Just Fall (8 page)

Rob never did make sense of it. It went on for years, that same grotesque cycle. The prick would drink then lose it, he would beat the crap out of her, there would be tears and murmurs and then the animal sounds that Rob learned were the noises of make-up sex. He hated it. Hated how passive his mother was, hated even more the fact that the bastard hit her and then she kissed him, consoled him, fucked him. Hated how the bastard would inflate afterward, proud of himself, that motherfucking cock of the walk, delighted with his dominance and her submission. It twisted Rob’s guts into knots every time.

When he was fourteen, he tried to talk to her about it. His stepfather was at work. Rob came into the master bedroom as his mother was putting the final touches on her outfit for a lunch at their country club. He watched as she pulled a baby-blue cashmere cardigan over her elegant, sleeveless sheath dress, carefully hiding the latest set of bruises that marred her narrow shoulders and soft upper arms. She gasped when she realized he was standing in the doorway watching her.

“Do you need something, baby? Some cash?”

“No. Not cash.”

And then he launched in; he at least had to try. Surely there were options; surely this merry-go-round of rage, abuse, tears, and reconciliation could be abandoned, along with the creep who perpetuated it. But his mother didn’t see it that way. She sighed. She twisted her fingers. She explained that he was too young to understand, that despite it all, she knew her husband was a good man, a man who worked hard and provided for them both, and if he didn’t always handle his stress so well? She was willing to live with that. She loved him. She knew he didn’t mean it. As she explained that he always,
always
apologized after, Rob felt disembodied, as though his spirit had risen out of his body and was watching this whole sordid scene from miles away. He tried to get her to see, but her face shut down and she changed the subject.

After that he stopped trying. He spent more and more time away from the house, avoided his stepfather when they crossed paths, tried for dinner alone with his mom at least once a week, even when she didn’t seem that interested. His stepfather seemed amused by his self-imposed exile, which only made it easier to stay away. And so it went. Rob kept his distance and his mom and stepfather danced their ugly little dance.

So began Rob’s campaign of subversive disruption. A near fire in the school science lab, a result of fucking around with the Bunsen burner. A spray-painted caricature of his headmaster, both accurate and cruel, on the school’s tennis court. Missed classes and a bad attitude. After a while, Rob needed to up the stakes. He got more aggressive. A fight in the boys’ bathroom left a kid with a broken jaw, and Rob was expelled. He was lectured and grounded and then his stepfather paved the way (paid the way) for Rob to attend another elite private school.

There he met Spencer. The two of them together were a conflagration just waiting for a spark. Spencer was the son of a local career politician. He had spent his childhood “smiling for the camera” and now turned that smile into a snarl. The two teens drank, smoked pot and cigarettes. They abused Spencer’s Adderall and raided Rob’s mother’s supply of Vicodin; her prescriptions were plentiful and she never noticed.

They pretended they were thugs, listening to rap music and letting their pants slink low on their hips; everything was “yo” this and “bitch” that, as they shaped their hands into gang signs and rolled fat blunts. They had no idea how pathetic they really were: two rich, privileged white boys pretending to be street.

They had big dreams. They were going to New York together and they were going to own that town. Supermodels and Cristal and Ferraris and yachts.

When they were driving wasted one icy night, toasting their future with a case of beer and a couple of bumps of Adderall, Spencer’s brand-new BMW, his sixteenth-birthday present from his parents, spun out on the ice as Spencer took a sharp curve way too fast.

The BMW drifted across the median in a lazy 360-degree spin, once, twice—before broadsiding a 1996 Chevy Impala. The driver, a retired electrician, was in the hospital for three weeks. Broken leg. Punctured lung. A lot of talk about what a miracle it was he wasn’t killed.

Rob’s stepfather and Spencer’s dad settled with the electrician, who was persuaded to take the more-than-generous sum offered. And sign an NDA.

The criminal charges were also dropped, a relatively simple call to a friend. A favor owed. Or paid. Currency was fluid in these circles.

