seem to matter how many times I tried to nudge him toward standing on his own two feet, getting a job of his own, he would always use me or his mother as a fallback.
Eventually, I got sick of it.
“What happened?”
“I just got a call from his building superintendent,” she tells me, her voice laced with concern and confusion. “They had calls from some of his neighbors last night and early into this morning…he went up to check on him, and…”
She pauses, like she’s still trying to make sense of it herself.
“He smashed the place to pieces, Martin. Wrecked it.”
My heart sinks.
This is a new low, even for him. Ever since he was a kid, he had a violent streak—we put him in therapy, tried to find some way to coax it out of him, but nothing worked.
He was always getting into trouble at school for causing trouble with the other kids, and he’d sit there, sullen, in the headmaster’s office while we tried to promise it would never happen again.
“The place you were paying for?”
“Yeah…”
She confesses it like she’s ashamed. She knows I cut him off financially a long time ago, but I understand why she doesn’t feel like she can.
It’s her son, no matter what he’s done. She can’t just leave him out in the cold, even if that’s what he deserves.
He’s well into his twenties now, and he still can’t seem to let go of the immature attitude that left him thinking he deserves the world.
“What did the superintendent say?”
“Said that we would lose the deposit, and then some,” she replies, her voice aching with sadness.
Even though it’s been years since we split, I still feel for her.
I can’t help it. Just because things didn’t work out with us romantically doesn’t mean that she isn’t my friend, and I hate seeing the people I care about go through this.
“How much?”
“I didn’t call you to ask for money, Martin.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“I just…I don’t know what to do with him at this point,” she continues, her voice rising.
“I feel like I’ve done everything I can, and nothing is coming close to being enough.
Nothing I do is enough to stop him, and I…
he won’t even answer his phone right now.
He won’t even tell me what happened to make him act out like this. ”
“It’s not acting out when he’s a grown adult,” I remind her.
“It still feels that way to me,” she shoots back. “He’s my son, in case you forgot—”
“He’s my son too,” I fire back sharply. I know it’s not useful or productive for us to get on at each other like this, but sometimes, I feel like she’s trying to undo that part of him, to pretend that she was the only one who had a hand in this.
Not that he’s the kind of man I want to admit to having a part in raising, but still.
I’m at least some of the reason he’s like this.
Maybe he got it from me. God knows I wasn’t the easiest kid when I was growing up, and it’s only now that I’m a parent myself that I can imagine what a pain in the arse I was to my mum and dad back in Ireland.
“You want me to come down?” I offer. Truth be told, I don’t want to leave the house quite yet.
I feel like the girl from last night might come back, and I want to be here when and if she does.
But I’m not going to leave Martha high and dry, especially not with the amount of stress she’s going through.
“No, no,” she murmurs. “I—I just wanted to talk to someone about it. Sometimes, I feel like…”
She doesn’t need to finish that sentence for me.
We’re both his parents, and we have a unique understanding of what it feels like to be responsible for someone like our son.
The shame that comes with it, the guilt, that feeling that we might have unleashed something on the world that does more harm to it than good.
The constant questions of whether we could have done anything differently, or whether he was destined to be like this from the start.
“Is it my fault, Martin?” she asks softly.
“No,” I assure her, and I mean it. “He’s responsible for what he does, Martha, you know that. And you can’t keep covering for him. You have to let him make his own mistakes—”
“Even when it comes to destroying a whole apartment?”
I run a hand through my hair. “Even then.”
She sighs, a rush of static down the line. “I’m sorry to bother you this early, Martin. You get some rest.”
“We’ll talk later,” I promise her, though I can already sense that she doesn’t much want to speak with me after everything that’s happened. I’m a constant reminder of the ways in which our family failed, and she only calls me when she can’t deny it any longer.
“Sure. Speak soon.”
And with that, she hangs up, leaving me sitting in silence.
I toss the phone onto the bed and stalk toward the shower.
I need to scrub the last twenty-four hours off of my body, because they feel like they’ve crept beneath my skin and thrown me entirely off my game.
First, that woman on the side of the road—bringing her back to the house, the way she slipped into my lap, the way she kissed me.
Then, waking up the next morning to find her gone and my ex-wife on the phone, terrified about what our son might do next.
My mind drifts to the bruises on the woman’s arms, how she brushed off my questions about where they had come from. Seems like there are plenty of people having problems out there, even if I can only do so much to help them.
It’s no wonder that she took off so early; she probably thought I would turn on her just like the person who did that to her. I can only hope that she’s still safe, even if I have no way to prove that for certain.
Could last night have been nothing but a dream? It’s starting to feel that way now. Like a break from reality that my brain offered me so I didn’t have to think about the mess of my real life.
But even as I flick on the shower and the memories of her flood into my mind, I know that I could never have come up with something as vivid and perfect as her.
Even if I get the feeling that I’m never going to see her again.