Left Drowning

It takes another twenty minutes of silence and stone collecting until he is ready to tell me what it was like to grow up with a monster for a father. As I hear details of how the people I love were brutalized in ways that I could never have imagined, I move next to Sabin and run my hands over his arms, then lifting up his shirt, looking for scars that maybe I never noticed. While I don’t find any, I am not reassured. I take in what Chris tells me with as little visible reaction as possible. I need to be brave for him, as he has been brave all his life.

“My father was very sick,” Chris says. “Psychotic, to some degree, probably. He built up my body and tried to tear apart my mind.”

“But you’re still here.”

“I am.

“And Estelle, Eric, and Sabin, they’re here also.”

“I thought that I’d protected them enough. Estelle thinks God protected her. After everything I did, she fucking believes God is the reason our father never touched her.”

“But you’re the reason.”

“Yes, but now I see that I didn’t protect her. I stopped him from going into her room one night, and I paid the price the next day, but even though he never got into her room, I still failed. I failed them totally.”

“Oh, Chris, no. You didn’t fail. How could you have protected them? You were a kid. This shit isn’t supposed to happen. But I know you, and I know that you did more than anyone could have. Than anyone should have to do.”

“I thought they’d all be okay, Blythe.” The mix of desperation and anger in his tone is awful. “I thought that … we would get out, and it would be over. But look at them. They’re all a mess, aren’t they? I fucked up.”

“No, no you did not. Christopher. They love you, and they are devoted to you. Always. I knew that the minute I saw you with them.”

“Oh Jesus, Blythe, come on. Look at Estelle. She’s sucked your brother into this mess now, too. This is my fault. I should have gotten us away from my father whatever the cost. I thought being torn apart from each other would be the worst thing. I was horribly wrong.”

“It is not your fault that your father was out of his mind. That he hurt all of you. Maybe he didn’t touch them the way he did you, but they … saw.”

“Yes. They did.”

“Can you imagine the guilt they carry? Not only the terror, but the guilt?”

Chris shakes his head. “For what?”

“Because they couldn’t protect you the way you protected them. They didn’t share everything that you went through.”

He wipes his eyes and turns into me. “I thought because he never went after her or Eric that they would be all right. She’s certainly not all right. And even Eric. Breaking up with Zach, not being able to sleep with him? That’s because of this. And Sabin. God, Sabin … We’re all irreparably broken.”

Chris and I sit facing each other, my legs over his.

“You are not broken. I love you,” I tell him.

“You only think you do. You don’t know everything.”

“I will love you no matter what.”

“We’ll see.”

“Nothing, nothing will ever change how much I love you.”

“My back. Those scars? Do you want to hear about that?” He’s daring me to listen, perhaps threatening me with the truth.

I can hear this because I can do anything for him. “If you want to tell me, yes.”

With his head buried against me, he talks in a whisper and tells me about the night that his father nearly killed him.

“You know how you don’t remember some of the days around the fire? It’s the same for me with the night I got these scars. I don’t know exactly what happened before or after. I vaguely remember exhausting work with no point, and threats. Endless threats. I think he had me move … I don’t know … blocks of some kind in his art studio. That was his style. He liked to torture me by giving me unbearably heavy things to hold, and making me stand still with them for hours. I think this type of thing went on for days during this episode. All I know is by the time evening arrived, I was tapped. I was so weak by then. He’d left us alone that night. Gone out and wasn’t home when we went to bed. I know we had di

“That’s okay.”

“Then it was late. After midnight, I’m sure. He pulled me from my bed. Grabbed me by the neck and dragged me down the stairs. Something about how a New York gallery was backing out of a deal. They’d commissioned a bunch of pieces, and … He wasn’t making any sense. The house was dark, and he kept bumping me into walls and furniture while he pulled me. The next thing I knew, my head was in the toilet. Underwater. He held me down, and I just wasn’t strong enough to fight back. Then he’d pull me up for a second, explain that we were a drain on him and that’s why his work was suffering. He’d make us move again. A new location would help. My head would go under the water. Over and over. At first, I thought he would just let up quickly and leave me there. I couldn’t breathe, but I was sure that he would stop, and I could go back to bed. All I wanted was to go back to my room.”

I inhale and exhale deeply so that Chris will breathe with me. And he does.

“He didn’t stop, though. He just kept going and going. I had this belief in a future and in escape, but the longer it went on, the less I believed. I started to fight him, but there was nothing left in me. And then he held me down harder, and I knew he wasn’t going to let me up again. That I was going to die. I was … very sure of that. I was going to die, and that was that. I don’t even think that was his intention. I think it would have been an accident. He couldn’t have wanted a dead kid on his hands, right? It wasn’t pla

“And then I heard this weird sound; even as I was drowning and dying, the sound came through to me. Suddenly his hands were off me, but it still took me a second to push myself out of the water. Then I understood what the sound was. His fucking volunteer’s pager was going off. That always trumped everything. So he turned it off, and he just left me there while he drove away.”

“I was coughing and trying to get air. I just wanted to get back to bed, so I crawled out of the bathroom to the bottom of the staircase. I reached up for the railing and walked about five or six steps up. Then I got too dizzy. I just couldn’t stand. I still couldn’t breathe.”

I inhale deeply again, reminding him that right now he does have air. “Of course you couldn’t. Nobody could have.”

He is still talking in a whisper, so softly that I have to strain to hear him. Like a little kid telling a secret that he isn’t supposed to. “I started to fall backward down the stairs. I managed to stay upright, but I couldn’t really figure out my footing … So when I hit the landing I just stumbled hard across the floor. Because I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t get my balance … I was so disoriented. That’s when I crashed into the glass display case. It was this giant floor-to-ceiling monstrosity that my father had built to keep a bunch of my mother’s things in. She had china and these silly little glass animals that she loved. That’s what I fell into, and the entire thing shattered around me.

“It must have made a hell of a noise because Sabin woke up, and you know how nothing wakes him. Apparently I passed out for a few minutes, not long. When I came to, the lights were on, and he was crying and fishing me out of the glass. I kept telling him that I was going to be okay. But I didn’t know how much blood there was yet. He got me upstairs to our bathroom and pulled out glass from me for half an hour. When I fell, I must have … ripped open my back on something. Maybe glass, maybe one of the metal shelves. I don’t know. Sabin wanted to take me to the emergency room, but I wouldn’t let him. Because you know what was crazy? There was something good about what happened. I mean, really, really good. I knew that it was over. Nothing would happen again. My father didn’t want to get caught, and he’d get caught. This had gone too far. It was too … visible. I just suddenly wasn’t afraid anymore.