Twenty-two years ago
I woke with a start, the echo of a sound ringing in my ears. I didn’t have the luxury of holding my breath and waiting to see if it was the shadows of a dream or if it was the nightmare I actually lived. I was already pulling on a pair of shorts when I heard it again. The shrill plea drowned out by the snarled accusation.
Dinner was cold.
The house was a mess.
There were muddy footprints in the garage.
Too loud.
Too quiet.
I’d looked at him wrong.
I’d been born.
There was a crash, followed immediately by a broken cry from the first floor as my bare feet hit the stairs. They were too loud for this to have just started. I’d fallen asleep.
Stupid.
I never fell asleep before he did. It wasn’t safe. I didn’t trust him. But I’d been so fucking tired. Between the last weeks of my senior year, a part-time job, and the pretense of college preparations, I crawled into bed, mine or Sloane’s, exhausted.
Mr. Walton had done so much for me.
He’d helped me apply for and get a scholarship and two grants. I wouldn’t even have to play football in college. Football had already taken a toll on my body. Football and living with my father. In public, the three of us acted out the same ridiculous farce over and over again, pretending that the darkness didn’t exist behind closed doors. That we weren’t living the same nightmare over and over again.
But no one can hide the truth forever. Especially not when it was this ugly. I wasn’t going to leave this house, not while my parents shared it.
I couldn’t. I was the only thing stopping him.
I’d been watching him closely, knowing it was going to happen again. The clock had been reset weeks ago with his last violent explosion. I still didn’t have full range of motion back in my shoulder, and my mother had a new scar at the corner of her mouth. She was wasting away before my eyes as if she were erasing herself from reality.
I’d wanted to hurt him that time. Not just stop him but really hurt him that time. I’d wanted to show him what it felt like.
But I’d held myself back. Barely. I’d thought of Mr. Walton and the chessboard as red had bled in on the edges of my vision. Sometimes the best offense is a good defense.
So I’d defended. And then he’d been fine. But I knew he couldn’t stay good for long. The man was a ticking time bomb.
I knew better, yet I’d still fallen asleep. It was my fucking fault.
I flew down the stairs as the sounds of fist against flesh, the dull thud of a body crumpling, and alcohol-fueled shouts tore through the house.
I found them in the living room. He stood over her, right hand clenched in an angry fist. Bicep bulging. Jaw clenched from the rage that ruled him. He’d put on weight while my mother had lost it. Almost as if he were sucking the life out of her like one of those vampires in the books Sloane was obsessed with now.
“I’m sorry,” Mom whispered brokenly. She was crumpled against the baseboard. Blood from her face smeared the drywall and floor. It soaked into the T-shirt that hung limply off her bony shoulders.
He kicked her viciously in the ribs.
“Stop!” The command ripped its way out of my throat.
He turned to stare at me with those dead, bloodshot eyes.
“It’s the booze,” he’d say after he’d sobered up. After Mom had bandaged the knuckles he’d bloodied on us. “It won’t happen again.”
I hated him. In that moment, time froze, and I was so overwhelmed with hate that my knees threatened to buckle.
“What did you say to me?” he demanded. The words were precise and loaded. He didn’t slur when he drank. Everything just got sharper, meaner.
“I said stop,” I repeated as that familiar haze of red began to appear. My heartbeat thumped at the base of my skull, and I reveled in the adrenaline that dumped into my bloodstream.
“Lucian, go,” Mom pleaded, now on her hands and knees.
He kicked her again without even looking at her. The blow of his boot knocked her back to the floor where she curled into a ball, whimpering.
That was when I saw it. The long, jagged cut on her forearm. The glint of metal in his left hand.
“You don’t ever raise your fucking voice to me in my fucking house, boy,” he said.
My eyes were fixed on the knife I’d washed and stowed in the block on the kitchen counter. There was blood on the blade. He’d cut her. And now he was brandishing it at me.
“Fuck you!” I shouted. The snap in my head was like a rubber band breaking. I wasn’t the dutiful teenage son anymore. I wasn’t the peacekeeper or the protector. I was him.
