by David Lubar
So, now you have no idea what to believe. And you probably don’t want to believe that this version is the truth, because it sucks to accept that anyone would use his kid for a punching bag. And because it is true too often in our sad and violent world. If we ever meet, I’ll show you the scar on my forehead. I’ll let you touch it, Thomas, and erase your doubts.
Here is all I have to offer as I try to tie together the threads I’ve dangled and make my exit. I hope it’s enough. Either way, here it is: If I were, in my heart, in my core, a liar, would I have told you the pathetic, fumbling truth of my first attempt at making love? Would I have confessed that Maddie climbed out a window to avoid me, or that someone I thought was a friend wouldn’t want to be seen with me at a concert?
Brother. Sister. Whoever you are, taking this journey with me—the only unconfessed lie that lay hidden throughout this voyage came at the start. And its nakedness has been uncovered. Its half and quarter truths have been revealed.
But there are still shards of shattered narrative to sweep up from that first meeting. What else is true? Alexander Graham Bell’s invention saved my life. But not by interrupting the beating with a phone call. How realistic would that be? Punch, punch, ring, ring. Hold on, I have to take this. Hit yourself for a minute until I can come back.
No.
After my father landed that first solid punch to my forehead, knocking me down, I grabbed my phone from the floor and thumbed 911. Before I could say anything, Dad stomped the phone hard enough to kill the call. He would have stomped my hand, too, if I hadn’t snatched it out of the way.
All those times he’d slapped me, I thought he’d lost control. Now, as I saw the crazy anger in his eyes, I realized how wrong I was. Those slaps in the past hadn’t hurt as much as they might have, because he’d kept some control. He knew he couldn’t get away with doing any real damage. He’d been like a drunk taking small swigs from a hidden flask to tweak his blood alcohol to a tolerable level. Now that he’d drawn real blood, there was no reason for him to stop.
This is what he’d wanted all along—to make me hurt outside as much as he himself hurt inside. And he was on his way to getting his wish. He was far stronger than Clovis. And this wasn’t a school yard fight. This was a merciless beating. I curled up and wrapped my arms around my head as he pummeled me and screamed obscenities.
“Stop!” I yelled.
That only seemed to fuel his anger. All I could hope was that he’d get tired, or regain some control, before he killed me.
But there are some things in this world you can’t take back once they’ve been set loose. A 911 call is one of those. Even if you hang up, or crush the phone, they have to check it out. So I wasn’t saved by the bell. I was saved by the call. The police were at the door less than two minutes later.
I’d protected my abuser all these years. Hid my bruises when he wasn’t careful where he hit me. Made up stories. Maybe that explained my creativity. I was an amazing liar, and obviously awkward at navigating my way through the spills and bruises of life. And he was sly enough not to lash out with too much fury when Mom was there.
It wasn’t always bad. He played the Perfect Dad role pretty well at times. We went on nice vacations. I got excellent presents when times were good. Guilt is Santa’s biggest helper. But whenever Dad lost a job, and had more free time at home to drink and brood, I knew there’d be pain. I took it all, and never told anyone.
This time, my face bleeding like the severed head of a goat, my father reeking of cheap gin, I wouldn’t have needed to say anything when the police were drawn inside by my screams for help and his cries of rage.
But I did. I said everything. As I spilled my guts, I felt like I was vomiting demons and razor blades. The cops stared at me with a mix of sympathy and weary familiarity. They stared at Dad with a look that said they’d be happy to shoot him in the back of the head and dump his corpse in an alley.
If I thought having sex after so many years of lusting for it was explosive, it was nothing compared to ripping myself away from beneath the boot of the man who beat me. The vast, uncertain future I’d always feared if I ever spoke the truth now seemed manageable and far from terrifying. Just as I was no longer a virgin, I was no longer a victim.
“He asked for it!” Dad shouted when I’d reached the end of my torrent of accusations and lay there, gasping for breath. “He’s always been a loser. Always pushed me. I think he likes getting hit.”
