Down Shift

by K. Bromberg

  A five- or six-year-old Zander stands on the grass in front of a run-down house, one window boarded up, the other with metal security bars over it. Zander with a stuffed dog clutched tight to his chest sitting on a stained couch in a darkened room. A small section of the coffee table is visible in the shot; it’s littered with scraps of tinfoil, two bent spoons, a child’s looped belt, and the discarded caps of syringes.

  I stare until I can’t stare anymore at the surroundings to try to understand as best I can the things he wants to shut out. It’s not very hard to comprehend.

  The one bright spot in the stack of pictures is the woman who accompanies him in some of them. She has long brown hair, an olive complexion, and blue eyes identical in shape and size to Zander’s. And I notice the only pictures where she seems happy are the candid ones where she is paying attention to her son. Her smile is magnetic, expression one of complete adoration.

  Then there’s the man in the photos. Standoffish. Arms always crossed, a cigarette habitually dangling from the corner of his mouth. Maybe it’s because I know the end of the story, but I dislike him instantly on sight.

  I sift through the pictures several times, each time my eyes drawn to the little boy, making comparisons with the man I know now. And when I finish, I turn my head and meet the intensity in Zander’s gaze.

  “She was beautiful, Zander. You look so much like her.”

  He nods his head ever so slightly, one ear on the pillow, the white pillowcase in such a stark contrast to the dark shadows across his features.

  “I’m sure you think I’m being a pussy about this.”

  His bluntness surprises me and leaves me clamoring for the correct response. “No! This is your past, Zander. Your history. There is no judgment on how you’re handling it or the pace at which you’re choosing to. Sometimes looking back is so much harder than looking forward. Just remember that while whatever is in that box may be part of your history, it doesn’t define the man you’ve made yourself to be today . . . unless you want it to.”

  I hear his shaky inhalation as his eyes flicker to the pictures in my hand. One of him and his mother rests on top. His Adam’s apple bobs and he exhales a sigh of exasperated confusion.

  “Until this box arrived, I didn’t have any pictures of my mother other than my memories.” I shift some to sit up so I can face him, let him know that I’m listening and ready for whatever he needs from me. “I keep telling myself that no matter what else is in the box, this is enough for me. That this is more than I had before.”

  I angle my head to hold his gaze, my mind turning, transforming the thoughts I had previously. When he first told me about the box, I thought it was just the idea of it that freaked him out and reopened old wounds a little boy had managed to forget. But now, with the way he’s so apprehensive, I’m realizing it’s so much more than that. What does he think is in the box that has him so worried?

  “I hope there are more good memories in there for you, Zander.”

  His chuckle is soft, exasperated, self-deprecating. “Well, considering the only other thing I pulled from the box and looked at says I was the one who killed my mom . . . let’s hope you’re right.”

  His words startle me. “Wait. What?” My hands are in midair between us. He’s thrown me so thoroughly for a loop that it’s like my gestures and my thoughts are in two different worlds.

  Zander doesn’t say anything; he just stares at me. And I’m not sure if he’s waiting to watch my reaction or if he’s testing me to see how I process the ridiculous comment he just made. But the longer he searches my eyes, the more I see that he really believes what he’s just said. It’s in the quiet intensity of his eyes, the gritted clench of his jaw, the unflinching tension in the muscles of his neck, and the overall deflated sadness that I’m watching slowly sap the vibrancy from his expression and posture.

  Needing to make a physical connection with him, I carefully move the pictures out of the way with the mind to cross the small space separating us. But before I can finish, he shifts suddenly so that he lies sideways across the bed, head in my lap like a little child, face toward my stomach and one arm hooked around my back.

  My heart breaks and swells all at the same time.

  “Talk to me, Zander,” I murmur softly. My fingers run through his hair on reflex. His breath is hot through the thin cotton of my shirt. His fingers cool beneath the hem of it at my back. Contradictions. Everything about him right now tells the same story: a grown man struggling with the memories of the little boy he can’t quite remember being.

