Daniel sprinted up to his room. He filled his backpack with underwear, some shirts, an extra pair of jeans, his toothbrush, and his copy of We Can Build You by Phillip K. Dick, which he had just started. In a tin that came with his X-Men trading cards, he pulled out seventy-eight dollars that he’d managed to hide from the step-monster. After his statement to the sheriff, they would likely place him in a temporary foster home. The thought scared him, but how much worse than Clyde could things actually get?
He crammed his duffel bag with some more clothes and as many course textbooks as he could. It was only three years until graduation. Then he could go anywhere, do anything, including the Navy or college on the West Coast, away from Rita, Clyde, Conklin, Adrian, Katie, and the state of Maryland. Three years until the rest of his life began. He would see it through, all aces.
From his pin collection, he chose the Green Lantern logo pin. He wanted to take everything, but space would be limited in foster care, and young couples were never in the market to adopt a thirteen-year-old. He looked around his room and wondered how much of his stuff he could reclaim one day. His library, his comic book collection, his clothes-it could be replaced. The only precious item was a Gil Kane original Green Lantern pencil sketch, which he had framed and hung on the wall. He wrapped it in a T-shirt and gingerly placed it in the duffel bag.
The hallway floorboards creaked outside his room, and he froze.
“Where are you going?” Rita asked.
“Away.” Daniel resumed packing.
“Away where?”
“You told me not to came back if I walked out the door. So I’m out of here.”
“To live where? What are you going to do?”
“Katie said I could stay at her house. I need time away from here.”
“You’re going to the sheriff, aren’t you? You’re going to lie. You’re going to screw your family.”
The family was screwed already. Denial was Rita’s way of coping with her life. Daniel was just collateral damage-expendable. This made him angry.
“Lie? I lied earlier today to protect this freak show of a life,” Daniel said. “You never lifted a finger to help me. Now I’m telling the truth.”
“You ungrateful little bastard,” Rita continued. “You don’t know anything. How much we’ve sacrificed for you… I’ve sacrificed for you. Do you know how much easier it would have been for me to find a husband if I didn’t have a brat clinging to my skirt? I kept you even after John died. That’s right, you little shit. I’m not your real mother. John wanted a family, but he couldn’t have kids. So we adopted you. Then he died and left me stuck with you.”
Daniel was shocked. Not at the news, which he’d known for years thanks to Clyde’s drunken rants, but the manner in which Rita chose to tell him. Like Clyde, she tried to poison his link to John Hauer, the only father he had ever known. Nothing of John endured in her anymore. Her transformation was complete-she was Clyde’s handiwork, body and soul. So, Rita wanted to play the “truth” game. The truth shall set you free, he thought.
“I saw Clyde earlier,” Daniel said. “He was having sex with that woman from the hospital in the cab of her pickup. Turns out she’s Principal Conklin’s daughter. I think they’ve been friends for a while.”
Rita’s fists were balled. She filled the exit with her enraged presence. Daniel recognized a new crossroad in his life. One where Rita would start pounding on him, too, if he stuck around. More than just unwilling to let her hide reality from herself any longer, he challenged her place in the hierarchy, such as it was. Daniel was coming into his own, butting heads with the top, and she would either have to find some way to reclaim her station or yield to him. He felt sorry for her. She was a victim, a creation of Clyde Knoffler’s, but he could no longer submit to her skewed view of the world.
“I’m tired, Mom. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be a punching bag. I can’t keep getting slammed for doing the right thing. This family is killing me, and I want out.”
Rita walked up to Daniel and tried to slap him, but he grabbed her wrist and twisted until she was off balance, then he pushed her away. She lost her balance and hit her head on the bureau on the way down. She was dazed. A wave of guilt suddenly hit him. Daniel tried to help her up but she batted his hand away. He gave up, grabbed his bags, and walked out.
Descending the stairs, he stopped halfway just as Clyde wobbled in through the front door.
“Where the hell are you going?” Clyde said. His breath preceded him.
Clyde only ever returned home early to get money or beat his family. The fear that had paralyzed Daniel in the past, however, was kept in check this time. His decision to leave, to let loose the pretense of this family and all the chains that bound him to this existence, spurred him to new possibilities. The start of a new chapter in his story brought with it new reactions to old stimuli. Clyde no longer dictated the narrative. Cowering in fear in the face of his stepfather’s wrath was an archaic response. If anything, catching Clyde in a crude act of adultery, in its prosaic glory, emphasized the man’s base character. No one who spent the majority of his life staggering and stumbling as his primary mode of mobility could be the threat Daniel had envisioned him. Even Clyde was vulnerable.
Looking down on him from the middle of the stairs, Daniel said, “I’m out of here. That’s what you wanted, right? You don’t have to look at my ugly face anymore.”
“Just like that? You think you can leave?”
“Yeah. Just like that.”
“Think you can just leave and stick us with the bill for your lawsuit? That’s right, I heard all about it. Uh-uh. No way.”