They took him out first, handcuffed and thrashing.
“You’re finished!” he screamed as they dragged him down the hall. “I want you cleared out of my house before I get back.”
So I was homeless at eighteen. And so beaten, I couldn’t even think about what to do or where to go when all of this was over. And then, as they were leading me down the stairs, those same stairs that played such a violent role in our first encounter, one final lie came true. Three steps down, I fell, dropping like someone had hit me with a sledgehammer.
Bed, and the Rest
I WOKE IN the hospital, confused. Dad hit me only once in the head, not counting the slaps. The blow hadn’t been hard enough to knock me out. My arms had pretty much taken the rest of the pummeling.
Mom was there. Sitting in a chair by the side of my bed. Keeping vigil. For a disoriented, fuzzy moment, I couldn’t separate my identity from images and memories of Nola. Had I gorged on a fistful of pills that dark night when I nearly gave up on life?
“What happened?” I asked.
Mom sprang from the chair. “Don’t try to sit up. The doctors think you’ve had multiple concussions,” she said. “There was a blood clot. It got knocked loose.”
“Will I be okay?” From what little I knew, clots could do terrible things to your body. I listened to my own voice. My speech wasn’t slurred. I flexed my fingers. My hands seemed to be okay.
“You’ll be fine. You were lucky the police were there. You passed out on the stairs. But one of the officers caught you. They took good care of you. I never knew—” She gasped as anguish seized her voice, then continued, measuring each word. “I mean, I knew he was rough. That’s how his father was. And his father’s father. But I had no idea it was this bad. If I knew he was hurting you, I would have done something. Multiple concussions. Why didn’t you say something? Why did you hide it?”
Concussions? Even in my current half-dazed state, I found an explanation easily enough. The fall into the Pit. My fight with Clovis.
“Those weren’t from him,” I said. “I fell. The Pit. Remember? Then I got into a fight.” It made sense now, why I’d been so sleepy those days. And why I’d felt nauseated.
“You don’t have to lie. Not anymore.” She threw her arms around me. “I’m so sorry.”
“I really was in a fight. You can ask Jimby,” I said. “I was protecting him. Robert and Butch can back me up. You have to believe me.”
“I do. But this morning, what happened, there’s no excuse for that.”
She was right. “I think Dad’s in jail.”
“Yes, he is.” She held me tighter.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen to him,” I said. Or to us.
“Things will work out,” she said.
“Did he ever hit you?” I was pretty sure he hadn’t. But he could have hidden things from me as easily as he’d hidden them from her. If he’d ever hit her, he deserved to rot in jail.
“Never.”
There was an odd rise in pitch at the end of that word. I stared at her.
“Once. It was a long time ago. Just once. It was an accident.”
I waited. It took her a moment to start.
“I was sort of a free spirit back then,” she said.
“Free spirit?” I contemplated various interpretations of that phrase.
“I had a boyfriend when I met your father,” she said. “Ross was an artist. Brilliant. Wild. Passionate about life. All my friends were artists, poets, and painters.”
“So you dumped this guy fo
r Dad?”
“Not right away. But your father was very persistent. He was charming, funny, and thoughtful.”
I could see the persistent part. I guess I inherited something from him, after all. But I couldn’t picture the charm. “So what happened?”
“I foolishly decided it would be okay to meet both of them at an outdoor concert. I wanted them to be friends. All my friends got along with each other.”
“Knowing Dad, that doesn’t sound like the best plan,” I said.
“It wasn’t. Your father and Ross got into a terrible fistfight. I can’t even remember who threw the first punch.”
“And Dad beat him up?” I asked. I could testify to the force of his punch.
Mom shook her head. “No. He got beaten pretty badly.”
“And you fell for the loser?” It gave me more pleasure than I’d care to admit to stick that word on Dad.
Mom nodded.
“So it became Beauty and the Beaten,” I said.
