Fifteen hours earlier.
Nov. 5th, 2006 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
secret_historyMarlene was awoken by the sound of the front door scraping against the new tiles in the entrance. The sound put her teeth on edge every time. The installers had warned Sean that not removing the old subflooring would result in the new floor being about an eighth of an inch higher than the previous one, but at the time an eights of an inch hadn’t seemed like all that much. Now there were scratch marks in the shape of a quarter-circle in the brand-new tile of her entrance floor, the lovely teal-and-blue tile she’d picked out herself during Home Depot’s flooring event at the beginning of October.
It had been quite the deal, too, and after the installers had worked for the better part of two days levelling the subfloor and removing all the screws sticking out of it (they explained carefully and in great detail to her that the old floor had been very poorly installed, and that it would affect the way the new floor would look) before laying down the tiling and the grout, it had looked splendid. It had looked splendid, that is, until about ten minutes afterward, when the front door scraped a horrible groove in the beautiful new tile. She had very nearly wept when she saw it. The installers were very understanding about it, and had planed the door a bit for her so that the floor wouldn’t suffer too much, but there was only so much they could plane the door without creating a gap that would let in all the cold winter air.
The one good thing about this latest state of affairs, was that she always knew when Sean and Patrick were coming and going. She supposed she’d grow used to the sound eventually, the way she’d grown used to so many things. Well, perhaps she wouldn’t have to grow used to it. It was unlikely that she or Sean would want to stay in the house after the divorce, although she had many good memories of the place. Maybe she would stay. Perhaps Sean would force her to move out. Perhaps she ought to move out, and forge an entirely new life for herself.
The front door scraped against the tile again, a more hesitant sound this time, as though whoever it was was trying not to attract notice. Patrick, then, and not Sean out on one of his nocturnal perambulations. She glanced over at Sean’s side of the bed, not surprised to find it empty. He was probably asleep on the bed in the guest bedroom. She glanced at the red numerals of the digital clock on her nightstand, trying to muster enough concentration and awareness to tell the time. Good Lord, was it really five in the morning? She reached out, fingers fumbling for the light switch, and blinked in the sudden glare, a lightbulb-shaped shadow appearing before her eyes. She blinked more to get rid of the retinal image, and then checked her watch. Yes, definitely five. Well, five minutes after five. She had to be up in less than an hour, she thought with some dismay. She was well past the age where she could afford an interrupted night’s sleep. Where on earth had Patrick been all this time? She hadn’t seen him since, well, in days, really.
Shivering slightly in the chill air she crawled out of bed, pulling on her dressing gown over her flannel nightgown. Shoving her feet into the brown carpet slippers Patrick had given her for Christmas four years ago, she shuffled tiredly to the head of the stairs, and then, slipper heels flapping, made her way down, clutching the bannister for balance. She could hear her son rustling about in the entrance, although what he was doing she couldn’t begin to imagine. She shuffled to the entrance and flicked on the lights. Patrick hadn’t even bothered to turn them on, preferring to blunder about it in the dark, for reasons which escaped her.
“Patrick?” the scuffling sounds stopped. “What on earth are you doing?”
Patrick stood frozen in the entrance, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming Jeep.
“Oh, uh, Mum. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“You’re making enough noise to raise the dead, my sweet. Where have you been? I haven’t seen you since breakfast yesterday, and all you did then was grunt at me before taking your coffee with you to school. You look dreadful,” she said, suddenly noting how pale he was, with dark circles under his eyes, his hair plastered to his forehead, although it wasn’t raining outside.
“Oh, I just stayed out too late,” he mumbled, embarrassed.
“I should say so. Do you know what time it is?”
“Not really. Late?”
“It’s five in the morning.”
“Wow.” He tugged vaguely at the sleeves of his coat, which he’d been trying to remove for the past minute or so. “I didn’t think it was that late. We must’ve lost track of the time.”
She shook her head, pulling her dressing gown closer around her shoulders and re-tying the belt more tightly around her waist. “Pat, I’m starting to think your father is right about these friends of yours. It’s not good for you to be out at all hours during the week like this. You have your studies to think about, and it’s nearly exam time. You need your sleep, and this has to be taking time away from your term papers...”
