Ben saw it so clearly, it could’ve been happening right now.
Marcus finally looked up, and Ben saw no satisfaction in his father’s gaze, no challenge, no troll-like belligerence. Marcus wasn’t a stereotypical child-abuser like on a Made-for-TV movie. It would have been easier—to hate him, to bring it all to an end back in September—if he was.
But he had never done this to Ben, had never harmed their mother (not that their mother stuck around long enough).
Just Jude.
He got his arm around Jude’s shoulders, helped his brother up. The molten core of anxiety was cooling—the worst was known—but not disappearing. Instead it hardened, settled in, made it impossible to take deep breaths.
“C’mon, Jude,” he said, glaring at their father and feeling useless in his inability to do anything else. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
He led the boy to the upstairs bathroom and examined him.
The bruises along the shoulder were dark; a little more pressure, if Jude had been holding onto the beer a little tighter, and it would’ve popped from its socket.
Yes, their father was good. A popped socket could be home-mended, but it would still require a temporary sling, which was noticeable.
The shiner on Jude’s face was also noticeable but … well, Jude was always getting punched at school, wasn’t he? This could’ve been just an early Christmas present from the tormentors of McMillian Elementary. It wouldn’t have been the first time their father had used that excuse.
He’s getting bad again, the interior voice murmured.
Ben got Jude back into his shirt and led him down the hall. Jude asked, “You wanna come read comics with me, Benny?” His eyes were dry now, the shiner coming along nicely, making one eye squint as he looked into his bedroom.
Ben followed his gaze, taking in the neatly organized books on the bookcase, the comics on the desk, the action figures from Toy Story and the X-Men cartoon show lining his windowsill—a ready display for friends who didn’t exist.
He looked back at his brother’s open, earnest, small—they were nine years apart—face. He had the face of a bull’s-eye. Every school, every class, had one. The ready-made victim. The one who just didn’t fit. The one whose timing was off, whose answer was either too right or too wrong, whose interests and look weren’t in. They weren’t obnoxious, or toxic, or even ugly in a broad sense of the word. They were just wrong, and everyone knew it. The one even the wallflowers of school felt impunity to pick on.
Ben had one in his senior class—Amanda Hofsteader. Not dumb, not bright, not pretty in the most generous sense of the word. She got it worst from the girls, who seemed to imbue Amanda with all their worst nightmares. She drifted through the halls of Ben Franklin High School, never seeming to know it was as bad as it was, or, if she did, burying it so deep as to make herself almost beatific.
Much like Ben imagined Jude at McMillian Elementary. But Jude got it worse because he kept trying to get along in a nerve-wracking, turn-the-other-cheek way, which seemed to rile everyone further.
“You all right, Benny?” Jude asked.
He looked like their mother. Which was part of the problem with their father. In all sorts of ways.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice thick.
“So, you wanna read comics?”
“Sure,” Ben said, and his throat clicked, and then it was normal again. “But no Spider-Man, though. I’m sick to friggin death of Spider-Man.”
Jude grinned, and Ben just felt sick.
Ben watched his father sleep on the couch.
Behind them, the television was on, sound low, with NBC playing through the end of Late Night with Conan O’Brien. The light from the screen threw Ben’s shadow, long and menacing, across Marcus’s slack face.
He’s getting bad again, the internal voice murmured.
Ben’s fists clenched at the end of rod-stiff arms that couldn’t do anything.
Marcus snorted in his sleep. He didn’t look evil, or monstrous, or anything but what he was—a man. A county sheriff’s deputy. Liked by everyone. And when Ben and Jude’s mother took off with that undergrad, everyone just clucked their tongues and said, well, what do you expect from Alana Sheever, nee Thompson? Everyone knew the Thompsons were a flighty bunch.
But at least Ben and Jude had a good father.
And what good father beat his youngest son?
He slowed down when he was almost caught, the voice went on, but now he knows he’s safe and he doesn’t have to worry, anymore.
