Chapter 99
Davian
Fractured Family
I‘m Sorry
Paul Leonard-Morgan
After all those coincidental encounters with Anthony downtown, during which he had either ignored me or glared at me with a withering look every single time, I had decided to invite him over and let him take his frustration out on me.
At first, we had both stood in my kitchen, staring at each other. His fists clenched, his gaze so hurt that it shouldn't have left me cold. But I hadn't been able to let any emotion show in my eyes, had spread my arms wide, and it hadn't taken two seconds before he had lunged at me.
He had rammed his fist into my face again and again until a hot trail of blood had run down my temple and I had sunk to my knees before him, ready for whatever he had planned for me.
“You filthy traitor!” he had yelled at me. “How could you?!”
He was right. I had betrayed him, had trampled our friendship underfoot.
But I had to let him know that if I had the chance, I would do it again. For Quill. I had told him I loved her. Over and over again. After every damn punch.
I must have said it too many times, because he had ended up breaking my nose.
But I didn’t care.
Anthony needed to know that I was willing to face any consequences and that I wouldn’t back down just for the sake of peace.
Quill had been my peace. Now she was gone.
But my feelings for her hadn’t grown any weaker. On the contrary.
I had hoped that after all those punches, I would feel better.
And I had begun to understand Quill. To understand that there was pain we could become addicted to if we weren’t careful.
That when we were so empty that nothing but pain could reach us anymore, we needed that pain to know we were still alive.
In order to let things out of us that would otherwise rot miserably inside us until we suffocated on them.
“If you had loved her, none of this would have ever happened! You wouldn’t have laid a finger on her! You would never have taken advantage of her, you damn scumbag!”
I had remained silent.
Because he was right about that, too.
It was my fault she wasn’t here anymore. Because I, the idealistic fool that I was, had clung to the illusion that the two of us had something like a future in a world where every law, whether earthly or transcendent, had worked against us.
After the next punch, Monica had appeared in the kitchen doorway and stared at Anthony in horror.
He had stared back, tears in his eyes, before his gaze had drifted to his blood-smeared hands. His eyes had widened and he had stared at me as if he were afraid of something, then back at Monica. And ultimately, he had stormed out of the house with a tortured “I'm sorry” directed at her.
Monica had eventually snapped out of her stupor and rushed over to me, helped me back to my feet, and walked me into the living room to the couch, where she had started – more or less clumsily – to take apart a medical kit until I had told her that she only needed the cotton pads.
The truth? I need this pain. I wanted to feel Tony’s inner suffering inside me until it became a part of me.
Confronting the Past
Luke Richards
“He misses your friendship,” Monica said, continuing to dab at the bleeding spot on my temple, causing me to endure another wave of pain and wince.
“I doubt he told you that.”
Hesitantly, she looked back and forth between the cloth in the bowl of water and the cotton pad in her hand before deciding on the cloth and wringing it out.
“You two were inseparable. And Anthony has always been a family man. You’re family to him. A brother he never had before.”
My chest rose and fell heavily. That was all I could give in response.
I gave him credit for still being there for Lara. For the two of them meeting regularly. For her not having lost her uncle because of me.
“I was always surprised that you and Anthony never got into fights,” she said with an absent-minded smile. “He has his father’s temper.”
With the familiar emptiness returning in my chest, I stared at the rose-colored water in the bowl on the coffee table in front of us, unable to think of anything other than that woman, without whom I would have pulled the trigger nearly a year ago.
“You, on the other hand, were always so peaceful. You never wanted conflict. Something you definitely didn’t get from me. Or from…”
She stopped abruptly.
Something that pulled my wandering mind back to the present.
“So you knew him…,” the words came out tonelessly. “My father.”
When she had told me about back then, she had only mentioned that she had gotten pregnant due to carelessness. However, she had never spoken of my father, which was why I had assumed he had been an insignificant one-night stand or a summer camp fling she only vaguely remembered.
Her hesitation didn’t make it any better, causing me to look at her directly for the first time.
There was distress in her eyes. Something that set off all my alarm bells.
“We shouldn’t talk about him.” She swallowed, awkwardly wrung out the cloth over the bowl, and endured my scrutinizing gaze. “Sometimes, less knowledge means more peace of mind.”
Peace of mind.
A very dark premonition threatened to spread through my mind, but I didn’t want to give it a chance, wanted to know every detail of her story, no matter how insignificant it seemed.
I was simply fed up with all the secrets of the people around me. I wanted to clear things up with everyone, didn’t want any more nasty surprises in my life if I could help it.
“There’s nothing that could shock me anymore, Monica.”
She paused, staring at the cloth as if, after everything that had happened, she didn’t believe me.
“Monica.”
She looked up, tears in her eyes.
My foreboding returned. And this time it took hold so aggressively that I braced myself for anything.
“Please.”
And then she told me everything.
Under Questioning
Luke Richards
A tear escaped her watery eyes as she stood motionless by the window, staring out at the overgrown garden. Then another.
She must have been standing there for five minutes already. Or ten… I didn’t know.
Time had changed since she was no longer here.
It was my mistake to never expect the worst when it would be reasonable to do so. I had been so good at it before she had entered my life.
Emotions were raging inside me that I couldn’t make sense of.
Emotions raging beneath that veil that covered all my feelings.
Yet these emotions were fresh, had yet to discover that they, too, would have no chance inside my dying body.
That they would be the next gravestones in the graveyard of my inner life.
“I didn’t want you to know because I didn’t want you to make yourself liable to prosecution.”
