by Aaron Dries
They shared the silence, drank up the quiet.
Okay, son, you let your dad free now, was what Marshall wanted to say, but he knew he couldn’t. Not yet. It was too soon. Now that he knew he wasn’t under any immediate threat from The Man—
(from Napier, dammit, don’t you fall into his delusion too)
—he had something which he never thought he would have again—the time to plan and articulate his control. He had to wait and strengthen the bind between them.
“Dad?” Sam asked, his voice raising a pitch. It was the kind of voice Noah had used when he wanted some money to take to school so he could buy lunch from the canteen as opposed to settling with homemade sandwiches. It had always hurt to hear him make this request. It meant that what they were providing for him wasn’t good enough anymore. Something had changed. Their boy was growing up.
“Yeah?”
“I can’t remember much stuff,” Sam said, his face screwed up and confused. “Sometimes, I try to think back to what it used to be like, you know, when I was growing up, and I just can’t remember.”
“That’s normal, Noah.”
“Yeah, yeah, I suppose.”
Marshall could see that Sam wasn’t done. The writhing of his thoughts was evident on his face like worms under his skin.
“Can you tell me something?” Sam asked. Marshall thought that he’d never sounded more like a child. “Something from when I was young?”
Marshall felt the spotlight fall on him and his stomach churned with butterflies. He was being put on the spot. Is this a test, he wondered? Or does he actually want to hear something?
“Dad?”
“Sure, N-Noah.”
Don’t you start stammering now, Marshall. Don’t you dare. Do you want to live? Yes? Well, hold yourself together. Pull yourself into line. Take the pain, all your cuts and bruises, take the ache in your toe from where that fat, disgusting monster went and chewed you away, take Claire and fucking betrayal—
(She didn’t do it.)
(Yes, she did. Stop lying to yourself.)
(Leave me, please.)
(…Noah wasn’t your son.)
—take it all and turn this fury into words. Do it now. Do it, or you just might die.
Marshall watched Sam watching him, bent forward in an expectant poise. The boy’s eyes were wide, receptive and dark like Napier’s. The resemblance was uncanny. Marshall could also see his ex-wife in the curve of his cheekbones and in the auburn color of his hair.
(You have no son.)
(I…I—)
(Say it. You have no son. You have to say it or he will beat you.)
(I—)
(Now, Marshall.)
(I have… no son.)
“Once, when you were young,” Marshall began, his voice tight yet controlled.
“How young?”
“Four, maybe five.”
“Cool.”
The word sent a shiver up Marshall’s back; his skin crawled. He swallowed the dry lump in his throat and continued with the story. “You were five and your mom and I took you to your first day of school. I made us breakfast.”
Marshall could still smell that meal; the sweet and the sour all mixed together. It lingered in the basement with him, like a phantom. But the smell changed, it turned into the stink of sex. Of Napier’s seething sweat and cum smeared over his wife’s legs, which he had kissed himself so many times.
“Breakfast,” he continued. “Bacon and eggs. You always liked bacon and eggs.”
“Did I?” Sam was smiling.
“Yeah, you sure did. You’d gobble ’em up like there was no tomorrow. You would cover that stuff in ketchup, too, which didn’t please your mom all that much. The sugar, you know. But on that first day of school, nah, she didn’t mind.”
Claire smiling over the rim of her coffee mug, the steam from her drink caught in the morning light. Her eyes were dancing. She was happy and proud.
“And what happened then, Dad?”
Dad. The word had claws and sharp rat teeth.
Marshall cleared his throat, afraid that the scream boiling up inside him would screech out and give his plan away. “Well, we put you in the car. We had an old Civic back then. It was all we could afford. This was before your mom found a steady job and I was still making connections in the video industry. I was jumping from job to job. But we always made sure you got what you wanted. We wanted you to be happy, Noah.”
The word had slipped out with such ease.