His stepfather now acted as if he owned Rob; he had cleaned up the boys’ shit and Rob had to pay the price. The violence inflicted on Rob’s mother became even more casual. Sometimes the bastard just liked making her flinch. A raised hand, the sudden bark of an order, a slammed door. Then he would laugh as she cringed, and try his hardest to goad Rob into doing something about it. Call him a pussy when Rob fled the room, jaw frozen, fists balled.

Rob, seething with rage and impotence, became more reckless. He was caught dealing drugs at school, suspended again. When he was caught a second time, he was threatened with another expulsion. His stepfather came into the headmaster’s office, slid a check across the desk.

The headmaster’s eyes widened. The next thing Rob knew, his stepfather seized Rob by the scruff of his neck, hoisted him to his feet. The powerful man in the two-thousand-dollar suit locked eyes with the headmaster, who nodded meekly once before looking away—and then did not raise his eyes as Rob was hauled out of there, his kicking, protesting feet flailing against the marble floors, his one cry of “Stop” silenced by the sharp crack of a backhand that split Rob’s lip.

Rob’s mother was waiting in the car. Silent. Angry. Worried. They drove home. Rob slouched, surly, in the back, his mother twisting the handkerchief she had offered him (and he had refused) into tighter and tighter knots, his stepfather a thundercloud with two hands on the wheel and a heavy foot on the gas. Rob spat a globule of blood down the front of his impeccable white school uniform shirt. It was even bloodier that night when his stepfather was done with him.

The beating only made Rob more defiant.

Rob’s mother and stepfather rode a carousel of fundraisers. A steady rotation of cancer research, animal rights, and historical preservation initiatives, with a sprinkling of election season Republicans. One Saturday night, eighteen days into Rob’s house arrest (as he called it), Rob took advantage of “Save the Duck or Whatever the Fuck” (as he later named it to Spencer, feeling clever).

Rob snuck out of the house and bicycled over to Spencer’s, where the two played pool and drank vodka (keeping track of the bottle level and filling it with water before replacing it in the liquor cabinet). For both, who had been bitch-slapped and unjustly imprisoned for varied offenses, it was the best night they had had in weeks.

Later. Rob glided up to his house silently, dismounting his bike in one fluid motion and walking it through the side yard, toward the shed. The enormous garden was peaceful and pretty in the darkness, the bright blooms muted violet and indigo. Rob left the bike leaning and walked softly toward the back door. He slipped in through the kitchen. He glanced at the alarm pad. Disarmed.

He noticed his stepfather’s keys and his mother’s sparkly little handbag on the kitchen counter. He glanced at the clock. It was early, not even midnight; they had said they would be home around two. His heart quickened. Had they come early to check on him? Or had they lied about coming home by two in order to set him up? Rob slipped off his shoes and crept across the kitchen. If he could just get into bed…maybe they hadn’t checked his room yet…

Rob crept into the central hallway. An ominous murk filled the big house, a thick fugue of feeling. It felt like dread. Naming it sent a tingle down Rob’s spine, a voodoo doll stab.

Rob switched on the hall light. He shook off his nerves. Fuck it if he was caught. So what? He needed light in this fucking house.

The cut crystal teardrops of the elegant chandelier shimmered. Rob crossed under it to the great room. Flicked the switch. A series of recessed ceiling lights illuminated the expensively framed art but revealed the room was empty. A pair of martini glasses sat on the coffee table. Rob crossed to them. One was empty. Rob slugged back the dregs of the other.

The dining room was silent, sixteen empty chairs around the handsome antique table. His stepfather’s office, empty. The media room, the pantry, the laundry room, the guest bath. He hurried through them all, leaving all the lights on, increasingly frantic, an unknown fear poisoning his belly, snaking up around his heart. Rob ran up the stairs to the second floor.

