“But you didn’t love me enough to tell me the truth. You didn’t love me enough to put your hang-ups about your affair aside. You didn’t love me enough to not let your guilt contaminate my entire fucking life.”
“Wetried!We thought wecould!Do you know how lucky you are? Millions of people are born into this world withnothing!We gave you the best of everything, you have an incredible life!”
“I have someone else’s life!” He was so furious he couldn’t catch his breath; it came in choppy gasps like he was sobbing. “Because I knew deep down, always, that I was supposed to be someone else!”
“How many times and ways can I say I’m sorry?”
“Don’t bother! You can’t actually do anything about it!” Carver got to his feet, still trying to breathe, so angry that his vision was growing dark around the edges. “You can’t do anything! Jesus Christ, you can’t doanything!” It was sheer agony to realize this. On some childish level, he’d been convinced that his parents were powerful enough to right what they’d wronged, like this was a misunderstanding that just needed to be cleared up, as if he could put all their missing homework scores in the computer and their grade would instantly change.
There was no going back. There was no undoing or redoing anything. He finally knew what was wrong with him, and it was a life sentence.
Carver staggered out into the hallway, his anger giving way to a physical grief which begged to be expressed. He turned to the first wall he saw and put his fist through the drywall, something he’d never done before. It felt good. It felt correct. He did it again, then again, littering that stretch of wall with holes until his knuckles were too inflamed to continue. He stopped and stood there, swaying on his feet, catching his breath.
From behind him, Doug said, “I found the first aid kit, but I don’t think there are enough Band-Aids in here for everything you’ve got going on.”
Carver turned to him woozily and offered him his sore right hand. The knuckles were already swelling, but they weren’t bloody. “This doesn’t need a Band-Aid,” he muttered.
“No, it needs ice,” said Nora, appearing at Doug’s elbow. She sounded surprisingly calm. “But your palms are bloody, what happened?”
“He fell earlier, weren’t you listening?” Doug said.
“I thought that was just with regard to the knee.”
“It’s both,” Carver said. He felt drunk again, or like the weed was finally hitting him — maybe because of how much blood had just rushed to his head and then rushed back out.
“I’ll go get ice,” Doug said to them, and handed the first aid kit to Nora.
She took Carver’s right hand in hers, peeled back the fingers and started swabbing his scraped palm with an antibacterial wipe.
“Do you think I broke my hand?” he said.
“Punching drywall? Probably not. Does it feel like you broke your hand?”
“No, but it hurts.”
Nora manipulated his hand and fingers. “Yell if you get a bad pain.” He did not. “No, I think you’re fine. Your knuckles will swell up, that’s all.”
“Okay,” Carver said. He didn’t know why he was okay with her tending to him now, but he was. He was momentarily calm again. He could feel now that he’d aggravated his rotator cuff, too. “That was stupid.”
“Punching inanimate objects is pretty stupid, yes.”
This comment sounded like it came from experience. “Have you done that?”
Nora nodded. “You don’t realize it, because I learned to hide it early, but you get your temper from me,” she murmured as she continued to clean his bloody palm. “You’re more like me than you know. Much more like me than the other two.”
“I think I knew that, actually.”
Nora let out a soft snort. “What, all the things you don’t like about yourself?”
“No, just a lot of them,” he said, and she shook her head, smiling grimly. “What about him? Did he have a temper?”
“Him.” She met his eyes briefly. She was still beautiful, his mother — she was one of those classic, ageless beauties. Carverwas starting to realize how much bullshit this had allowed her to get away with in her life. “He did have a temper, yes. More of one than your father does, certainly. I wouldn’t call him angry, though, just intense. And he would never punch a wall.”
Nora almost sounded relieved to be able to discuss this man with him. Carver was suddenly animated by a guilty sort of fascination.
“Why wouldn’t he punch a wall?” he said.
Nora lifted his other palm and began to clean it, very intentionally not looking at him. “Because he was a doctor who was training to be a surgeon. He was finishing a cardiothoracic surgery fellowship when he died.”