  And so I do the only thing I can: I give him time to find the words to speak. He’s been flying on broken wings for so long, I’m sure it’s going to take him a minute to figure out how to land so we can repair them and make him whole again.

  I thread my fingers through his hair. Over and over. Soothe. Comfort. Let him know I’m here.

  “The first thing I pulled from the box,” he begins, voice thick with emotion. And I just keep doing exactly what I’m doing: fingers through hair, body relaxed, thankful for the trust he’s bestowing upon me. “It was her autopsy report. I don’t know why I even looked at it. It’s not like I didn’t know how she died. I was there for fuck’s sake. How could I ever forget that?” The break in his voice breaks me too.

  “What was her name?” I speak softly, wanting to bring him back to the important thing. To her. Not the blood that I can imagine stains his memory of her. Because, yes, while we both know the pain of losing a mother isn’t something that can be quantified or compared, Zander, by far, has had the tougher of our situations.

  “Lola. Her name was Lola.”

  “Lola,” I repeat. His fingers flexing against my back are the only sign he’s heard me. “I think Lola would be proud of the man her son’s become.”

  His ragged sob catches me off guard. All the emotion he’s held in for what I can assume is so long manifests in that single, heart-wrenching sound. The storm rages outside the windows and I have a feeling it’s similar to what’s happening inside the man before me too.

  All I can do is sit here, wait it out with him, and hope to be his lighthouse this time around.

  “I remember her lying there, blood everywhere,” he finally continues sometime later, a dreamlike quality to his voice. The emotion that was nonexistent the day he told me amid the pine trees comes back tenfold in his tone right now. “And there was the handle of the scissors against her neck. She couldn’t . . . her breath . . . it was hard for her to breathe and I thought it was because of the scissors . . . so I pulled it out.”

  And that last statement tells me what the report says. What the adult in me can infer but what the scared little kid could never have known: that dislodging the scissors most likely opened up an artery. Caused her to bleed out. But she was bleeding out anyway from all of her other injuries. Zander did not kill his mother. A fact that he has to recognize on some level.

  But I think the brutality of the report, the reopening of old wounds he couldn’t remember himself, was a reality he wasn’t ready to face.

  His sudden spiral out of control. His continued avoidance of an innocent cardboard box. His lashing out at his family, his career—everything makes so much sense to me now. A man can’t control the uncontrollable.

  “Oh, Zander.” I lean forward and press a kiss to his temple, leave my lips there, right above his ears, so he can hear what I need him to hear over the noise I’m sure is roaring in his head. “I don’t care what that report says. You did not kill your mother. Your dad did. I know the report might state otherwise, but you know differently. You were there. You were with her. You were the last thing she saw, her son, her baby. Her truth.”

  The two of us are huddled together, his mouth against my stomach, mine against his head, my hands still in his hair, and we just sit here for a moment. Thinking. Accepting. Dealing.

  “I know.” His breath is ho
t against my shirt. “I know,” he repeats, sorrow morphing to anger in a matter of seconds as he sits up and stares at me, head shaking, fingers on one hand fidgeting with the fingers on another. “But that’s the problem, Getty. I dealt with this shit years ago. Fucking therapists upon therapists upon therapists and then some more. I talked about feelings and drew pictures of my feelings, of what happened. Christ!” he barks out as he rises from the bed, paces back and forth, restless with anger, and scrubs his hands over his face. “I’m supposed to be over this shit. The memory of my mom shouldn’t fuck me up and yet it did and I’m so goddamn angry that it did. All this time later and something I fucking lived, breathed, and dealt with did it again. Took ahold of me. At first I thought my anger was at not knowing this. At how it was kept from me by Colton and Rylee. So that’s why I lashed out at them. But then when I came here, I had distance. Time. Space. I realized I was just angry because it shouldn’t affect me AT ALL and it does. And I can’t stop it.”

