Work Text:
The boy was four years old when he first realized there was something not quite right with the way his parents interacted with each other. The amazing thing about children is that they learn very quickly and mimic what they see very well. People, generally, don’t realize that their childhood is anything strange while they’re still in it - it’s only as they’re older that one day a thing may strike them and lead to the epiphany that their “normal” is not the utopian “normal” of TV characters, or the “normal” their acquaintances and peers are used to, and perhaps not even the “normal” that most folk regard as common decency for raising a child in. So, to have an inkling of this realization at the grand age of four is a rather momentous thing, one could say.
The other amazing thing about children that adults often forget is how perceptive they are. Perception is a key element in learning - after all, it’s very near impossible to mimic something if you don’t notice it first. Children notice most things at all times, which as a rule is more than they’re given credit for, likely owing to the fact that they disregard much of this noticing because they’re too efficient to deal with it or they wish to pretend they didn’t notice (like when their parents call them), or they don’t understand what it is they perceived quite yet (like the inherent danger of a car racing down the road). There are things, too, that children probably mimic subconsciously as part of the human evolution of learning to live, but by the time children reach such an age as to be able to record their thoughts these activities are too natural for them to be of any note, and when they’re older still and have begun to view their earlier childhoods with nostalgia, they’ve also begun to forget the ins and outs of what it was like to live that way. (Which is understood to be the cause of nostalgia in the first place.) And so you end up with adults that bury their longing to remember, add nothing to the field of psychology, and have forgotten all the wonders of a childlike mind by the time they raise children of their own and are instead both amused and very frustrated by the lack of comprehension of things that seem so simple and plain to them now. So perhaps it’s not so strange at all for a child to realize something was amiss that their adults didn’t even realize they saw and for them to speak nothing of it. (Children, after all, ask the strangest questions at the most inconvenient of times, but ultimately say little about the potentially very important things like the girl down the road who pushes them into a rose bush everytime they walk by.)
Of course, most of this is merely side detail and certainly all of it was irrelevant to the boy who saw his father slap his mother when he was fifty-three months old.
.
This same boy was born later in the year and consequently only had to wait through three months of kindergarten before he experienced the joy of aging from five years old to six. A few nights after his birthday - for which he was sung to by his classmates and teacher (at her behest) at school - he heard his parents arguing heatedly. It was the continuation of an argument from before his birthday, though he didn’t know this, about whether or he should(‘ve) be(en) allowed to skip going to school that day. His mother thought that it might be a nice day off for him and a pleasant outing for them both, as she wasn’t used to having both her children in school and being home alone for most of the day. And it was only kindergarten, after all. His father cited his son’s education, emphasized his own control, and disparaged the mother for such ridiculous notions. After all, hadn’t she done the same with their daughter every year, and wasn’t the girl now doing poorly in her second grade level reading? Not to mention, the annual free day had gone from a surprise visit to an expectation, and there was nothing worse than spoiling a child.
The next day when the boy went to bid his mother goodbye in the morning, she hoarsely told him that she was sick and she’d see him after school. He tried asking his sister if she knew anything, because even though he was infinitely jealous of the two years between them, he still considered her older sibling wisdom worth listening to on most things. (Even though he’d made a point of ignoring her advice when she’d smugly prattled on about all the things she’d learned from, about, and how to deal with school, he’d still run through a list of what he remembered every day the week before he anxiously stepped foot into the room filled with a veritable sea of children his age.) His sister wouldn’t say anything, however, and kept on walking without turning her head no matter how many times he pulled on their linked hands and wheedled.
That evening after they ate dinner, he saw one side of his mother’s face was darker coloured than usual and her face powder was dense enough that he could actually see it when she bent down to fuss with his cowlick. He reached up curiously to see if the color would smear onto his finger, but she shied away from his hand and stood up, out of reach, as she told him to start the bathwater.
.
There were more things the boy noticed as he aged up through the classes of the neighborhood elementary school. Injuries he started to be able to put words to, from what he read and watched and heard his classmates say. Dark bands and blotches of bruised skin, small cuts on his mother’s arms or above her eye; what a Telecrime detective might call “defensive wounds” peppered his mother’s body like a seasoning her freckles could no longer supply. Other boys would mention their fathers’ belts, but he knew his mother’s choked shout - as her words were cut off and she tried to quieten her pain. He learned the smell of the liquor his father drank on the evenings when he could hear shouts and thumps from the master bedroom down the hall.
