Masquerade

I look at Maddox and he’s emotionally gone again. His hand is still on me, but the rest of him looks as though he’s checked out, leaving me alone.

“Okay… I agree. Can we see her now?” Is it bad that part of me doesn’t want to? That I’m scared to death to walk in there and see her? To risk that her anger will come out at me like it always does.

“Of course. Follow me.”

I know before he stops me that Maddox isn’t going. His eyes that look so much like mine soften as though he’s trying to tell me he’s sorry—words he’ll never say out loud.

“It’s okay,” I tell him, but really it’s not. I need him and he knows it. Mom needs him. We both know she’d rather it be Maddox with her than me.

My legs tremble slightly as I walk into the room. She looks so small in the bed. Her blond hair, so different from my dark brown, is stringy and matted. I just saw her two days ago. Two days and she didn’t look like this.

“Hey, Mom,” I say. The doctor is gone, leaving me alone in the room with her. Gray cloth shackles keep her hands tied to the metal on her bed, almost covering the scars on her wrists from the first time. The time I held her while she bled.

Of course she doesn’t answer.

I stand next to her bed and touch her hair, but then pull back, afraid to wake her. Instead, I stand there wishing I would wake up and we’d be the family we were four years ago before everything changed. Before my dad got drunk and, while his girlfriend went down on him, drove into a yard and killed a little boy. Before we found out about his gambling and the other women. I guess we were never the typical family I thought we were. That isn’t true either. I knew that even then, when Mom would get pissed at me for spending time with Dad and Maddox stopped playing ball with him.

Tears roll down my cheeks in synchronized wave after wave, like a crowd at a football game. Maybe one of Maddox’s old games.

I think of the woman, Angel, who I visited a few weeks ago.

The pain in her eyes when I told her who I was. But also the forgiveness she showed even though my father took away her little boy.

Maddox hates the idea bogging down my brain, but I don’t know what else to do. Maybe the only way to end our family’s suffering is to continue to make amends, the same way I did with Angel.

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