Eleven Years Ago
“DON’T LET OWL KILL ME, baby.”
Nina’s tears bled out of her eyes as she clutched the collar of my damp wife-beater, clinging onto me for dear life. I only wore wife-beaters when I came to visit her. It wasn’t like anyone there was going to appreciate my collection of flamboyant YSL men’s T-shirts or suede shoes. “You gotta do something about him. He’s hitting me real hard. See these marks? See ’em? He’s going to end me. Are you gonna just sit around and let it happen?”
“You should leave him.” I took off the sleeveless undershirt and tossed it over her bed. I was done weeding her huge-ass garden and was getting ready to make the three of us some dinner. “Come with me to California. Mom wouldn’t mind.”
“Helen is not your mother, Dean. I am.”
There was no point arguing, but that didn’t mean I agreed with that statement.
She always dragged me into her marital shit, every single summer without failure. I swear she thought of me as a hybrid between a bodyguard and personal assistant. Couldn’t blame her, though. I constantly tried to save her. To protect the person who compromised me.
That night, Owl came home drunk. Nothing out of the ordinary. He may not have been a junkie like Nina, but he sure as hell liked his bourbon on a hot summer night. He crawled into their bed, slurring and swearing. I heard everything from my room across the hall as I lay in bed with their neighbors’ daughter, Tiffany. She snuck into my room every night through the window. It was a one-story, barn-like house. I had bite marks all over my fists from stifling her moans to prove it, but no one asked what they were or where they came from, because no one gave a shit.
Come to think of it, no one gave a shit about anything under that roof.
Muffled shrieks and sobbing filled my ears, and I couldn’t concentrate on our make-out session, failing to elevate things from dry-hump territory.
“This crap is going to drive me nuts all night,” I groaned, brushing away some of the hair that fell on Tiff’s face so I could see her lust for me better. This time, the rusty springs on their mattress didn’t scream. Something was different. It was the first time my intuition was so strong, it burned me from the inside.
“Your aunt is a mess,” Tiffany retorted, climbing atop of me, straddling my hips with her thighs and grinding against my dick.
She didn’t know Nina was my mother. My parents made sure Nina kept her mouth shut.
I heard the smack of skin hitting skin. I heard Nina yelp in horror, and then her trying to get away, bumping into furniture, shit falling to the floor. Placing both hands on Tiffany’s waist, I moved her aside and got up.
“I’m going to check and see that everything is okay.”
“Nothing is ever okay in this place,” Tiff said, slumped on my bed. She wasn’t wrong. Everybody knew the Whittakers in this minuscule village. Knew that Nina was a drug addict with pupils like saucers and that Owl drank his own body weight every night and that they were both losing money trying to pay for the mortgage on this land every year. Guess most people prayed they’d finally have to call it quits on this little adventure, sell the property, and move the fuck away.
“Let me rephrase.” I clasped the door handle, half my body already in the hallway. “I don’t want Owl to kill Nina on my watch. Better?”
“He won’t kill her.” Tiff scooted up the bed until her back hit the wall and lit a cigarette, making herself comfortable.
“That’s right, because I’m about to make sure of it myself.” Thwack! Another hit and another yelp pierced the air from the far end of the hallway. I stalked toward their room.
“You don’t want to do that,” Tiffany called behind me, blowing clouds of smoke like she didn’t have a care in the world. “They’re insane. You’ll get yourself into trouble.”
She was right, of course, but I didn’t want to listen. Protect the strays, a voice inside my head recited. Even the person who made you one.
As soon as I walked in the room, Owl threw a vase at me. And missed. That was enough to turn my rage switch on and pull me into the situation without thinking of the consequences. I lunged at him with balled fists, punching his gut mercilessly as I crouched down, immobilizing him completely, not giving a fuck if an inner organ exploded.
“Just fucking stop it,” I demanded on a scream. “Touch my mom one more time and I’m breaking every goddamn bone in your pathetic body.”
My mom. Sweet Jesus. I needed a good dose of a reality check with a generous side portion of spine.
“You tell him, boy!” Nina yelled from her throne on the bed, straddling a pillow, and at that time, I didn’t stop to think about how she looked perfectly okay. Composed, fresh-faced, and mark-free. How she looked so turned on by all of this. And how sick the whole situation really was. “Kill him, Dean! Kill him!”
I broke his nose.
“Show him not to mess with me!”
Mounting him in a crucifix position, another elbow flew across his face. It was the first time she truly acknowledged me, and her voice didn’t reek of boredom when she spoke to me. And I took it. Swallowed the fishing rod along with the fucking bait. Thwack! Whack! Slap!
I was strong. I was athletic. I was capable of finishing his old ass in less than two minutes, it wasn’t even funny.
“Kill him for me, baby!”
“Dean! No. Stop.” I heard Tiffany’s stifled voice from the door. What the hell was she doing there? Not that I particularly cared if they knew she snuck into their house, but she could get into a shit-ton of trouble. Her father was the village’s pastor. “Get off of him. You’re going to kill him. Do you really wanna end up in jail? This guy is insane!”
I kept hitting Owl, but not with the same gusto as before, noticing that he never once tried to fight me. He just took it. And Owl never took any shit from anyone. Least of all me.
