999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [111]
Still, he did not do well with Lily, and though both he and my mother strenuously denied it, so far as I could tell his leaving could not have originated from any other source. I can’t speak for my brother, but I did not do well with his departure. Of course I blamed Lily; I couldn’t blame him or my mother, could I? Lily was such a convenient target, like that croc whose skull I stove in after Adolfo had shot it to death; by then it couldn’t harm me, but it had sure as hell scared the living piss out of me.
Possibly Lily did, as well.
In any event, in the first few months after my father left, my mother was desperate for the rest of the family, so far as it was possible, to do everything together. I imagine it was her way of reassuring us that our world hadn’t fallen apart. Years later, it occurred to me that she must have been reassuring herself, as well. Toward that end, she engineered this outing. Because I was the eldest sibling, it was my responsibility to collapse and unfold Lily’s wheelchair, as well as to push her around while she screamed, barked, howled and generally sent chills up and down my spine.
It was a beautiful spring day in late May. The birds were twittering busily and the insects were droning. For some reason, the air was filled with butterflies, as if they all had broken out of their golden chrysalises at the same time. You can imagine how beautiful they were, but something about them—perhaps their erratic, skittish flight—seemed to terrify Lily. She rose up out of her wheelchair, screaming and clutching the air with her spastic fingers. When I made the mistake of coming around to try to calm her, she clawed at me with such ferocity she actually drew blood.
That’s when I hit her. It was just a smack on her cheek with my open hand, and it startled me just as much as it must have startled her. Her eyes rolled in her head, her face filled with blood, but she was eerily silent for long minutes. Then she erupted into tears. She wept and moaned, rocking and shaking as if with a high fever.
My mother hurried over and boxed me hard on the ear before shoving me away. Then she knelt beside Lily and began the long and repugnant ritual of calming her down. While she tenderly stroked her forearms and murmured to her, while Lily wept and pulled at her hair, hateful Herman looked at me with the full-blown contempt of an adult. Not that he did anything to help Lily—I don’t believe she ever liked him, and he knew it. But now he could lord it over me. He could say that he’d never lifted a hand to his sister.
“Billy, how could you,” my mother said sometime later.
“Mom, look what she did to me. She drew blood, for God’s sake.”
“She couldn’t help herself. She’d never intentionally hurt you. You know how much Lily cares for you.”
“Mom, I don’t know anything of the sort,” I said defensively. “And to be brutally honest, neither do you. Can you tell if a mushroom likes you? No, ‘cause a mushroom can’t think.”
Then she did something she had never done before or after. She grabbed me by my shirtfront and shook me like a rag doll. “Now you’re talking like your father, young man, and I won’t have it. Do you understand me?” She was mad as hell. “This is your sister you’re talking about. Lily is a human being just like you or Herman.”
“Nobody is like Herman.”
“Billy, I’m serious. What does it take to get through to you these days?” All at once she let me go and all the fire went out of her. She appeared defeated, not just by me, but by life. The lens through which the world appeared to her was so distorted by her own past that she could not help but define us by the same severely restricted