Are You Afraid of the Dark?. Seth Adams C.
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She slapped him.
He didn’t see it coming but he felt it, hard and loud against his face.
She gasped when it was done. He touched his flushed, stinging cheek.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, tried to touch him again on the shoulder as she’d done before. He flinched away from the gesture as if from a hornet.
‘You’re a bitch,’ he said, flat and clear.
She slapped him again.
Reggie turned away; stared out the window.
But he could see her vague reflection behind him in the window.
She almost cried, a glimmering wetness at the corners of her eyes before she wiped it away. She gripped the steering wheel as a tremor passed through her. Then she started the car again and they pulled out of the place.
But in the rear-view Reggie could see the gentle hill and the tree atop it and the plot beneath where his father was, and though seen only fleetingly through a mirror, it felt as if he were being watched. A guilt and shame rose in him and he squashed it with indifference and old pain. Then he turned away from the mirror.
It kept showing him things he didn’t want to see.
4.
‘What happened?’ Ivan asked when Reggie climbed back up into the tree house. It was early afternoon and hot and Reggie handed over the sandwich and lemonade to the man across from him.
‘What?’ Reggie asked, settling down again in what was becoming his spot against the wall immediately to the right of the ladder.
‘Your face,’ Ivan said, gesturing with one hand at Reggie’s cheek where his mom had hit him, taking a large bite of the sandwich with the other.
Reggie touched his face absently.
‘My mom hit me,’ he said.
‘Why’d she do that?’ Ivan asked.
‘I called her a bitch,’ he said.
‘You sure have a way with people,’ Ivan said, finishing the sandwich and washing it down with the glass of lemonade. ‘Hit twice by two people in one day. Do you see the common denominator?’
‘What do you mean?’ Reggie asked.
‘You know why you were hit, don’t you?’ Ivan said, brushing crumbs from his hands and off his lap.
‘Because I called one guy dickless and called my mom a bitch,’ he said.
‘It’s more than that,’ Ivan said.
‘How so?’ Reggie asked.
‘You let people hit you,’ Ivan said. ‘You let them get away with it.’
‘The kid from school was bigger than me,’ he said.
‘So?’ the killer said.
‘My mom’s an adult,’ he said.
‘And?’ the killer said.
Reggie said nothing. He wanted to argue, wanted to defend himself, but didn’t know how. Also, some part of him thought maybe he deserved it – the hard shove to the ground, the stinging slaps. Why and what for, he couldn’t say.
‘The common denominator is you,’ the killer said. ‘People know you’re weak, so they know they can hit you if they want, and you won’t fight back. You have to change the common denominator, and the equation changes.’
Reggie didn’t reply, but he considered what the man said.
‘Tell me about the man who killed your dad,’ the killer said.
At first he didn’t want to. Caught off guard, Reggie struggled to find the words. The words to refuse this man before him, but more than that, to refuse the memory. He thought again of the rear-view mirror casting back his father’s gravesite, and the shame that simple reflection had stirred in him.
Reggie’s thoughts and feelings whirled, collided, then solidified into something clearer. He focused and it came to him, and surprising himself, he told the killer in his tree house about another killer, the one who’d taken his dad from him with a single bullet.
***
‘Where’d it happen?’ the killer asked.
‘In a parking lot,’ Reggie said.
‘What was his name?’ Ivan asked. ‘The man who killed your father.’
‘I never asked,’ he said. ‘I never found out.’
‘Why’d he do it?’
‘Because he was a drug addict,’ Reggie said. ‘And my dad tried to help him.’
‘Explain,’ Ivan said.
‘He was a parishioner at my dad’s church. My dad caught him stealing from the tithing box one day,’ he said. ‘Dad asked him why he was doing it. The man broke down and cried and told my dad. He said he needed the money for a fix. He couldn’t take it not having a fix. It made his body burn. It made him see crazy things. Only the drugs made it go away.’
‘What did your dad do?’ the killer asked.
‘Dad talked to him, and listened,’ Reggie said. Suddenly he had to do something with his hands. He rubbed them on his jeans; plucked at his shoelaces; scratched his arms. He needed to move and he stood, took a couple steps, settled down again and brought his legs up to his chest as he’d done before. For a strange and uncomfortable moment, Reggie wondered if this was how the drug addict had felt that day. ‘He told the man about programmes that helped people like him. He told him the church sponsored these programmes and could get him in at discounted rates or even free.’
‘Did he go?’ Ivan asked.
Reggie stared at the man across from him. Lowered his gaze to the large bandage about his middle, and the great red stain there. Again, he thought it looked like an eye, even through the bandage. A third eye looking at him, seeing him. Seeing through him.
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘He went.’
‘But it didn’t work, did it?’ the killer asked.
Reggie superimposed himself on that large red eye. Looked with it back in time to the past year. He saw the parking lot clearly. His dad lying there in a pool of blood.
‘For a time it did,’ Reggie said. ‘The guy went to a rehab centre for two weeks. My dad went to see him every day. Came back and told me and Mom how the guy was doing over dinner.
‘“He’s really going to make it,” Dad said. “He’s going to turn his life around,” Dad told us. “That’s great,” Mom said. “That’s good,” I said.’
Reggie rubbed his eyes but found no tears. He felt inside like he should be crying, but he wasn’t. There was a numbness and a dull sorrow, yet his eyes remained dry. He wondered if it’d be like that until he died, and somehow that was sad too.
‘My dad was so happy when he was helping people,’ Reggie said. ‘And it made me and Mom happy to see him that way. He liked giving people hope. He’d take calls from the congregation at any hour.
‘He woke in the middle of the night once to talk to a man whose mom had died from cancer. Another time, he drove twenty miles across town at 2 a.m. to console a couple whose son had died in Iraq. He even helped bury a little girl’s dog that’d been hit by a car.’
‘And helping this particular man got your father killed,’ the killer said.
Reggie nodded.
‘How’d it happen?’ Ivan asked.
‘My