Up on four, nothing had changed. Had the drill only been on the second floor?
As I approached the waiting room my family was in, a cheer went up from them and my blood rushed with the tingle of adrenaline. There stood a version of my family I’d never seen, because the Drazens didn’t huddle in a group hug so tight you couldn’t identify every participant. They didn’t jump up and down together at this time of night. Not my mother. Not Sheila. My father wasn’t inside the hug’s circle but stood with his hands pressed together, head bowed over them, eyes closed as if in prayer. A part of my brain became electrified when I saw my father in that pose.
“Dad!” I ran to him.
He didn’t move. I knew he’d seen me before he closed his eyes over his hands. “Daddy, what have you done?” I asked.
I smelled Antonio, and a forest, and saw my father with the sounds of a thousand birds behind him.
The memory had been activated by an algorithm of input.
The memory of the boy in the forest. The one who came all over my shirt and slapped me. The one who had been found at the bottom of a ravine with a broken neck. The first boy who kissed me like a man. The first one who got his fingers inside me and shocked me by making me come. That boy. I’d laid his death in my father’s lap, because all the facts clicked together, but when Dad folded his hands in prayer because Jonathan was obviously going to live, the whole memory came to me. I’d blamed my father not because he was capable of murder, but because I hadn’t been able to deal with the fact that I was.
The ravine, and the boy twisted at the bottom, and Dad next to me with his hands folded and saying, “What have I done?”
Me, looking at my own hands and feeling their power. A brown button sat in the center of my right palm. I’d pulled it off when I’d yanked the boy by the shirt and thrown him over a cliff. It was so clear now. Dad had arranged a meeting to simply threaten him, and I’d shown up. I’d swung him by the shirt, using his weight and surprise against him, and let go. Just let go and watched.
“What have I done?” he’d said. Dad had wanted to know what kind of animal he’d raised.
I’d killed that boy. I’d killed him for leaving a swirl of prematurely released semen on my shirt and slapping me. I’d killed him for our shame. I’d been a murderer way before I met Paulie Patalano.
Antonio hadn’t made me a killer. Violence was in my blood, my skin, the sinews of my heart.
Dad put his hands down, and the memory shattered, like a painted window broken to reveal an entire landscape beyond.
He opened his eyes. “They found a heart. He’s going to be fine.”
I pressed my hand to my chest as if checking for my own heart. “I need to know,” I said while no one was listening. “Antonio. Where is he? What deal did you make?”
“Two of my children are saved tonight,” he said. “That was the deal I made.”
If I stayed to grill him further, I would get sucked into my family’s joy, and I didn’t have time. Antonio didn’t have time.
forty-four.
theresa
didn’t know where I was running to with my stolen clipboard and nothing but forward momentum. He had to be alive. Had to be. The life would be sucked from my world if he was removed from it. I had hope, and I clung to it like the last dollar to my name. He had to be alive. He had to be. I trusted him to live.