“All the money we’re paying out, the school desks, my expulsion, the lawsuit, it’s all because you stuck your dick into Principal Conklin’s daughter.”
Clyde looked around nervously. “Shut your mouth, boy. You say one word about that to anyone and I’ll kill you.”
“Mom knows, but she’s too beaten down to ever divorce your ass.”
Clyde ascended the stairs with clenched fists. “You little shit…”
Daniel slammed him square in the face with his bag full of texts and sent the man reeling backward, grasping for the banister but too drunk to find it. Clyde landed on his back on the edge of the first stair and floor. Sprays of spit shot from his mouth as he yowled.
“I’m gonna rip you apart, you piece of shit,” Clyde bellowed. “And not gentle, like before!”
Daniel jumped from the middle stair and landed on his stepfather’s breadbasket. He heard a rib crack, and Clyde vomited the contents of his stomach over his own face. He choked on his own puke as Daniel leaped off him and made for the exit, but not before a hand grabbed his ankle, causing him to fall into the door headfirst. Daniel saw spots and struggled not to black out.
Clyde turned over, ready to get up. Daniel thrust his free foot into the man’s face repeatedly, but Clyde was so drunk, his pain threshold was beyond Daniel’s ability to breach. Clyde exposed his torso as he struggled to stand. Daniel let loose a solid shot to the cracked rib. Clyde yelped and let go. Daniel stood and swung his duffel bag into his foe to knock him down and nearly drove his own cracked rib into his lung in the process. He heard his picture frame crack within the bag.
Rita froze on the stairs. She stared silent and still at the scene unfolding below.
Clyde grabbed the duffel and threw it aside. Then he grabbed Daniel by the throat and dragged him into the dining room. He picked the boy up and slammed him into the dining room table, splintering it. Daniel grabbed one of the broken table legs, swung it, and missed. Clyde caught the piece on the backswing, pulled it from Daniel’s hand, and threw it aside. Then he grabbed the boy by the throat again. The grip was a vise. Daniel clawed and scratched the arm to no avail. He thrashed his hands around trying to find something he could use as a weapon.
He remembered his pin. He unclasped it, bent the pin outward with his thumb and in one swift move jabbed it into Clyde’s left eye. Clyde screamed and stumbled back. Daniel rushed him, blocking into his gut. He heard the rib crack again. They fell backward onto the shattered dining room table with Daniel on top. Clyde became still, almost frozen. His body tensed and then he coughed up blood. Daniel scrambled off and stood back. Clyde’s one eye stared wide in shock. The man looked ludicrous with a Green Lantern monocle pinned to his eye. He coughed up more blood, and that’s when Daniel noticed a section of Clyde’s shirt, pitched up like a tent. A bloodstain soaked into the cotton at the point.
Daniel didn’t need to be an anatomy expert to know that something important in Clyde had been pierced by a shattered table leg. Clyde extended one shaking hand upward toward the boy, but whether this was a plea for help or a last-ditch effort to throttle him was unknown. Clyde peed his trousers. His breathing became shallow.
“Oh God! Oh God!” Rita yelled, unfrozen and running down the rest of the stairs.
Penny waddled into the room. When she saw her daddy on the floor exhaling blood, she began to cry.
“Penny, go into the kitchen,” Daniel ordered. But the girl just stared and wailed.
Clyde tried to roll onto his side but was staked to the spot. His breath was a gurgle, as though breathing submerged. He vomited more blood, but gravity forced it back into his throat. Clyde was drowning on many different levels; his face turned blue.
“Oh God,” Rita repeated, hovering over her husband, frantic, but afraid to touch him.
Clyde convulsed, causing the shattered table leg to slide farther. He was having a seizure. Then as quickly as it started, Clyde just stopped.
He lay there with crimson streams running from him like a mountain in a spring rain.
“Oh my Lord,” Rita whispered hoarsely. “Oh, God…”
Daniel went cold. He couldn’t believe this was happening. It was a dream, a fantasy. Things like this happened on the nightly news to other people.
Daniel went to Penny and got down on one knee. “It was an accident,” he pleaded. “I’m sorry…”
Howling, she pulled away from him.
“Penny…”
“You killed her father!” Rita cried. “You son of a bitch, you killed my husband.”
The accusation shook him. Daniel couldn’t remember the last time Rita referred to Clyde as her husband. For years he had cheated on her, squandered her fortune, basically shat on her, and all of a sudden he was her husband.
“He came at me…”
The boy collected his wits. There would be no finishing high school, no amending his friendship with Adrian, no second chance at Katie Millar, not even a kind word from his mother or his principal at his murder trial about what a good kid he was. His life, if he remained, was over.
Daniel grabbed his cap and jacket off the hook. He had to follow his instincts. After all, they were often correct. Over Rita’s lamentations and Penny’s sonic bawling, he walked out the door and never looked back.