“That’s what it became.”
“But you said he hit you once.…”
“It was after I’d graduated. We were—” She paused, then apparently decided I wasn’t in a judgmental mood. “—living together. This was before we were married. One of the guitarists from my old band decided to take a shot at really making a living with music. He asked me to join him. I wanted to give it a try. The idea of earning a living doing what I loved was so powerful. Your father was dead set against it. I guess the fact that the guitarist was Ross’s brother didn’t help. We argued. I turned my back on him and started playing, to drown him out. He got louder. I played harder. He came around and tried to knock the fiddle from my hand. I was swaying when he swung his hand. He wasn’t aiming at me.” She left the next part unspoken.
“That sucks.”
She rubbed her cheek. I didn’t think she was even aware of the motion. “He was so sorry. And it was an accident.”
“There’s no excuse,” I said. “Never.”
“I know. I moved out that night. We talked a lot before I agreed to come back.”
I guess I could forgive one terrible mistake that he made long ago. But he’d made a series of mistakes after that, with me as the recipient. I tried to picture the funny, charming man she’d described, but all I could see was drunken anger and resentment.
“Did Dad ever love me?” I asked.
“Your father loves you,” Mom said. It was an instant and automatic response. I waited for the truth.
“He loved you when you were little and he was sober,” she said.
I shook my head. “Booze can make you do a lot of things. But I don’t think it can make you hate what you love.”
“I know he loved you…,” Mom said.
I allowed her to cling to that fiction, but couldn’t bring myself to validate it with a response.
“I love you,” she said. “Don’t ever doubt that.”
“I won’t.”
I thought about when we used to visit Dad’s father. He’d give Mom a hug but pretty much ignore Dad. And me. We’d stopped going there after Grandma died. Something always came up. If I tried to come to grips with all of the past, right now, I’d drown. For the moment, I had to deal with the present and future.
I wrestled with the idea of Dad in jail. He’d never hit her after that one time. Maybe he’d be able to stop hitting me. “I could tell the police I started it,” I said. “I’d brought up money and shoved it in his face. That’s when he’d lost it.”
Mom stepped back. I think a thousand thoughts flashed through each of our minds. I can’t speak for her thoughts, but I know mine. I could save him, maybe, from jail, if I could figure out the right story.
What did I want? Did I want him locked up? Did I want him free, getting help? Was vengeance more important than family?
He was my father.
But if I hadn’t used the phone, he might have killed me this morning.
But he was my father. He wasn’t a criminal. Fathers who don’t belong there get killed in jail.
I saw Lucas being punched in the face by his dad. I saw Robert trying to slip out of a hug from his father, but not trying hard enough to actually escape. I saw Butch sitting with her dad, doing the Sunday crossword puzzle together, and sharing a bowl of popcorn. I envied Robert and Butch as much as I pitied Lucas. I saw myself walking through the corridors of school, hearing whispers about a father in jail.
“I need to think,” I said.
Mom put her arms back around me. “I know.”
“Are you going to see Dad?”
“I have to,” she said. “It won’t be easy. But I can’t hide from what happened. I need to deal with it.”
I thought about Jillian, and all she’d had to face. “You’re strong. You’ll be okay.”
“I hope so.”
“Can you get me something before you go?” I asked. I thought about the gift Mr. Piccaro had given me. I couldn’t ask Mom to go all the way home. But I could ask her for a surrogate.
“What do you want?”
“A notebook,” I said. “And a couple pens.” So I could lose myself in time. Or find myself.
“I’ll check the gift shop. They should have that.”
She brought me what I needed. Unlike Jillian, I didn’t have the skill, or the desire, to draw accurate images of my pain. But I had the words.
