Red String, Blue String

Chapter 3

The red and brown bricks coloured the outside of my childhood home, they were a mix of the two colours, to an outsider, this cozy little home omitted an atmosphere of warmth, but to the inhabitants, it was more of a chill. A constant chill, though only frost-bite inducing some of the time. I remembered when I would walk into my home after school each day, and particularly in elementary school, I'd walk into the kitchen and the smell of alcohol would immediately consume me.
              My mom would often be passed out on the couch, even as early as two or three in the afternoon. It was like this for my entire childhood, many days I'd even go hungry. My mother would just forget entirely that she had a child to feed. I didn't know my father, I had never met him as a child, apparently he had done drugs and my mother thought he wouldn't be a good influence. The irony in that.
             I was six years old when my younger brother was born, Spencer, he had these big blue eyes and curly brown hair. Like mine, but he wasn't mixed, we had different fathers. Spencer smiled when I looked at him for the first time, his precious face showing his love to me, it was the first time I ever felt something like that, love. In that hospital room engulfed in stuffy air, I felt love.
            As a kid I always imagined my father and what he would be like, I had only ever seen one picture, he was holding a basketball on his shoulder and smiling. Maybe he was funny, and smart, or maybe he would have taught me how to play basketball. I tried playing it when I was in middle school, but I ended up with a black eye and a couple bruised knees. I wish I had met him when I was a child, maybe my mother wouldn't have done all that she did.
    * * *
    Spencer blew out his candles as my mother and I sang to him, our voices ringing through our smiles. It was one of the last good days. He was turning seven, and got a remote control car that he loved so much, he spent most of the day playing it. I raced him around the backyard and we baked cookies with our mom, I was in seventh grade then and the following Monday I was doing a presentation on pollution. So that evening I was writing out my speech, I was always nervous for presentations but that one went particularly well. It was as if life was finally giving me a break.
    Then Thursday came, five days after Spencer turned seven. We went to school that day as we always did, but when I got home my mom wasn't there, which was weird, that past week she had actually been doing better, making dinner. I picked up our home phone and dialed her number, no answer. I decided to just get myself a snack before trying to call her again. I didn't have to call at all because the door opened about twenty minutes later, my mother was as white as a ghost. Something was wrong.

* * *
    His machine at the hospital kept beeping, I leaned down and placed a kiss on his forehead, it was cold to the touch. I'll never forget the feeling of having to walk out of the hospital without Spencer. He was gone.
My mother and I didn't speak for almost two weeks, I had never hated her as much as I did during that time. The falling leaves changed to snow and the air turned cold. Every christmas, my brother and I would decorate the house and I'd lift him up to place the star on top of our tree, that was the first year that I wouldn't be doing that, the year he died.

* * *
    There was also my bedroom closet, it would be so stuffy during the summers, I'd hide in there whenever they screamed in the kitchen. My mother and my step-father, every day, Monday to Friday, they would yell. At me or Spencer, at each other but mostly just at the world. The older I got, the more toxic I realized that they were, by the time Spencer was four, my step father was long gone. Mom got worse for a while following that, the drinking increased tenfold, and suddenly, random men would always be around, I'd be scared to walk into my own house most days.
    The reality was and had been that my mom had serious issues, things left unresolved from years of childhood trauma along with her own insecurities. By the time I was a teenager, there were many days I wished that I was never born. My own mother didn't even want me, or she at least didn't know how to love me. I always hoped that I was just unloveable. That was an easier pill to swallow than knowing my own mother just didn't care.
* * *
            I was four years old, wearing a yellow short sleeve shirt, streaked with dirt and a pink set of overalls. My shoes were on the wrong feet but I didn't care. I walked through the long grass in the front lawn and made my way into the house, this was a couple of months before I had met my step father. My mother was laying on the floor next to the couch, I walked over and kneeled in front of her, my naive mind thought she was just napping, "mommy, wake up," I said as my little hands shook her. She wouldn't move.