A fury like nothing I’d ever felt before propelled me across the room. My hands fisted in his sweaty T-shirt. They looked like his. Big, bruising, capable of destruction.
It stuck in my head, lodged there like a jagged stone.
He seemed distantly surprised. Because I knew my place. I didn’t fight back. But tonight I did. Tonight it ended before he ended one of us.
I used his surprise to my advantage and threw him bodily into the wall he’d pinned me and my mother against countless times. My fist flew and connected with his concrete jaw. Pain exploded distantly. I could hear my mother screaming from far away.
He was shouting now. Horrible, disgusting abuse. The kinds of things you saved up for the enemy who took everything from you. Not the son who’d once only wanted to make you proud.
He slashed at me with the blade. But I felt nothing except a burning anger that would never be quenched. A need to destroy. It felt so good to finally unleash it all back on him.
Fresh pain fueled me. I snatched the knife out of his hand and threw it to the floor. His fist caught me in the temple, and everything went sideways. But I didn’t crumple. I didn’t fall or beg or cry.
I snapped.
I wouldn’t stop until he fell. Until he begged, he cried.
Like father, like son.
I heard it in my head like a mantra on repeat. Over and over again. Over the faraway sound of breaking glass.
Like father, like son.
Over my mother’s low wail.
Like father, like son.
I kept going. Kept swinging, kept dodging his fists, kept going even as my head rang. Even as the red changed and became blue and white and then red again.
Sloane
My hands shook as I clutched the cordless phone in them. I wanted to cry or throw up, and before this was over, I was fairly sure I’d do both.
I’d made Lucian a promise. He’d been adamant. But if I didn’t do something, someone was going to get hurt. Really hurt.
I’d seen Mr. Rollins come home. The fuel door on his truck still open. He’d swerved into the wrong lane then back again to avoid Mrs. Clemson walking her two Saint Bernards. Shouting profanities at the woman, he’d hit the gas too hard and then slammed on the brakes, stopping mere inches from his own garage door.
There had been so many times over the last year that I wanted to tell my parents. But Lucian had made me promise. I was to stay out of it and let him handle it.
He never talked about it. But I knew enough to watch for the signs. I always left my window unlocked, but on the bad nights, I left it open an inch or two and huddled under a blanket on the window seat, listening.
Since I couldn’t stop it from happening, I could at least suffer through it with him.
We were so close in some ways and yet practically strangers in others.
There was the Lucian I saw at school. The beautiful boy with the entourage. The one who’d wink at me or give my ponytail a tug when no one else was looking.
Then there was the Lucian who had dinner three nights a week at my parents’ table. Polite, respectful, quiet. The one who’d volunteered to teach me to drive in the high school parking lot on Sundays after my mom said her blood pressure couldn’t take it.
And there was the Lucian who climbed through my window. He was funny and broody and smart and interested in me. We argued for hours over music and movies and books. Sometimes he read what I was reading just so we could talk about it. He’d even coached me through my first real relationship with Trevor Whitmer, a sophomore trombone player with an in-ground pool.
It was June. Lucian’s eighteenth birthday was coming up on Tuesday. The same day as his high school graduation. It felt like a ticking clock was hanging over our heads. He was going through the motions of a graduating senior. Summer plans and college T-shirts. But no matter how many times I tried to pin him down about it, he wouldn’t open up. Sometimes it seemed like he wanted to know everything about me without giving up anything of himself.
I heard another faint shout carried on the night air and cringed, clutching the phone to my chest.
Lucian almost always came over after. After the fight. After his father had passed out or left again. After his mother had been soothed. There was no one to look out for him. So I stocked bandages and Neosporin in my nightstand. Sometimes I snuck downstairs to throw ice cubes in a baggie or to forage for snacks.
He trusted me enough to tell me. Maybe that meant he also trusted me to do what was right, even if it was something he didn’t want, I rationalized.
I chewed nervously on my lip. I couldn’t just sit here in my pretty room with my pretty life and wait for his father to stop hurting him. That wasn’t what friends did. That wasn’t what you did when you loved someone, and I loved Lucian.
In what way, I wasn’t sure. I just knew that I loved him and I couldn’t stand to see him hurt anymore.