  I get how a grown man can be so angry at being blindsided. At fate’s way of proving he’s weak when it’s all he’s bucked against his whole life. At feeling like you’ve overcome something only to have it resurface later and beat you back down, make you question what you always knew to be the truth.

  “Zander,” I say his name, watch his feet falter. His eyes full of duress and emotion lift to meet mine. “You want to be angry? I would be too. I’d be fucking furious. Shouting and screaming and hating the world. There is no shame in that. There is no brushing her under the rug. She was your mother. Your everything. If this didn’t affect you, I’d be worried.”

  Silence. The thunder rattles the windows.

  “The robe I wear? The ridiculously expensive one you noticed? That robe was my mother’s. It’s the little piece of her I get to touch every day. I slip it on and feel close to her. It’s silly, Zander. It’s a reminder of the pain and a memory of her all at the same time. But sometimes we have to take the little things we are given to help on those days when all you feel is the hurt.” I look down to the box on the bed with me and then back up to him. “My robe is your box. It’s brought you both so far, the good and the bad. . . .”

  His brow furrows, lips twist as if he’s having a hard time believing what I’m saying. “I don’t know what to say.”

  The lost look in his eyes is so hard to handle and yet I can’t look away. My love for him is so strong that I can’t deny it anymore. The need to pull him into my arms and take all the pain away is so powerful, but he’s the one who takes the step forward. He’s the one who takes a deep breath, a forced swallow, and reaches out to slowly open the top of the cardboard box.

  I watch him, methodical in his movements but his face a sea of emotion, and hope that my comments aren’t pushing him to do something he’s not ready for yet. And in the same breath I think he needs to face this, because until he does, the unknown will eat him whole.

  He unfolds the flaps of the box, then moves the humidor beside it and opens the top. He picks up the stack of pictures he let me see earlier and places them gently in the humidor. The sight is bittersweet. A first step toward closure.

  When he lifts his eyes, they are the brightest of blue and hold so much turmoil, but it’s the words he says that tell me he’s ready to do this.

  “Just jump.”

  Chapter 29

  ZANDER

  Hurt Till It Hurts No More.

  Twenty years is a long time to suffer. Getty’s right. It’s always going to be there, even if just a whisper of the pain. How come she can simply tell me it’s okay to be angry and I already feel better? How is it she can break through the bullshit clouding my head and make me really hear her? Validate my feelings with a simple statement?

  Let someone in instead of shutting everyone out. . . . Sometimes it takes a new ear, a fresh voice, to put things in perspective for you. . . .

  Colton’s words come back to me. Son of a bitch. How’d he know? I glance up to Getty, the faintest of memories coming back to me. Of after my mom . . . being at the House, the boys’ home where I was Rylee’s charge. And I’m not sure if it’s from hearing them tell my little brother Ace the story of how they met that’s created the memory, but it’s there: Rylee helping Colton overcome the trauma of his past. How she broke through and he actually heard her.

  How in the end she helped him be the man he is today. The man who stepped up to the plate to adopt me, save me, set an example for the kind of man I want to be.

  “Because he knew,” I murmur to myself as I stare out the window, my mind fucked, my emotions disjointed.

  “Who knew?” Getty asks from behind me where she sits on the bed sorting through the papers.

  “Nothing.” I give myself a mental swift kick in my ass for how I treated him. The things I said. The shit I did. The disrespect I showed to him. I sigh and run another hand through my hair. “Just something I should have known.”

  I glance over to where Getty is stacking the unimpressive contents from the box on the bed. After we spent an hour going through it, I realized it looks like nothing more than the contents of a desk drawer upended and dumped into a cardboard box.

  Maybe it was my dad’s desk. Maybe my mom’s junk drawer in the kitchen. I don’t know, but the inflammatory things I expected to find on the heels of her autopsy report just aren’t there.

  And I’m not sure if I’m more upset or relieved that it doesn’t contain more about my past. More pieces of my mom to hold on to. A bigger insight into the life I lived and the man who stole it from me.

