Page 94 of Unorthodox
That’s on the days my father wasn’t there.
But when he was...
When he was, I hid Oliver away.
He liked small spaces and prying open a floorboard was easy enough.
It was the times when our father was drunk it became more...difficult to hide Ollie.
I became more vicious.
I’d do whatever my father wanted to whatever woman he wanted me to do it to. When he started screaming Ollie’s name,“You fucking retard! Get in here!”I’d come instead, and I’d hit the slave he’d brought out to entertain his friends in the lounge room.
I was a teenage boy, but with brass knuckles against a woman’s face, her chest, between her legs, it didn’t matter.
She’d be coated in blood by the time I was done with her, my father beaming with pride, knocking the glass of his beer bottle with his friends’ as the slave would lie comatose on the floor, naked and spent.
I’d do it again and again.
Better a nameless whore than my brother.
And to save Ollie, I’d do anything. To savemyself, I’d do anything.
But that day I slipped in my mother’s blood, that day Ollie had a speech therapy appointment and was home early with Mom, and I ran through the apartment.
He was gone.
It wasn’t until later I knew what my father did to him.
I searched for him. Those first three days, and later.
For years, I poured over the news. Police reports. Foster homes.
For years, I didn’t sleep, thinking about the horrors he must’ve endured.
For years, I blamed myself.
Sometimes, I’d imagine he found a loving home. I’d imagine he found a woman like my mother, who loved him for who he was, and cherished him and helped him and adored him.
Sometimes, I’d dream he found a man like my father.
Sometimes, I’d hear his screams in my head.
But now, I can get him back.
All I have to do is give up the girl. Send her in Oliver’s steed.
It’s not hard.
I don’t know her. I don’t fucking care about her, and we all have to live through pain at some point.
To take Oliver’s away, I’d throw Addison to the wolves.
He was so good. So happy. So…innocent.
She might be, too. But someone has to pay, and I learned a long time ago you don’t ask for things that can never be. Saving them both is a pipe dream.
If she thinks what she saw was a weakness to exploit, she’s dead fucking wrong.
