Chapter 41 The Past #2
I stood at the edge of the driveway for a full minute, staring at the warped siding and the sagging gutters, wondering if tonight was one of the good ones. If my father would be so far gone he wouldn’t notice me at all.
I pushed through the front door, letting it slam behind me, and the smell hit me like a punch: piss, sweat, the metallic sweetness of spilled beer gone sour.
The TV blared a sports recap show, the volume cranked to a level that made every word sound like a threat. My father was in the battered armchair, a plastic liter bottle of cheap vodka balanced precariously on his thigh.
“Look who it is,” my father said, not turning. “The prodigal shithead. Home before midnight for once.”
I didn’t bother with a response. I moved to the kitchen, the soles of my boots sticking to the floor, and opened the fridge for something to eat.
I grabbed a slice of bologna and folded it into my mouth in one bite, chewing without tasting, then washed it down with water straight from the faucet.
I’d almost made it to my room when my father called out again, his voice slurred. “Hey! Get your ass in here.”
I paused, every muscle in my body hardening with dread. I considered ignoring the summons, but that always made it worse in the long run.
I walked into the living room, arms crossed over my chest. The bastard didn’t even look up.
“You skipping school again?” he asked, eyes glued to the TV. “Got a message from the office. Said you’re about to flunk out if you don’t get your shit together.”
“Don’t care,” I muttered.
My father made a show of sighing, as if the weight of disappointment was crushing his ribcage.
“You’re a fuck-up, you know that? You’re gonna end up like your mother, running away from everything.
” He raised the vodka bottle in a silent toast, eyes bloodshot and yellow at the edges. “At least she had the sense to leave.”
The old rage surged up, raw and electric, but I ground my teeth and looked at the floor. If I didn’t respond, I could sometimes ride out the abuse until it burnt itself down to cinders.
But tonight, my father was in a mood. “Look at me when I talk to you,” he shouted, and when I didn’t, the bottle flew across the room, smashing on the wall above me, liquor fanning out in a sticky comet as the bottle wrecked itself against the drywall.
I didn’t flinch, but the sound did something to me. Snapped the last filament of self-control inside my chest.
“Clean that up, you little shit,” my father spat, not even watching for a reaction.
I went to the kitchen, dug out the crusted mop, and blotted the puddle of vodka from the carpet, the stench burning my nostrils. The urge to burn the house to its bones, to torch everything and walk into the ash, pulsed white-hot under my skin.
I almost did it. Almost set the rag on fire and chucked it onto the couch, to see if my father would even notice before he was part of the smoke.
But the memory from that morning cut through, stopped me cold: Amelia’s voice as a kid, the way she’d said my name like it was something precious, not something broken and thrown away.
I’d killed that feeling a thousand times, buried it deep, and yet there it was, alive and kicking at the inside of my skull. It made me want to scream, or punch the emptiness into submission, or just find a way to shut it up for good.
I finished the cleaning, tucked the mop away, and stared at the red-hot line of my knuckles where I’d clenched the handle too tight.
I wiped the spill, rinsed my hands, and headed for the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?” my father barked, now fully upright.
“Out,” I replied, my voice flat as a gravestone.
“Don’t come back here unless you plan to act like a man,” he said, then dropped back into the chair.
That’s when I snapped. “I’m more of a fucking man than you. Your own wife couldn’t stand you and left. She left me here with a goddamn monster.”
My father lurched out of the chair, the remote thumping to the floor and batteries rolling under the couch.
His face was angry, veins throbbing in his temple, mouth wet and trembling with words that wanted to be fists. “You little fuck. I should have left you at the hospital. I should have drowned you in the goddamn bathtub the minute I found out you were mine.”
I almost laughed. It was the same threats, the same spit-streaked litany of disappointment and hate. What was new was the way a part of me, a very small and haunting part, felt nothing at all.
“I gave you everything. I put a roof over your head. I showed you how to be strong. And all you do is whine and mouth off, just like her. Useless.”
He continued to advance. A slow, rolling threat.
“You’re drunk,” I spat. “You’re always drunk. Your threats don’t mean shit to me anymore. You don’t even know why you’re angry anymore.”