  “Fuck.” I blow out a sigh and turn around to face the bed where Getty’s sitting, categorizing the items in piles. Old bills, maxed-out credit card statements, unpaid parking tickets, handwritten grocery lists, a warrant for my father for drug possession, an eviction notice. Nothing I can really draw conclusions from other than knowing what my mom’s penmanship looked like—she was still so young she signed our last name with a heart for the dot over the i—and that my parents were late on a lot of payments and about to lose the house.

  I lift up the first thing on the stack closest to me, a folder from Child Protective Services. The letter inside turns out to be a warning addressed to my parents that the county had received a phone call from a concerned citizen about my well-being. CPS would be visiting unannounced to do well-checks on me.

  I toss it back in the pile, then consider the humidor filled with the few things I wanted to keep. A picture I drew on a scrap of paper of two stick figures, both with belly buttons, one labeled Zee and the other Mom. The stack of pictures, a credit card slip with my mom’s signature on it, my original birth certificate, a cheap bookmark with a rainbow tassel that I remember used to hang out of the top of her paperback books, a red paper clip she had bent into the shape of a heart and had given me one night when we sat in my room and waited for all my dad’s friends to leave.

  There’s one last item—a Matchbox Indy car. The tires barely roll and the paint is almost completely worn off from where I carried it with me everywhere, but I still see the shiny red paint. I still remember the elaborate tracks I’d make in my mind. And how I’d clutch it in my hand while I sat riveted to the television next to my dad for the one thing he’d make time to do with me, watch Indy racing.

  Tears unexpectedly burn my eyes as I stare at this little piece of my past that somehow became such a huge part of my future. For the first time in forever, I wonder what my dad would say if he knew what I did for a living. Shouldn’t even think about that piece of shit, but at the same time, I wonder.

  And that makes my mind shift to Colton. To the man who stepped up to the plate and took me as his own when no one else would. To the father I let down because I was too goddamn chickenshit to talk to him.

  I set the old car back down beside my other mementos in despair at the depressing amount of things I have to represent the first seven years of my life.

 
“You okay?” Her voice is soft and her brown eyes are compassionate when I look up to meet them.

  “Yeah. I’m just . . . I don’t know. I’m disappointed there’s not more and at the same time relieved there’s not the ticking time bomb I expected in there . . . if that makes any sense at all.”

  “It does. It makes perfect sense.”

  I exhale loudly and sit down on the bed beside her. The mattress dips, the old cardboard box falls onto the floor, and I grab her hand to stop her from getting up to retrieve it. “Yes. No. I don’t know.” She laughs softly at the phrasing and links her fingers with mine.

  “What’s bugging you?”

  “I’m pissed at myself.” I rifle through the perfect stacks she just spent time organizing and I love how she doesn’t rush me to finish the thought. There’s something about her silence that is comforting and encouraging. “I mean, why? I did all this, caused all of this bullshit for this box? And this is all there is? I hurt my family, fucked over the trust people had put in me, possibly screwed up my career, and for what? For a report I knew deep down wasn’t true and for some small trinkets of a life I’m probably glad I didn’t have to live?” My voice rises as I throw my hands up and walk back to look out the window, where the sky is darkening.

  “Zan—”

  “Shouldn’t I at least get some kind of closure? Some kind of valid explanation so I don’t look like the asshole I was when I have to go back and apologize to my family?”

  God. Even that makes me sound like a prick. Like I’m not man enough to admit I overreacted and lashed out for no reason. Fuck, this is fucked.

  “Zander.”

  “What?” I hear myself snap at her and the minute I do, I cringe in regret. “I’m sorry, Getty, it’s just—” My words are cut off when I look to where she’s pulling something out of the box as she picks it up from the floor. “What’s that?”

  Her eyes lift to meet mine. “The bottom flap was stuck. We didn’t see it. When the box fell off the bed, it jostled it loose.”