I shoved the window up and climbed out onto the porch roof.
It was almost midnight. My parents would have been asleep for hours, and I couldn’t very well go running into their room, blurt out the whole story, and then ask them to call 911. Could I?
To be fair, my parents were pretty great. They’d call 911 and my dad would run next door and try to calm things down.
I could appreciate the need for de-escalation every once in a while. But Mr. Rollins seemed like the kind of guy who wouldn’t even let you finish your first sentence before decking you. And I didn’t want my dad to get hurt. Besides, he’d be crushed if he found out what was happening next door. He and Mom would feel guilty that they hadn’t seen the signs. And they’d try to make up for it somehow, which would only embarrass Lucian and make him start avoiding me.
I hated Mr. Rollins with the kind of dedicated passion that only great works of fiction seemed to capture. Every time I saw him, I glared my hate into him, willing him to feel it. To turn around and find me shooting poisoned eye daggers at him. To know that he hadn’t fooled everyone. That I knew his dirty little secret.
But he never noticed me. Never once glanced in my direction. It was better that way, I supposed. Then when I put my plan into action, he’d have no idea that I’d played a role in his karma.
I had a lot of plans. A whole notebook of them. Ways to Get Mr. Rollins Arrested So Lucian Can Go to College. I’d written that in big, block print with my favorite purple highlighter on the first page. On the outside of the notebook, I’d scrawled Geography Notes so no one would get snoopy.
The last plan I’d sketched out skipped the “get arrested” part and went straight to the “murder him” part. I’d noticed Mr. Rollins changing the brake pads on his truck in the driveway every few months—probably because he was a drunk and constantly slamming on the brakes to avoid hitting things. I’d thought about sneaking over there while he was under the vehicle and taking the parking brake off.
Then I’d wait until I was sure he’d been crushed before I’d call 911 with a quaver in my voice.
The more realistic plans that didn’t involve me committing a homicide, no matter how much he deserved to have his face murdered, centered around drawing the attention of an independent witness.
Like Lucian’s football coach who had to wonder about the bruises. Or maybe the neighbors who lived on the other side of the Rollins family. Except Mr. Clemson had a hearing aid that he rarely used, and Mrs. Clemson was so busy talking she never seemed to hear anyone else.
I was going to figure it out, and I was going to make him stop. Then Lucian could go to college and not have to worry about his mom, and he’d be happy. Like really happy.
A muffled shout startled me. It was followed by the sound of breaking glass. Loud breaking glass. As in their living room window, I guessed.
My thumbs punched 911 before I’d even fully made the decision.
A sob broke the eerie silence, and I realized it had come from me.
I was shaking so hard my teeth were chattering.
One of us had to end this tonight. And if it meant he’d hate me for the rest of his life, at least he’d have the rest of his life.
“911. What is your emergency?”
“There’s a man hurting his wife and son. It sounds bad. Please send help before it’s too late.” My voice broke.
“Okay, honey,” the operator said in a softer tone. “It’s gonna be all right. What’s the address?”
It took me two tries to get it out between sobs.
“I’ve got officers on the way right now.”
“Tell them to hurry up and to be careful. Mr. Rollins is a big guy, and he drinks all the time and he drives drunk,” I said, spewing out the list of reasons why I hated the man.
“Okay. The police will take care of this,” he promised.
“Thank you,” I whispered, wiping my eyes on my sleeve. It was cold up here on the roof. Cold and lonely waiting for Lucian to be okay.
“Are these your neighbors?” the operator asked.
I could hear sirens in the far-off distance and willed them closer.
“He’s my friend,” I whispered.
Lucian
The handcuffs bit into my wrists. Broken glass cut the soles of my feet as Wiley Ogden marched me out the front door. Blood coursed from a dozen cuts on my face and arms. My father had managed to carve a shallow slice over my ribs with the knife before I’d taken it from him. My head hurt, and I was having trouble paying attention to what people were saying. Everything was blurry and muffled.
There were two patrol cars on the street in front of the house and an ambulance parked in the driveway. All three vehicles had their lights on, alerting everyone in the neighborhood to my shame.
There was a small contingent of concerned neighbors in bathrobes.