“It was your first day at big school so it was only half a day. We took you to the front gates, me with one of your hands and your mom, she had the other. Noah, you took one look at that big building and just dropped the fucking bomb. You were terrified. And screamed! We’d never heard such noises from you. ‘Please, Mommy, Daddy, don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!’”
Marshall found himself at a loss for words. He’d given himself over to the memory and it had drained him.
“That was one of the hardest days of our lives. As a parent. We left you there, all crying and screaming with one of those teachers and we felt like we’d betrayed you.”
Marshall coughed. He could taste bitter, slimy blood. The flavor of infection.
“Going back to pick you up was like walking the Green Mile, we felt so bad. But, all that torture was over nothing, because when we came out to pick you up, you came running out to meet us with the biggest damn smile on your face. Jesus, it was like the sun itself was shining out of you. You loved it. You did painting and sung songs, the whole lot. All that pain for nothing.”
Marshall was empty.
Sam went upstairs and returned with water and toast. Marshall drank so fast it sloshed over his face and he swallowed the food in desperate gulps, giving him the hiccups. As far as he was concerned, it was the best meal he’d ever had.
Sam stood in the middle of the room, his hair burning bright red under the light. Marshall watched him with nervous anticipation. The moments that he stood there—swaying from side to side—seemed just as long and arduous as those Marshall and Claire had experienced whilst waiting for Sam’s first day to at school to end.
No, not Sam, Marshall thought. Frightened. Noah.
“You’ve seen my scars?” Sam asked, wrapping his arms around his chest.
Marshall nodded, slow and deliberate.
“The Man did that to me.” The boy spoke with a chilly detachment. “At first it started off that he only would scare me. Like, when I was really young. It would be just me and him in this house and it would be late at night and I’d be sleeping, and he would creep into my room and get into my closet. He’d sit in there and growl at me. That’s how it all started… There would be other times when I’d be like, sitting in the living room upstairs watching cartoons or something—I always liked the Roadrunner ones the best. And he would cut the power and I’d be left alone in the dark…I don’t like the dark… One time, he wrapped himself up in a sheet and pretended to be a ghost. He had a knife in his hand and he chased me through the house. I tried to run outside but he’d deadbolted all the doors. I was just so scared. I pissed my pants. I think I was eight, or something. He found me all curled up under my mom’s bed and he pulled me out by my ankles. He took the sheet off and just looked down at me. I never knew why he hated me so much. I didn’t think that I was such a bad kid, you know?”
Marshall held back his tears.
“That was the first time he cut me. It didn’t stop. It never stopped.” Sam continued to hug himself, running his fingers over his arms. “He only cut me where nobody could see and he would always bandage me up so the blood wouldn’t come through my shirt. I never had to do gym at school because he spoke to the principal and told her that I had some sort of skin condition. I guess they believed him. I almost told my ninth grade teacher once… But I didn’t. I don’t know why.”
Sam let go of his arms and they dangled at his side. He closed his eyes and turned his face up to the light. “I can feel it. It’s warm.”
Sam shook his head and rubbed his face. “It’s a little after six. I better get ready for school.” Sam made a start towards the stairs.
“Noah?”
Sam turned back to him. “Yeah?”
“Can I ask a favor?” he asked, not sure why he being so brazen.
It’s too much too soon. You’re going to fuck this up.
“Sure. Well, it depends.”
It’s too late now.
Marshall opened his mouth and waited for the words to come out. It took a great deal of effort to let them pass through his lips. He’d never looked so sad. “Noah, if it’s after six, that means the sun’s come up, right?”
“Yeah.”
Was that suspicion that Marshall heard in the boy’s tired voice? The rest of his request shriveled up inside him. He gave up.
Sam grabbed one of the mattresses on the right and threw it to the ground, pulling the barbed wire taut with a discordant ping. Dust blew into Marshall’s mouth. A cactus lay in a mound of soil beside its upturned pot. Small shards of stained glass lay in pieces against the concrete, twinkling and yet colorless. The busted slide projector had been pushed a little closer to the stairs.
