Bruises

Ch.24-Endgame

"What?"

My voice sounded strange after the long period of silence, foreign to my ears. I stared hard at my father, whose face was a blank mask.

"What did you say?" I reiterated.

"No," he said again. "No, I didn't kill anybody."

And I thought there was no way I could possibly be any more confused. "But-but eight years ago-and now you're in prison-what the hell is going on here?"

His eyes flickered behind me for a nanosecond. "Lower your voice, honey," he scolded in a hushed tone, and then sighed. "I knew you would find out eventually. I just didn't think it would be under these circumstances."

I swallowed hard. "Well then, get to it. You have a lot of explaining to do."

"Okay." He licked his lips. "I guess it started a long time ago. Ten, eleven years, maybe. It's kind of foggy. I had seen Samuel Harding around before, with his father. It wasn't difficult to see that something was clearly wrong with him. The way he cringed away from his father, or the way he froze up whenever his dad would touch him. And his dad would always touch him in some way."

I released a strangled sound of dislike. I absolutely hated that Sam had to go through what he did.

"I didn't do anything about it. What with trying to make things work for you I didn't really have the time. But a year later, situations got worse. He lived right down the street, and sometimes I would see him walking home from school. Always by himself. He didn't used to be; he used to hang around with other kids. I think he had just started high school. Just to be friendly I confronted him outside, just to say hello, and he flinched. He tried to hide it, but I caught it." his eyes became distant, as if he was transporting himself to that very moment. "You can't hide abuse, no matter how hard you try. Someone will always make the connections."

"What did you do?" I asked fearfully.

"I watched. I watched him steadily grow more closed-in. More introverted. It got to a point where I just couldn't take it anymore. I met him outside his school one day and asked him if he wanted to go for a walk. He told me yes. I asked him-jokingly, of course-if he readily agrees to go places with strangers all the time. And with zero amusement in his eyes, he told me he would if it meant he didn't have to go home."

My blood turned to ice, pain tightening up my throat at the image of a younger Sam, beaten and battered and scared. "That's not right."

"No, I didn't think so, either. We talked for a good hour. He trusted me, I could tell. It took a lot of urging but he did open up to me. I think he had been waiting to for a while, to anybody who would listen. But nobody had ever confronted him before to ask him about the bruises on his arms, the ones he couldn't conceal on his face. I did. I was the first. And I did something about it.

"The things his father did to him, Elsie-it was sick. Absolutely sick. Not the kind of stuff you think a father should be capable of doing to his son. And the abuse . . . He's still probably one of the strongest people I've ever known. And he was only thirteen or fourteen. I was a grown man and I couldn't ever fathom going through all that while staying in my right mind and not completely breaking down."

That was the truth. I knew Sam told me never to compare abuse, that you couldn't put a time on that kind of thing, but I was pretty sure Sam's case was different. Most of his life that was all he knew, and he would have to live with those scars forever.

That just didn't seem fair.

"Did you help him?" I questioned.

"I wanted to. So badly. He was a boy with so much potential; I didn't want to see it go to waste because of some sadistic, perverted man. I did what I could. I told him he could come to me whenever he just wanted to-talk about things. And he did. Many times. You were eight-years-old when things started getting trickier." The next part seemed to physically pain him to say. "Sam came to me after a few months and told me I needed to watch you, Elsie. To make sure you were never alone, because his uncle had taken some sick obsession with you, and that his father was going to try to help him satisfy it."