then he stepped off the stoop and went to stand in front of the man whose lips had disappeared and whose neck was popping with veins and sinews and fury.
Dad didn’t take his eyes off the car and the mess of tools and paint cans on the floor around it.
“Dad, I—”
He backhanded Trey so quickly, like a lightning strike, that it was over before I’d seen it coming. Trey fell against Mom’s car so hard that his back curved over the hood. My dad kept him plastered there with his hand on his throat, pushing down on his neck like he wanted to crush it.
I felt like I was watching the scene through a wall of buzzing bees, so thick and seething was the air.
The sky lowered and added its weight to my dad’s. The trees in the yard bent forward, forcing more air out of my brother’s lungs.
“What have you done?” Dad raged, disgorging a crush of poison words. “What have you done to my car?” I could see the spit flying out of his mouth, even at a distance, and the veins around his eyes were starting to stand out. He was red. Mottled. Rabid. His body taut and straining. His teeth bared in a snarl that belonged on a sick, caged animal—not on my dad. This was not my father. This was my worst nightmare in human form, my greatest, most horrendous fear choking the life out of my brother in Technicolor and surround sound. My legs wanted to buckle and my mind wanted to flee into insentience, but the only good part of me was being broken, that part that walked and talked and breathed as Trey, and I couldn’t let it happen. There was a bright-blue flash at the back of my mind and I launched off the porch, pushing through thick air toward my brother. My friend. My protector.
“I’ll kill you for this! I’ll kill you!” my dad was shrieking, his voice like broken glass. Then he ran out of words and just screamed and howled and thundered while I tried to pry his vicious hands from my brother’s neck. I pulled at his arm, pitting my full weight against his grip, but I was a moth throwing myself against a fortress, feeble and frantic and impotent.
In a desperate last effort fueled by the churning lava in my chest, I jumped onto Dad’s back and braced my feet against Mom’s car and tried to pull him away from the hood, away from Trey, away from the hell of seeing my brother, shattered and helpless, dying before me. And still, my efforts were in vain. I reached around to my dad’s face and started to claw. I clawed at his eyes, I clawed at his cheeks, I clawed at his mouth and ears and nose. I felt wet against my fingers, and I didn’t care whether it was spit or blood or tears. All I cared about was that he was staggering back and releasing his hold on my choking, convulsing brother.
And then he turned, his hands tearing mine from his face, and slammed backward into the car with me on his back, knocking the terror from my lungs, before throwing me over his shoulder like a wrestler onto the ground. I felt my wrist bend too far, but it was only the mechanics of the injury that registered, not the pain. I heard shrieking in the background that sounded like my mom. Then my face hit the pavement in a streak of fire-yellow and blood-pounding red and I passed out.
My first thought when I woke up on the living room couch was, Shoot, I didn’t kill him. I’d really hoped my clawing would have severed an artery somewhere in his face and made him bleed to death. But there he was, sitting off in the corner of the room in the chair that was so pretty that none of us ever used it. My eyes were seeing things a little blurry, so I couldn’t tell if it was blood or just scrapes crisscrossing his face. I hoped it was blood.
“Trey . . .” I croaked, turning my head to find Mom’s face above mine. She was holding my wrist like you hold a dead bird.
“It’s just a sprain,” she said, and I squinted a little to make sure it was really my mom. She didn’t sound like her.
“Trey,” I tried again. “Where’s Trey?” This time my voice sounded less like a bullfrog and more