My movements slowed down before dying completely, as Tiffany’s quivering voice grew firmer and sharper.
“You really want to get arrested? Is it worth it? Are they worth it?” she pleaded, pressing her palms together. She had a point.
I straightened my spine, hearing Nina shouting in the background, “Shut up, bitch! Get the hell outta here! Do it, Dean! Do it!”
That was when I noticed the camera.
I stood up, my feet unsteady. Owl was underneath me. His face was so blood-soaked, I couldn’t make out his eyes from his nose, or even lips through all this mess. I hadn’t even noticed that my wife-beater was drenched in gore, and it wasn’t mine. I looked straight into the camera. The red dot flickered at me. Almost taunting. Nina held it in one hand and yelled at me to kill him, her voice hoarse from screaming.
Film running.
Act one – record your spawn committing a crime.
Act two – blackmail him with the videotape.
Act three – get rich and bail out on his ass again, this time starting over somewhere new.
The End.
My biological mother never took a picture of me. She never recorded a video of my first step, first word, or any birthdays. Not to mention even owned an album where you could find a picture of my face. But here she was, recording me in my plea to save her. Framing me. Pulling me down into the abyss that swallowed her chance to be a someone in this life.
“The fuck are you doing with that thing, Nina?” I asked, taking one step toward her. My voice was cold, and even though the adrenaline was sizzling in my bloodstream, I was no longer angry. She did it. After all this time, she managed to staple that dark chip onto my shoulder. I would live with it—and die with it—because of her. “You have one second to explain, and it better be good.”
“This is attempted murder,” she slurred. God, she was high. Bitch was all over the place. “I can put you in prison for a very long time for something like this, son.”
“Son?” Tiffany gasped behind me. Fuck. She was still there. Part of me wanted her to leave me alone. A bigger part wanted her to stay so she could serve as my witness. I tilted my head sideways and smiled. Because it finally dawned on me.
My mother was the devil.
My mother hated me.
My mother envied me.
And my mother was never going to stop unless she was stopped. By me.
“You really think you can pull this shit off?” I chuckled. I wanted to scare her, and by the way her face collapsed into a frown, I knew I’d succeeded. “C’mon now, Nina. You’re a goddamn mess. Don’t let my chivalry confuse you.”
She lowered the camera, just by a few inches, taken aback by how well-spoken I was. Yeah, I definitely wasn’t the same polite, wide-smile bastard who wanted to please her. The penny had dropped, and with it, any type of sympathy I’d had for her. I realized that she was going to piss all over my future if I was going to let her have this hold on me.
“Put that fucking thing down, Nina.” I walked over to her nightstand and took out a blunt, lighting it casually, her camera still following me. “I won’t ask twice, and trust me when I say, you don’t want my dad to find out about this.”
Owl cried in pain on the floor, and I kicked him, the rolled blunt still between my lips. “Shut the fuck up, asshole.”
“Should I call an ambulance?” Tiff asked, biting her fingernails, still leaning against the doorframe. I cracked my neck and sighed.
“Owl brought this shit on himself by listening to his junkie, brain-dead wife. Let her take care of him. So, this is how you wanna play it?” I made the necessary steps to Nina, grabbed the recorder, took out the tape, and tore it to tiny shreds, before throwing the camera to the floor and smashing it into a fucking flatbread with my foot. “You wanna blackmail me with a stupid tape?”
Nina’s pupils were dancing in their sockets. Reality started to sink in for her, and it wasn’t pretty. I tipped the ash from the blunt on her sheets, exhaling smoke through my flared nostrils.
“Well?” I growled in her face. “You gonna talk, or what?”
Up until that point, I didn’t know about Walmart. I didn’t know she had abandoned me. I didn’t know she went to get fucking cigarettes and a beer right after she left me to die, naked and screaming, in a public restroom. My parents saved all the juicy parts for themselves, and I didn’t blame them. Their version of things was far easier to digest: Nina had a drug problem. She couldn’t take care of me. So she gave me to them, knowing that they would love me fiercely. Which they did.
“Like you were even going to miss this money!” she screamed in my face, pushing me away. “You got everything! They give you everything, goddammit!” Her Southern twang deepened.
“They do, because you didn’t.” It was my turn to raise my voice. I tried hard not to fling my arms around. To stay composed. But the need to kick something was intense. And Owl was right there, but he was starting to look a little purple so I didn’t want to push it. Nina shot up from her bed.
“That’s right. I didn’t. I threw your ass where you belong. In the toilet. Because you were nothing and a no one!”
The blunt almost fell out of my mouth.
“What?”
She repeated herself. Then shouted the rest of the story of my birth at me. Then she proceeded to cry and attend to her husband, mumbling to him that everything was going to be okay. Tiffany still stood at the door, watching me with a mixture of pity, pain, and horror.
“Get out of here.” I jerked my chin at Tiffany. “Now.”
“But, Dean…”
“OUT!” I yelled, pointing in the direction where the front door was. “I fucking mean it. It’s over.”
And it was. Every single thing about this part of my life was done.
I got on a plane back home the next day and never set foot in Alabama again. As far as I was concerned, the state ceased to exist on the U.S. map.
The fun-loving, happy guy I was died there, too.
And I was present at his funeral. It took place every single fucking day from that point forward.
In my mind.