Page 41 of Damnation
He hesitates for just a moment but keeps talking. “I mean, I’ve been in that situation a lot in the past.”
“You’re someone who likes to drink, that’s obvious.”
Thomas shakes his head, running a hand across his forehead. “That’s not… It’s not just that… It’s more complicated than that.”
“Complicated?” I frown, trying to follow his train of thought.
He nods, giving me a dark look. “I’m an alcoholic, Ness,” he adds quickly, watching my face.
This revelation hits me like a bolt from the blue.Alcoholic, I repeat over and over in my mind as I stare at him unblinkingly.
Impossible…
Thomas is not an alcoholic. He likes a few beers every nowand then, true, but he…he’s just not an alcoholic, I try to convince myself.
“That can’t be…”
Thomas just nods.
“H-how…how did it happen?” is all I can manage.
Thomas shrugs miserably, as if not even he can answer that question. “My sister claims I got my looks from our mother and my alcoholism from our father. A genetic defect,” he confesses.
“For as long as I can remember, he’s always been drunk. And he was a mean drunk, a real mean drunk. The clearest memories from my childhood are screams, begging, and pleading, and the terror that we felt whenever he’d come home.”
My God…
“Your father…he…did he hi…” The words die in my mouth, I can’t bring myself to say them. I can’t give voice to that monstrous possibility. Thomas nods, understanding without needing me to finish the sentence.
“I was four years old the first time it happened. My mother was in the living room, I remember that she was ironing something while I was on the floor, playing with these toy cars. My father came back late from work that night. He was hungry and he started a fight with my mother because he wasn’t happy with the dinner she’d made.” His voice is heavy with resentment.
“He started yelling, so my mom made me go sit on the sofa and turned the TV up and she told me not to move from there, not for any reason in the world. The two of them shut themselves in the kitchen to argue, but the door was open a crack. I did everything I could to focus on the cartoon on TV instead of the deafening noise. Pans being thrown around, pounding on the walls, plates shattering, and then my mother’s whispered cries… I was too little to understand what was happening and too scared to stay put like I’d been told.” He lets out a sigh full of misery and keeps going.
“I remember running to the kitchen door, sticking my head in through the little crack and…I saw it. The worst thing I’d ever seen. My mother was curled up on the ground with blood running downher temple, begging him to stop. She was pregnant with my sister at the time. And the more she screamed, the more he hurt her, until she couldn’t catch her breath. Until she passed out.
“My father realized I was there because I started crying. I was fucking terrified. And it was only then that he stopped. Ignoring everything I’d just witnessed, everything he’d just done, he just walked past my mother’s body on the floor, threw me aside on his way out of the kitchen, and left the house.”
He holds on tight to my thighs as I blink away tears. “My God…all of that…it’s awful.”
“Over the years, episodes like that started to become almost normal. My father kept my mother at home and didn’t let her go out much so no one would get suspicious if they saw her. For me, he’d explain away the bruises, saying that I was a troubled boy and that I was always getting into fights. He didn’t touch my sister, probably because if people saw marks all over a little girl, they’d be alarmed. Instead, he got in her head. He’d insult her every time he saw her. If he saw her leaving the house in clothes he considered too short or tight or whatever, he’d say, ‘You’re growing up to be a whore,’ and throw condoms at her. That was how he talked to a ten-year-old girl. Ten fucking years old,” he repeats angrily.
Horror and disgust sweep over me, taking my breath away.
“My sister spent years fighting panic attacks and self-loathing. She got so ashamed that she wouldn’t even leave the house anymore. She’d just stay locked in her room, while downstairs, our father drank and drank until he exploded, taking it out on Mom and me.”
“Did you ever report him?” I murmur brokenly.
Thomas shakes his head.
“My father is a cop, and the county sheriff is his good friend. And obviously the sheriff believed every single lie my asshole father fed him. And if that wasn’t enough, my mother was scared of the repercussions a complaint might have had.”
“Oh my God. Did she ever consider taking the two of you and just making a run for it?”
“Of course she did. But she knew that he would kill her if she ever tried. She’s got a scar on her neck to remind her.”
The gravity of these confessions makes me feel lightheaded. But I need to prove to him that I can be strong. “I can’t imagine the hell that must have been…”
“The worst kind. That house became a cage with no escape route for my mother and my sister. I, on the other hand, spent as little time there as possible. But all that time out in the world without any sort of guidance, constantly searching for some way to push down all the anger I had inside…I was adrift. By the time I was fourteen, I was on a dark path. Feeling so pissed off all the time made me look for conflict everywhere. I would get into fights just because I wanted to hit someone and get hit. I wanted to suffer and make other people suffer too. It made me feel alive. If people refused to attack me, then I’d start something. And I remember it so clearly; with every punch I threw, it was his face that I pictured hitting, beating until my hands were bloody. It was always my father’s face. But it was never enough.
