Without the distraction of the steaming kettle, he could hear, distinctly, from the back room…
It wasn’t. It wasn’t. He tried to calm himself, but it was so much harder now. A child was crying in the back room. Who else’s child could it be?
Apollo’s body seemed to lose all shape. He felt larger, like the size of a star, the sun. A burning gaseous form. Too enormous for the small kitchen of a two-bedroom apartment. Why weren’t walls disintegrating? How soon before the floor and ceiling singed into dust? Why hadn’t the world been burned to ashes instantly? His terror flared hotter than the star at the center of our solar system. I am the god, Apollo! I am the god, Apollo! He rose in his chair. If the bike lock choked him, he couldn’t feel it.
What had been done to his child?
He found his voice, but not his words. He growled at the little man in his kitchen. The one holding the kettle of scalding water. What threat could that pose now? He bellowed at the home invader while in the other room his son squealed. The figure in the kitchen stood in place. It was holding the teakettle not by the handle but in its palm. Its flesh must’ve been burning, but the hand didn’t quiver. The invader finally held his gaze. The creature saw him there, chained in the corner, spitting and raving and rattling his chains.
And now the man in chains could see his attacker clearly.
“Emma?”
In the back room his son’s cries turned into hiccupping shrieks. Brian was six months, but these were the cries of a newborn. That special senseless yelping. They ride one on top of the other, the next one begun before the first has even finished. Not only pain. Also confusion. And such naked weakness. The cries that make a new parent panic right inside the bones.
Emma Valentine had come out of that room.
“Emma,” he tried. “What did you do?”
Maybe nothing yet. Maybe Brian was only terrified and not hurt badly. The weapons were all here in the kitchen, weren’t they? Even in this nightmarish moment, he fussed at a thorn of hope.
She watched him.
The steaming kettle sitting on her palm made her look like a waiter, about to bring a tray to a table. How could she not feel the pain? He could see her palm had turned red. Despite his son’s screams, he could even hear the flesh of her hand roasting. The air smelled like burned charcoal now. And yet his wife registered none of it. She stood in the room, but she wasn’t there.
“It’s been hard on you, Emma,” he began. “I’ve been hard on you.”
He set back on the chair because his vision had been going blurry, and he realized the bike lock could still hurt him even if he couldn’t feel it now.
“You’ve been so broken down, and everything seems to make life feel worse.”
She watched him. She didn’t speak. How could this be his wife? She looked drained, as if her whole soul had been siphoned out. She looked almost green. A likeness of his wife carved out of slate. She stayed there, silent. He thought maybe, deep inside, she wanted him to talk her out of whatever she had planned.
“You’re not the only one. It happens to mothers all the time. Emma, it’s not just you. Kim told us that before you went on the meds. I can hear Brian in there. He still sounds…strong. There’s nothing that happened here that we can’t fix.”
She shuffled and looked away from him. For the first time her hand and the kettle wobbled, as if she finally felt the pain. As if she was coming back to herself.
“Just let me loose. We’ll check on Brian.”
Hearing her son’s name seemed to work on her like some post-hypnotic suggestion. Her head tilted backward as if she’d gone into a trance. Her eyes became electrified. There was his wife. He had her. Appeal to that woman. The mother of Brian. Sister of Kim. Friend of Nichelle. Professional librarian. The woman who’d lived in Brazil. The girl from Boones Mill. His wife. All these versions of her were women who would never willingly hurt her only child.
But Apollo was wrong. He didn’t have her.
With her free hand, Emma grabbed the claw hammer off the counter. She stepped toward Apollo with one fluid motion and drove the hammer’s face into the side of his head. Apollo’s cheekbone cracked. He heard the bone chipping, the sound played loudly inside his skull. And suddenly the right side of his mouth wouldn’t open as easily. His vision shifted, the bottom half going dark, as if his eyeball had just slipped out of its housing. Through the left side of his mouth he pleaded, even as Emma, his wife of five years, dropped the hammer to the floor.
She walked past him now. He rose from the chair again. What pain could compare to what Brian would go through? Nothing. Not one damned thing. He rose in the chair, and the bike lock barked him back down. His weight crashed with such force that one chair leg broke right through the thin wooden floorboard. So now his chair went back down at a new angle, and his throat caught on the bike lock yet again. But this time good posture wouldn’t help. He was like a ship listing to port. He was sinking. The bike lock became a noose. He was going down.
“Don’t hurt Brian,” he pleaded.
His wife walked out of the kitchen.
In the hallway, just before the back room, she turned to him. She raised the kettle of scalding water.
“Don’t hurt my son.”
The child wept and choked and coughed and cried.
“Please don’t hurt my baby,” he begged.
As she stepped back into the darkened room, he sank into a darkness of his own.
Spots appeared in his eyes, and still he strained so hard that blood coughed out of his mouth.
Emma spoke then, clearly and directly.
“It’s not a baby,” she said.
RECOVERY.
The word defined as “the regaining of, or possibility of regaining, something lost or taken away.” Economic recovery. Data recovery. Asset recovery. Common enough terms these days. A plausible matter with information once held on a computer or funds siphoned out of some savings account. Even the human body will validate the noun. For instance, a fractured cheekbone, the result of a hammer shattering it, can be repaired with surgery. A zygomatic orbital fracture (a secondary result of the fractured cheekbone) will require a slight realignment of the eye, but once the eye has been lifted, set back in its proper place, the zygomatic rim can be reconstructed. Within weeks recovery will be noted. Bruising to wrists and elbows and even the throat will not last. Burst blood vessels heal. Topical treatments containing vitamin K applied to the skin are suggested. Bodies recover.
But what about the soul?