Blood and Water

I’m folding the laundry like Darren taught me to. I pluck my sweater Darren bought me last week on from the clothesline, fold it into quadrants, and plop it into the laundry basket alongside the rest of my clothes.

One fold, two fold, three fold, four! Darren had exclaimed excitedly when he trusted me to go outside and do laundry by myself. I parrot his singsong voice as I reach up to fold a shirt.

A bunny prances a few feet away from me in the tall grass, its dead eyes staring ahead into the creamsicle horizon. A grin spreads across my face as if I’m seeing an old friend. My hands furl like I could feel its fur between my fingers, rubbing the hairs between my pointer and thumb finger in a gesture familiar only to me. I almost run toward it before I remember I can’t go past the clothesline or else Darren pulls a mean face and gives me more vegetables than meat at dinner, and I don’t want to test what else he’s capable of. I wouldn’t dare to, anyway. Before, my landscape consisted of skyscrapers, towering beings that never left my sight. Now, in the golden countryside where the horizon stretches uninterrupted, I’ve never felt more alone.

So, I finish my folding and walk back inside the warehouse that Darren makes me call home. I find myself calling it home, too, sometimes, but I don’t like when I hear myself say that.

I set down the laundry basket near my bed that creaks too much whenever I move. It scares me at night, even though Darren plugged in a nightlight for me so that I don’t have to walk to the bucket in the dark when I have to pee. The creaking reminds me of the crows that populate the tin roof and squawk at me when I go out to collect my rocks, and even though I like birds, I don’t like those birds.

Just as I begin to load my folded clothes into the battered dresser with one drawer that squeaks when opened, Darren opens the warehouse door as if on cue.

“Connor, I’m home!” he announces proudly, setting down a couple grocery bags on the floor and opening his arms. “How are you doing, son?”

I’m not Connor, and I’m not your son, I want to say every time he says that, but I had given up a long time ago.

“Hi, Dad,” I reply, the word splintering inside me like the wood chips I played with where Darren goes to chop wood for the back boiler.

His footsteps are heavy, his work boots probably weighing more than I do. One thing I hate more than my creaky bed is the cracked concrete ground that sucks up my coins when I roll them on the floor and allows bugs to crawl inside. Darren tries to kill the bugs for me, but when he is doing whatever he does on the outside, I’m alone with the spiders and roaches that also want to call this warehouse home. I want to scream at the bugs, Fine! Take it! It’s yours! I don’t even want to be here! But all they do is stare back at me with beady eyes or tickle my neck when I sleep. That’s when I really don’t need the bucket to pee. I have to sit in my mess all night until Darren comes and silently cleans it up and kills the bugs surrounding me.

He hugs me and does that thing where he buries his nose in my hair so deeply, I can feel the hairs in his nostrils tickling my scalp. All I do is pat him on the back and wait for it to be over. The first few times he did it, the humid moisture of his breath in my hair caused me to lash out and hit him. That reflex has since worn off, and my body is limp like a ragdoll in his arms.

His hand is as big as me, his thumb resting on one shoulder blade and his pinky stretching to the other. I notice then that I’m getting taller—I used to measure up to his hips, but now I can rest my face against his chest, hear the steady beat underneath the warmth of his muscles. I find myself flattening my hand against his back, pressing myself closer.

“Good job folding the laundry.” Before I can process that the hug is over, Darren is already over by the dresser, taking a look at my handiwork. “Just like I taught you. I’m proud of you, kiddo.”

I don’t deny the warmth I feel in my chest, the radiating feeling similar to when I’d wet myself in bed. I walk over to the grocery bags and take a peek, seeing my favorite snack, Pirate’s Booty, in one of them. I breathe in eagerly and jump, shaking my hands as Darren walks over to see what the fuss is.

“You got the big bag this time!” I yell, grabbing it out of the bag and sitting down with it on the floor. “Thanks, Dad!”

“Hey—Connor, you can’t have that before dinner,” Darren says as he begins to reach down to take the bag from me. But something—perhaps the combination of me thanking him and calling him Dad in the same breath—must have changed his mind. “Okay, you can have one.”

