Blood on My Hands

CHAPTER 47

THERE WAS A boy who lived with his mother and father and older brother and sister. They were a happy family until one day when his mother was too tired to get out of bed. And then everything began to change. No one spoke about it in front of the boy, but the mood in the house became tense and sad, and his father’s and older brother’s and sister’s faces were always grim. His mother went to the hospital and his sister cried when she made the boy his breakfast and packed him off to school the way his mother used to do.
And the boy felt sad.
His mother came home a few weeks later and soon lost all her hair and took to wearing scarves and hats. She started making his breakfasts again, but often by dinnertime, she was too exhausted to cook. At first there were still moments when she was happy and full of energy, but gradually they were outweighed by days when she was exhausted and the house was gloomy and quiet.
It went on that way for a while, and then one day his mother went back to the hospital. A few days later the boy’s father took him to the hospital and the boy saw sad faces on the nurses and doctors when he went down the hall, holding his father’s hand. The boy and his father went into a room and there was his mother in bed, only she looked more like a grandmother and was now wrinkled and pale and thin. She held his hand and cried and the boy knew something very bad was happening.
Then the boy’s father walked with him back to the car and it was the first time the boy had ever seen his father cry. And the boy felt very, very sad.
At the funeral, with many crying people, the boy watched his mother’s casket go into the ground, but it was hard to believe that she was really inside it.
For a while the boy lived in his house without a mother, and his father and sister and brother tried to do the things his mother had done, but of course, they could not do any of them as well. And then a new woman started to come around, and after a while, the boy was introduced to her children, and then one day there was a big party and the woman and her children moved in with them.
At first things seemed better again. His father was happier. The new woman wasn’t the same as the boy’s mother, but by then the boy understood that his mother wasn’t coming back. So he tried to pretend that the woman would be his new mother and he tried to get along with his new brothers and sisters. Then the new woman had a baby and suddenly the boy had a half sister named Alyssa.
A few years passed and then his father wasn’t happy anymore and there was yelling and fighting—things the boy had never heard at home before.
And then the new woman and her children left, and while things at home once again became melancholy and quiet, at least it was peaceful. The boy and his sister and brother grew older and made friends and spent more time outside the family. The boy never stopped feeling sad, but slowly he built a wall against the memories and tried to stay on the other side of the wall as much as he could. Sometimes he would think of his mother, and an invisible door would open unexpectedly and he would be pulled back through it and into the gloom, but after a while, he could always go back through the door to the other side.
Then the boy met a girl and everything changed. For the first time since his mother had died, he truly believed that he might be able to stay on the good side of the wall forever. And even when the invisible door opened, as it still did now and then, he found that thanks to her, he could usually grab the doorframe and pull himself back out.
By then his brother and sister had moved on, leaving him with Alyssa and his father, whose life was drywall, and the EMS squad, and the television, and a bottle. Deep down the boy had always known that drywall and the EMS squad would be his life, too. That his father was depending on him. That he was the tape and mud that held the gypsum boards of his father’s life together. That without him it would all collapse in a heap.
And the boy believed he had no choice in this matter. His deepest, greatest fear was that if Lamont Drywall and the EMS squad ended, his father would end, too. He had already experienced the loss of one parent and could not bear the thought of going through that again. Besides, now he had Callie, and as long as he had her, things would be okay.
Then high school ended and it was time for him to serve in the armed forces, just as every Lamont had since the First World War. And this, too, he had always known he would do, regardless of whether he believed in it. But he had a secret, a bad knee he’d carefully exercised to keep strong but had started to neglect, hoping that it would grow weaker and eventually get him sent home.
So he did the things he didn’t want to do, went far away from home to train for a war he didn’t understand and wasn’t sure he believed in. And he was homesick and missed Callie horribly and counted not only the days but the hours and minutes until he could go back home and see her again.
And then, just a few weeks before he was supposed to go home, she called one night and, out of what felt like nowhere, said they were through and she didn’t want to see him again. It made no sense. He felt as if he’d been blindsided. Suddenly the wall he had built collapsed and the sadness came rushing at him and enveloped him and he had nothing to grab on to. He flailed helplessly in the dark, went into shock, and became numb with disbelief. He called and wrote to Callie, but she didn’t answer. It seemed unspeakably cruel and heartless for her to have broken up with him so abruptly and unexpectedly, without giving him a chance to respond.
And then, to make everything even worse, he learned that his unit would be sent overseas, to support the troops at war. He stumbled through the final weeks of Guard training like a zombie and then went home, determined to confront Callie in person, but before he could, someone else appeared in his life. Someone familiar. And she told him what he’d both suspected and feared—that while he’d been away, the girl he loved had quietly begun to see someone else.
The news was excruciating, like salt poured into a wound already too deep and painful to survive, and it produced an anger in him so extreme that he was not sure he could control it. And yet he wasn’t entirely surprised. He’d seen it happen to others in his barracks. Now it was his turn.
Frightened by his own anger, and unsure that he could stand Callie’s lying to him about this other guy, he decided not to confront her. Instead, he followed the example his father had set: he tried to become numb and threw himself into work, meanwhile hoping that his bad knee might prevent him from being deployed. Like his father, he might have resigned himself to nights in front of the TV, but that other girl made it clear that she had more than gossip to share with him. In fact, she had something to offer that might save his life.