The Way Back from Broken (7 page)

“That sounds nice for you, Leah.” His mom wasn't doing a very good job of keeping irritation out of her voice.

“I bring it up,” Mrs. Tatlas continued, looking a little embarrassed, “because Jacey's being a bit stubborn.” Rakmen shook his hand free of Jacey's grasp. “She doesn't want to go—”

Jacey wrapped her arms around herself, hunching over so she seemed even smaller than usual. Of course she didn't want to go, and for the same reason that he really needed that job with Ray. Neither wanted to spend the summer with mothers like theirs.

“I don't understand what you're telling me, Leah,” said his mom, sounding way beyond tired.

“Jacey wants Rakmen to go with us.”

He jerked to his full height.

“What?” his mom asked.

“George can't get the time off,” said Mrs. Tatlas, gesturing to her husband, who was halfway out the door and clearly wanted to get all the way out. “Jacey's got it in her head that Rakmen's her own personal Superman or something.” She laughed nervously. “It's a little weird, but we'd love to have him, especially since he's got the time now.”

“Someone's got to take care of me,” Jacey muttered.

A mask fell over Mrs. Tatlas's face, turning her features corpse-like.

“Jacey. Out. Now,” said her dad.

The girl skittered past her mother and down the front steps.

“Thanks for the offer, Leah. We'll think about it,” said his mom.

Rakmen swallowed back his rising nausea.

The thinking was done. A cabin in the woods with the two of them wasn't a vacation; it was a prison sentence, and besides, he couldn't be trusted to take care of anyone.

CHAPTER 7

After helping his mom clean up, Rakmen retreated to his room and flopped on the bed. The fading smell of charcoal from the grill curled up from the backyard, and the party at the neighbor's was still going strong. He wanted to sleep, but it was only a few weeks from the longest day of the year and still light outside. Besides, a tight ball of unease rattled inside his ribcage.

His dad had not come home.

A few days ago, while thumbing through one of his mom's books on surviving the loss of a child, he'd come up with a statistic, which he'd carefully penciled into the notebook.
In the majority of cases, the marriage does not survive the loss.

And the walls in this house were thin. Overhearing was something Rakmen couldn't escape. His dad wanted space. He wanted to be left alone. His mom wanted to talk and talk and talk as if words alone could bring back babies.

He opened the notebook and wrote
‘Til death do us part
.

He crumpled the book in one hand, straining to tell if the rumbling engine noise outside was his dad's truck or the neighbor's. A minute later he heard the front door open and close. He waited for his mother to speak. She was there. He'd left her on the couch, re-reading that book, the one about grief.

Instead, the TV blared SportsCenter. The familiar buzz of the broadcast filled him with relief. He pushed off the bed. He could catch the game with Dad and forget about how Memorial Day had gone down in flames, but as he opened the door, the TV voice cut off mid-sentence.

“I was watching that,” said his dad.

Rakmen froze with his hand on the doorknob.

“You can't keep pretending that nothing has happened,” said his mom.

“That's not what I'm doing.” His dad's voice was gravelly and tired. Rakmen crept to the top of the stairs, drawn unwillingly to watch the coming disaster.

His mother was shrill. “You won't talk or go to therapy, so what are you doing?”

“There's nothing to do, Mercedes. She died. Talking doesn't change that.”

Rakmen could fill every line of every page in his notebook with
she died, she died, she died
, and it would never be enough.

She died in my arms.

He edged down the stairs like a guilty man to the gallows.

“If you don't talk about it, how do you expect our son to work through this?”

They should know everything that happened the night Dora died. He felt like he might explode with it.

“Rakmen's fine,” his dad growled as Rakmen reached the bottom of the stairs.

“Fine? He's about as far from fine as you can get. He's almost flunking out of school. He's depressed. He's volatile. You'd know if you paid any attention at all to your kids—”

“Kids?”

From the shadow of the hall, Rakmen could see the dangerous currents swirling on his father's face.

His mother took a step back. “You know what I meant.”

“Yeah, I do,” said his father. “You mean it's my fault she's dead.”

