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Don’t Stay Together for the Kids
I have friends on the school bus. We talk and laugh on the way home. They’re good boys, from privileged homes. I pretend I still fit in. The air brakes compress and the door folds open in front of my beautiful home.
I climb the porch and step through the brilliant mosaic front door, under the chandelier. The doorway sits between the levels. There are six stairs up to the living room, and six down to my basement. I climb up and deliver my armload of books to the top step on the way to the bathroom.
Mom is waiting at the top of the stairs to head me off. It’s too late. You can’t not see the blood. The puddles are bright pastel, like red paint, unreal. It’s all over the kitchen, pooled in the linoleum floor. Droplets trail across the carpet to my bathroom.
Well, it used to be my bathroom. That was before Mom found out, before we moved away to Florida to live with my grandmother for two weeks, before Mom woke up and decided to fight for the house.
Right before that my sister graduated and split at her first opportunity, a couple months after we moved here. When she packed to go back to Alabama, she took me for a drive and cried and said she wished she could take me with her, that I had a room as soon as I could leave. She left me there, alone, and my world that was barely stitched together ripped at the
seams soon after.
I can’t wrap my head around my current living situation. I live with my parents, both of them. Why didn’t he just leave? Is he staying just to torment us? The house is in foreclosure. It will be gone soon anyway. It can’t be won. He’s moved into my sister’s empty room to steal any piece left of my mother’s sanity. Now he’s the one that’s totally lost it.
Mom is crying, but she’s not bleeding. He’s holed up in my/the guest bathroom, shouting at her in heaving breaths and wails. I can’t
make out what he’s saying. It probably doesn’t matter. His words are hard to discern, dragging together like someone who is deaf—or drinking.
I duck into the master bedroom, my mom’s room now, to use her bathroom and then retreat back to my basement as ordered.
I’m not sad. I am not sympathetic. I am angry. I’m not hurt-angry in the way that people are when someone they love commits suicide, when they feel that person is being selfish, blah blah blah. I’m not angry that I am 16 and shouldn’t be witnessing this. I’m numb to that. I’m not even angry at the fact that none of this should be happening, or because this is all his
fault. I’m angry because he’s a hypocrite.
How many times had he stood behind my mother like her agreeable little puppet? I bet he handed her the phone, her weapon she used to send me away. First the police would come. Then the ambulance to make a big show.
I look out my basement window and count the cop cars in our yard. I bet the neighbors think they’re for me. There are four, like my
dad’s the Incredible Hulk or something. Their lights are off and they’re out of the cars, pacing around on the lawn on their walkies like some big hostage ordeal.
More sirens, this time long and wailing. Here comes the ambulance, like a record on repeat, but this time with a different ending. It feels strange to know they’re not coming for me. Still, I can’t be here.
I jot down “Went Walking” to leave a note, but when I open my bedroom door to duck out the garage Mom’s waiting for me again. She says I can’t leave. Rebellion sparks in my eyes and she corrects herself: I may leave when the ambulance is gone.
That doesn’t take long. They speed away as quickly as they can stuff my blubbering father in the back. Then the police cars slowly
disperse. There are two left when I shut the garage door behind me.
When I come back, it’s dark out. I climb the stairs again to head for Mom’s bathroom before bed. All the lights are still on. She’s
in the kitchen with the mop pretending it can be fixed. The linoleum goes back to white. The gray mop turns pink. It will never come out of the carpet. I
should know.
She glances at me, eyes glossed with tears, but we say nothing. She’s still mopping when I slink back downstairs. I climb into my canopy bed in my fully finished basement and breathe a sigh of relief. When we wake up tomorrow, he won’t be here. It will be the first day of peace in weeks.