A window was now exposed. It wasn’t big enough for a man to get through and the glass was dusty and streaked with grime, but morning light came through it, nonetheless. The sun carved a wedge through the room that stretched from the window to the opposite wall, shining on the closed door to the room where Napier had kept Brian.
It was beautiful.
Chapter Fifty-Five
The class was in a slump with students slouched in their chairs and the limited attentions of those awake continuing to wane. Mister Thornhill, their cleft-lipped teacher, droned on at the front of the room whilst scribbling on the whiteboard. He favored the overhead projector because his hand had a tendency to cramp, but it was out of operation. Hence his foul mood.
The subject was English—it wasn’t Sam’s favorite. Well, he didn’t really like any of his classes, except for maybe drama. He liked pretending to be someone else, feigning drama. There was energy in the small school theatre, with its heavy curtains and the used sets piled high in the corner. He’d been contemplating auditioning for one of the end-of–year-productions, but he was worried that he’d end up in a musical.
Sam’s body heat had ironed out the wrinkles in his clothes. He knew he had to wash them—and soon; they were starting to sour. He flicked his fringe out of his eyes, toyed with his pen and glanced over the sketches he’d doodled in the past hour. There were drawings of girls. Not their bodies, he wasn’t interested in breasts or legs, unlike the other guys in his year who seemed obsessed with these features above all else. He was more inclined towards the curvature of a pretty face. Lips, and the way you could catch the glimmer of shiny teeth when they slithered apart. But he liked eyes more than anything else. Yeah, they were the best—and he was good at drawing them, too. His notebook was covered in them, they stared up at him now, unblinking and perfect.
He took a deep breath. Onions. He’d bought a hot meat roll at lunchtime. Sam fished through his pockets for a stick of gum, found one and popped it on his tongue. He sucked on it until it grew soft and then swirled it around his mouth.
His fingers were blue from all the ink smudges.
There was an American flag pinned above the door near the clock. Man, I can’t wait to get out of here, he thought, itching for freedom. Three ten couldn’t arrive soon enough. School bored him. Nothing his teachers attempted to preach at him seemed to have any relevance to the life he planned to live. When would they realize that the only way to get their pointless messages across was to discourage them from falling asleep? And what annoyed him the most was that the teachers just didn’t seem to care; being the victims of their own swinging moods seemed more important to them all.
Anna Garland sat at the front of the class under the flag, her head resting in one hand, a warm gust of air from one of the heaters tugging at the strands of her blonde hair. Her shirt looked very white against her lightly tanned skin. Anna’s cheeks were full; he liked that. She looked healthy, which was something he couldn’t say about a lot of the girls in his year, many of whom starved themselves down to their skeletons for weeks on end. It was a real turn-off, as far as he was concerned. He liked Anna because she seemed…well, more real. She was lip glossed, old school Americana, smelling like bubblegum and her mother’s expensive soap. Her voice was deep and raspy, and the fact that she didn’t say the word “like” as much as the other girls helped quite a bit, too. They shared the same quiet and shy language without having to say very much at all. It was easy being Anna’s friend.
They had gotten close of late and a no-funny-business date had been planned for the end of the month. Just a movie, nothing more. Not even dinner; his cash flow was limited. He only worked a couple of shifts a week at the video store in town and even those hours were drying up as online downloading threatened to close them down for good. But Sam would rather be poor than spend his time in that ratty room, with all the middle-aged men hiding their porno DVDs between copies of Toy Story and the latest Barbie flick, their kids hanging around the counter like flies.
Sam chewed on the end of his pen. A lot of the drawn eyes staring back at him from his notebook were Anna’s eyes. The small, light-catching irises, her hooded lids. She looked kind of sad. He liked that, too.
Somebody coughed, making his heart skip a beat. Sam wriggled in his chair. He wondered how his dad was doing.
