Reprinted with permission of The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers.
In the spring of 2010 mom tells me something that dad doesn’t want to share yet. When I hear it, I cry. She tells me she doesn’t know why.
My father told me stories about lavish adventures, bike rides in the woods, forts by the beach. “I went up to Canada to stay with Bill,” my father tells me, one day. “I walked into his house and the first thing that I saw was a giant moose on the kitchen counter. My father used to hunt”, dad tells me now. “He would bring back all sorts of animals, clean them, and hang them in our basement to dry. Bill and I hated it, but I guess Bill had carried out the tradition. My brother has always had so much life in him. I hope someday you will meet him.”
It is a Saturday. The sun is beating down on streets of Brooklyn as my mother and I walk to the bank. We are leaving for France in about a week and we have to exchange currency. My mother looks straight on, but I can see the twisted, frightened look on her face. “I don’t know why,” she said. He left us wondering ‘why’.
“Bill, Scott, and I rode our bikes down to the old railroad track,” dad began one day. “The beach was just on the other side. We left our bikes on the side of the tracks and decided to jump to the other side. Bill and I were successful, being that the jump was only a few feet across. Scott was the last one to jump, because he, of course, was the youngest. Scott leapt across the track and it looked like he was going to make it, but as his foot hit the other side it slid onto a rusty nail, sticking out of the tracks. The nail went right through and we could see it poking out of his foot. Bill and I were horrified, of course, but it wasn’t a new occurrence. Scott was always hurting himself. Bill and I went over and lifted him off of the nail and carried him to the hospital.”
I don’t want to cry. I hadn’t planned on it, but as I stare down at my shoes, with the sounds of my father’s family screaming behind me, I find it hard to help myself. The stranger I barely knew had taken something from me: my sense of security. And I will never forgive him for that. I wanted to know him, to talk to him, about his life, about my father’s life. But now it is too late.
Dad regales me with another story, “for Christmas, Bill, Scott, and I all received BB guns. Which at the time was great, but now that I think about it, it was one of the stupidest mistakes my parents ever made. Bill and I chased Scott through the yard, through the basement, up the stairs, into my room, into Bill’s room, and finally when we reached Scott’s room he slammed the door in our faces, thinking that would keep us from shooting him with the BB gun. I eyed Bill and he knelt down, slipped the tip of this gun between the floor and the bottom of the door and pulled the trigger. Scott yelped. He had gotten him in the foot, again.”
My mom touches my shoulder and I jump out of my trance. I don’t know what to say, or how to react, so I just nod. We walk in silence from the bank back home. The only sound is the click, click of our shoes and the roar of the occasional street-cleaning machine.
“Bill, Scott, my friend Charlie, and I built a house in the middle of the woods, using whatever we could find and my dad’s tools. One day, we made plans to all meet there. When we arrived Bill was carrying something in his arms. He had found a few kittens. They looked like they had been abandoned recently. Everyday, the four of us would go out there to bring them food. They stayed in the house, which we were surprised they did. A few weeks passed and we went out there everyday, but one day the house that we had built had burned down. The sides were black and charred. We didn’t know how it started.”
I get home and draw a hot bubble bath. I can’t tell if I’m sad or angry. I guess upset would be the best way to describe the feeling or maybe a little disturbed. I don’t know how to explain it and I don’t want to talk. Sometimes, I think silence is the best medicine. I close my eyes and I can see the blood splattered on the wall behind him. I can see Bill’s hand, where the gun used to be, held in his fist. The half drunk bottle on the kitchen counter glows iridescent in the evening light. I can hear the screams of my aunt. I quickly open my eyes, trying to remove the image from my head, but I can’t shake it.
“Have I told you about the time Bill and I had to bring Scott to the hospital?” my dad asked me.
“The railroad? Yes, many times.” I replied.
“No. Not that time. The time that Scott got his hand stuck under a metal bar and it pulled off all the skin on his fingers and Bill laughed because it was like déjà vu, all over again.”
Silence is the best medicine, I tell myself.
Dad doesn’t talk about Bill anymore. No lavish adventures. No bike rides in the woods. No forts by the beach. No torturing Scott. No saving Scott. No saving kittens. Just silence. I regret what I thought before.
Silence is the worst antidote.
I stare into the water, it seems to be getting darker and the world around me seems to stop, just for a moment. I don’t want to cry. I hadn’t planned on it, but one tear drops with a splash into the water. “Please don’t leave us,” I whisper. But I know he cannot hear; he is thousands of miles away, without so much as a goodbye.
All I have now are my father’s stories and the memory of his words reverberating in my head.
