Left Drowning(106)



Chris is frozen. Estelle is asking my brother to smack her around, Eric just broke up with his long-term boyfriend, and Sabin is, once again, incredibly drunk. Sabin babbles incoherently to Jonah while Chris stares out at the ocean.

“Everyone is crumbling,” he says softly so that Sabin can’t hear. “I can’t believe this. They’re crumbling, do you see it?” Chris gets up, walks around Sabin, and hops off the deck to the sand.

I watch him as he searches the beach. He’s looking for stones. It takes a while, but eventually his pockets are full, and he starts skipping them across the surface of the ocean. He works his way up and down the beach, and he wades through the water to stand in front of me. Chris looks incredibly sad today. I kiss him and then nudge him to turn around and sit in front of me so that I can rub his shoulders. The tension he carries is enormous.

Sabin is still playing with Jonah, stroking his fur. “Hey, Chris?” Sabin is slurring something fierce now. “Do you remember … ,” he starts. “Do you f*cking remember those two dogs that our father used to have?”

Chris tenses noticeably. “Sabin …”

“I’d totally forgotten until now. Remember? He was such a f*cking bastard. Do you remember? He had two dogs for a while, right? And I remember this one time … Christ, what a sick * … he put their food dishes on the floor and he hit ’em with something while they ate.” He closes his eyes and pulls Jonah in close. “I don’t get why they kept eating. I mean, there’s our father, hitting ’em with a … with a … what was it? A belt?”

“Sabin, stop.”

“No, c’mon, Chris. I’d forgotten about this until now. What was it? Must have been a belt.”

The man I love hangs his head. “No. No, it wasn’t a belt.” I stop rubbing his shoulders and quickly pull him in so that my arms are around him. He reaches for my hand. “It was a switch. He’d made it from the willow tree in the yard.”

“Right. That willow tree.” Sabin laughs, and it is one of the worst sounds I’ve ever heard. “A switch. Yeah, so he’s yelling about what f*cked-up animals they are, and every once in a while, he’d let them have it. For nothing.” Sabin leans his head against Jonah. “No one’s gonna hurt you, boy. Jesus, Chris. Those poor f*ckin’ dogs.” Sabin lays back down on his side. “Shitting rainbows,” he says with a laugh and then immediately passes out.

Jonah curls up protectively next to him. “He’s okay, Jonah. He’s okay,” I try to reassure all of us.

“No, he’s not okay, and you know it.”

Chris takes a stone from his pocket and hurls it while I hold him. He throws another. “The thing is, Blythe? My father never had dogs.” He throws again. “He had me. And he had Sabin.”

Inside, I explode. I rage. I cannot begin to process what he has just said because the ramifications are enormous. I’d known, I’d felt, that it would be bad. Very bad. But not like this. The scope, the vast depth, of their father’s madness is something that I cannot begin to take in. This is a man I will forever feel only vehement disgust and hatred for. What he has done to the people I love most in this world … It is incomprehensible.

For an entire hour, we don’t talk. The sky, however, speaks to us in distant rumbles of thunder. Chris shivers. I keep him as close to me as possible, and we just watch the tide come in. I let the tears cover my cheeks and fall to his shoulders because it would be impossible not to cry, but I don’t melt down in front of him. I can’t because he isn’t.

He slides off the dock and collects stones again. It’s a routine that will ground him, I know. “It wasn’t constant, and it wasn’t usually like … what Sabin just told you,” he says from the shore. “We went to school, played sports, had friends. But then that would change. We … or I, mostly … weren’t hurt all that often. Months at a time would go by where things were normal enough. Six, eight months of near total normalcy. Sometimes a whole year. But when it happened, it wasn’t usually about … direct hits. It was usually about stamina, endurance. Wearing me down. Sometimes wearing us down.” He is incredibly rational now, overly logical about this. It’s his protection.

It takes another twenty minutes of silence and stone collecting until he is ready to tell me what it was like to grow up with a monster for a father. As I hear details of how the people I love were brutalized in ways that I could never have imagined, I move next to Sabin and run my hands over his arms, then lifting up his shirt, looking for scars that maybe I never noticed. While I don’t find any, I am not reassured. I take in what Chris tells me with as little visible reaction as possible. I need to be brave for him, as he has been brave all his life.

“My father was very sick,” Chris says. “Psychotic, to some degree, probably. He built up my body and tried to tear apart my mind.”

“But you’re still here.”

“I am.

“And Estelle, Eric, and Sabin, they’re here also.”

“I thought that I’d protected them enough. Estelle thinks God protected her. After everything I did, she f*cking believes God is the reason our father never touched her.”

“But you’re the reason.”

“Yes, but now I see that I didn’t protect her. I stopped him from going into her room one night, and I paid the price the next day, but even though he never got into her room, I still failed. I failed them totally.”

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