She smiles at me then.
A sad smile that makes me want to bawl my eyes out because I know that that sad smile of hers is as much for me as it is for him.
For everything that I don’t know about him and want to.
But not like this.
Not when the price is breaking his trust.
But Mo doesn’t share the sentiment because she goes on, “If he wants to see it as betrayal, then that’s up to him. But I think you need to know because it’s as much for you as it is for him.”
And then we both grip each other’s hands harder than before.
As if we both know that we’re going to need it.
“So,” she begins, her eyes on me but with a faraway look. “I guess to understand it all, I’d have to take you to the beginning. The very beginning, the day he was born. I remember that day for two reasons: one, it was the hottest day we’d had in decades. Temperatures were through the roof. We were sweating our butts off. The air was so thick and still and heavy. There was no relief to be had. It was like we were living in an inferno and we were, both literally and figuratively. Because Mr. Marshall, the old Mr. Marshall, was angry. He had a temper, you know. A very bad temper. He was impatient and testy most of the time but on that day he was particularly so because Mrs. Marshall, Mara, was in labor. And it wasn’t her time yet and it was painful. She’d been in the hospital all night and she’d lost so much blood, and we were all walking around on eggshells, dreading that we’d be getting bad news soon. We thought we’d lose both the mother and the child. We didn’t though. By some miracle, the baby was saved. Not the mother, however. But as sad as we were, because we all loved Mrs. Marshall — she was the only one who could calm Mr. Marshall down — we were also happy, you know. We were thankful that one of them was saved.
“But not Mr. Marshall. He wasn’t thankful. I guess he didn’t want the baby to begin with. He wasn’t ready to be a father, but Mrs. Marshall insisted and he loved her so much that he gave in. But now his wife was dead and there was this baby in his arms that he apparently didn’t want. And on top of that, this baby was weak. This baby was premature and needed so much care and attention. He was underweight. He had problems with his lungs, his heart, his kidneys. And when we all saw how precarious his life was, we thought we’d lose him after all. But somehow we didn’t. Somehow that baby survived and lived through all the atrocities that were visited upon him so early. Because that baby was a fighter.
“He had to be, see. Not only because he had to push through those first few months of his life but also because he had to survive his father’s neglect. His hatred. His downright abuse. Because there was a lot of that. At first we all thought that he’d grow out of it, you know. That he was mourning the loss of his wife, so we thought it was grief. But that grief never ended. The grief made a home in him and turned him into something else. And he took it all out on his son.
“I’d find him, you know, Alaric. Hiding and crouching and just trying to make himself smaller whenever his dad was around. I’d find him under the bed or in his closet or in the woods behind the property. He’d tell me that he wanted to disappear. He’d read stories about it. Those were his favorite kind, where people had magical powers to disappear. But then I think he grew up a little and he realized that there’s something even better than disappearing. And that was being strong.
“Because he wasn’t, see. He was not a strong child, Alaric. Because of his early health issues, he was smaller for his age. Thinner and sickly. He’d get sick often. He’d be in and out of the hospital so much. Which frustrated his dad even more, that his only son, who killed his wife, was weak. He’d never visit Alaric in the hospital. It went on until Alaric was about ten or eleven.
“And by then he knew: his dad hated him. His father wanted nothing to do with him. Not that he didn’t already know that. He spent the better part of his childhood hiding from his father, his mean words, his mean fists, his bad temper, so Alaric knew. But by the time he was ten or eleven, I think it was cemented in his brain. It was cemented that he was a hated child. That his own father didn’t want him. And when you grow up like that, with that kind of neglect and abuse, you find a way to cope. Books were his escape.