The thick spray of blood on the apricot-colored wall was the first tangible piece of evidence. Then the hank of his mother’s glossy hair, curled on the hardwood with a scrap of bloody scalp still attached. Terror flooded his body; he sprinted down the hall to his mother’s bedroom and flung open the door. The room was dark, the blinds drawn, the lights off. His eyes refused to adjust, and while he was still struggling to make out the shapes before him, his mother’s low keening hit him like a blow. He snapped on the light.

The first thing he saw was the shattered dresser mirror, scattered about the opulent room and refracting the light in a crazy quilt of directions. Then the kaleidoscope of bloody images it reflected. He stepped in the room and saw the lump of blood and bone and pain that had been his mother. Her eyes were dull; one of her front teeth had been knocked out and she showed it to him in her outstretched hand.

In a few panicked steps he was by her side, kneeling, pulling his T-shirt over his head to staunch the blood flowing from her mouth, her nose, the gaping wound on her head.

“Is he still here?” he asked in whisper.

She didn’t answer, just looked up at him with those dead, dazed eyes and continued the low animal moans that had first greeted him.

“Mom. Listen to me. Is he still in the house?”

She reluctantly made eye contact with him. Mumbled a reply distorted by her broken, bloody mouth. He didn’t understand, made her repeat it.

“Do you think they can fix my tooth?”

Panic gripped Rob, bile flooding his mouth, as he heard a flush from the bathroom and then a stumble and a curse. He cast his eyes about wildly, looking for something he could use as a weapon, finally seizing on a razor-sharp shard of mirror glass with its violent, jagged edge. He wrapped his now bloody T-shirt around his hand to protect it from the glass. He gestured to his mother that she should be quiet, not sure she comprehended. He flicked the light back off and crouched down low behind the side of the dresser, where he knew he could not be seen from the doorway to the bathroom. He realized he was panting loudly, his heart thudding in his chest, and he breathed in and out, in and out, in and out, long and slow, willing his body to settle, his brain to cool.

There he was. A looming shadow. He stumbled again and grabbed the doorframe to steady himself, cursing, leaving a bloody handprint. Then he strode over to where Rob’s mother crouched and kicked her in her stomach. It was the casual nature of the brutality that made Rob react. That and his mother’s passivity. She didn’t cry or beg him to stop, she didn’t even try to protect her soft belly. She just took it. Like she deserved it. Like she expected it. Like she wanted it.

Rob sprang to his feet with a grunt and flung himself at the bastard, slashing wildly with the shard of mirror. He caught him right above the eye and the blood flowed, blinding him. Rob took full advantage, slashing at the arms his stepfather had wrapped protectively over his face, and then as they came down, at his throat, leaving a welter of nicks and cuts. His stepfather bellowed with fury and launched himself at Rob, tumbling them both to the floor. Rob’s head smacked hard; the bloody shard dropped from his fingers. For a moment, he felt dizzy and winded. But as his stepfather scrambled to his knees, swearing, rearing back to give leverage to the fist he had aimed at Rob’s face, Rob grasped at the piece of mirror and shoved it, as hard as he could, into the man’s throat. Blood spurted; the hand that had been clenched in a fist opened and clutched at the wound. Shock swamped the eyes that moments ago had only known drunken fury. And as he tumbled off Rob and onto the thick carpet beside him, Rob could hear his mother’s anguished cry.

“Please! Don’t hurt him! Please! Stop it!”

Rob turned to look at her, knowing that she was trying to protect him, that finally she had had enough. Instead, he saw that she was crawling toward her husband, weeping. And that her imploring had not been for him, her only son, but for the man who had nearly killed them both.

Ellie stares at the ocean, digging her toes into the warm sand. This strip of beach is nearly empty, a couple of hard-core, leathery tanners prostrate in sun worship, a young mother and her toddler digging with yellow plastic shovels and a bright red pail. A translucent pink crab scuttles by Ellie’s feet. Her newly brown hair is wind-blown dry and pulled into a ponytail, her blue eyes startling against the rich mahogany tones. Her crystal-adorned fake nails glint madly in the sun. She tries to pick them off, but they are firmly affixed. She needs another run to the Dollar General store; she wants to change up her appearance even more.