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wouldn’t happen again, but it was frequent enough that you never forgot it was possible.
There was a rhythm to it. I remember one time, after one terrible incident, nobody spoke to
him for over a month. No words, no eye contact, no conversations, nothing. We moved
through the house as strangers, at different times. Complete silent treatment. Then one
morning you’re in the kitchen and there’s a nod. “Hey.” “Hey.” Then a week later it’s “Did you
see the thing on the news?” “Yeah.” Then the next week there’s a joke and a laugh. Slowly,
slowly, life goes back to how it was. Six months, a year later, you do it all again.
—
One afternoon I came home from Sandringham and my mom was very upset and worked up.
“This man is unbelievable,” she said.
“What happened?”
“He bought a gun.”
“What? A gun? What do you mean, ‘He bought a gun’?”
A gun was such a ridiculous thing in my world. In my mind, only cops and criminals had
guns. Abel had gone out and bought a 9mm Parabellum Smith & Wesson. Sleek and black,
menacing. It didn’t look cool like guns in movies. It looked like it killed things.
“Why did he buy a gun?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
She said she’d confronted him about it, and he’d gone off on some nonsense about the
world needing to learn to respect him.
“He thinks he’s the policeman of the world,” she said. “And that’s the problem with the
world. We have people who cannot police themselves, so they want to police everyone else
around them.”
Not long after that, I moved out. The atmosphere had become toxic for me. I’d reached
the point where I was as big as Abel. Big enough to punch back. A father does not fear
retribution from his son, but I was not his son. He knew that. The analogy my mom used was
that there were now two male lions in the house. “Every time he looks at you he sees your
father,” she’d say. “You’re a constant reminder of another man. He hates you, and you need to
leave. You need to leave before you become like him.”
It was also just time for me to go. Regardless of Abel, our plan had always been for me to
move out after school. My mother never wanted me to be like my uncle, one of those men,
unemployed and still living at home with his mother. She helped me get my flat, and I moved
out. The flat was only ten minutes away from the house, so I was always around to drop in to
help with errands or have dinner once in a while. But, most important, whatever was going on
with Abel, I didn’t have to be involved.
At some point my mom moved to a separate bedroom in the house, and from then on
they were married in name only, not even cohabitating but coexisting. That state of affairs
lasted a year, maybe two. Andrew had turned nine, and in my world I was counting down
until he turned eighteen, thinking that would finally free my mom from this abusive man.
Then one afternoon my mom called and asked me to come by the house. A few hours later, I
popped by.