The boy found himself a stranger with the people who didn’t know the fear of hearing a door squeak slowly open, and pushing back into the flattened pillows of a dimly lit room to try and escape notice. He found himself estranged from his family: the sister he loved but who turned her gaze to the side or the floor and only told him to never say anything, the mother he loved for her kindness and her thoughtful riddles but who seemed to need this man enough that she couldn’t get him to stay out of their house. The . . father whom he came to watch carefully, to distrust except for his workaholic ways; and slowly, as the bruises layered, to have any positive feelings of awe or respect he’d felt for the man sour into raw, terrified anger.
.
The boy was eight when he realized that the reason his sister wore long sleeved dresses and blouses was to hide the red-black bands of fingers, as large and weighty as shackles on a child’s forearm, that wrapped her wrists.
.
When he was nine, he caught his parents discussing whether his sister should drop out of school. They needed the money, and she could take small jobs as a runner somewhere. The cost of her school supplies, at least, should help. When the voices became too low to make out safely, he went to leave and turned to find his sister on the stairs behind him. They stared at each other with wide, frightened eyes for long moments until a clap of thunder startled them into scuttling down into the ever-dim, cavernous dining room to wait in silence across the width of a table.
Some time later, the announcement came that if she wished to remain in school, his sister would have to find her own way to pay for her lunch. She murmured only a quiet, “Yes, sir,” and ducked her head.
.
The boy spent his weekends after that helping his sister pick berries by the basket, collect recyclables for 5¢ a can, and do odd jobs for the neighbors. They always had a different reason why they needed the money. It would’ve stood out too much in their middle class neighborhood with tidy and comfortable if somewhat small houses, that a family should have to send both their children out every weekend picking trash out of lots and off the roads just to earn their lunch money.
.
It was as the boy’s tenth year was winding to a close that things changed on a dime. He came home after school, earlier than his sister did now that she was in junior high, and the atmosphere of the house told him that his mother wasn’t alone. The air was still and rooms dim and unlit even with the west-facing windows in the brightest part of the day. He made his way carefully to his room, ignoring his growing hunger, and took out his school books for something to do.
It wasn’t long after he heard the careful creak of the door as his sister came home that another door sound - this time a slam - echoed through the house. The boy jolted, his arm sending most of the spread of homework on his table thumping and fluttering to the floor. He held his breath for the better part of a minute, but when no footsteps came heavily up the stairs, he carefully picked up the pages and packets and started again.
A sense of unease grew on him as the dinner hour approached and he heard no sounds of rummaging in the kitchen below. He considered going down himself to join his sister - she hadn’t come up the stairs, so she must be working at the dining table or in the living room - but convinced himself each time that everything was fine at the moment. He heard nothing, and nothing was good. His presence might cause the very type of reaction he wanted to prevent. So he stayed sitting, with increasingly drifting focus.
When he heard the tell-tale squeak of the front screen door for a third time, however, he jumped up almost without thinking and ran to his bedroom door to hover his ear over the wood. He couldn’t make out much in the yelling that followed, except that his mother had gone to the store so she could make dinner - they were usually low on food, but this sounded like there wouldn’t have been anything at all to eat if she hadn’t - and the man was incredibly displeased with this. There was the scrape of a chair leg and his sister’s piercing cry as both the adults’ voices grew louder. The boy opened his door, any noise masked in the tumult, and slowly crept to the landing of the stairs.
He’d just peaked his head around the corner, still not able to see what was happening, when his mother screamed - “Don’t you take her, you--” - and several impacts followed of varying strength, all of them sounding like a body thrown against a hard surface. The background pitch of his sister’s nearly wordless whimpered pleading stopped, and all other sound stopped with it.
For an interminable moment, dead silence reigned and the shadows crept closer along pale walls.
Then there was a sound of rage, the likes of which the boy had never heard before, and the sound of flesh meeting flesh. The boy raced down the stairs, forgoing quiet for the sake of speed. Drawers opened with their contents forcefully rattled, there was a curse from the man, and then the through the entrance to the kitchen from the dining room the boy saw his mother holding a potato peeler, the edge gleaming dimly, facing off against the man who held one hand to his profusely bleeding cheek.
