“You’re having nightmares,” Mia says. “You think I don’t hear you talking in your sleep? That I don’t notice you getting up and checking doors?”
“My sleep problems are my own business,” he says. “Please. I know you all mean well, but this isn’t going to help me.”
“There’s also Maisey,” Mia says.
“What does she have to do with any of this?”
“Tony. Look at me.” His mother is so incredibly calm. She reminds him of the maple out back that holds his treehouse. Her roots run deep into the earth. She sways with the wind but never breaks.
And yet, it’s her voice he hears screaming in his flashbacks and his nightmares. Hers. Theresa’s. Vanessa. Jess. Barb. Mia. All of them were there that night. All of them know what he did. The thing they’ve never talked about. The thing they inexplicably want to talk about now.
“I was too broken to talk to you right after,” his mother says now. “I sent you to the counselor to do what I should have done myself. I am sorry for that.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he says. His voice is rough in his throat, sandpaper. The words hurt him. His breathing hurts him. All their eyes on him, the weight of their collective memory, hurts him.
Vanessa and Jess wrap their arms around each other. Mia’s face is wet with tears. Even Barb’s sun-weathered face is creased with grief.
But his mother continues, perfectly calm. “It never occurred to me to ask you what you remember about that night. What you believe. You were only a child, Tony. I’m not sure if you realize that.”
“I was twelve!” His voice sounds angry, the rage he feels at himself breaking through his reserves. “Old enough to know what I was about.”
“Same age as Elle is now,” Mia says, very softly. “Think on that, Tony.”
“Not even a big twelve,” Barb agrees. “I could still take you in a fight.”
“We were all bigger than you,” Vanessa says, “except for Mia.”
Tony closes his eyes. In his memory, in his dreams, he’s always the size he is now. Six foot two, two hundred pounds of highly capable muscle. With their words, he has a sudden flash of himself at twelve, a skinny kid. Bookish. Shy.
It’s too much of a shift for him. He shakes his head. “Old enough to think of something else.”
Theresa gets up and crosses the room to him, takes his hands. He lets her, surprised to discover that hers have age spots. She’s fifty-three and was twenty-six the night it happened.
Which is another trick his memory has played. He always sees her as a terrified child, huddled in the corner with the rest of his sisters. She was home for Thanksgiving, he remembers now. Had moved out the day after she graduated from high school.
“I’ve always felt guilty,” Theresa says. “I took off as soon as I was legal and left the rest of you in that house. I didn’t have the guts to do what you did. I wish to God I had been the one to pull the trigger.”
Her words carry him back to the cramped living room of the run-down house in Seattle. His sisters are all weeping silently, huddled in a little knot at the end of the sofa, as far away from his father as they can get.
The TV is blaring, but it can’t shut out his mother’s voice, pleading, or his father’s, threatening.
She’s on her knees, and her eye is swelling shut from where he punched her.
Tony, man-size and powerful, holds a gun in his hands. He aims it, a deadly marksman, at his father’s chest and pulls the trigger. The recoil. The blood. The smell of gunpowder.
But Theresa keeps talking, and her words change the picture.
“You were such a stringy little kid,” she says. “Even at twelve. You hadn’t hit your growth spurt yet.”
“And those glasses!” Barb’s voice adds in. “Too big for his face. Like Harry Potter.”
“You couldn’t see properly that night because he’d blackened your eye and broken your nose before he started in on Mom. Your nose was pouring blood all down your shirt.”
“No,” Tony says. “No, it wasn’t like that at all.”
“It was exactly like that,” Vanessa and Jess say together.
“Defiant,” Barb says. “All of us girls were trying to hide. But not you. You marched out of the room, a little wobbly from the head punches, and came back with the gun.”
Flashes of memory come at Tony from all directions. He can’t look at any of them very long, they’re like a strobe light. Pain in his eye. Blurred vision. Blood gushing from his nose down the front of his shirt. Nausea twisting in his belly.
And the blurred image of his father, yanking his mother’s head back by the hair.
Tony gasps, leans back against the wall behind him. “He had a knife,” he says. “I’d forgotten the knife.”
“You saved me,” his mother says, her calm voice cutting through the haze of his growing panic. “Maybe all of us. He was crazy drunk and into some kind of drugs, I think. I don’t know, but he was worse that night than he’d ever been. Paranoid. He said I’d been cheating on him. He said he would kill me first, and then all of you, one by one.”
Tony’s knees give way, and he slides down the wall, letting the floor and the wall hold muscles that don’t know what to do anymore. He is weeping in a way he didn’t know was possible, as if something lodged deep inside his gut is trying to tear itself loose.
And then Theresa is on the floor beside him, with her arms around him, and she is weeping also. And then all of his sisters pile on, one after the other, like it’s a football game and he’s the quarterback. He’s buried in a pile of soft arms and hair and perfume and tears, but it’s all right. They are there because they love him.
A long time later, when the tears stop and the girls are all sitting on the floor around him, he says, “I remember it all so different.”
“I wish I had asked,” his mother says. “You don’t owe us anything, my son. You saved us. We owe you.”
“I don’t know what that means,” he answers.
“It means,” Mia says, irrepressible and already laughing through her tears, “that you can stop being such an idiot of a martyr and take Maisey out on a date.”
“You’re a crazy girl,” Tony says. But in his heart, he begins to think that maybe, possibly, he might do exactly that.
Chapter Thirty-Four
One day flows into another, and we flow with them.
Marley and JB have moved into a house just outside of town, one with a couple of acres and their own small, personal forest. She says she can breathe out there and is working on clearing away too many years of ugly. Turns out JB is more teddy bear than bouncer, unless something is a threat to Marley.
As for the rest of her band, they weren’t too excited about Colville. She says they can suck it up. She can find new people either here or in Spokane. It’s not like she even wants to be big-time; she just likes to make music. She’s teaching guitar lessons and waitressing for now, but she is talking about going back to school. She says she doesn’t care what she studies, as long as she studies something. She always wanted a college degree.
Geoff succeeded in his bid to have Greg’s custody suit heard here in Colville. He’s also managed to get the date set for the first week of October. That way, he says, the best interests of the child are more likely to have her continue the school year here, especially if things are going well.
We are now two weeks in, and so far Elle is happy. She says school is still boring, and she still wants to homeschool, but she gets that it will be better for the court thing if she’s enrolled in regular classes for now. She’s making friends, and she’s in band and choir and drama.
As for me, I’m still at loose ends. Dad’s cognitive state is pretty good, in general, although he never has gone back to work. He reads a lot, sleeps a lot, takes long walks around the neighborhood. So he doesn’t require much care from me, apart from cleaning the house and making meals.