A VISIT’S END
We’re bringing the boys down the first-floor stairs which lead to the lobby in the apartment building I live in. Their mom has my youngest son by the hand, guiding him down the stairs one at a time. We descend, together, at his pace. I hold my oldest son in my arms, giving him kisses and telling him everything a dad should say to his children. Everything a dad should say upon the conclusion of a rare and internally conflicted visit with his sons. The truth is, I have no idea what I should be saying, but I am saying the things I wished a father had said to me, whether he lived with me or just visited. But men that don’t exist never speak.
We’re exiting the building. Just like every other time my two toddlers leave my apartment to go back to their mother’s house, I feel like part of me is dying inside. An essential piece, separated from the whole. A necessary part of the self, excised, removed.
We’re walking down the sidewalk, headed towards their mom’s car. I’m still telling my eldest how much I love him, how happy I am that he and his brother came to visit me, that he is welcome anytime he wants—all he need do is ask. I’d be lying if I said this was the hardest part, but it is by no definition easy. Letting them go, watching them leave, it is by far one of the more painful aspects of this circumstance. Even the parts that are supposed to be happy are sad; even the parts that are supposed to enrich our lives only seem to erode it. I question whether I am sick inside.
I help buckle the boys into their car seats. I kiss my eldest’s forehead and little hands two, three, four times, all while repeating my departure chant, my mantra of divergence.
I love you and your brother so much. Thank you for coming to see me today. I hope you enjoyed your supper. I’m going to give your brother a kiss and tell him I love him, too, then I’ll say goodbye to Mom. I love you, bud. I’ll see you soon, any time you want.
I do what I said I would do. I circle the car and open the rear passenger-side door. I repeat everything to my youngest. I kiss him over and over, just as I do for his brother. I’m trying my best not to appear as though I’m purposely delaying their inevitable departure. I’m not. Not intentionally, anyway. I want to hold them forever, but it’s almost 8:00 p.m., and I know they still need a hot soak and a book. Or two. Or three. Or even the same book four times in a row. They are my children, after all. They love to be read to, to pretend to read books themselves, and to make up fictional stories they tell me when they visit.
If I could keep them, I would read to them every night for as long as they wanted, forever. I would teach them the beauty and power of language. I would teach them to harness and respect this power, and to respect themselves, and to love each other without expectation, endlessly.
I shut the rear door and walk to the front driver-side door. I bow my head inside the window. We don’t cheek-kiss goodbye anymore. We simply gaze into each other for a few moments. I couldn’t guess what she’s thinking, but I am wondering how things came to this while trying my best to conceal how I feel. I thank her for bringing our children to visit. I tell her to please come again.
I return to the building and hold the door open for a woman leaving the complex to walk her dog. She’s pretty, well dressed, and initiates a smile. I’m too overcome with emotions presently unidentifiable to return her smile, but I try hard. I imagine that the look she gets from me is punctuated with pursed lips and underlined in dead eyes. I keep the door held for two men entering the building. They both know me well. They’re good people, each with his own problems.
“They look really good, man. You’re doing a great job!” says one of the men. I scurry for words.
“It’s a lot of hard work, but worth the investment.” I give him the truth.
“You make it look easy. You look really happy.”
This time I lie. “I am. Thank you.”
I return to my small apartment and spend the rest of my night watching movies to keep my mind entertained. I don’t want to think about the twisting, nauseous, knotted feeling of being separated from my children.
Although there are days when I want to take the whole bottle my doctor prescribed me—because I am weak in that way, and it would be so easy to find such release—I take just one to help ease this anxiety.
Until it can start to take effect, I calm myself with repetitions of This, too, shall pass. It needs to be true. I choose to believe it. I commit to trying again, harder, tomorrow.
INCENDIARY
My mom and Dan, her boyfriend, had been fighting all day and night.
It was about eight o’clock on a warm spring night in Westbrook, Maine, and I was in my room—which used to be Dan’s youngest son’s room—playing a game on my desktop computer. It was then that I heard the argument get increasingly louder until my mother was cut off in the middle of an insult. There was something about the abruptness and unnatural silence that followed that drew out an instinctual fear in me. I paused the game and walked out into the kitchen where I knew they last were.
I came around the corner and saw Dan holding a half-full rocks glass in his left hand, and my mother by her throat in his right hand. He was smiling and pinning her up against the refrigerator. My mother’s hands were clawing at his forearms. A cigarette burned in an ashtray on the kitchen table behind them.