He sighs and opens the box, tossing me a bag before taking the rest to the cupboard we call a pantry near the makeshift kitchen toward the middle of the warehouse. I eat my snack gratefully until he calls my name, and I run to the dinner table. I eat my dinner with even more gratitude. It’s steak and potatoes night, my favorite.

“It’s only fair for my growing boy,” Darren says in a fond voice. He never eats with me. He sits at the table and watches me eat. Sometimes I wish he’d eat with me.

But that hope is dashed when he reaches over, and I flinch out of habit, and I remember why I keep my distance. A look of pain crosses Darren’s face, and he haltingly retracts his hand like a machine out of oil, resting it on the table and keeping his eyes on the swirls in the wood.

Then comes nighttime where he sets out my pajamas and turns around while I change. When he hears the shuffling of clothes stop, he sits on my bed and pats the spot next to him. I crawl up next to him, his arm settling on the curve of my waist as he digs in the bedside table through the stack and pulls out a book I don’t recognize.

“The Mysterious Benditch Society?” I ask, raising a brow as I look up at Darren.

He chuckles and leafs through the pages as he corrects me, “The Mysterious Benedict Society. It’s a more challenging book, but I think you can do it. It’s about time you move up a reading level.”

I smile at the thought that Darren thinks I’m smart enough to get through this giant book and understand what’s going on. But the length of a book never intimidates me after we read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone together a few months ago. I lean my head against his shoulder, my eyes dancing across the dedication page.

“I saw a rabbit today,” I say as he tries to find the first page. “A really cute one.”

Darren tucks his chin to look down at me, that same nice smile on his lips. “Oh? What color was it?”

“White and pretty, like the one from Alice in Wonderland,” I reply. I purse my lips. “Sometimes I want to go to where Alice went.”

Darren’s face hardens, his eyes going dead like the rabbit in the field. I don’t like when they do that, and they almost never do. But whenever I do something wrong, he gives me that look where I can see my reflection in the dullness of his eyes, see the panic in my own face, and all I want to do is hug him until the look is gone. But I don’t have to do that since Darren clears his throat before I get the chance to and turns back to the book, finally reaching the first page.

“Sometimes where we are is the best place to stay,” he says. “It’s where you’re safest.”

He starts to read, but I don’t listen very much at all. I pretend to doze off, and Darren slowly lays me back onto the mattress and tucks me in. He leans over to kiss me on the forehead. The vulnerable squish of my temples makes the perfect landing spot for his lips. After he leaves, I pull the covers up to my neck, my fingers lingering on my temple as my sleeping aid.

I dream that night of when I was Evan in my previous life, in my Before. I dream of the regular snapshots: a flash of my mother’s pink bathrobe, a cigarette dying a painful death in an ashtray, my father’s veiny hands as he reached out to me. Their faces are blurred—I tried to remember them after four years, but my drawing skills from eight to now haven’t improved all too much. I stare at the stick figures, and they stare back at me, unrecognizable except for the beauty mark underneath my mom’s nose in Eggplant from my Crayola set.

I turn in my sleep and hear a screeching in my nightmare that I chalk up to my bed springs. A red car pulls up as I walk home from school. The tires screech as it comes to a sudden stop, catching my attention. A man sits inside, a nervous smile on his face as he stares at me, lowering the window. “Hey, kiddo,” he says, his voice wavering as his eyes bounce around outside. “I have something caught in my tailpipe. Mind helping me getting it out?” I don’t know anything about cars, but I look around the car and see black smoke coming from the tailpipe. I shrug and walk over, and before I know it, I’m blinded by black smoke and restrained, the backpack on my back replaced with the leather cushion of a car’s backseat.

I don’t have the nightmare often, but when I do, it’s usually when I almost forget the beating I received on my arrival…or was it before? I was beat until the memory became a haze, until the man’s face looming over me blurred. Sometimes, when Darren wasn’t looking, I’d cut out the faces of the ugly villains in my picture books and hold them up to him when he’d be making me breakfast or reading the newspaper at the dining table. I stopped when he questioned why I was cutting up the pages.