Sam hadn’t liked cleaning up his blood and shit, but that was what good sons did for their fathers—they gritted their teeth and did their chores without complaint. Besides, his dad would do the same for him.
His dad had looked sore and humiliated. Sam had told him to stop worrying, that everything was going to work out fine. “We’re all going to be a family again, soon,” he’d explained.
There was a saying that one of his teachers was fond of spouting, which seemed to fit his dad’s situation: Hey, it’s bound to get darker before it gets lighter, or something… It was a quote from some old movie but he couldn’t remember the name. Something from his childhood.
He took comfort in knowing that the worst over and soon they would all be out of the dark. The Man was gone now; they were free. Sam struggled to grasp the concept.
He wanted to tell someone about The Man and about all the horrible things he had done to him over the years, but thought better of it. Nobody would believe him, and even if they did, he didn’t want their pity or sympathy. Sam was above that. And besides, there was a part of him that wanted to boast about how he had gotten rid of The Man. But that didn’t seem wise, either. He was too smart for that.
It was tempting, though.
Very tempting.
Who would I tell?
Nobody in his year would understand. Sam was popular and liked by most—he floated back and forth between social cliques but he never seemed to settle, and as a result, he didn’t have any real friends, just pals that he could share time without having to revert to pass-the-salt trivialities. He kept it casual.
In the end, he didn’t believe that there was anyone in his year that would appreciate what he’d done. No one, except for Anna.
Maybe.
He knew that she didn’t come from the best home. She might relate. But the limits of empathy could only be stretched so far and experience had taught him that over reaching led to fear. Rejection. She might run. He didn’t want that. It would hurt to lose her. Anna’s parents were divorced and she lived with her mother who was dating this total douche bag, according to the character description Anna had painted, some dick half her age. It was embarrassing for all concerned. Not that her actual father was any better. The asshole was a cheater, and nobody—not divorcees or daughters—liked a cheater.
Would Anna understand? He turned the idea in his mind to inspect it from all sides, a diamond scoured for flaws. Sam chewed on his pen. It was a habit, like overthinking, which he was trying
to break since last summer when he’d gone home with black ink all over his teeth. People had laughed and he had laughed along—that was part of the act.
Thornhill’s marker squeaked against the whiteboard, making Sam jump. Man, I’m on edge, he thought. I’m about to burst outta my skin.
He burped. Onions and mint. He stretched the gum over his tongue, blew it into a bubble. His jaw hurt from all the chewing.
The scribbled eyes in his book peered up at him.
Silent, head bowed, he sat in the window spotlight. His body was blue and had come over all shivery. He was sometimes woken by the sensation of his drool slipping into his chest wounds. The sunlight had probed its warmth against him for an hour and then passed on; he missed it. Every so often he would shuffle against his binds and split open the gummy scabs of his wounds, which would then weep red tears threaded with pus. And after all of this, the compassionate kiss of sleep.
He opened his eyes, and through the haze, saw that he was no longer alone.
Claire lay on the floor in front of him, right where Indy had been. He watched her roll over towards him through a cloudy veil of midday glare. She was naked and in torment, her face a stony color.
He spoke her name.
The woman he had married and been divorced by put her head to the concrete floor and made a pillow from her auburn hair. He watched her ribcage rise and fall in short bleats of breath. Her eyes had been thrown into caves of shadow.
Say something, Claire.
Claire’s mouth opened as her throat began to bulge and swell in an enormous quake of agony. She drove her fingernails against the concrete until the tips snapped off. Marshall watched her lift her head and vomit up the massive wad of pink flesh; it slapped against the floor and sent a swarm of fine, ruby drops dancing through the air.
Marshall bit into his lip. Take it away, he said to her.
The pink wad of flesh was a half-formed fetus, the face unformed except for the two squinting eyes and the tiny nick of a mouth. Fingerless hands jerked and jiggled.
God damn it, Claire! Get that fucking thing out of here! God!