Rakmen wanted to scream
it was me
but the words stuck in his throat.

“I didn't say that. But—”

“But what?!” his dad said, each word an attack.

Tears poured down his mother's face. “You're the nurse,” she shouted. “You should've known something was wrong.”

Over her head, Rakmen could see Dora's picture on the mantel. Her dark eyes pierced his body. And suddenly he was running. Out the front door, down the steps. He slammed his feet into the sidewalk and pumped his arms until he was an engine, incapable of feeling anything but the urge to go and never come back. He half-slid around the corner, darting through traffic, sprinting past pedestrians. Running trumped thinking and memory and all the things that kept him up at night.

Rakmen ran until he was a few blocks from Pier Park. His lungs screamed for air and explosions of black dotted his peripheral vision. Sweat dripped into his stinging eyes. He swiped at it with his sleeve, ducked into the shade of the huge firs on either side of the bike path, and collapsed on an empty bench.

The energy that had propelled him drained away until Rakmen was empty, an old tin can, worthless for anything but target practice. It shouldn't have been Dora. It should have been him. Then his parents would have held joy between them instead of the hollow space that was Rakmen.

Minutes passed. Rakmen's breath slowed and his pulse returned to normal. The steady thump of dribbled basketballs came from the courts up a set of stairs to his left. There were birds chittering up high. A splinter from the rough wooden bench jabbed him in the back of the thigh. He couldn't move to save his life.

He couldn't go home.

He had no job.

No family.

Stuck. He was always stuck.

Rakmen scuffed the toe of his sneaker in the gravel below the bench and watched an old Hispanic guy in a Parks Department uniform empty the trash can at the base of the stairs. That'd be him in fifty years, hauling bags of other people's castoffs. Rakmen closed his eyes and dropped his head to his chest.

A second later, an ear-splitting screech of wood against metal jolted him to his feet. The groundskeeper was still bent over the trash can, but a skateboarder had jumped the stair rail and was skidding down in a blur.

The old man dove out of the way, the metal trash can lid went flying, and the boarder skidded to a stop.

Rakmen took the stairs two at a time and knelt beside the groundskeeper. “Are you alright?”

“
Dios mío, que gabacho loco
,” he said as Rakmen helped him up.

The skater, a gaunt-faced white guy in his twenties, flipped up his board and pulled his knit cap nearly down to his eyes. “Man, I nailed that. You okay?”

Rakmen wanted to rip his face off.

“Young man,” said the groundskeeper, brushing dirt and pine needles off his coveralls, “There is a skate park over there.” He pointed through the trees in the direction of the baseball diamonds. “These rails are off-limits.”

“Off-limits for who?” sneered the skater, lighting a cigarette. “Sneak back over the border, old man. I'll skate where I like.”

Roaring filled Rakmen's ears, obliterating the sounds from the basketball court and the distant hum of traffic. An outsized savagery bloomed in his belly and raged through his limbs. Face first. Arms second. He lurched forward, fists clenched.

The groundskeeper tried to stop him, but Rakmen swung hard from underneath and took the skater in the jaw. The impact ricocheted up his arm, the man's chin rocketed back, and the cigarette whirligigged in the air.

Specks of saliva clung to the corners of the skater's crooked lips. Surprise, then anger, then disgust flashed through his eyes as if he was above fighting someone so worthless. Rakmen's fists curled again. He wanted to erase that sneer. He threw a wild punch, but this time the skater was ready. He swung his board up hard, connecting with the side of Rakmen's head and throwing him off-balance.

Through the reverberations in his skull, Rakmen heard a guttural roar coming from somewhere, his own throat maybe. He lurched forward, plowing his head into the skater's stomach. Together they crashed to the ground. For a split second, they were chest-to-chest, too close and strangely intimate. Then the skater was digging his hands into the sides of Rakmen's face, scraping flesh, inching toward his eyes.

He pushed Rakmen's head back to the splintering point. Fire shot down his spine. With a fierce jerk, Rakmen broke free of the skater's grasp and pounded his head into the man's chest. Under him, the skater thrashed and bucked, wrenching loose with a vicious jab to Rakmen's kidney.

