It wasn't that I didn't like to go home. I mean, as if I had a shattered family life or anything. It was just that mom and dad had been fighting a little more often. That's nothing unusual, either, really, but for some reason, it felt different. I sat awake in my bed at night, listening to them down the hall, yelling, slapping, doors slamming, more yells, dad hitting mom. I had been listening to the same noises for ten years, and every night I would try to write down my thoughts and feelings in a little notebook by my bed.
Usually I wrote colors. Sometimes I would write something like "grey" or "orange." Just a color. A color sticks in my mind. It worms its way into my head and makes me remember exactly how I felt when they fought. It's like every time I see this certain shade of light brown mixed with a green that looks like the color of the paint flaking off our back porch, I'll remember the Wednesday night when I was fourteen years old and I'd just broken my hand against a brick wall. Dad, he took this spatula and he hit me a couple of times while mom looked behind me through the window. I remember sitting in my bed that night, trying to write left-handed, and that light brown with green was the color that came to mind as mom tried to tell dad that hitting me with the spatula was only making things worse. I heard him hit her, too, down the hall.
But don't get me wrong. I love my parents, both of them. Sometimes they just have these problems. That's why I like to take walks after school - the long way home, so I can think about things on my own for awhile. Usually it's nice. Sunny, sometimes. But on that one grey cloudy day it was nothing but cold and this heavy wind that cut right through my jacket and felt like it was touching my soul. It grabbed my bones and told me to stay away. Don't go home, it said, just leave. Just turn your back and run.
I couldn't, though. I'm not a runner, you see. I always face my problems, like mom always said I should do. We'd sit together in the kitchen after dad had gone to work and she'd make me pancakes or eggs or something good and warm to send me off to school. She'd sit in the old red stool that Grammy gave us, and I'd be at the table. I would eat my warm meal and tell mom about colors and the sky and how much I loved to write about things. She would always smile a little, laugh to herself, sipping some coffee from a broken cup that she held with both hands. Then she'd brush a wisp of hair out of her eyes and tell me to always face your problems strong and determined. The world is a hard hard place, she would say, and to survive in it you've got to be harder. Never run away - stay and deal with your problems. Then she'd shake her head and start doing the dishes or something.
Mornings with mom were always yellow.
I took a break next to the short bend in the river. There's a rock at the bend that is ages and ages old. It's stuck into the earth at an odd, almost painful angle, as if God took this slab and just slammed it down. So I sat under the rock, looking out over the river and at the low trees and houses beyond it.
I dropped my book sack beside me and fished around for a pen. This is what I did when I took a break by the rock. I lay on my back, looking at the angle of rock above me. There were hundreds of words scrawled across the bumpy surface. Here, when I'm at the bend in the river, I would write a word. Just a word to know where I am at this stage in my walk. There is "cold" and "vibrant" and "ooky." "Eggbeater," "stitches," and "uncertain." I always take the first word that comes to mind, because I know way down that this must be the right word. A word that sings to me, that says just what I need. I remember laying under the God rock, thumbing my permanent marker, searching for the word. After a moment, slowly, almost cautiously, I wrote "hope."
It is very difficult, sometimes, to pick the very first word that comes to mind. What happens is, immediately after the first, instinctive, right word, my mind spews forth hundreds of words of how it thinks I should feel. They blast me away from my word, like a small man caught in a flash flood. They run past me, faster and faster, daring me to pick them. I push further and further upstream, ignoring the words swimming around me, gnawing, until I finally grasp the firm rock in the middle of the flood. "Hope."
Somehow I wished that wasn't the word. I didn't know why I should hope or even what I should hope for.
I sat under the rock for awhile longer. I'm not really sure how long I stayed there, protected from the cold wind. Finally, under an even darker sky, I picked up my book sack, zipped my jacket up to my neck, and started walking along the river. I could see my house just about a mile away. It was always kind of comforting to know that wherever I was, I still had a home. I liked that. A lot of my friends at school would say that I was crazy to hang around so long. Just move out, they would tell me, just leave! Your dad is a psycho. Get out of there! But they couldn't ever understand why I stayed. It was my home. A guy doesn't have anything unless he has a home. There's no place for him to go, nothing for him to do or even hope for.
I crossed the river at the shallow point, just across from the stadium. The river was running a little high and I got my pants wet at the bottom. I stopped at the other side of the river as the first sprinkles of rain started to fall.