Ben wanted to shake his head until he rattled the voice out of his skull. No, that wasn’t true, wasn’t true. That gave hint to some kind of animal cunning and malevolence in Marcus Sheever and he wasn’t like that. Was he?
But wasn’t that why Ben had gone to talk to Ms. Quinn, and then one of Jude’s principals last fall? Because Marcus was just getting worse—his irritation mounting, the time he was a normal father fading, the over-correcting jabs more common, double rations if Jude tried to make up for whatever negligible thing he had done wrong? It’d taken Ben time to see the increase, but it was there. The hits were creeping up from Jude’s chest and onto his face. It was this last bit that had made what Ben said palatable to Ms. Quinn. Jude might’ve been an everyday target for the bullies at McMillian, but there were cafeteria and recess monitors to halt things.
Not at home, though.
Ben’s jaw clenched until the pressure sang in his ears.
Not that it mattered much, did it? the internal voice said. Send the balloon up, and it got popped by the school board president. And suddenly …
And suddenly the questions from the counselors were focusing more on Ben and his relationship with his father. The protocol Ben had learned from television—tell adults and they would come in and fix everything—was going off the rails. Suddenly Marcus was there, looking at either Ben, or Ben and Jude, or Jude alone, during these questioning sessions. Suddenly, Ms. Quinn wasn’t there to help, and Jude …
“Jude backed you up,” Ben hissed, softly.
Jude, who’d never been fully on-board with what Ben was doing, never corroborated. Yes, it was the bullies at school. No, Marcus was nothing but what he appeared to be: a loving single father.
He didn’t do it out of fear, Ben thought, but out of his essential Jude-ness. The Jude that saw only the good in people (he’d once explained to Ben that a particular bully happened to be a very good artist, as if that made up for the fact that he’d made Jude eat sand). That quality in Jude seemed amplified when it came to their father; it reminded Ben of how he’d seen Marcus in the years before Jude was born and their mother ran off. Back then, Marcus was just … a dad. Attentive, but not domineering. An authoritarian, but not a dictator. Caring.
And that quality that everyone hated got Marcus out of the fire, got Ben slammed into counseling because of course this all stemmed from teenage angst and upcoming graduation and repressed anger over the absence of his mother.
Marcus grunted in his sleep, turned over, exposing the nape of his neck. Ben stared at it, imagining getting a kitchen knife from the drawer and—
He shook the thought away. That was useless—more Made-for-TV-Movie garbage. As stupid as “telling an adult.”
What are you going to do? the interior voice asked.
Talking hadn’t helped, obviously. Any other idea Ben might’ve had was strictly the domain of television—not that his school therapist wouldn’t have loved to hear about them.
And what happens after graduation? What happens when—
“Shut up,” he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut, like a kid scared of the bogeyman. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
And, for a wonder, the voice did.
He felt that hard lead ball of anxiety in his gut, felt the weight of hopelessness and the future settling onto his shoulders and, for the first time, became truly aware of the pressure he was under, like a deep-sea fish finally coming to realize the sheer tonnage of water surrounding him, waiting for
a weak moment to crush him.
Between the pressure on his shoulders and the pressure in his gut, he was stuck in a huge vice, slowly turning, slowly tightening. He wanted to scream, just to release some of the pressure, but he was a boiler with a busted vent. No relief.
“Something will change,” he breathed. “Something will give. It has to.”
His father offered a throaty snore. Behind Ben, a syndicated Top 40 music program played on television. Sheryl Crow was asking, if it makes him happy, why the hell was he so sad?
He went upstairs and checked on Jude, who lay facing the window, the moonlight flickering with falling snow, reflecting off the bruise.
When he went to bed, he avoided looking at the open envelope on his desk, but the voice was there, waiting in his head: What are you going to do after graduation?
The scrape of metal on concrete and Jude’s delighted laughter brought Ben up from a thin, scratchy sleep.
He cracked an eye open.
Eight-thirty, according to the nightstand clock.