He flipped Rakmen onto his back and scrambled to his feet. Rakmen was trying to stand with the singular goal of wrapping his hands around that asshole's neck when the skater kicked him hard in the side. The sound was a pumpkin dropped on asphalt. The pain was a black flood. The skater kicked him again, and Rakmen crumpled.

“You're nothing,” the skater jeered through bloody teeth.

Rakmen couldn't be sure if the words came from that gash of a mouth or from those puncture wound eyes, but they reverberated through him as he passed out.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

CHAPTER 8

The old man was calling 911 when Rakmen regained consciousness.

“Don't,” Rakmen said, his tongue thick in his mouth. He'd thrown the first punch. Cops would never side with him.

“You're hurt.”

Rakmen tried to shake his head. His brain seemed to bang against the side of his skull with every movement. He held his head steady, looking at the still-spinning trees overhead, and reached for the man's arm. “Please. No.”

Squatting on his haunches, the old man gazed at him a long time.

Rakmen willed himself to pass out again. Instead his body resumed. The world stilled. His breath returned to slow and steady. Everything ached, throbbed, stabbed.

The groundskeeper pursed his lips and frowned at Rakmen. “Can you stand?”

Rakmen stood, shrugged off the old man's arm, and began to drag himself home. The blocks he'd sprinted stretched out before him. It was all concrete and pain and returning to worse than a beating.

He could hear his parents fighting as he went up the front steps.

He walked right in. At least they'd have something new to yell about.

. . .

His mother had cried, screamed at him, and then cried again, a good show of full-on parental shit fit. But really, she had been crying for Dora. Rakmen's father had cleaned his son's wounds in silence, diagnosed a broken rib without sympathy, and prescribed a double dose of ibuprofen. Rakmen was some patient on his rounds. A stranger.

Rakmen had been banished to his room. No one checked in before bed. No one woke him for school the next day. Now it was nearly five o'clock. He'd stayed in bed all day, propped up on pillows to protect the worst of his bruises, and trying not to think about anything. His phone hadn't rung once.

When he heard his parents come home from work, Rakmen turned away from the door, even though resting on that side made the egg-sized lump on his head throb like a battering ram inside his skull. He breathed in shallow gasps. Inhaling too deeply sent pain stabbing through a rib on his left side.

There was a knock on his door. He ignored it, but the door opened anyway. Rakmen pretended to sleep. The desk chair scraped against the floor. He could hear the weight of his father settling into it. The mattress shifted as his mom sat beside him, sending a redoubled round of aches through his body.

“We need to talk,” she said.

Rakmen rolled over, blinking at her through swollen, slitted eyes.

His dad sat in the desk chair, elbows on thighs, his head resting on the tips of his fingers. “What's your pain level?” he asked, without looking up.

“What am I? One of your patients?” Rakmen said. His dad's lips pinched into a tight line, but he didn't respond. “I get it,” Rakmen continued. “I'm such a big disappointment to you that you won't even look at me.” He pushed himself to a sitting position, ignoring the screams of his injuries, welcoming the stab in his chest. Level eight. It was what he deserved.

“This isn't about you,” said his mom.

“That guy totally had it coming to him. Complete jerk-off.” Now his mom wasn't looking at him either. She stared at her hands, limp in her lap. Rakmen sensed that he might have misread the stakes of the situation. Badly.

“So I'm grounded, right? For like the rest of my life. Fine.” His dad cleared his throat, but Rakmen cut him off. “I'm sorry, okay? I shouldn't have gotten in a fight.” His mom started to cry. The space between his dad in the chair and his mom on the bed seemed vast and unbridgeable. He knew, suddenly, that they weren't here to talk about the fight.

His dad cleared his throat again. “What we're trying to say is that things aren't going very well for us.”

Rakmen tried to disappear into the rumbling sounds of the evening commute outside. Desperation settled over the room like poison gas. Since Dora died, they'd faked everything. A united front. Stiff upper lips. Acting normal. Barbecues. They'd tiptoed around like everyone was made of glass. The fatal mistake was expecting things to get better.