It was the first time the boy had ever fought back against the man, more than the little resistances he could carve out. He grabbed a paring knife and slashed where he could while his mother held the man off. She kept his attention on herself, grappling and slicing and allowing the boy a mostly open guard. The man’s attention had to switch between the two of them, as his wife fought with stunning ferocity and the boy danced just out of reach. When it was over, droplets of blood flecked the kitchen and smeared their clothes in lines and splotches.
The boy moved for the basement stairs where his sister had been tossed, mindlessly numb but purposeful. He knelt beside her crumpled body, tried to carefully move her hair from her face so she could breathe better. It was the unnatural angles of the her limbs and the thought - What if she wasn’t breathing at all? - that finally sent him rattling into the full shock that had overtaken his mother standing over the form of a man a staircase away. His head was fuzzy so that he couldn’t think straight; he must’ve been hit harder than he thought. The knife still gripped tight in his shaking hand seared a line of pain into his palm that he didn’t notice through the blood - the blood on the floor, his sister’s, the blood on the blade, the man’s, and the erratic, drumming sound of his own blood in his ears with the time of his pulse as his heart beat on.
The lights didn’t flicker in the basement like they always had in the house, as though in some kind of sympathy with the man’s rage. The lights didn’t flicker because the basement was hardly lit at all, except by the dull creep of sunlight that made it through the kitchen window and down the stairs until it fell across his feet and his sister’s skirt.
.
The boy was two and a half months past eleven when his mother moved, alone with her son. “What a terrible accident,” the neighbors said, shaking their heads. “The girl in the hospital for so long, and the husband just up and disappeared! And a woman alone!” The others agreed, “Lucky the realtor would take her money at all without her husband to sign. Will she go back to her parents’, do you think? Hopefully they’re nearby . . Hopefully they’re still around.”
The boy and his mother walked past them all with a show of faux calm. They themselves were unseen, though their absence was keenly noted and widely remarked upon. The boy had once found himself a stranger to the living, and now to the dead, too. But he continued to watch over his mother and think of his sister and guard against the thoughts of the man that came with the remembrance of blood in the night.
.
Slowly the boy grew from a child into a stranger, tetherless but forever cemented in the vivid moments of his past. He was excitable and painfully polite, and often selfish as people can be, not out of a sense of malevolence, but a thoughtless disregard for the effect of one’s actions on another. His longing grew and endured to see that house that had been his making and origin in two very separate ways a decade apart, to quell the ghosts that haunted him with the memory of dim rooms and bones under dust.
Some time after he had been long dead, the boy-turned-stranger did, in fact, return to the house. The stranger was too polite to ask for entrance, but the strength of his will ran deep and slipped into the woman who now lived there in the span of one breath and the next, so that the skeptic prevailed upon her husband to open the door wide. The house, he found, had changed a great deal from his memory, in all the minute, important ways. The marks he had long associated with the man’s anger were all erased and light banished the shadows of fear from the rooms; the parents understood one another and communicated in the way infamous to long-married couples, with significant glances and subtle movements. The boy’s room, though, was the one place that felt the same. The taste of memory collected and distilled in the fiber of the wood supports of the walls could not be covered with a coat of fresh paint. It was there, in that room in the house so different and distant from the one that had been his, the stranger felt a connection to himself once again. He felt lighter, younger, full of passion and hope which the dead don’t feel as a mathematical riddle he’d learned decades before came easily to his mind and flowed from his fingertips onto the page. It seemed he recalled the universe in all its obfuscated clarity for the moments he spent drawing infinite triangles . . and then the man’s hand landed heavy on his shoulder, shocking him back to the house that was brighter, better perhaps, but not quite right.
He was herded through the house until he stood in the front doorway and remembered with desperation the basement. But the man wouldn’t let him see the place where his beloved sister had fallen, denied the final wish of a spirit about to be forced to rest, and barred the entrance in all the physical ways he knew how. Locked, shut, cut off from the open air. The stranger had no choice but to leave. And though he felt younger still as he vanished into the street, limp alleviated for the first time since his sister had been slammed into the stone floor, it was not quite enough. The boy was still selfish, and his will knew it and stayed behind.