STAINED
I CONSIDER GOING TO school late. But as I sit down on the couch, the warmth slowly returning to my body, I realize I’d rather just sit here and do nothing. I slink out of my boots and gloves and scarf and coat. They sit there, forming a puddle on the floor. Like I’ve melted away and all that remains is this small pile of personal effects.
I sink into the couch cushions, their soft, massive arms folding around me. My eyelids feel so heavy, like I’ve been drugged by the day. I try to keep them open, but they drift and set, as they often do, on that pesky faded grape juice stain, before closing.
When I open my eyes again, I’m ten years old. It’s Sunday morning. Cartoons on TV. I’ve just stashed Callie in our bedroom. I closed the door behind me quickly and stood there in the hallway trying to become invisible, trying to blend in like a chameleon, fading into my surroundings, becoming undetectable.
“What, you think you’re a tough guy, huh?” He pushed Aaron. Hard. “Big man, are you?”
Aaron had thrown his cereal bowl at Dad only seconds earlier.
If I was ten, Aaron was thirteen. Still small—too small, too scrawny—and Dad was like a giant advancing on him. I think Aaron must’ve been aiming for his head, but he never was particularly good at throwing things, so the bowl hit Dad in the back instead. It made a dull, soft thud and then clattered to the floor, sending the spoon flying across the kitchen.
Dad turned around. He let go of Mom, whom he’d already backed up against the wall. I watched soundlessly from the hallway as the scene unfolded in slow motion.
“Leave her alone!” Aaron yelled, trying to hide the trembling of his voice under sheer volume. I thought I might pee my pants, I was so scared for Aaron. But a small spark of hope flickered alive inside of me for just a moment—the hope that maybe this would work. After all, it wasn’t like anyone had ever actually tried to stop him before. Maybe it could be that simple. Maybe Aaron was onto something.
Dad shoved him again, though. Aaron stumbled backward, and as the two of them spilled into the living room, that little light inside of me was snuffed out, almost as soon as it had ignited. Because of course Aaron couldn’t stop him; Dad wasn’t going to suddenly flip a switch in his head and wake up and see all the damage he was doing.
Aaron tried to stand his ground. A stupid idea. He should’ve been running.
Mom was calling both of their names, yelling for them to stop, but it was suddenly like there was no one in the world but Dad and Aaron. Everyone seemed to fade into the background: Mom and her pleading; Callie humming quietly behind the closed door; and me, frozen there in the hall—even I had finally faded away. And there was no place else in the world except our living room, the space between the two of them, no sounds but Dad’s voice, shouting:
“Come on! You wanna hit me? Do it like a man. You get one free shot—do it now,” he demanded, this deranged smile distorting his face. He bobbed his head up and down, holding his arms open, beckoning Aaron forward, repeating over and over, “Come on. Hit me. Hit me. Come on. Now—now!”
Something in Aaron’s eyes went all steely and hard, and I wanted to scream, Don’t! It’s a trick! but I wasn’t even there anymore, so I couldn’t say anything. And it was too late anyway. Because everything sped forward, happening too fast to stop. The flat, sloppy sound of flesh against flesh: Aaron’s fist crashing into Dad’s face. But Dad had some kind of force field around him. He didn’t even flinch, didn’t miss a beat before he hit Aaron. It was so quick I barely saw how it happened; one second Aaron was standing and the next he had collapsed like that tiny, weightless bird from the hospital, smashing into an invisible glass wall—crumpled on the ground, wings broken.
By then I’d rematerialized in the hallway, still guarding our bedroom door. I flattened myself against the wall and tried not to make eye contact as Dad walked toward me. Didn’t matter, though; it never did. Because he just looked through me as if I weren’t there anyway, and I knew that was the best I could ask for.
And then the worst part.
He threw a glance over his shoulder as he walked away, and mumbled “Loser” under his breath, like Aaron wasn’t even worth enough for him to bother saying it to his face.
My legs trembled as I walked over to where Mom knelt on the carpet next to Aaron. The coffee table had been knocked over, and with it, Callie’s entire glass of grape juice, which was now sinking into the carpet fibers. Mom touched Aaron’s hair, saying, “Why did you do that? Why?” She looked back and forth, frantically, between Aaron and the growing purple stain, like she couldn’t choose which one to save. She said something to me, but all I could hear was that word echoing in my head: Loser, loser, loser. All I could see was Aaron lying there on the living room floor.
“Brooke!” she yelled at me. “Get something!”
“What?” I stood there, not knowing what she wanted me to do. “Get what?”
“A towel, something. Anything! Go, now.”
I ran into the kitchen, slipping in the spilled milk from Aaron’s cereal bowl, and grabbed the dish towel that was hanging from the handle of the refrigerator door. When I returned, Mom had Aaron sitting up, her hand on his back. I knelt down next to them and brought the towel to Aaron’s face, trying to decide how best to approach the blood coming from his nose, his mouth. But Mom snatched the towel from my hand before it touched his skin.
“Help him up!” she snapped at me. Then she grabbed my wrist, replacing her hand on his back with mine. She turned away from us, on her hands and knees, and folded the towel in half, pressing it down against the carpet, sopping up the grape juice. “Get him to his room”—she was crying hard now—“before he comes back.”
