Page 68 of Even After Sunset

So I tell him the truth: that I came home drunk—because that’s my best shot. He’s not going to rally for a kid who admits to underage drinking, then coming home plastered and not even bothering to hide it from his guardians.

Only there’s a brief silence on his end, and I worry for a second that I blew it. And then: “Okay… Can you elaborate a little more?”

I came home drunk. What more does he want?

“Well, uh, that’s pretty much it. I mean… I was supposed te be home by eleven and I wasn’t. And I wasn’t supposed to be drinking, and I did. My uncle had every right to be pissed when he found me passed out on the lawn at hell-knows what time in the middle of the night.”

“Silas…” Richard says, his voice low and steady, like he’s trying to soothe a lion cub. “Coming home drunk is not a reason for your uncle—or for anyone—tohurt you. No behavior makes it okay for your guardians to harm you in any way.”

I rub the back of my neck, pacing in a slow circle. He is not getting this.

“Look, I appreciate you trying to look out for me, Doc. But you’re getting the wrong idea. Believe me, I deserved the ass-kicking I got that night.” I pause and add: “And every other time, too… So we’re all good, here.”

But he’s like a dog with a bone: he won’t let it go. He comes back with more questions. He wants to know if I ever talked to anyone about the altercations with my uncle (No), or if I ended up seeing a therapist to talk about the incident surrounding my parents’ deaths (also No). Then he wants to know if I think I’m a bad person (my lengthy rap sheet is answer enough for that one), and when the first time was my uncle punished me physically. I laugh at this one, because it was the honest-to-God first day they moved in with me - two weeks after my parents died. I trashed my room — literally tore it to shreds: upturned all the furniture, ripped the bedding and curtains, smashed every item I owned and kicked my ten-year-old shoe right through the gyprock.

So yeah, I think it’s safe to say I was asking to have my ass handed to me. I was a little tyrant, and it only escalated from there. My aunt and uncle tried to tame me, but I just kept fighting back harder and stronger over the years.

“I want you to imagine something for me, Silas,” the good doctor says. “I want you to imagine a little boy… A boy about ten years old, who comes home from school one day and finds both his parents dead. And that little boy has no-one to comfort him. His best friend gets taken in by a nice older couple, but that little boy is put into a house to live for two weeks with a family he doesn’t know. And then two weeks later, a man and a woman he’s never met before come to live with him and he’s told they’re going to be his new family. And even though they’re his aunt and uncle, he doesn’t know them.”

Richard pauses here, and even though I was ready to cut him off a second ago, now I’m pulled in by the story. And yeah, I get that it’s a story about me. But it’s weird hearing about it this way—like I’m just some stranger looking in on my life from the outside.

“The boy is sad,” Richard continues, “because he misses his mom and dad so much. And he misses his best friend. He feels alone and confused and sometimes he feels scared because of what he saw that day when he found his parents, and it makes him feel all sorts of things that he doesn’t know how to untangle. And that makes him angry. He isso angrybecause it’s all so unfair and confusing and overwhelming.”

“He’s so angry that he tears apart his room. He kicks the walls and defaces them. And then the door suddenly opens and the boy longs for it to be his mom or his dad or his best friend who walks through that door. Only it isn’t any of them, because they’re all gone now. It’s his uncle who comes in. And when the uncle sees what the boy did to his room, he is furious.”

Richard stops here, and the line goes completely silent, except for the heavy sound of my breathing.

“Do you think the boy deserves to be punished?” Richard finally asks. And for the first time since I’ve met him, I don’t totally resent him.

My breathing is shallow and labored. I feel like I am in the room with that boy. And when I answer, my voice is barely above a whisper.

“No,” I say.

And then, in my head, I finish:

“ButIdo.”

Because, unlike that boy, I wasn’t just scared and lonely.

I was guilty, too.

Chapter Nineteen

Silas

Richard doesn’t push after that. He tells me he wants me to think about that boy for the next couple of days. He wants me to look at my past from an outsider’s perspective. And it’s not a totally stupid idea, except that the scene he thinks I’m looking back on has a few jarring differences from the one that really happened.

I can tell he’s pissed that my aunt never set me up with a therapist, and he’s a decent guy for giving a crap. But come on—how much more do I have to re-hash this shit before I can finally move on from it? And I doubt there’s too much a shrink can do that will help me sleep through the night at this point, anyway. Other than maybe prescribe some strong sleeping pills. Which, yeah… on second thought, would be sweet. Maybe it’s not so bad that he’s determined to set me up with some colleague of his when I get back. “Someone I might feel more comfortable talking to,” as he puts it.

Right now though, all the excavating the doc’s been doing in my brain is starting to give me a headache. Like I said: I’m an avoidance-at-all-costs guy—and Richard is clearly from the total opposite school of thought. Basically, we’re a match made in hell.

I tell him I’m exhausted after a full day on the road (not a lie), and that I’m heading to bed (total lie). I’m not sure he buys it, but at least it gets him off the phone and off my back, and I’m free to breathe normally again. Well, semi-normally. I’m still jittery as hell and jonesing for a drink more than ever. I have to settle for a cigarette instead. It helps, but only a little.

A breeze has picked up now that the sun is down and I’m just wearing a T-shirt, so it’s cool. I open one of Trudy’s outdoor storage compartments and haul out a bag of logs, then arrange them in the low metal fire drum and use my zippo to light it.

Soon the fire is full-grown and throwing off a decent amount of heat. I drag the picnic table a few feet until it’s closer to the fire pit, then sit and go back to smoking and staring into the flames. The heat is nice. So is the smell: that musty bonfire smell that stings the edges of your eyes. It smells like my childhood. Which tugs my thoughts back to the conversation with Richard, and to that ten-year-old boy tearing his room apart.

I don’t hate that kid.

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