Circumstances 16

We were sitting at their kitchen table, all four of us.  Mrs. Jenks had made cocoa.  I felt like an idiot.

I’m 14.  If you wake up crying from a nightmare at someone else’s house, and you’re 14, you feel like an idiot.  You can take my word for it.

Mrs. Jenks had finally taken her arms from around me when I’d stopped crying and told both of us to come downstairs for cocoa.  Then she and Mr. Jenks had left.  I don’t know if they thought it would be embarrassing for me to get out of bed with them there.  Probably did.  I had boxers on, but they didn’t know that.

It wouldn’t have bothered me, their seeing me in my boxers.  I was already so embarrassed that that wouldn’t have made me feel any worse.

Gary got a robe for himself and then another one for me.  What kid has two robes?  He did, but told me the one I was wearing was an old one he’d grown out of.  Well, he was bigger than I was, so it made sense.  He was about five and a half feet tall and probably weighed 140, 145, whereas I was just 5 feet tall, if I stretched, and had just broken 100 pounds a couple of months ago, though I hadn’t had anyone to brag to about it.

The robe fit pretty well.

We went downstairs into the kitchen where we sat at the table.  When it was ready, Gary’s mom brought the cocoa to us, then put a bag of marshmallows on the table.  She stopped after she’d put my cup in front of me and leaned down to give me another hug.  Not just a brief one, either.  I didn’t mind.

When she was the last one seated, she said to me, “Tell me about it.”  The concern I heard in her voice almost had me tearing up again.  I wasn’t used to people caring about me.

I put a marshmallow in my cup, stirred the cocoa a little, blew on it, and took a sip.  Wow!  It was really good.

“I think I know why I had the nightmare,” I said at last.

None of them spoke, but they were all looking at me.  Stange, but that didn’t make me nervous at all.  If a bunch of kids, or teachers, looked at me like that, I always wanted to run and hide someplace.

“The TV was on.”  Still no one spoke, so I continued.  “A movie came on and the man and woman were arguing.  I was asleep, but heard it.  And I think it registered, just like it did when I heard the real thing.  I think I reacted like I used to, too.”

I looked down at my cup, and saw it was empty.  I wondered who’d drunk it.  Mrs. Jenks got up and poured me another.  I smiled at her.  She hugged me even longer this time before sitting back down and smiling at me.  “Go ahead,” she said.  How’d she know I had more to say?

“My parents fought a lot.  Yelled at each other.  It made me feel…”  I had to stop.  I drank some cocoa.

When I could, I said, “Sometimes they did it right in front of me.  It made me feel like I wasn’t worth anything at all, that I didn’t matter, that what I felt didn’t matter, if they could fight like that right in front of me.  And sometimes it made me feel like I was the reason they fought.  Maybe I was.  My dad…”  I had to stop again, and it took me a moment to regain my composure.  When my voice would work again, I said, “My dad yelled some things I overheard.  Things about being happier when he was single.  When…”  I gulped back tears.  “When he didn’t have a kid.”

I stopped again, and couldn’t help it.  My eyes started dripping, and then she was there holding me again.

I cried a little, then said, “I want to finish.”

So she sat back down, I sipped a little more cocoa, and said, my voice shaking but fighting through it, “Every time they’d fight, it would hurt.  I’d go up to my room, but I could still hear them.  It finally ended.  My dad left.  They got a divorce, and he said he didn’t want any part of custody, he didn’t want to see either of us again.  He hasn’t, either.  Or even called or written.” 

My voice was getting stronger.  “I was a mess after they finally got the divorce.  I used to cry a lot.  I was eight, and you’re not supposed to cry when you’re eight.  My mom would get angry with me; she yelled at me for not being more of a man, and that made it worse.  She sent me to a psychiatrist, and I talked to him.  Several times, even though my mom had a hard time paying for it.  He helped some.  He said I had serious self-esteem problems, that I didn’t have much feeling of self-worth, and that I blamed myself for my parents fighting and splitting up.  He was right about all that, but I already knew that.  Having him tell me didn’t help much, didn’t make anything better. 

“That was a few years ago.  I’m a lot better now, but when people argue, or yell at each other, or at me, I can’t really handle it.”

They were looking at me and I could tell they didn’t know what to say.  How to help.  I didn’t know, either.

“After my dad left, we didn’t have much money.  To keep up the mortgage payments so we could keep the house, my mom had to go back to work.  She’s a lawyer, but she had to start over, and didn’t have any money to start her own practice.  She finally found a job at a big firm.  Starting out, lawyers don’t get much money, but they do get to work long hours.  She started as an associate in the office and wasn’t even on the path to make partner when she began.  I don’t think she is now, either.  She had to earn that partnership path when she first started, and maybe she hasn’t done that.  I don’t know.  She doesn’t talk about it.  She’s just angry all the time.

“Anyway, after she finally got the job, she was gone most of the time, and when she was home, she was tired, and she was unhappy how things had worked out, and she needed someone to vent her anger at, so I began to get blamed for stuff that wasn’t my fault, and it became a habit for her to criticize me, and, well...”

I didn’t say anything else, and looked at the empty cup for a while, and then felt my head drooping.

Gary came over and said, “Let’s go back to bed.”

I looked up at him.  “You still want me to sleep here?”

He didn’t even answer.  He just took my arm, helped me up, and we went back up to his bedroom.  He got in bed, then I crawled in after him.  He said, “Roll over on your side, away from me.”

Well, I should have figured that.  I’d sleep with him tonight, as far from him as he could make it, then tomorrow, he’d say, “So long,” and that would be it.  So, I rolled over, away from him.

Then he rolled over, too, and pressed his body up against my back and held me tight to him.  In the three seconds it took me to fall asleep, I was too exhausted to do anything but enjoy how good it felt.