Aaron was out of it. I was glad. Because maybe that meant he hadn’t heard what Dad called him, maybe he hadn’t noticed that Mom seemed more concerned about the stain setting than his bloody nose and split lip.
“Come on,” I told him, struggling to pull him up. He wobbled as he got to his feet. We took a million shuffled steps to get to his bedroom. When we finally did, he fell onto his bed and bounced with the mattress, gasping like he hurt everywhere. His left cheekbone was already bruising up, his eyelid swelling fast.
Ice.
I ran back out to the kitchen, this time sidestepping the puddle of milk. I grabbed a bag of frozen peas from the freezer and wet a bunch of paper towels in the sink. I wanted to say something to Mom, but she didn’t look up; she just cried, and scrubbed and sprayed the spot with carpet cleaner. I closed Aaron’s door behind me and sat next to him on his bed. I tried to wipe the blood off his face with the paper towels, but he kept pulling away.
“Are you okay?” I asked, but that was a stupid question.
“My fucking hand,” he moaned as he sat up slowly, raising it, wincing as he tried to move his fingers. It was so swollen and bruised all over I was sure he’d shattered every bone.
“Does it hurt?” Another stupid question.
But as he inspected the damage, I watched his mouth twisting upward slowly. He was smiling as he said, “It feels like someone strapped a firecracker onto my fist and it exploded.”
“Here,” I whispered, handing him the bag of peas. “Your face—it looks really bad.”
“Good,” he said, his voice tight.
“What?”
He laughed, struggling to focus his one nonswollen eye on me. “He did exactly what I wanted.”
“But, Aaron—” I began, but he cut me off.
“I can take it, all right? What I can’t take is just standing by, doing nothing, trying to stay out of his way. There’s no staying out of his way—he won’t let that happen.” He paused, gingerly cradling his hand in the nest of frozen peas. “I can’t pretend anymore.”
I understood. Sort of. He’d never thought he could win. That wasn’t the point. I tried to think of anything I could say to try to plead some sense into him. “He’ll kill you.”
“He’ll kill her if I don’t—it’s only a matter of time. You know that.”
I shook my head, my eyes getting hot, stinging with tears. No, no, no—we weren’t allowed to think those kinds of things. Aaron was breaking all the rules.
“You don’t have to be scared,” he told me. “I don’t want anybody to be scared anymore. I got this. I promise,” he added, holding out the pinkie of his good hand.
I couldn’t decide if I thought he was really brave or really, really stupid. Reluctantly I reached out and wrapped my own pinkie finger around his.
Something pulls me back through time, abruptly, tearing me away from Aaron and his bedroom and his promise. It takes me back to the day in the hospital—that bird smashing into that glass window. I hear the sound of it—that horrible thud over and over again. The crack and crash of it. My mind reverses, then fast-forwards. Now it’s Dad’s footsteps on the stairs as he leaves. Mom crying somewhere, muffled. Then a key in the door.
My eyes fly open. And it’s now. I’m still slouched on the couch. My things still sit in a pile next to the door. My neck aches, my head kills. I sit up straight. I reach for the remote and quickly turn the TV on.
When Aaron opens the door, I’m almost expecting to see a small thirteen-year-old version of him. He looks down at my stuff sitting in the doorway but doesn’t say anything. He closes the door behind him, pulls his arms out of his coat, and drops it on the floor next to mine, another silent nod to our solidarity, I guess.
“Hey,” he says, his tone not so much casual as it is exhausted. I feel the cold coming off him in waves as he plops himself down on the couch next to me. He yawns through the word “Jesus,” sighing as he rubs his eyes. Then he turns to look at me, surprised, as if he didn’t fully realize I was here.
“What?” I ask, wondering if there’s any way he can tell where my mind has just been, where my body was earlier. “How did it go today?”
“Wait, should you be here right now?”
“Oh. Um, I came home—I have a headache.” Not a total lie. “So how did it go?”
“Fucking sucked.”
“Why, what happened?” I ask, pretending I wasn’t there for at least part of that torture.
He shakes his head, opens his mouth, but nothing comes out at first. “It’s not going well, Brooke. It was like every person who got up there to testify—the other lawyer twisted everything they were saying, made Mom look . . .” But he stops himself from finishing.
“Look . . . what?” I ask. “Guilty? Crazy? Stupid?”
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “All of the above.”
We both look away. I turn the TV back off and set the remote down on the table.
“Sorry, I’m just trying to tell you the truth,” he adds. “I don’t want you to be scared.”
And in the forbidden part of my brain I hear the sentence that followed: I don’t want anybody to be scared anymore. I wish I couldn’t remember so clearly now—I wish I’d kept that memory locked up tight and safe. “Are you?” I ask, some new surge of bravery stirring in my gut, daring me to trespass once more. “Are you scared?”
His gaze travels across the room, and I think maybe his eyes set on that goddamn stain for a second before he lets his head fall back against the couch and closes his eyes. He doesn’t have to say yes.
I watch him in profile, and suddenly the entire puzzle of him clicks into place. He couldn’t keep pretending anymore—he told me as much, but I don’t think I really knew what he meant until now. Because I think for the first time in my whole life I’m beginning to see things clearly, feel the way things really are, the way things have always been.
I’ve been pretending along with Mom for years, scrubbing out all the stains alongside her, trying to erase all the ugly things as if they never existed.