My father sneered, as if reading my mind. He knuckled his bloodshot eyes and jabbed a finger in my direction. “You think you’re better than this? Than me? You want to know what a real man does? He takes what he wants. He gets even, and he doesn’t whine about his fucking feelings.”
My jaw tightened, feeling the muscles jump in my cheek. “You ever think maybe that’s why everyone leaves you?” I asked, the words landing with less force than I meant.
My father just laughed. A dry, rattling sound.
“Yeah? Well, at least when I fucked up, I got something out of it.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and leaned in, voice dropping to a hiss. “You know what your problem is, Caiden? You got your mother’s softness in you. All that hope, all that wishing. That’s why she ran.”
The room spun a little, his voice, the TV, the tang of blood and rot all swirling together in a way that was almost psychedelic.
I could see the rage in his eyes, but underneath it there was something else.
Fear. Or maybe regret, but more likely just terror that I would become something he couldn’t control.
“You wanna act like a man?” he sneered. “Then you gotta kill what’s soft in you.
You gotta break it before it breaks you.
That’s all women are good for, son, breaking men.
They’ll smile at you while they stick a knife in your gut, and they’ll walk away laughing.
You need to be meaner. Maybe you might actually be loved if you’re meaner. ”
My face went cold, skin stretched over bone, my mouth opening and closing but only spit and air emerging.
There was no winning. Not with my father, not with myself, not with Amelia, not even with the world. It was all just a sick, looping game, and every night I told myself I didn’t care, I didn’t want her, I didn’t feel, but then I dreamed of her and woke up wanting to set something on fire.
Maybe my father was right. Maybe I needed to be crueler. Perhaps I was only good at crippling hearts with my words and bleeding them out.
I had to get out. I was a human fire alarm, nerves screaming, every fiber in my body ready to start a riot.
I scraped together my wallet and a pack of crumpled Camels and walked out, not sure where I was going, only that it had to be away.
The cold hit me in the face, wind biting through my hoodie, but I liked the pain. It was real, uncomplicated, nothing to decode.
The streets were empty except for the blinking neon above Duffy’s, the only bar in a ten-mile radius that would serve a kid who could barely grow a beard.
My fake ID was a joke, Dante had made it on a laminator in the school library, but the bartenders at Duffy’s didn’t give a shit.
All they cared was that you didn’t puke on the pool table or start a fight you couldn’t finish.
I pushed through the door. The regulars were hunched like gargoyles around the bar, eyes glassy and indifferent.
I liked that about this place. Nobody cared who you were, or what you were running from. You slid money across the counter, and the bartender slid oblivion right back at you.
I took a seat at the end, near the jukebox, and nursed a whiskey Coke with both hands, staring at the TV above the bar. Some sitcom played to a captive audience of zero. I drank until my jaw unclenched, until the edges of my anger went fuzzy and loose.
After maybe forty minutes, I noticed her.
Lillian Langston, Amelia’s older sister.
She had already graduated high school, but I remembered seeing her when she still went to our school. She was three years older, so I never interacted with her much.
But something pulled me to her. She did look similar to Amelia in the face. Maybe that’s why I went over to her. Or maybe I was just sad, and needed comfort.
She was a little drunk, but managed to keep her eyeliner from smudging, which was more than could be said for the state of her hands, ringed with purple marker, some old cigarette burn on the web between thumb and finger.
Lillian was slouched against the bar, two empty shot glasses already lined up and a third sweating beneath her palm. Her hair, darker than Amelia’s and long enough to tangle in the little bowl of peanuts, fell in ropes around her face.
She looked like she’d given up on pretending to care.
I ordered another drink, then sidled up beside her, not even sure what words would come out.
In the muted light, her resemblance to Amelia was uncanny, but the effect was like seeing a photo after too many generations of photocopying. The lines blurred, a little more haunted around the eyes.
She didn’t look at me when she spoke, just stared into the bar mirror, lips tight around the rim of her glass. “I know you,” she said, voice flat and steady. “You’re that Baxter kid. The one makes my little sister cry.”
I almost retorted with something mean, but it didn’t land right. Instead, I took a long drink of whiskey, letting the burn recalibrate my insides. “She used to cry a lot. Now she just looks empty,” I said finally, twisting a cocktail napkin until it tore.