It was nowhere near me, but I flinched.
“I’d been begging her to move out with me. I told her I’d take care of her, but she had to leave him. He’d stopped hitting me when I got big enough to hit back, so I could say that to her in front of him.”
I watched Daniel start to crumble in on himself as he spoke, like the bones in his body were shrinking. His next words started out as a whisper.
“She wouldn’t go. She wouldn’t come with me. She stood next to him like I was the one she was afraid of. Me!” He punched his chest hard enough that I winced. “I stood between him and her so many times. Let him hit me so he wouldn’t have the energy to go after her. So many times… So I left her. I left her with him. I should have killed him that day. I could have.”
I should have been scared by his words, by the cold and quiet way he talked about killing his father, but I wasn’t. I could hear the anguish just in the way he was breathing.
“This last time one of the neighbors called me when they heard the screaming. It was almost too late when I got there, when I got him off her.” His hand slid up his side, over scars that I’d never be able to forget.
I filled in the words he didn’t say. Matching up the scars I remembered. So many. But he was here. Daniel was standing in front of me.
“He nearly killed her, hit her so hard that the police didn’t give her a choice anymore. But even that wouldn’t have been enough. She’d have waited for him. Her bones were broken from his fists and she would have waited for him. What kind of sick love is that?”
It wasn’t love at all.
“I packed everything up while she was still in the hospital. She would have stayed, so I didn’t let her choose. She had no money, no place to live, and her husband was behind bars for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. If I’m lucky, he’ll be gone for ten years. If he’s lucky, it’ll be longer, ’cause if I ever see him again, I’ll bash his skull in with that baseball bat he likes so much.”
I had to close my eyes, which only made it worse as Daniel’s words painted a horror I couldn’t conceive of, one that made my recent confessions to him about my mom feel so unbelievably petty. But I couldn’t dwell on any of that since Daniel was still talking.
“She always wanted to live somewhere warm…she hated the snow. So here we are. No snow for her, and no…” His throat choked off then and he didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.
I wanted to go to him, to hold him. I took a step, but I hesitated, worried I might end up hurting him if I touched the wrong place. Then a streak of white-hot hatred blistered through me for the man who’d caused them. It birthed a violence so intense, my vision flared red.
Daniel didn’t notice the emotional fracture I was feeling. It wasn’t a helpful reaction, so I tamped it down as best I could and took another step.
He reached out, grabbed fistfuls of my shirt, and literally hauled me to him.
I took my cue of how tight to hold on from him. Tight. Rib-crackingly tight.
We ended up facing each other sitting on the curb, my legs folded up between us. I listened while he talked. Not about his dad, I could tell he was done on that account. His mom though. With every word I could hear how desperately he loved her. It was kind of staggering.
All I could think was, why? What had that woman done to deserve that kind of love? The only reason I kept silent was because I could hear him asking the same question. Not out loud. But in every pause, every pulled-in breath.Why?
The small, selfish part of me turned those same questions inward. Stealing a moment that belonged to him. It all seemed so unfair that some could love so constantly and others so capriciously. Daniel’s mom had done nothing to deserve his love and, from the way he talked, she could do nothing to jeopardize it. Dad had tried more than I had with Mom, but the result was the same: she didn’t love either of us. When I tried to analyze it, put labels on her behavior, love never came close to displacing disregard or spite.
Why did he love her?
Why didn’t she love me?
We had no answers, and the lack ate at us both.
Somewhere through all of that I took his hand. I was holding it in both of mine, running my thumbs over his knuckles. I didn’t feel even the slightest bit self-conscious even when Daniel ran out of words. Some things just fell away in the face of others.
We weren’t drifting inexorably closer to each other in a moonlit pool, wanting and wondering and possibly daring. We were sitting on a cracked curb with scattered pebbles and cigarette butts littered around us.
And it was better and worse altogether.
We sat, letting dim streetlight and our words reveal scars so deep and raw that they threatened to block out every other emotion that came before and possibly after.
CHAPTER 21
Iwoke up Saturday morning, after crawling into my bed only hours before, to a Post-it.
It was stuck to the fridge, not my pillow. And it held Dad’s handwriting, not Mom’s, but that didn’t stop my throat from swelling shut before I read it.
I left you the truck. Don’t crash it. I’ll be home from the auction Monday night. Might bring you something.—Dad
