Cindy C Bennett Heart on a Chain (pdf)

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gaze on my face, my cheeks heating up. He’s silent.
“Does it look that bad?” I ask when the silence
lengthens.
He doesn’t say anything for so long I finally risk a
peek at him. He’s looking at me with an intense
watchfulness. He sighs.
“No, it’s really not that easy to see.”
“You saw it,” I accuse.
“I’m pretty observant, probably more than what’s
normal.”
We walk in silence for a few minutes.
“Have you ever thought of becoming a doctor?” I
ask.
He jerks in surprise.
“What makes you ask that?”
“I don’t know, you just seem sort of doctor-ish, you
know, like today with my eye and last week when you
were cleaning my hands. You just seem really
concerned about injuries.”
He smiles. “Actually, I have thought about that. I’ve
thought about it a lot. Enough that I have my
schooling planned to send me in that direction. My
dad’s a veterinarian, so I’ve spent most of my
childhood watching him heal—animals, anyways. I
always wanted to be like him, be a vet, you know?
But even though I really like most animals, I’m not
passionate about them like him, so I thought maybe
I’d be better with people.”
I try to imagine what it would be like to have a dad
you admire so much that you want to follow in his
footsteps.
“I remember your mom a little bit,” I tell him. “She
always came on field trips, and I remember her
being in the classroom for parties and things.”
“Yeah, she’s a good mom. It’s a good thing I have
younger sisters, because she would miss having
little kids to spend all her time on.”
Tightness grips my throat. I vaguely remember my
own mom once being like that. What a horrible child I
must have been to have killed that kind of caring. I
clear my throat, pushing those thoughts away.
“I remember one sister; your mom always brought
her in a stroller. You have more now?”
“That was my little sister. She’s ten now. I have
another sister who’s thirteen. Maybe you don’t
remember her because she was in school herself.
And I have a little sister who’s three; she was sort of
an oops. Pretty embarrassing for a fifteen year-old
boy to have a pregnant mom. But, what can you do?
Besides, she’s a really cute kid.”
“No brothers?”
“No.” He laughs. “My dad says he and I live in an
estrogen ocean, which isn’t too bad right now, but
just wait until they’ve all hit puberty.”
I laugh. He looks at me, embarrassed that he said
that, then looks away.
always came on field trips, and I remember her
“What about you?” he asks. “Any brothers or
sisters?”
“No,” I say, thinking as always of the little brother I
should have had, the little brother who’s death had
destroyed my mother.
I still have memories of life when it was good.
That’s both a blessing and a curse, as the saying
goes. A blessing because in the darkest of times
those are what I cling to, what I dream about and re-
imagine my life to be. Sometimes that’s all that
keeps me hanging on.
The curse is that those remembrances also make
my life now seem that much bleaker because there
was a time when life was light. The darkness began
the day my dad lost his job—but really; people lose
their jobs every day. Why had it been so traumatic
for my father? That’s a question I’ve never had
answered.
In the beginning, my pregnant mother protected
me from the worst of my father’s fury. She was the
calm in the storm. When we could hear his car
coming down the road, she would shuffle me outside
to play on my new swing.
It was there that I found my escape. With the wind
blowing through my hair, blue sky above and green
grass below, I found flight. I would imagine I was a
bird, and that if I could just go high enough, I could let
go of the chains and fly far away from the yelling,
from the sounds that I refused to let my brain
process, but that always resulted in a black eye or
cut lip on my mother.
When she went into premature labor after a
particularly violent fight just a few days before
Halloween, I was outside trying to reach that magical
flight. I had heard my father slam out the front door
and drive away when I heard her painfully distressed
call for help.
I ran inside and saw the pool of blood underneath
her where she lay on the floor, holding her rounded
belly and gasping in pain. About a month earlier
some scary looking men had come during the day
and taken her car. I couldn’t have driven her anyway,
being only nine and small for my age. Having no
phone also diminished the options. It was expressly
forbidden to go to the neighbors at all. When she
slumped to the floor and I couldn’t wake her up, I was
desperate. I broke the rule and ran to the house next
door.
The neighbor called 911, but apparently, that was
where her help ended. She didn’t even come to the
house to see if she could help my mother, and even
at that young age I could understand her reluctance
to become involved. I would have happily uninvolved
myself with my family if I could have.
Soon there was an ambulance taking her away.
No one seemed too concerned that they were
leaving a nine-year-old home alone with a large
puddle of blood marring the kitchen’s tile floor. I was
afraid of my father coming home and seeing the
mess, so I found some towels and wiped it up as
best as I could. I had never actually used the washing
machine myself, but I had seen my mother do it, so I
tried to mimic what I remembered and placed the
red soaked towels inside, dumping in what seemed
like the right amount of soap, and twisting the dial
until the water flow began.
I then pulled the mop and bucket out of the closet
and finished cleaning up, scrubbing around the
edges of the puddle where the blood had begun to
dry in a hard line, until I couldn’t see any remnants of
the blood left. My father never did come home that
night. He’d received the news somehow and had
gone to the hospital. I stayed home alone.
I’d been out back swinging for quite some time
before realizing he wasn’t coming, and neither was
she. So I went in, locked the doors and went to bed
as if nothing had changed. Noises in the night when
you are alone are much more sinister than when you
have someone there with you.
She didn’t come home the next day either, though
my father came home briefly to tell me that she would
be home the next day. I was surprised that he
actually looked somewhat sad and something else—
guilty?—when he stopped in. He brought a bag with
a hamburger, some greasy fries, and a soda for me;
a rare treat that I hadn’t had since before the day he
had lost his job. He left and I assumed I would be
spending the night alone again.
However, I was awakened in the dark of the night
when he stumbled in. I cowered down under my
covers, afraid without the protection of my mother.
His footsteps stopped outside my door, and ice
crawled over my skin, freezing my body motionless,
even my breath. Finally, he stumbled on, and I
breathed a sigh of relief. I shook like a fall tree in the
night. He’d received the news somehow and had
wind, unable to control the residual fear, tears
running silently down my cheeks. Sleep was a long
time coming.
He did go to the hospital the next day to bring my
mother home. When she arrived her stomach was
strangely flat, and she did not bring a baby. I was so
happy she was home I threw myself against her,
wrapping my arms around her waist. But she didn’t [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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