He sat up and threw his legs over the side of the bed. The world outside his window was coated in rounded white edges of fresh snow. Marcus and Jude were at the mouth of the driveway, shoveling, their laughter coming out in white streamers from beneath thick winter caps.
Ben stood, a vein throbbing in his head. Marcus tossed a loose shovelful at Jude. Jude staggered, but kept upright, and tossed a shovelful of his own. His gloves looked comical—they were Ben’s old ones, still too large for his hands.
Ben waited for the snow to sting Marcus’s cold face, for it to get in his eyes, and for him take the flat of the shovel up the back of Jude’s head. Instead he dropped the shovel, grabbed a handful of snow from a mound, squeezed it, and lobbed the ball at his youngest son. Jude returned the favor. Their laughter rang like church bells. Ben let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.
“It’s okay,” he said.
The envelope on his desk caught his eye. He stuck his English assignment—Grendel, by John Gardner—on top of it, got dressed, and headed downstairs.
He entered the kitchen as the back door opened, Jude and Marcus walking in.
“We thought we were gonna have to come upstairs and throw a snowball at ya!” Marcus said, rolling his shoulders free of snow. Behind him, the winter screen fogged.
“Dad said we’re gonna have hot chocolate!” Jude said, grinning, stopping in front of Marcus. “Want some, Benny?”
Ben’s mouth stretched into what he thought was a grin—the right side of Jude’s face was dark, not as swollen as last night, but enough to make the core in his gut roll forebodingly. “Sure, bud.”
Jude hunkered down to unlace his snow-caked boots.
Marcus tried moving around him, but couldn’t. “You sleep okay?” he asked Ben. “Got bags under your eyes.”
Ben’s jaw tightened. “Not as much as I would’ve liked.”
He wanted to scream—at Jude, at their father, at everything: Why are you acting so fucking normal? Did last night not happen? Look at Jude’s goddam face!
“Hot chocolate will fix ya up,” Marcus said, and tried to move around Jude again, but Jude was oblivious, working the soggy knot of his boots with numb fingers.
Ben saw the flicker in Marcus’s eyes, the hardening in the facial muscles.
“Move!” Marcus grunted and shoved Jude aside. Jude stumbled, his one foot half-in-half-out of his boot, and connected with the kitchen table hard enough to shove it a few inches along. He rebounded and went to his knees, hugging his side.
“Jesus!” Ben cried, zipping over to Jude. He got his arm around Jude, whose face was red with trying not to cry.
Marcus clomped around them to the stove, dropping puddles of melting snow, heels squeaking over the lino. “Should’ve gotten outta the way,” he said, but low, the fatherly tone gone. He sounded robotic. He stared at the teakettle on the stove burner like he’d never seen such a thing.
Ben got Jude standing, his feet back into his boots. “C’mon,” he said. “I wanna get some air to wake me up. Walk with me.”
Jude nodded numbly and Ben led him outside, snagging his own jacket off the hook by the door. He spared a hot look back at their father. Marcus was still in the same position. His eyes were squeezed closed, as if struck with a sudden pain in his head. He reminded Ben of a toy that’d run out of power.
The cold was a solid force, settling against the bare skin of Ben’s face like a mask, instantly numbing. He led Jude across the backyard to the tree line, the branches thin black talons against the white sky.
They didn’t speak as they made their way deeper into the woods. Jude rubbed his side and matched Ben’s pace.
Ben shoved his hands into his coat pockets, trying to even his breathing, trying to slow his heart. Jesus, a flicker in the eyes and then—nothing. From that flicker, Marcus and Jude might not’ve just been outside, laughing and throwing snowballs. They might not’ve just been talking about making hot chocolate.
He looked at Jude, who was watching his feet—the soft curve of his jaw, the slight uptick of his nose. Like their mother’s.
Jude, the ready-made victim, just brought out the worst in everyone.
The further they got from the house, the better Ben felt, but that pressure was still there, pushing against his shoulders, pressing him against the hard solid cannonball in his gut.