I started writing, creating a half lie, at first, to try to purge the demons with a fictional telling, based on the truth, painting my pain with words instead of pigments. Four paragraphs into the heated narrative, as I slammed down with my father at the foot of the stairs and wondered whether to give him a broken back, I knew I needed to go with the truth and not try to invent parallels and parables for the story of my life. A made-up story, as much as I loved it when handed a novel, would be like my sketchy paintings of blurry dragons and half-recognizable game controllers. Truth would be like Jillian’s isolated objects, each depicted in painstaking detail. I would paint my demons with words, holding true to what happened, suspending them against a neutral background. Sentences would be my objects, meticulously drawn and carefully placed.
So, here we are, just several hours past the place where we started our journey, but many lifetimes wiser after the two months we spent together. I’m glad you came along. I hope you feel I fulfilled my promise of a story worth hearing. I can tell you this—despite the bumps, it was a story worth living. I hope you agree. And I hope you find, or have found, your own Jillian. You deserve that.
As much as I hate to leave you, I’m not going to linger. Time has passed since our previous present. The notebooks and journal are nearly full. The pens are nearly dry. There’s just one last essential scene to share. But first, before I share that moment with you, let’s leap ahead briefly to the true chronological ending of my story.
Here’s where I am now, in space and time, in the real world, as I prepare to write that final scene. My father didn’t go to jail. But he didn’t come home, either. Mom wouldn’t let him. I haven’t seen him since that day. I know at some point, I have to deal with that and make peace with my past. Whether the message is I forgive you, or I’ll never forgive you, I need to deliver it to him face-to-face. I think I need to make a trip to see my grandfather, too. But not quite yet. I want him to understand the legacy he created. And let him know it’s reached a dead end. If I ever become a father, I’ll be like Robert’s dad, or Butch’s. Not like mine or Lucas’s.
My amazing, brilliant friend Jimby said it perfectly, way back when I was wondering how I could get the attention of the dazzling light who entered my universe: Nobody has the right to kiss you without permission. Or touch you in bad places. Or hit you.
Those are words to live by. Though I know there’s a lot more to being a good parent than not hitting. But I’m getting wordy, and that will do neither of us any good. Let’s complete our visit to the present.
Summer is half over. I’m an official high school graduate. I made it out of the hospital
in time to walk onstage, get handed my diploma by the principal, and toss a quick bow to the cheering crowd. Since then, after a full week of doctor-prescribed rest, I’ve been working hard, driving to a construction job that Butch’s parents helped me find. Yeah, driving. I got a car. What kind? To describe it, to even hint at the color of the body or the curve of the chrome, would be to reveal too much of my soul. Or, perhaps, too much of the limitations of my budget. Instead, I’ll let you craft your own wheels. Think of the kit you’ve labeled WHAT I’D LOVE TO DRIVE. Make it in that image, rev it up, and take it for a ride. Don’t forget the air fresheners. Or your friends.
Mom has been working hard, too. She’s a manager now, at the bakery. She’s working a lot more hours, but she gets to start later in the day. The cop who caught me on the steps when I fell stops by there all the time. He buys a lot more rolls than anyone would need. She thinks he wants to ask her out. She’s not ready for that. Not yet. Maybe someday.
But she’s found time for more happiness in her life. All these years, she’d kept her fiddle. It was stuck in the back of her bedroom closet. Now she’ll take it out and play sometimes. It has a crack on the face, near the bridge, but that doesn’t seem to hurt the sound. I told her she should form a band. She said she was too old for that, but I could see she liked the idea. Mostly, she plays happy tunes, like Doc Watson instrumentals. But when she plays a haunting ballad or a lament in a minor key, I think she’s painting away bad memories with her bow.
We decided, if we scrimped and watched our spending, I could go to County full-time. I didn’t think that was necessary. Mom insisted. I’m glad she did. I’ll be taking classes in education. And maybe creative writing. I might even take an art class, though I’ve accepted that it’s unlikely I could ever have a career as a painter. I guess part of maturity is learning to see not just yourself as others see you, but seeing your art that way, as well.
But let’s get back to the hospital. To the true ending. And beginning.