God, how well she knew me. God, how much I would love to make myself liable to prosecution right now.
“You would never have told me if he weren’t behind bars.”
Where that disgusting piece of shit had been since the trials against him and Joseph had begun. Where Joseph was, too, because Miss DeLoughrey had filed the assault charge against him on my behalf.
This woman seemed to have her connections, because both men would normally have spent their time awaiting trial on bail, but we had managed to get both of them remanded in custody.
Up until now, I had been exhausted, but grateful for it.
Now, however, aggressive resentment was welling up inside me. A rapidly growing poisonous plant of bitterness that threatened to bloom into blossoms of rage.
Until now, I hadn’t fully processed her words, yet a storm was raging inside me.
“I…” Monica hesitated for a moment before shaking her head, and even more tears streamed from her eyes.
“I never intended to tell anyone. Especially not you. But then Quill… She…” Her voice broke, and the chaos of tears on her face left streaming trails.
“I don’t know what it was that made me tell her, but she made it so easy… and… and…”
I immediately stood up with all the strength I had left in my body, crossed the living room, and Monica turned to me, remorse in her eyes. And so much pain that a fragment of it actually reached me, and I pulled her into my arms without hesitation.
Something tightened in my stomach as she sobbed, as if she’d never expected me to take her into my arms again.
I let her hug me tighter, just as Lara always did with me, letting guilt overwhelm me.
Not only had I torn our family apart. All those years, a part of me that was connected to that cancerous tumor, which I had always believed I couldn’t be more different from, had been lying dormant inside me.
The lump in my throat grew bigger and bigger.
“Do I remind you of him?” I asked after a while.
She immediately pulled away from me, looking up at me desperately.
“No.” She shook her head hastily. “Never…” New despair settled in her gaze, accompanied by a pained smile. “Never, Davian.” She placed her hands on my upper arms, stroking them gently. “You’re perfect.”
Something inside me froze.
I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t hear those words from her.
The only person I had almost believed those words from was no longer here.
With growing self-loathing and the feeling of being a stranger in my own body, I pulled away from her.
“I need time.”
With those words, I turned away from her and hurriedly disappeared up the stairs.
Numb
Linkin Park
I had thought my study was already in the worst possible state.
But after I had smashed the desk to pieces with a hammer from the workshop – grateful that Lara was at Maplecrest and hadn’t witnessed her broken father acting like a mad tyrant, tearing her home apart piece by piece – I had moved on to the floor-to-ceiling built-in cabinets as well.
He had hurt her! He had touched her! That filthy pig had raped her and thought he would get away with it!
All the flower pots had lost their purpose after I had smashed them into tiny pieces with nine hammer blows, while soil and plant debris had scattered all over my study when I had realised that Troy had been my half-brother. All those years.
I had smashed all my framed certificates of honor off the wall until the shards and scraps of paper had covered my floor. Memories of a plastic life that would now forever remind me of the source of all the suffering in this town, in my life, unless I eliminated it completely.
His DNA was part of me! This man was part of me!
Again and again I had slammed the hammer against the wall until I had broken through into my bedroom.
He was my father!
Quill had known it. She had looked at me and not seen him.
And yet he was part of me!
The thought was on the verge of blowing my system apart, so I kept hammering the hole bigger and bigger until my vision blurred.
It was contaminating me, poisoning me…
“Dad…”
I spun around, panting heavily as I stared into the distraught face of my daughter, who stood in the doorway wearing one of her brown-and-orange-checked fall dresses over a white blouse, and it was as if I could see in her eyes that she was seeing parts of the monster that had ruined all our lives.
I lowered the hammer, letting it slip from my hand so that the thud made her flinch.
Lara looked up from my desk toward the gaping hole in the wall.
That was the moment I realized I would never be a good father to her again.
My mere presence was poison.
She had to move out of here. As soon as possible. She had to leave me behind before the wretched wreck of a man I had become would overshadow all the beautiful memories I had tried to plant in her life.
Realization dawned in her eyes.
“Monica told you.”
I nodded. That was all I was capable of.
Justice
Luke Richards
Exhaustion caught up with me, and I sank against the wall, slid down it, and stared into the void.
I was so broken.
I wanted to ask my daughter how long she had known. Whether she saw him in me. Whether she was afraid of me. Whether I reminded her of that old Nazi.
But my strength was gone. All that remained was this wretched body and a head filled with memories that robbed me of my sanity every night.
Sharp shards that I touched willingly, just to be close to her, knowing that I cut myself deeper with them with each passing day. Addicted to all the pain.
I didn’t look up at Lara, knowing she felt pity for me before she finally did the right thing and disappeared into her room, along with Streusel, who, ever since I had my breakdowns in that study, always hid under the kitchen table downstairs, wailing.
I should get up. Should lock myself in Quill’s room – the room that came closest to my old home, even though I would never have one again – and do what I had already been doing for weeks to be close to her.
Write about her. Make her immortal in my lines.
Weave my fragments of memory of her into tapestries of words, driven by the fear that, with every passing day, parts of her were slipping through my fingers.
But this…
I didn’t know how much time had passed, but the sun was about to sink below the horizon when the ringing of the doorbell tore me from my contaminated spiral of thoughts.
Unable to get up, I listened as it rang again. And again… And again…
When it rang for the ninth time, I forced myself to my feet and, with growing suspicion, made my way down the stairs to the front door.
Writing with tears on the keyboard
is truly something else entirely.
I didn't expect the salt
to wash away the letters.
– Leaking Batteries Diary