Page 59 of Damnation
He reciprocates with his lips against my hair. “No secrets, right?”
It’s the promise we made each other two nights ago when, lying together under the covers, I opened up to him and told him all about my father: the pain his abandonment caused me and the sense of helplessness I felt when I watched my parents gird their loins and go to battle with each other.
“No secrets,” I repeat, grateful that he seems ready to take the same step forward.
Thomas runs a hand through his hair, takes a sip of his Coke, and begins: “After I woke up from the coma, I stayed in the hospital for a little over a month. My mother never once came to visit me.”
His confession makes me shudder, and I wonder how that could be possible. She had lost a son, true, and she must have been in excruciating pain, but there was still another son who needed her. That son was alive; he survived and was lying in a hospital bed. He didn’t deserve to be there alone.
“The only good thing about that time was that my body was forced to go through a kind of detox,” he continues, pulling me back from my sad thoughts. “By the time I was discharged, I was clean. I made myself a promise when I left that hospital. I was going to take the second chance I’d been given, and I’d go straight. I had to do it, not just for myself but for my brother, who was gone. But more than anything else, I felt like I owed it to my mother. It was the least I could do after what she went through. After what she’d lost. But when I got home, the situation was even worse than I expected.
“Leila said something to me, but it wasn’t until I got back that I realized my mother had fallen into an intense depression. She spent days in my brother’s room. Lying on his bed with his clothes in her hands, just staring at the wall. She refused to eat or speak. She didn’t even go to parent meetings at Leila’s school. All she did was sleep, doped up on psych meds. I could see this woman who looked just like my mother, but there was no real trace of her left. There was just emptiness in her eyes.” He hesitates a moment before starting to talk again as I feel a stab of pain in my gut.
“I tried everything I could to get close to her, because I needed it. I needed her desperately. But the harder I tried, the more I saw nothing but an accusation in her face. She never said it, but it was as clear as day when she looked at me. The only thing she saw was the boy who had taken her son’s life. The better son, who deserved to live much more than I did.”
“Thomas…I–I don’t think she…” My voice is shaking so hard that I can’t finish the sentence.
“That’s how it was. Believe me. She couldn’t stand to see me in that house anymore…or maybe she did want me around but couldn’t find the strength to forgive me. That was when I realized that I had to back off. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t go anywhere for two years because of my sentence, so—”
“Wait, what? Your sentence?” I interrupt to ask, my head snapping up in surprise.
He nods. “I was charged with manslaughter.”
My eyes widen as I sit up straight. “But it was the driver of the truck who ran you off the road!” I insist, my voice anguished.
He sighs, running a hand over his face, and looks at me. “I was driving the bike while intoxicated, and the accident resulted in the death of a person. The driver of the truck didn’t stop, so…” He leaves the sentence hanging there, trusting that I’d be able to intuit how it ends. I rub my forehead, my heart thumping.
“My God! So you’ve…have you been to prison?” I shudder just thinking about it.
He gives a weak shake of his head, and I let out my held breath. “That would have been the right sentence, but no. During the trial, my lawyer made a big deal about how young I was, telling the jury that I was definitely a troubled boy but not irredeemable. He argued that there was no need to send me to prison, because my prison would be the burden of living the rest of my life without my brother, drowning in grief and guilt. I guess that made them feel some kind of pity for me, because they lowered the charge to involuntary manslaughter. I got two years of community service and probation for driving under the influence, plus some of the fights I’d gotten into in the past. Then I had to make up the year of high school that I’d missed because I had to prove I was a ‘good citizen,’ or they’d have sent me to jail. I went straight until my sentence was over.”
I stare at him in shock. “And then what happened?” I ask, guessing from the dark tone of his voice and the tense expression on his face, that the story didn’t end there.
“What happened was that, despite all my efforts to keep my nose clean, the situation escalated again. Things at home were out of control. My father always blamed me for my brother’s death. For how my mother was, for the failure of our whole family. After the accident, he actually started drinking more, if that was even possible. He still hit my mother; the only difference was that now she didn’t react. She was basically catatonic at that point.
“In the end, it was just like it always was: that bastard and me coming to blows. After a few months, I’d completely fallen back intomy old habits. That house…that life…it had become this vicious circle that was impossible to escape. Leila found herself forced to take care of all of us. She tried to fill my mother’s shoes…but she was still just a teenager. The life she was living wasn’t right for her. She should have been going out with friends, pining for some douchebag who broke her heart…certainly not looking after a couple of alcoholics and a severely depressed woman.”
“And you’d started drinking heavily again?” I guess.
“I’d also started using hard drugs again.” A glacial silence settles over us; then he rubs his hand along my thigh and says, “Listen, what I just told you…I’m not saying this to justify what I did. But when you live a certain kind of life and you hang out with a certain kind of people in an unhealthy situation like mine, it becomes really difficult to resist temptation. Especially if you don’t want to resist temptation. My brother was dead; my sister was miserable; my mother…she… I had lost her for good. And it was all my fault. Getting high was the only way I could just not think about it all for a while.”
“And you haven’t heard from your mother since you left?” I ask, testing the waters.
He nods.
“Did you ever try calling her?”
“And tell her what? Her silence since I left speaks loud enough. She has no interest in knowing where I am or what I’m doing or how I’m doing. I probably did her a favor when I walked out. Apparently things are better at home now, which just proves that my leaving freed her from another burden that was weighing her down for too long.”
“He hasn’t hit her since you left?”
Thomas shakes his head no.
“How do you know that?” I ask.
“My sister kept in contact with Mom, and she reassured Leila about it.”
So this is why Thomas refuses to show hide nor hair at home…he’s afraid that going back would light the fuse, and everything would explode again.
