12. RIVERS OF GRAVITY.
RIVERS OF GRAVITY.
I should’ve enjoyed growing up in a small town in Massachusetts; most kids did.
It was a tight-knit community. Everyone knew what my father was like, but no one ever stepped in.
No amount of bruises outstood the lies people let themselves believe.
No matter what, they always looked the other way, and eventually, I did too.
The abuse became routine, and I always thought it was something that I had to endure because it was just the way things were; the life I’d been given. I was taught to be grateful at church on Sundays. I was to give something to the world and never expect anything back, so I gave it my silence.
My father wasn’t always angry. Until I was five years old, he was a good dad—great even. There was little to remember about him in that way. The good memories became swarmed with bad ones, and it was all I could see.
I had been so confused the first time he hit me.
One night, I was playing with my action figures at the dining room table when he was watching a poker tournament on television.
He asked me to grab him a beer from the fridge.
My mother was already in the kitchen, working on her recipe book.
She loved to cook and come up with unusual concoctions.
I loved trying everything she made because it made her happy.
“I can get it,” my mother had said, already opening the fridge to reach inside.
“I told the boy to get it.” His voice was mean, which had me cautiously looking at my mother. She gave me a reassuring smile and nodded at the beer in her hand. She instructed me how to pour it into the mug he kept in the freezer so that it wasn’t too foamy.
I was proud of myself as I carefully walked toward him, holding the mug with two hands.
I looked forward to the appreciative look on his face as I served it to him.
One of my shoelaces had come untied, and I tripped, falling onto the floor.
The beer sloshed everywhere, even onto the side of the recliner.
My mother gasped from the kitchen and hurried over to lift me back on my feet. When I looked at him, his eyes had changed. An angry vein popped out of his forehead as he slammed the recliner shut and stood on his feet.
“Dax, it was an accident,” my mother pleaded, and I could tell from the sound of her voice that she was afraid.
I watched her quickly walk to the kitchen to pour him a new beer.
When I turned around to face my father, he backhanded me so hard that I saw stars for the first time without looking up at the sky.
My mother was deranged with anger, and everything was confusing after that.
My blinks felt slow and my mind slower; like I couldn’t keep up with time.
I saw her mouth moving, but I didn’t hear anything.
He grabbed a handful of her hair and dragged her to their bedroom.
I stared at the shadows beneath the door until my ears began working again.
She was screaming at him to stop and even then, I knew I was too young and too small to do anything to stop it.
I cried “Mama!” over and over again so that she knew I was okay.
It was twenty minutes later when my father emerged from the room alone.
He didn’t look my way as he charged out the front door, nearly taking it off the hinges.
I ran to my mother and found her picking herself up off the floor, crying out in pain.
“Mama,” I called to her and when she turned, her eye was nearly swollen shut.
The sight of it was horrifying. There was a hurt in my heart that I couldn’t understand.
It was a betrayal that altered something inside of me.
“I’m all right, sweet boy,” she soothed, caressing my cheek softly before walking into the bathroom and closing the door behind her.
The hate for him was instant, but it never outran the fear.
Things have only gotten worse since then.
I was standing on the bank of a river with a few other kids who lived in my neighborhood. I asked my father if I could bring Love, but he said no. On my seventh birthday, she growled at my dad, so she’s been outside a lot lately and I have to sneak her inside at night when my parents are asleep.
I wasn’t good at making friends so when they came over and asked if I wanted to ride bikes with them, I begged my mother to let me go.
It was a mistake.
We played a game of truth or dare, but since I was the new kid in the group, they said I had to keep choosing dare—that was the rule. I thought it was some sort of initiation tactic, so I went with it in the hopes I’d come out with friends on the other side.
One by one I’d lost articles of my clothing. First, it was the puffer jacket my mother bought me the year before. I outgrew it, but Mama couldn’t afford to buy me things that often. Then I lost my shoes and pants.
It was the middle of January. It had been thirty-six degrees that morning. Now that it was dusk, the temperature rapidly declined.
My teeth clattered as I shivered against the harsh cold air, my breath fogging it.
“Look at him!” Ricky cheered. He was their ringleader. “He’s turning blue!”
The boys laughed in unison, and I joined them, because what else was I supposed to do? It was only a joke, I’d told myself, a shared joke. After that, I convinced myself I'd finally have friends.
“What’s so funny?” Ricky asked and the tone in his voice was one I’d recognized. It caused my heart to beat faster.
“N-nothing,” I stammered out, fighting against my body’s urge to lock up.
Another boy stepped closer, Braden. I’d always thought he looked so cool in school. He always got the girls’ attention. He always had nice clothes, and his mom had a Range Rover.