The night before, I wasn't going to write any colors because it hurt too much. On the nights that really hurt, I would just write and write and try to lose myself within the world that I was creating. I thought that if I could completely submerge myself, then I would be able to avoid the pain of mom and dad. That very bad night I was writing about a great knight in a beautiful kingdom that had huge rolling grassy plains. A gentle curving valley that led to a tall and strong castle where the beautiful princess lived. She loved the knight with all of her heart and he loved her back in the most perfect, heroic way. One day, a monstrous black dragon captured the beautiful princess and took her back to it's blackened, hideous lair. The great knight was preparing for rescue when dad, oh my God. Dad burst into my room, mom running after him. He tore my notebook away and started waving it in the air. I jumped up and started to hit at him. He backhanded me hard across my face, throwing me back onto the bed. I cried and pleaded for him to please give back the book. Please, dad.
He waved my notebook in front of him. You think we don't know what you're doing in here, boy, he yelled. God, you make me sick. You sit in here and write in this damn book and don't think we don't know what you're planning on doing with this thing. Thinking you can use this against us! We will see about that.
He ran out of my room and I started to follow him downstairs into the living room. I tackled him just after he threw my book into the fire place. Dad, no! He pushed me down to the floor, pinning my arms down with his knees. Look, he said. I am sick to Jesus H. Christ with you and your damn book. Do you hear me? Don't think that blood protects you from me, boy, because I swear I'll kill you if you even think about writing again. I will skin you alive. Are you hearing this, boy? Am I making myself perfectly clear? I nodded, crying a little. If he just wasn't so big, I was thinking, if only I could hurt him. If only he wasn't so big.
And I was sitting holding my knees on the riverbank because the wind was so damn cold. My jacket was wet with windy rain. I didn't know why I was supposed to hope. I didn't have any reason. My God, I loved my parents and I could never understand why. I sat with my knees in my chest, on the edge of the river, wishing. Always wishing.
Dad set my book on fire as I lay on the floor, watching silently. He stalked back upstairs. Mom just stood on the staircase, watching. After my notebook stopped smoking, stopped burning, I walked back to my room and fell onto my bed. I picked up a crumpled piece of paper from my wastebasket, smoothed it out gently with my fingers. Trembling, barely able to write, so afraid of my father, I wrote in careful, quiet letters: "light blue." Not the light blue that you see in the sky when the sun is just beginning to rise. Not the light blue that you see in the shallow end of the county pool all summer. Not those colors at all. It was the light blue of a man who has slowly, very slowly, been suffocated. The light blue of a three day old corpse, cold and limp on a metal slab at the morgue.
I was walking up the front walk to my house. My home, I mean. The icy wind was about to break me in half. The sky was restless and even wetter and a baby screamed next door. They always do, I thought. They're always, always crying, all their damn life.
I walked inside. I'm home, I said, shutting the wind out behind me. Mom said that she was in the kitchen. She asked if I wanted something to eat.
No. Where's dad, I asked.
Upstairs. He's really very tired. You'd best just leave him alone.
For the first time in eighteen years I ignored my mother. I walked upstairs, thinking that just for once, maybe for the first time in my life, I would tell my father that I loved him, that no matter what he does, I'll love him just because he's my father. I wanted to tell him that I would stop writing and stop talking to mom about colors and words because a man is nothing without a home. Mom and dad were my stability. I wanted to hug dad, hoping that he would change just a little bit.
When I opened the door to the bedroom, I saw him laying on the bed, all sprawled out, the sheets scattered about him. I walked inside, feeling so full of an unexplainable hope and love that I felt like exploding.
When I bent over to kiss him, I noticed the dried blood caking down the side of his face, coming from a wide gash in his forehead. And that's when I noticed the slight, very light blue in his face and hands - the light blue of last night, the cold light blue of an icy wind banging against the window.
Honey, mom called from downstairs, you sure you don't want anything? A sandwich or something?
I didn't say anything, couldn't even think to move my mouth. I lay on the bed, hugging dad.
Honey? Don't disturb your father. He's had a long day.
I slid my arms under dad, brought him to my chest. His head hung loose over my shoulder. Rocking him back and forth, trying to think that everything was going to be all right, I suddenly realized, like a stab in my brain, that I had just lost my home. I began crying and screaming, like that damn baby next door. All your life, you can never stop crying.
(c) copyright 1989 Robert K. Brown
Copyright 2002 © Robert K. Brown
