Page 64 of Crash & Burn

“When?”

“When it started.” I shouldn’t be surprised she is putting all the pieces together. I wasn’t exactly subtle just now or when Annie made the comment about how our friend group doesn’t do well with parents at the bar a few weeks ago, and I have no power over how well Mia can read me.

“I was eight the first time I saw him hit her. I was eighteen when I was finally big enough to be the one to hit him back.” A weight is lifted off my shoulders with just those two sentences, and it is a weight that I have been carrying with me since that night.

All it took was him telling my mom to get him another drink, and years of holding back my utter hatred towards him came out that night. I stood up and told my oldest sister, Isa, who was fourteen at the time to get Lucia and Carmen out of the room. She did so without a word, and that is when I told my father to stand up.

I didn’t want them to see what was going to happen, especially not Lucia who started having panic attacks almost daily when she got old enough to realize what was happening to her mom. And that the perpetrator was her dad.

I had a couple inches on my father, having grown a little since starting college in the fall. I came home as much as I could, but tonight was the last night before things with the band were starting. Mateo, who was my roommate at the time, asked me to join, and it was going to take up a lot of my free time starting when we came back from winter break.

It had been long enough of pretending not to see what hid underneath my mom’s makeup and her long sleeve shirts. I let all the anger in me that had been building for years all out that night. Starting with a punch but not stopping until Mateo, Theo, and Silas pulled me off my dad’s unconscious body.

Good ol’ dad got a few good hits in, and I wasn’t surprised when he played dirty, reaching for anything he could to hit me with. He ended up grabbing a fallen glass, leaving me with a six-inch scar running down my forehead, over my eye, and down my cheek.

My mom had called Mateo when I threw the first punch, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to stop me. Mateo had met my mom a few times over the past few months of freshman year, and she had his number for emergencies. The emergencies she had in mind were needing to get ahold of me and my phone being dead. She wasn’t supposed to have to call him for help with stopping me from killing my own father.

My dad didn’t die that night.

He died a few years later, long after waking up on the dining room floor later that night, with my mom, sisters, and me gone. Our bags packed and never looking back.

He never pressed charges, but I wouldn’t have cared if he did.

“Your brother was the one to pull me off him. My mom had called him because she didn’t know who else to call. She had lost all her friends and her only sister was hours away. My dad made sure that my mom had no one besides him.”

“Mateo never told me that,” she whispers.

“It isn’t something I talk about often. We barely talked about it after the fact.” Silas and Theo helped my mom pack up everything she needed, and Mateo helped my sisters. The three of them helped us out of there that night, and I never saw my dad again.

It wasn’t until the next morning, waking up in my dorm, a bandage over one side of my face, and learning from Mateo that my mom and sisters were staying with my aunt that I realized I could never let something like that happen again.

I will never forgive myself for what I made the guys do for me, and I owe my life to them for helping us get out of there.

“That was the last time I saw him. He died a few years later from a heart attack.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you, Eddie,” she says, but I don’t deserve her sympathy.

“The past is in the past,” I say. “We can’t change it.”

“That’s true,” she sighs, “but we can learn to live with it, rather than let it take hold of us.” She grabs the Kit Kat from where it is sitting on her seat, and she unwraps the red packaging. I watch as she takes out the four chocolate covered rods and breaks the rectangle in half.

Learn to live with it.

Isn’t that what I’m doing?

Living with it buried deep inside me, every day.

Feeling a constant dull pain in my chest, every day.

Scared to death I may lose something else that means something to me, every day.

I am living with it.

But it feels like it could kill me.

Mia holds out half of the Kit Kat to me, reaching across the center console. My body is aching to pull her from her side of the car over to mine, bringing her into my lap and holding her close. I’m longing for her to be in my grasp, feeling like she could disappear any second even though she is right here.

I settle for taking the Kit Kat from her, letting my fingers graze against hers, knowing the stolen touches are all I am going to get from now on.

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