Dan saw me and fixed his eyes to mine. Mom strained to turn her head toward me. The blood vessels in her face and neck were bulging from the built- up pressure, and her eyes were glossed-over and red, like the blood had been trapped there as well. Her brow contorted when she realized I was standing there watching her get strangled one-handed by a man that was staring back at me. He finally let go. I was frozen in place, even though I’d seen her abused before.
“Go to your room!” she yelled. She didn’t even come in after me; she just stayed in the kitchen with him. That night, I had to listen to them fuck in the next room over.
I was locked out of the house within a few days. I was in eighth grade at the time, and when I came home from school one afternoon, no one was home and my key didn’t work in the front door. I was furious. I assumed Dan was kicking mom and me out of his house, but I later learned that wasn’t the case. Mom thought she and Dan would work out better if I wasn’t there to disturb their love for one another. I admit that after the night of intoxicated choking, I did everything I could to drive a wedge between them. I was fourteen years old and five-hundred miles away from anything familiar, and I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do.
I walked to a friend’s house on the other side of town and brought him back to Dan’s home. We walked around to the back of the house, and I quickly devised a plan fueled by my growing fury. I kicked in a basement window that was about one foot tall by two feet wide and crawled through. I climbed up the basement stairs, through the kitchen, and unlocked the sliding glass door so my friend could come in and help me pack. I filled a duffel bag with clothes, toiletries, and a few personal items: a hard-shell case for my glasses, my favorite pen, and my journal. By the time we went back outside, the rage I felt had hardened into hate. I hated this man, and I wanted to hurt him the way he had stolen my New York life away from me, stolen my mother—who let herself be taken and abused—stolen the place where I lived, and I just wanted to take it all back from him and burn it all down.
So, I did.
I broke the lock off his tool shed with a rock near the swimming pool. I took everything out of it. Hand tools, power tools, a push mower, a lawn tractor, the propane grill, and other assorted house-maintenance items were all thrown or rolled into the below-ground pool. Some things floated, but most of the things I hurled in slowly sank to the bottom, ripping the pool liner into tattered shreds. I turned back to the shed and found two red metal containers, which I instantly recognized. I opened those two jerrycans of gasoline and dumped them in the shed and into the pool. The petrol glistened, floating like a thin rainbow membrane on the surface of the water. I wanted to burn his house down, too, but I knew Mom had her mother’s wedding band and engagement ring in there somewhere, and that was the only thing that kept me from doing it.
I asked my friend for a match—he regularly smoked his father’s cigarettes and rolled joints—and he gave me one. I struck it on the cement surrounding the pool and stood there with it in my hand, contemplating what I was about to do, until the flame had nearly burnt through the entire matchstick. I opened my thumb and forefinger and everything after seemed to happen in slow-motion—at least that’s how I remember it.
The match dropped to the ground. A line of flame sprinted laterally, running left and right, into the shed and over to the pool. Fumes must have built up in the shed because there was an explosion that sent splinters of wood out through the shed’s door. The surface of the pool burst into flames. Thick black smoke plumed from the edges of the burning pool. It looked like a Hollywood movie. I had never seen water burn before. It was like magic.
We climbed over the tall wooden fence, me with a duffel bag filled with my life slung over my back. I felt exhilarated as I hopped on my bike and turned my head to get one last look at the smoke billowing into the sky.
I was taken into custody later that day, but the authorities didn’t press charges, despite Dan’s insistence. Maybe it was because I lived in his home, and it was legally my residence. Maybe it’s not a crime to burn parts of your own house down. Maybe the police simply saw the logic behind my behavior and chose not to see crime in it. A more probable explanation might be that they saw the finger- shaped bruises on my mother’s neck and wished they had done what I did. I wanted to break his arms for hurting my mother, but this was the best I could have done.
I finished out the school year in Maine living out of my duffel bag. I stayed in my friend’s bedroom where he lived with his grandmother. I never went back to Dan’s. I’m not sure when Mom decided to get out of there, and we’ve never talked about it. We’re not that close anymore, and as much as I wanted to protect the woman who gave me life, I don’t think we were ever close as family to begin with.
Kiel M. Gregory teaches for the Binghamton Poetry Project and serves as Guest Curator for Bartle Library. He coordinates community school programming and afterschool tutoring to empower youth in the Southern Tier of New York where he is an MA candidate at Binghamton University. His prose and verse appear in Lips, Paterson Literary Review, Stone Canoe, 365 Tomorrows, and Willowdown Books’ anthology concataverse, among others. Visit kielmgregory.com for more.