Glass breaking, piercing and shrill, shredded the night. I rose up on my knees to see a table lamp in Daniel’s front yard surrounded by a sea of glass, glittering against the dull gray gravel.
I scrambled over the peak of my roof and down the front side, my bare feet skidding and just barely stopping me from sliding off the edge. It only took seconds, but unnamed fear clenched me so hard in those strangled heartbeats that I barely registered catching my hand on a stray nail. It tore right through the fleshy part of my palm.
It didn’t hurt until I saw him, framed in jagged glass beyond his broken living-room window. Daniel stood immobile while his mom was a blur of fists. Her words barely had form. Shrieks and incoherent sobs slapped at me as she struck him.
“You killed him!” she screamed, over and over before folding in on herself.
A phone lay forgotten at her feet. When Daniel reached for her, she shrieked as if she were on fire and attacked again, slapping him hard enough that his head snapped to the side, and our eyes met through the broken window.
I had nothing with me this time. No pop can to throw, no coupon for his Jeep. I couldn’t fix anything. I watched Daniel turn back in time to catch another slap.
I’d only seen Daniel once with his mom, and then only in silhouette. They were flesh and blood this time, less than twenty feet away, bordered by broken glass like some sort of sick stage play. I saw the way the pained expression slipped from his face.
Then she spit at him. “It should have been you.”
When Daniel failed to react, impotence smothered me until I wanted to scream as she drew back her hand again. Maybe I did scream. Because he caught her wrist only inches from his face.
She had to see what I saw, the break. The moment Daniel was done. The moment he stopped trying. She attempted to pull her wrist free, but he held on. He didn’t need to yell like she did. His voice held a kind of quiet anger that was impossible to miss.
“He’d have killed you a dozen times over if I hadn’t gotten big enough to distract him. I let him bust my hand with a hammer the last time you burned his dinner. He didn’t deserve what he got?” He lifted his head. “It wasmyjaw he broke when he lost his job,myback he burned.” Daniel pulled up his shirt, and even twenty feet away, I could see the round, puckered flesh dotting his shoulder. “What did he deserve for that?” He pointed to the massive scar that spanned his torso. “I was ten when he pushed me out the upstairs window, do you remember? I hit the porch light on the way down. He wouldn’t let you take me to the hospital until you cleaned up all the blood. What’s that worth?” He threw her hand back and she stumbled. Her black hair had fallen free from her bun and the strands snaked around her face, concealing her features, but they did nothing to disguise the contempt in her voice.
“We would have been fine if you’d stayed away.”
“He would have killed you if I’d stayed away! And for what? Because you forgot to record a show he liked? Maybe you were wearing the wrong color. What did you do to deserve a dozen broken ribs and a bat bashed into your face?”
“No!” she screamed, jumping at him again. “You were the one who made him mad. If you’d just left us…”
I was moving then, skirting the edge of my roof until the wall appeared below me. When I flipped onto my stomach to slide down, Sean was there. Sweat broke out across his forehead, and not from heat, as he followed right behind me. Concrete from the wall touched my bare feet, then gravel a second later as I jumped to the ground. I started to run but an arm wrapped around my waist and pulled me back.
“Jill, there’s glass everywhere.” Sean looked at my bare feet.
But she was still yelling, hitting him.
“I’ll go,” he said, already moving toward the house.
“Give me your phone,” I said, and Sean tossed it back to me, but the sirens we heard halted both of us.
Blue and red lights flashed from around the corner, illuminating dozens of neighbors in their yards, and more than a few in Daniel’s.
Everything after that was a blur of moving bodies and blaring noise. We watched two officers emerge from the car, jump through the window and start wrestling Daniel’s mom to the floor. Neighbors recounted events for latecomers, and later for the officers.
“He didn’t do anything,” one said, while another quickly nodded.
“It’s true. She attacked him. He never retaliated.”
I dropped my eyes to Daniel’s mom, who was on the ground with a knee in her back still screaming obscenities at her son. It took forever to haul her out of the house. When she passed me, her black eyeliner was smeared all over her cheeks.
Daniel’s face. It was painful to look at as he watched them load her into the backseat. He still wanted to protect her, even as she intoned over and over again that they should keep him away from her.
Daniel tried to go after her. “Wait,” he said. “She’s not right. You can’t—” An officer halted him, but he called to her. “Mom, I’ll be right behind you.”
His face was worse when he noticed what I did: she fought less and less the farther away she was from her son.
Behind me, a neighbor was watching too. “She said he killed someone.”
I shook my head, knowing there was no way that could be true even as part of me called out for the justice of it. But could the rest be true? I’d barely been listening to Daniel’s mom. It hadn’t been the content of her words that I’d focused on, so much as the scene playing out in front of me, but I did now, keeping my eyes on Daniel as the officer spoke.
Daniel’s father was dead.
