The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(54)

“Why the f*ck was this door locked?” he shouted. It wasn’t locked. It couldn’t have been. He’d gone on a rampage the summer before and drilled out every lock in the house, breaking half the knobs in the process. “There are no locked doors in this house! There are no secrets in this f*cking house!”

He charged across the room, ripping the covers away from Teddy’s bed, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck.

“What are you doing under there? Are you talking to the neighbors about me? Do you have a radio? Do you have a radio!”

In my father’s world, radios were spies and electrical lines mocked him in the middle of the night. In my father’s world, holding an eight-year-old by the neck while backhanding him hard enough to split his lip and loosen his teeth was rational behavior.

He’s going to kill him, I remembered thinking. He won’t stop this time.

I jumped from my bed and ran at him, throwing myself on his back. He flung me off like I was weightless, then turned and threw a punch. I lived the blossoming agony all over again, the cartilage in my nose crunching, breaking under his fist.

you’re not really here you’re not really here you’re not really here

He went back to beating Teddy, turning his back on me, my brother’s panicked cries drowning out my pain and painting my world blood red.

I reached under the mattress and pulled out the butcher knife.





Twenty-Seven



I writhed on a cold metal table, clawing my way up from the vision like a drowning man reaching for sunlight, naked and soaked in sweat. Flickers of candlelight danced in my vision. My sweat-drenched skin was marked in swirling white paint. Droning, sing-song chanting all around me.

“Hold him down!” a voice echoed, distorted and far away.

“We need to do something about his fever!”

“—working on it,” a third voice snapped. “I don’t understand the—”

Silence.

A clock ticked on the office wall, counting away meaningless minutes. I sat in a chair too big for me, looking up at a kindly man in a shabby suit on the other side of the desk. A wall of folders lay between us, each stuffed with a rumpled rainbow of papers and memos.

“—I don’t understand,” I said.

“It’s a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo, but the important thing is that you aren’t going to juvenile hall. After the hearing, and reviewing your assessments, the judge thinks you’d be better off in an environment, um, better suited to someone with your challenges. A place where you can get the help you need.”

“I’m not the one who needs help!”

“Daniel,” the man said, “come now. You stabbed your father seven times with a butcher knife. He lost a kidney and four feet of intestine. He nearly died.”

“He should have. I was trying to kill him.”

My father had looked so smug the day of the hearing, showing up with his hair slicked back and trousers pressed, wearing a suit I didn’t even know he owned. He spun a hell of a story. In his version, he tried to stop me from beating Teddy, and I retaliated by stabbing him. I got the broken nose when he defended himself. What else could he do? The kid was nuts. When it was my turn to talk, I was enraged and scared and about as eloquent as your average twelve-year-old, with a public-aid lawyer who didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. It didn’t help that Teddy sided with my father. He saw which way the wind was blowing, and he was too afraid to stand against it. I never blamed him for that. Never once.

The lawyer talked like he was reading out of a travel brochure. “Once you complete your course of therapy, you’ll spend some time in a halfway house, learning valuable life skills—”

“What about my brother?” I demanded. “I don’t care about any of that. What about my brother?”

“What about him?” He looked puzzled. “He’s back at home, with your father.”

I was twelve years old, and I had just discovered the meaning of pain. Pain was knowing that you’d failed the people who needed you most. Knowing that they were suffering, you were powerless to save them, and it was all your fault.

“Do you see the trend here?” the lawyer asked, sending a jolt down my spine. I’d been sucked into the memory, reliving the past.

But the lawyer had never said that. In real life I’d gone berserk, demanding they let me go, let me save my brother, and I’d ended up hauled out in handcuffs.

“You ruin everything you touch,” he said. “It’s in your blood.”

Outside the office window, a cloud passed over the sun. The sky turned gray, darkening fast, a storm on the horizon.

“What’s going on here?” I said aloud, my young and old voices speaking in tandem.

The lawyer shrugged, standing up. “At least they took good care of you at the funny farm. And then that halfway house! Pity about what they did to you there, but you can’t say you didn’t deserve it.”

You did deserve it, I told myself. What you put Teddy through…you deserved everything that happened.

The lawyer loomed over me, his body elongating, casting a wavering shadow as the sky outside went black.

“That’s right,” he said. “Your father was an insane, abusive alcoholic. His father was an insane, abusive alcoholic. With odds like that, how could you have ever thought you had a chance at a normal life? The poison is in your blood, Daniel. Under the circumstances, don’t you think the fairest thing you can do for everyone is to just give up and die? Isn’t it the right thing to do? It’s the only way to break the cycle.”