“What are you doing?” Simon Walton marched toward me, fire in his eyes and cats on his pajama pants.
I looked away, not wanting to see the judgment in the eyes of the man I’d come to think of as a surrogate father. But it wasn’t me his ire was directed at. He stepped between me and the chief of police and drilled a finger into Ogden’s flabby chest.
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, Wylie?”
“I’m arresting this punk prick for trying to cut his parents to ribbons with a chef’s knife,” the chief said loud enough for the neighbors to hear.
“That’s not what happened!” The crowd parted, or my vision cleared long enough to bring Sloane into focus.
I looked away quickly, but not before seeing her tear-streaked face. The horror. The guilt. She was still holding the cordless phone.
It was her. She’d called them. She was the reason my life was over. The reason my mother was unprotected. My mother, who had remained silent when my father told the cops I’d attacked them unprovoked.
A wave of nausea rolled through me.
“Sloane, I’ll handle this,” Mr. Walton insisted. “Uncuff him now, Wylie, or we’re going to have an issue.”
“I don’t take orders from some namby-pamby ambulance chaser,” Ogden said, giving me a hard shove forward. My knees buckled, and I went down on them hard on the sidewalk.
Sloane cried out, but I refused to look up.
“Officer Winslow, will you please take care of Lucian while I talk to Chief Ogden?” Mr. Walton said through clenched teeth.
Another cop and an EMT each took an arm and helped me up.
“Hang in there, buddy,” the officer said to me quietly as they guided me toward the ambulance.
“Don’t bother patching him up. Let him bleed on the way to jail. See how he likes it,” Ogden called after them.
I thought I heard the EMT mutter “fucker” under his breath, but I wasn’t sure.
The cop eased me into the back of the patrol car, where I collapsed against the seat.
“I’ll get you some water, and we’ll clean you up down at the station,” he promised.
I nodded but didn’t open my eyes. There was no point. There was nothing left for me here. This life was over.
“Lucian.”
I managed to open my eyes and found Mr. Walton leaning in the open door. “Listen to me. I’ll be right behind you. Okay? Don’t talk to anyone. If they try to question you, tell them you won’t speak unless your lawyer is present.”
His tone was calm, soothing.
“What…” My voice sounded rusty, and I cleared my throat. “What about my mom?” I rasped.
“They’re taking her to the hospital to get her checked out,” he said, keeping his voice low.
“Lucian.” Sloane’s panicked face appeared next to her father’s earnest one.
I turned away, not wanting to see her. Not wanting to face the betrayal…or the shadows my family had put in those green eyes.
“Go,” I said.
“What?” Mr. Walton asked, leaning closer.
“Get her out of here! Please.”
“Lucian, I’m sorry—” Sloane began.
“Go stand with your mother, Sloane,” Mr. Walton said using his lawyer voice.
My father was standing guard at the back of the ambulance watching me. I knew what he was really doing. Reminding my mother what happened to wives who didn’t know their loyalty lay with their husbands instead of their sons.
I didn’t blame her. I didn’t even know if I blamed Sloane. I just knew that everything I’d fought for for so long was now over. It was all for nothing. I was going to jail. My father would kill my mother. Then he’d either go to jail or drink himself to death. No matter which way the dice landed, this was the end of the Rollins family.
“But, Dad, you can’t let them take him. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t Lucian’s fault. Mr. Rollins—”
If he heard her, if he even had an inkling that she knew… I wouldn’t be there to stop him. I felt sick.
“Enough!” I barked sharply. I still couldn’t look at her. She needed to get away from me.
“Lucian.” Sloane’s whisper was broken.
“Go wait with your mother,” Mr. Walton ordered briskly.
I sensed her leaving. A wave of hopelessness crashed over me. “You don’t want to get involved in this, Mr. Walton. It’s not safe.”
He reached in the car and put his hand on my shoulder. “We’re not abandoning you, Lucian. You’re a good kid on your way to being a good man. I’m going to fix this.”
On the way to the police station, I found myself wondering why some people dedicated their lives to fixing things while others set out only to break them. Not that it mattered anymore. I was one of the broken.