But maybe it wasn’t so bad—as he watched, Jude squeezed his side once, winced, then let go and, more or less, walked normally.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.”
They reached a small crick. During the spring, it would swell with runoff, graduating from that Pennsylvania colloquialism into a full-fledged creek, but, for now, you could walk across it without getting the tops of your boots wet. Round snow hats capped the stones. They followed it and soon the creek merged into the Buchanan River.
Ben and Jude stopped at the edge, fifteen feet above the water.
It hadn’t frozen over, not yet, but Ben could see it getting there—the shorelines furry with white and reaching for the other side, the water itself a thin black eddy in the middle, threading south. Across the river, the backyards of nicer homes were spotlighted by the sun.
Ben breathed deeply, taking in the cold air, the thick peaty smell of the minerals and earth of the Buchanan.
Jude sat down on the edge, his boots dangling. “Dad makes the best snowballs. You know that? I asked him if he’d show me, but he said it was a family secret. He’d tell me when I was older.” He looked up at Ben. “Did he ever show you? Will you show me?”
Ben stared down at him. In the stark blacks and whites of the outdoors, the eggplant-colored bruise on his brother’s face was like the dot on an exclamation point.
“No,” he said, almost mechanically. Is that all you can talk about? Really? All? Jesus Christ.
Pressure momentarily throbbed behind his eyes and he squeezed them closed, willing it back, unconsciously looking like their father back in the kitchen.
“I gotta take a whiz,” Jude said, and turned at the waist, boosting himself. His boots slipped a bit in the snow, dropping clumps over the edge.
Ben jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Go in the trees. No indecent exposure out here, Sonny Jim. I don’t got the cash to bail you out.”
Jude laughed, passing him. “You’re such a dork, Benny.”
Ben smiled without showing teeth. “And one day you’ll be just like me.”
His brother laughed again, and stepped into the trees.
Ben’s thin smile disappeared. He looked across the river, but the sunlight seemed colder now, the smell of the river cloying, the air freezer-burning his skin instead of numbing it.
“Hey, shake off and let’s head back,” he called, thinking their father would be gone for work by the time they arrived. “I gotta hankering from some Eggo waffles.”
No answer.
He stepped towards the trees. “Jude?” He listened hard, that k
ind of listening where you hear ringing.
Finally, he heard—faintly—a single gasp, a sweaty pah! sound.
Ben took another step forward. “Jude?”
Now he could hear Jude panting.
“The hell?” He entered the tree line, following his brother’s breathing.
He found Jude, in a triangle of white birch, seeing first a hand clenching a trunk, and the puddle of yellow urine at the base, threaded with blood.
He entered the triangle. “What the fuck?”
Jude looked up, his face cheese-colored and sweaty, one hand on his shriveled sex, the other clenching the tree. He stared at Ben, his eyes double-zeroes of pain and fear.
“It hurts, Benny. It burns.”
In Ben’s head, Jude hit the side of the table again and again, with a neon sign flashing kidney damage kidney damage kidney damage between, and suddenly the vice was turning faster now, tighter.
A stray thought arced across the shocked expanse of his mind, like NBC’s The More You Know comet: He’s gonna kill this kid.
“Hey, what’s this?” Jude asked.
Mid-afternoon. Marcus still at work. When they’d gotten back to the house, Ben had wrapped an icepack in a dishtowel and taped it to his brother’s side.
They were in Ben’s room, Ben sprawled on the bed, trying to decipher Grendel while Jude did little brother things, sitting at Ben’s desk and rooting through Ben’s stuff.
“What’s what?” Ben asked, re-reading the same line for the third time. The words didn’t want to stick; they were fuzzy black caterpillars that inched just outside his comprehension.
“This,” Jude said and Ben heard a whisper of paper.
He looked up.
The open letter. He could see the Ohio State return address.
He was out of bed before his brain could catch up, snatching the envelope out of Jude’s hands. “Gimme that.”
Bones are Made to be Broken Page 18