I awake when the creaking of the door, which has been a neutral sound these past few years, strikes me with fear. My chest tightens to the point that I grip the front of my shirt, the firetrucks printed on the fabric sucked into my fist. However, the movement indicates that I’m awake, and I scrunch up when I hear the slow intake of air and metered exhale get closer until the heavy breathing is above me. I wonder: if Darren sees that I’m faking, will he attack me again? He hasn’t once beaten me since our first encounter, but that one time is enough to make me tiptoe whenever he is near. The breathing continues for a few beats: I’ve discovered that he likes to watch me sleep for a few minutes before waking me up. Sometimes he touches me, traces my eyebrows and my nose bridge, caresses my cheeks and strokes my hair, and I’d feign waking up so he’d stop. But I let it happen until he says, “Connor, time to wake up,” and I raise my head in response to the name as if he had said Evan.

He makes me breakfast, and either he doesn’t notice my solemnness, or he pretends everything is normal. After he feeds me and does the dishes, he bids farewell and leaves. I could make a run for it. He’d long since stopped locking the door. But I attempted that once before, and after wandering around hopelessly for an hour, I broke down sobbing on the dirt road until Darren came to find me and swaddled me in a quilt he made for me—for Connor.

I leave the house and go on my usual rock collecting journey, finding a particularly smooth black stone when a rustling pricks my ear and causes me to whip around. I spot a rabbit’s figure hopping into the clearing, but this one isn’t the one I saw yesterday. This one has brown spots, a heart-shaped one on the ear.

Bunny! I cry, my pet rabbit’s corpse laying limply in my hands, which are coated in its sticky blood. The blood stains the brown mark on its ear, leaving it an ugly mahogany. I scream until somebody tells me to shut up.

I blink, blink again to rid myself of the horrible image. My chin dimples from how hard I’m holding back my tears, and I get up and run off to seek refuge at home. I curl next to my bed, rocking with my head held in my hands until Darren comes home and sinks to his knees to comfort me. These flashbacks are not new. They’re rare, but when they happen, they are raw. They started about a year after I was taken, but time here is a sludge that is hard to measure. There’s a clock on the wall, but Darren didn’t teach me how to read it until a few days after my—Connor’s—ninth birthday. My only sense of time is how often the flashbacks come.

The simple sound of Darren’s jacket zipper was enough to set me off once, equating the zipper to the feeling of heaviness on my body, so much so that I couldn’t breathe and clawed at my shirt for relief. Darren bought a new brand of dish soap, and I reflexively covered my eyes and bowed my head to the floor. Darren taught me how to cook when Connor turned eleven, but when I turned toward him with the knife and began to walk, he cried “Stop!” and I froze, my grip slackening and causing the knife to hit the edge of the counter and tumble to the floor, narrowly missing my feet. A large purple bruise on my leg appeared after I grazed the side of the dining table, and I wore long pants until it healed even though it was the middle of summer and a hundred degrees at home because the sight of it would send me into a crisis.

I’m eating lunch when Darren’s gaze on me is more searing than usual, and he reaches out to slip a hand over my wrist. “I love you,” he says. “More than anybody else in the world. My love is pure and unconditional. Do you know what unconditional means?”

“Yes,” I reply, even though I don’t. His grip on my wrist is constricting, confining me, and that’s the last straw. A burst of images, an accumulation of all the flashbacks that had taunted my being all these years, dot my vision in fragments. Still frames and videos flood my vision like when I had a fever and could only see stars when I stood up.

My father’s face materializes over Darren’s, his wiry eyebrows, gnarled scowl, and veiny hand reaching out to me. I feel the pressure on my neck while my father’s other hand grasps my wrist, my eyes looking over my father’s shoulder to see my mother watching the scene in her pink bathrobe, her arms crossed with a cigarette hanging loosely from her lips. Her beauty mark is tucked underneath her thick smile lines, the same shade as Crayola’s Eggplant. You’re gonna kill him, my mom says with as much nonchalance as somebody talking about the weather.

I’m just gonna teach him a lesson for eating my fucking chips, my dad replies, grabbing me by the hair and taking me into his room. The scene fades to black until I stand up after my bruised legs stop trembling and see Darren’s face through the window. He was making the same face he’s making now—one of aghast and torment—his grip on my wrist long gone and replaced with a worried shaking of my shoulders.

