Page 27 of Gone Tonight
I breathed out and went into my room. My mother was probably passed out on the couch and would likely stay that way for the rest of the night.
I moved quickly, no longer worried about being so quiet. I grabbed clean cutoffs and a top and bra and underpants and carried them to thehall bathroom. I slipped out of my sneakers and pulled off my clothes, wrinkling my nose as I raised my arms and caught a whiff of old sweat from Poms practice.
I took the world’s fastest shower, then dried off and dressed in record time. I liked makeup—a lot—but I only had time to apply a few swipes of mascara and cherry-red lip gloss.
I thought I heard a noise, so I cracked open the bathroom door and listened hard for a minute. But nothing had changed. Timmy’s door was shut, my parents’ door was ajar. The house was quiet.
I had two minutes before I needed to leave.
This next part is so hard to write.…
I shut the door and reached for the blow-dryer and turned it on.
You know how you flip your head upside down and aim the dryer at your roots to get more body into your hair?
That’s what I was focused on: a little more body in my hair.
The roaring noise of the dryer filled my ears. For one hundred twenty seconds, I couldn’t hear anything else.
Then I turned the dryer off.
Kids cry in a lot of different ways. Whether they’re angry, sad, injured, or tired, it sounds different. I’d heard Timmy cry in all of those ways. I thought I knew all of the ways there were for a boy to cry.
But I didn’t.
I can’t remember how I got from the bathroom into Timmy’s room, but I swear my feet didn’t touch the ground. I was in one place, then another, without having consciously moved.
Timmy was flat on his back on his bed, with my mother pinning him down. Her knees were on his elbows, preventing him from moving, as she slapped his face. His nose was bleeding.
I went wild. I flung myself at her, yanking her off my brother and pushing her across the room.
She was bigger than me, but she was also drunk.
She recovered quickly. She grabbed me by my upper arms and slammed me into the wall, cursing me. Calling me a bitch and a whole lot worse.
I could hear Timmy begging her to stop. My sweet little brother, whocame to my room when he woke from a bad dream because he knew I’d protect him, had a line of blood trickling from his nose.
Then Timmy’s voice faded away and I couldn’t hear anything but a roaring in my ears. It sounded a lot like the noise of the hair dryer.
I wanted to kill her. I wanted to claw out her eyes and grab fistfuls of her hair and smash her head against the plaster wall until her face looked like pulp.
If my father hadn’t arrived home at that exact moment, maybe I would have.
My dad wrapped his arms around me from behind, trapping my arms at my sides. If you didn’t know better, it could almost look like the way a dad would surprise his kid after arriving home from work by coming up behind her and hugging her.
My father ordered me and Timmy to get outside. The noise in my ears receded. I felt like I’d had an out-of-body experience, but I was coming back to myself.
My mother had been slumped on the floor, but her eyes were open and she was already climbing to her feet. She wasn’t badly hurt.
She might not even remember what had happened.
I grabbed Timmy’s hand and we ran back downstairs, retracing our route through the kitchen. I grabbed a paper napkin from the table as we passed it because my mother always kept nice paper napkins—the kind that almost look and feel like real cloth—in the silver holder.
Appearances were important to my mother. She’d never hit us outside the house, where someone might see. That would be unseemly.
Timmy and I sat on the front steps of the house. I cleaned his nose as best I could, then held him for a long time. To distract him, I talked about all the things he’d do someday. Ride a horse. Fly in an airplane. Go to Italy with me and eat a different flavor of gelato every day.
My father finally came out. He still wore his handyman’s coveralls with his name on the left pocket.
