Todd Robinson - The Hard Bounce

She winked at me. “Feel free.” Moments later, I heard water filling the bathtub.

We sat in the hot water, slowly washing each other off, face to face, my legs over hers. Good thing the old claw-foot bathtub was big enough for two.

She squeezed the sponge and the water dribbled down my neck, over my chest, the thick scar parting the water as it ran down my body. She moved the sponge lower and held it, warm and soapy, against my mark. My badge. My ever-present souvenir from a time a loving God could have allowed me to forget but never did.

She never asked. Not once. Maybe that’s why I wanted to tell her. Outside of Junior, nobody knew. I’d been asked. I’d never told.

“I was eight years old…”

It was a summer of long, humid days and sticky nights. I was spending my summer like all kids did. Playing wiffleball with sugar-sticky hands until dusk settled and mothers started yelling. Chasing the ice cream man. My birthday was coming, and the summer stretched ahead of me with the great promise that only exists until you hit puberty. Maybe I’d get to go to a Red Sox game and see my heroes, Jim Rice and The Yaz. Maybe we’d get to go to Lincoln Park down on Route 6, or make the big trip into Rhode Island to Rocky Point for clam cakes.

Every day had endless possibilities.

Also endless, or so it seemed, was my mother’s lineup of boyfriends. That summer, there was the plumber with the rough hands and the musician with the perfectly feathered hair who called me “little man.”

I hated that.

I did like the bartender, who always smelled faintly of beer, cigarettes, and maraschino cherries. But, like every summer, the boyfriends came and went.

My mother wasn’t a bad person. She was so young. Lonely. That summer, she was younger than I am now. She wasn’t a woman who slept around town. If she was, she kept it hidden, and I’d rather not think of her like that. What she was, though, was a poor judge of character.

My mother’s name was Annie Malone. I have her last name.

Time hasn’t erased her in the slightest, unlike most of my early memories. I remember every kissed scrape. I remember every sacrifice. I remember her love. She was the most beautiful person I ever met. If I’d known who Elizabeth Taylor was then, I might have said my mother looked like her, but with a better smile. My mother had the same black hair. And the eyes. I’ll never forget my mother’s violet eyes. God’s little joke on me, all I got were her cheekbones.

My little sister, now, she was the heartbreaker. Looked just like my mother. She was only five years old, but I remember what a beauty my baby sister Emily was.

I had a week to go before my birthday. I was riding my red, white, and blue Huffy up and down the street, Star Wars toys rattling in my backpack. As I came back up the street, I could see my neighbors milling nervously in front of the house we rented.

Angry voices were pouring through the screen door onto the sidewalk. Again.

Our elderly next-door neighbor, Mrs. MacAllan, was saying to the air and anybody in earshot that she was going to call the police. Mr. Dominguez, the man who lived opposite us, grabbed me by the shoulder. He thought it might be a good idea if I waited outside until “things blew down in there.” I shrugged him off and ran inside.

Most of the yelling was coming out of my mother’s recent ex-boyfriend, Teddy. Teddy was a mechanic, a tool belt always around his waist. I didn’t like Teddy. He didn’t take his tool belt off at the dinner table. I thought that was rude. Whenever he shook my hand, he ground my knuckles together until tears welled in my eyes and then smiled when I winced.

I followed the yelling into our kitchen. Teddy had my mother gripped by her shoulders, pinned against the sink with his thick arms. I saw one of Emily’s frightened violet eyes and the bright blue marble eye of her stuffed dog, Blackie, looking out through a crack in the yellow kitchen pantry door.

Teddy screamed at my mother, face inches from hers, calling her a lying, cheating slut. My mother was crying. I didn’t know what a slut was, but nobody was going to make my mother cry. I grabbed a fork off the kitchen table and drove it right into Teddy’s ass cheek. It stuck there, dangling like a silver tail.

Teddy yelped as he plucked the fork out of his khakis. He turned and unloaded a punch to the side of my head that threw me across the room. Blunt pain exploded through my body. I skidded across the kitchen table and crashed to the floor in a heap. I didn’t lose consciousness. If I had, maybe things wouldn’t have ended the way they did.

My mother roared like an enraged lioness and was on Teddy, fists beating, nails clawing at his face. He got in a punch to her temple and she crumpled to the floor, blood streaming from her head.

I was hurting badly, in ways my eight years on the planet hadn’t prepared me for.

Teddy wasn’t done with my mother. He pulled a small gun from his waistband and pistol-whipped my mother across the face, saying no man would want her when he was done.

He hit her again.

And again.

Then, for the first time ever, the world turned red.

I shrieked and attacked him, the rage in control, strength flowing through me like nothing I’d ever imagined.

It wasn’t close to enough.

I bit a good chunk out of Teddy’s bicep, blood warm and salty in my mouth. His scream of pain was sweet music. Then Teddy cracked me across the face with the gun butt, shattering my nose and cheek.

Then he turned his grip around and fired point blank into my chest.

The gunshot slammed me against the wall with a wet smack. I fell to the floor, my body no longer responding to my will. The strength to inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale, was all I had left.

As badly hurt as she was, face battered to pulp, my mother stood on shaking legs. With a howl, she grabbed a butcher’s knife from a wooden block and drove it into Teddy’s throat. Teddy gurgled, took three steps, and shot my mother twice before he fell backward, dead.

So much blood. I couldn’t move. The last thing I remember is my mother reaching out to me as the light left her beautiful violet eyes. I wasn’t sure what were sirens and what were Emily’s screams.

After that, it all fades in and out. I remember biting a paramedic. I remember doctors yelling. I remember asking for my mother, asking for Emily. I remember asking where is she without knowing which one I was asking for.

I never saw either of them again.

“What happened to Emily?” Kelly said softly, a hitch in her breath.

“I don’t know. I don’t know how long I was in the hospital for. A lot of that time, I spent in one coma or another. The State did what it had to. As far as I know, we had no next of kin.”

“You’ve never looked for her?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

I had to think about it. I had reasons, lots of them. But I’d never put any of them into words. “I’d like to think that her life has been… better. If it hasn’t,” I shook my head, “I don’t want to know.”

We sat there until the water went cold.

I got up early the next morning and decided to cook breakfast. I had bread, eggs, and milk, so I tried French toast. What I wound up with was some type of eggy paste with a burned crust that somehow stayed gummy inside. Smelled pretty good, though.

Kelly came out of the bedroom in nothing but a pair of panties and naked morning glory. She scratched at her head and sniffed. “What is that?”

“It’s breakfast. I think I invented French toast pudding.”

“You are useless in a kitchen, aren’t you?” She tiptoed up and placed a tender kiss on my face.

“You’ve never tasted my Hamburger Helper Almondine.”