“You know what’d be really funny?” he asked.
“What?”
He jerked his head. It was a signal because they collectively went for my discarded clothes. Too cold to react, I watched as they threw them into the river.
“N-no!” I cried out, moving to push the first boy I reached. I couldn’t remember the other two boy’s names. “Why w-would you do t-that?”
Ricky laughed in my face. “You really thought we’d be friends with someone like you?”
I couldn’t help it; I started to cry. My entire body was filled with pain as rushing and violent as the river.
Braden pushed me and I stumbled backward, falling onto the rocks. He towered over me, and I eyed his clenched fist. “You’re a nobody—nothing but a weed in this town.”
“You reek like the trash you crawled out of, coon boy.”
Braden laughed at Ricky’s new nickname, and the other two joined in. “Coon boy! Oh, that’s perfect!” They both looked down at me with such malice in their eyes that I shrunk.
It’d been a few days since I bathed, but I hadn’t thought I smelled.
My father threw an empty bottle at my head.
When it fell to the floor, it shattered.
He shoved me into the broken glass and the shards cut into my back.
It hurt too much when water touched the cuts, so I’d been waiting for them to heal.
“Maybe it’s time he took a bath,” Ricky stated.
I shook my head vehemently as they each grabbed an arm and ankle, hauling me into the air. The roar of the river water intensified. “Pl-please. No, wait!”
“Hey!” a loud voice boomed from somewhere and I was dropped to the ground in an instant. “Just what do you fools think you’re doing to that boy?”
I followed the voice to see an older man in an orange vest holding a shotgun. The boys were already running off to their bikes, but I was frozen. My hands clutched the grass, pulling at the rocks as I tried to understand what I did to deserve their hatred.
Heavy footsteps approached me, and I flinched backward at the hand in front of my face.
“Woah, easy there, kiddo. Just trying to help you up.” He reached out his hand again. “Come on now, ain’t got all night.”
I took his hand and stood. “Th-thank you.”
He propped his gun on the ground, supporting his weight on it as if it were a cane.
“Where are your clothes, kid?” His face was weathered, and his head was bald, all his hair was on his chin.
He didn’t seem dangerous, so I glanced at the river and back to him.
Understanding flickered through his eyes as he nodded at me. “You Dax’s boy?”
I stood straighter. “I’m my mom’s.”
His mouth twitched as he studied me for a moment. “My name’s Keith Ledger. Let me give you a lift home. I think I got a blanket somewhere in the truck for you.”
He drove me home with the heat on full blast. I had a blanket that smelled of sawdust and gas wrapped around me. He pointed me in the direction of his house, which was down a long dirt driveway.
The trailer park was about a five-minute drive, and we arrived just as I was starting to warm up.
He got out first to grab my bike out of the bed of the truck.
I hesitated at the sight of the glowing lamp in the living room.
It meant my father was home and most likely a pack of beers into a game on TV.
I jumped when the old man rapped his knuckles against the window. I stepped out of the truck, leaving the blanket behind.
“Thank you, Mr. Ledger,” I said as he walked around the truck to the driver’s side.
“Those boneheads bother you again, you let me know.” I nodded at his words. He got in his truck and rolled the window down. “You need anything, you know where to find me.”
“Yes, sir.”
I watched him drive off until the truck disappeared.
Anxiety rolled through me as I went inside the house.
The smell of beer was potent in my nostrils and the volume of the football game on TV blared.
The moment the door shut behind me, his eyes landed on me.
I resisted the voice that told me to run far away from this place .
His eyelids drooped, so I knew he was drunk. Maybe something else, too.
It took me a moment of being frozen in fear to notice my mother on the kitchen floor. Her head was bowed as her shoulders shook. She was holding a bloody rag to her forearm.
I rushed to her side. “Mama,” I said softly as I touched her shoulder. It was the second mistake I’d made that day. The next thing I knew, my father was behind me, grabbing me by the neck and throwing me across the room. My body rolled as pain bounced around inside of me.
“Dax, no!” my mother yelled. “He was just worried about me!”
“Where you been at, boy?”
I didn’t respond—I knew better. It only ever made things worse. When he kicked me, every drop of air in my body felt as if it left my lungs in one whoosh. The second kick had me gasping.
My mother was hitting and shoving him away from me as she screamed. That was when I saw the amount of blood. It pooled from her arm as if she was sliced by a knife. The rag was on the floor. It used to be white, but it was completely red now.
I could hear Love barking outside in her pen and I wanted to tell her it was going to be okay.
His kicks kept coming and my mind went back to the river. The rushing sound droned into my ears like upping the volume of a stereo. I found myself wishing that they would have pushed me into the freezing depths, and I was somewhere floating lifeless.