“Connor! Connor!” he shouts, but I cannot hear him. All I hear is the blood pounding in my ears, my father’s grunts, the squawking of the crows as my mother dug a shallow grave for my pet rabbit.

I accept the name, wholeheartedly enjoy the sound of it rolling off my dad’s tongue, and renounce my old name. Yes, I am Connor. I am Connor Ackers! I fling myself at my father, bury my face in his chest and cling onto his shirt as if being removed would kill me. He collects me in his arms, his hug full of the same love he’d been giving me these past four years. Only now do I accept it, let myself fall into it, allow myself to press my heart to his. Only then do I understand the meaning of unconditional. I sink under the weight of knowledge.

I live life as Connor Ackers for two blissful months. Dad begins to teach me how to ride a bike outside. Settling into our newfound roles must have lowered our defenses because I’m wearing nothing but a T-shirt and shorts as a jogger comes toward us. She slows in her steps, takes out her earphones, a curious expression on her face. The crunch of gravel elongates as her footsteps get more hesitant. I feel Dad stiffen behind me, his fingers digging into my shoulder.

“Connor,” he says, and I look up at the sound of my name. He’s staring ahead at the jogger, whose eyes never leave me as her expression morphs into shock. “Turn around. Now.”

When we get home, Dad grabs a folder with his passport and other papers. He calls his friend Mike, asks for a favor. Dad packs a few bags, his foot tapping by the fax machine as he waits for documents to come in. It’s sundown by the time that eerie sound of crunching gravel under tires echoes throughout our home. He pauses, and that’s the first time I see my father cry. His tears are silent as the police ram the door down, but mine are wailing, roaring, scalding the ears of anybody near me. I wrap myself around Dad’s leg like a koala as the silver cuffs seal my father’s fate. I scream his name, refuse to move, but when I look up, I see Dad’s face gazing down at me through the tears that blur my vision. His face is oddly calm, a bittersweet smile on his lips. His eyebrows are pulled tightly as if somebody had sewn them too close together, his eyes wet and soft. I know that if his hands were free, he’d reach down and pet my head. I already long for his touch.

“It’s going to be okay, Connor,” he says. “I’ll see you soon, okay?” Then he’s gone, leaving me splayed out on the floor with burning lungs and bloodied lips. My wails die in my throat, and I’m only capable of a pathetic weeping.

“Poor kid,” one of the cops says in the car, his eyes staring me down from the rearview mirror. They allowed me to take one thing from home: my quilt, that is currently wrapped around me. I look out the window and see the countryside grow into skyscrapers and concrete replace any sort of nature I had grown used to. These powerful steel beings used to be my friends, but now they are my enemies. I’m dropped off at the police station, where two people from Before come forth and hug me. But they’re nothing like Dad’s hugs. These are loose, performative. I see Helen look around at all the reporters before she hugs me, flipping her hair over her shoulder to make sure they get her good side. Bill glares down at me disdainfully. My body, which had been clean of bruises for the past four years, except for the ones I got from playing, is littered with them by the end of the month. They had given me a grace period after my kidnapping, but things resumed as normal soon enough. By the end of the next month, I’m in a foster home because a woman in a suit came to our door and took me by the shoulder and told me I’d be staying with an older lady named Barbara who had crow’s feet and a saccharine smile.

The cycle continues for two arduous years until I amass enough money to take a bus to San Quentin State Prison. I had made an appointment earlier that week when nobody was home, my voice still low in case they had cameras installed in the living room. I’m wearing a jacket made from the quilt he gave me, and I hope he can recognize it after all these years. It’s tattered from so much usage; from all the nights I fell asleep with it. But it still smells like him.

The officer leads me to a line of people talking to men clad in orange jumpsuits behind thick glass, their hands curled around telephones like in the movies. I sit down, buzzing with excitement, until a muscular arm reaches around the partition and grips the counter, orange flooding my vision as I look up and see him. He looks worn out, older—a two-year trial and prison will do that. But his essence is the same: the same salt-and-pepper hair, the kind wrinkles that line his face, albeit deeper, and that smile that still hasn’t deteriorated in four years. I pick up the phone, my hand trembling as the tears crawling down my cheek match his.

“Hey, Dad,” I whisper. “It’s Connor.”