Reaching Hearts - Faleena Hopkins Page 0,40
I’m going to bed.” I trudge toward the door.
“Your momma’s turned your old room into a meditation space, so you’ll be sleeping on the couch in the den,” my dad says to my back.
I turn my head and wince, shifting my feet to do the work instead so I can face him. “She did what?”
“You know your mother. She’s into that hippy shit.”
Paul, looking from me to my dad from underneath his eyebrows, wipes his stupid fucking long-ass tweezers with a rag and some paint remover. I shake my head and leave the room, calling to Bruce over my fucked-up shoulder, “It better look like it did before.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bruce calls back in his best attempt at a deep voice.
My mom has laid blankets on the couch and she’s fluffing a pillow when I scuffle up. Her eyes look me over quickly, and she lays the pillow down, her long salt and pepper hair falling on the sides of her face. “Your father give you that mark on your face?” She straightens her back and looks at me from the corners of her gray eyes. “It wasn’t there before.”
“Well, it’s there now.” I come up to stand beside her at the couch. The room is decorated in safari colors, safari prints, safari art. It’s like a camel threw up in here. There are framed photographs of Lions, a Giraffe lamp with a lampshade made of fake green leaves, Monkey coasters, and even a hyena statue with a snake around the base of its paws. My mom wants to go to Africa, but they’re never going to go. Dad’s too much of a racist to be around all those black people. The racism in this family will die with him. Paul, Bruce, Mom and I – none of us are that dumb.
“A meditation room, Mom? Really?” I climb into the bed and she pulls up the covers.
“I need a space of my own. And it quiets me, Tommy.” She sits on the arm of the couch near my feet. Her sad eyes fall on the source of my pain. “I should wash that.”
“Please don’t touch it, Mom. Not unless you have some pain meds to overdose me with, first.” My eyelids fall half-mast and I let my head sink into the clean, camel-colored pillowcase.
Her eyebrows twitch up. “They didn’t give you pain meds?”
I don’t say anything. She should know better than to even ask, but I don’t need to tell her that. Nothing’s going to change around here anytime soon. Except my room.
“I’ve got some. I’ll go and get them for you.” She rises slowly and flattens her hands on her belly, a personal tick she has that comforts her.
“Thanks, Mom.”
She nods as she walks away to the window to shut out the growing brightness of morning. I watch her thinking what I always think: how’d she ever say ‘yes’ to my dad? I’ve stopped asking why she stays with him long ago. It’s the abuser/victim psychosis. The victim gets used to the abuse so much that they don’t see it as abuse anymore. Any little crumb the abuser gives them is like a steak to the starving, so when he says something nice, she feels like the world is brighter. And it is… for two whole minutes. I used to beg her to leave him when I was a little guy and we were alone. But she slapped me hard across the face the last time. I learned to keep my mouth shut after that.
“Tommy?” she mumbles, turning away from the closed curtains.
“Yeah?”
“Who did this to you?”
I blink, thinking of what I want to tell her. “It was a robbery gone wrong, Mom. That’s all.”
She looks at me, expecting more. “But it wasn’t time to do the Tiburon deal.”
I sigh loudly, annoyed, and adjust my arms, crunching my face against the ache. “It wasn’t the Tiburon deal. I did something on my own.”
And just as I was feeling sorry for her, she says, “Well, that was a stupid thing to do, now wasn’t it.” She walks to the door, mumbling, “You got what you deserved.”
Speak for yourself, Mom.
I’m still on the couch, sleeping, when I get a phone call a couple days later. My dad comes in the room, holding my phone. “Your buddy’s calling you from the grave,” with his expression sneering, You couldn’t even get this right.
I cut my eyes to the phone. Brendan’s alive? Well, that answers that question.
“Well, this is a surprise,” I say to