Lance slowly sat up and tried to focus his eyes, which didn’t want to center on anything in particular. His muscles felt new and weak as he levered himself out of the bed and began to stand. His jaw hurt immensely. He tried to work it down and up, down and up. He imagined a rusty bucket on a backhoe articulating after a winter of being stored in muddy water. After gingerly moving it up and down a few more times, he rose from his bed and wobbled across his room, his father following a few steps behind. Lance could feel his pants sticking to him uncomfortably, both on the back and front, and realized the smell that had been assaulting his nose was emanating from himself.
When he made it to the bathroom, Anthony walked past the doorway, leaving him in relative solitude. Lance leaned against the sink and looked at his gaunt reflection in the mirror. His face was drawn and stark white. His hair looked that much darker because of his paleness. A bluish-purple half-moon had formed around the right side of his jaw just below his ear. He touched it and winced when the slight pressure set off aftershocks of pain that radiated out into the rest of his face.
When Lance stripped off his soiled clothes, he was appalled by what he saw. His bowels seemed to have been working on their own accord over the last week, as his father had so eloquently put it, and he realized now that yes, he had been shittin’ himself. The smell was so overwhelming that he wondered if he might pass out from it, and he put one hand on the back of the toilet to steady himself. When the bout of dizziness had passed, he started a bath and waited until the water had filled to nearly halfway before stepping into the hot water.
Sitting in the water felt glorious. The heat boiled into him and his coiled muscles began to relax. The water soon took on a dingy brown color, and became even more so when he applied a lather to his skin with a sliver of bar soap that had been sitting abandoned on the bathtub’s shelf.
Lance’s thoughts soon became sharpened as the water began to cool, and turned to the subject he had been trying to avoid: his mother. She was gone. Lance had gathered that much, his father had said so. He had said she had run off. That had been a lie and Lance knew it. There was no way his mother would have left him to his father’s rage, no matter the beating she received. She wouldn’t have abandoned him. That left only one option. His father had finally stepped over the line he had been treading on for as long as Lance could remember. He had finally let his anger pull him over the precipice of violence he had never allowed it to before.
His father had killed his mother.
The truth of the idea shocked Lance as he sat huddled in the dirty bathwater, surrounded by his own liquefied filth. It rocked him backward like a physical push, and he rested his wet head against the wall behind him and wept. He wept for his mother and the absence of her newfound strength and caring for him. He wept for the injuries he had sustained a week before that still throbbed, the healing only just beginning. And he wept for the final realization that made his tears course even more quickly down his battered cheeks: the comprehension beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was now truly alone.
Lance sat in the squalid water, crying silent tears of hopelessness as the wind began to pick up in the frigid October afternoon, and gray-shielded clouds rolled across the sun, which closed its eye to everything below.