“Since when do you agree with Dad? You’re divorcing him, anyway, isn’t that what you told me yesterday morning? I did get that, even if I was only grunting at you over my coffee,” he added rather bitterly.
“Just because I’m divorcing him doesn’t mean he can’t be right about some things, Pat,” she gave him a pleading look. “I’m not angry at you. I’m worried. You look terrible, and this will make your grades slip, and I’d like you to do well.”
“Wouldn’t want to disappoint you, would I?” he said bitterly, finally extricating himself from his coat.
“That’s not fair. You know I just worry about you. Have you been doing drugs?”
“Mother!”
Marlene sniffed. “Don’t sound so shocked. It’s not like I was born yesterday, Pat. Are you high?”
He fumbled with a coat hanger, unwilling to look her in the face. “It’s only pot, Mum. It’s not like it’s anything dangerous. Besides, you must have done it when you were my age.”
“As it happens, I didn’t. But that’s irrelevant, anyway. What’s relevant is that you’re coming home at all hours, and paying no attention to your schoolwork, and wrecking your health.” She stopped and stared at him then. He was wearing nothing but a ratty t-shirt underneath his coat, and was probably frozen half to death. “Patrick, what on earth is that on your neck? Is that a bite mark?” she exclaimed.
“Mum!” he cried, anguish evident in his tone. “Just leave it be, all right? It’s not important, and it’s none of your business!”
“Well!” she drew herself up, unwilling to retreat entirely into righteous indignation just yet, but sorely tempted. “Since when has the welfare of my only child been none of my business? You’ve got blood on your t-shirt, for one thing, and believe me when I tell you that the human mouth is filthy. If you don’t clean that out, you’ll get an infection for sure. Whoever your lady friend is, she certainly wasn’t gentle.”
“It wasn’t like that,” he muttered, staring at the floor.
She felt herself relenting in spite of herself. Whatever he did, he was still her little boy, and she was never more reminded of that than when he acted as he was doing now: like a naughty ten-year-old caught sneaking sugar from the bowl.
“Come into the kitchen and I’ll help you get cleaned up. I have disinfectant in the first aid kit. It wasn’t your girlfriend?”
“Not exactly,” he mumbled, shuffling after her into the kitchen.
“Not exactly?” she echoed, hearing the uncertainty in his voice. A doubt began forming in her mind. Surely not? “It wasn’t a boyfriend, was it Pat?”
“Mum!” he howled. “No!”
“Shh,” she flapped a hand at him. “You’ll wake your father. It was just a question, Pat. Perfectly natural of me to ask, especially nowadays when it’s so common for young people to be homosexual.”
He groaned. “Mum, it’s not any more common than before.” He let himself fall onto one of the kitchen chairs, which creaked alarmingly under his weight.
She sniffed disdainfully as she poured rubbing alcohol onto a cotton wipe. “Well, there are certainly a whole lot more of them around now than when I was your age. This is going to sting,” she added, dabbing at the wound in his neck. Whoever the girl was, she had very nice, even teeth, she thougth irrelevantly. Good orthodontist, most likely. Patrick hissed as the swab came into contact with the open wound in his neck. “Sorry, I did warn you it would hurt. Why don’t you tell me what happened with this girl, then? It was a girl who bit you, right?”
“Yes.”
“So tell me what happened. Did she bite you on purpose?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “She, umm, she was doing harder stuff than I was, and I wasn’t really paying that much attention. You know.”
“All right. So what then?”
He shifted uncomfortably on the chair. “I don’t think you really want to know, Mum, to be really honest.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Okay, well, anyway, we were at Jay’s place, in the basement. We were all on the couch —it’s big enough for five people— and mostly we were all kind of half-asleep or whatever.”
“Mm-hmm.” Marlene was careful not to break his train of thought, but since he looked as though he didn’t want to continue. She wasn’t sure why she was so bent on hearing his version of events, but for some reason it seemed very important.
“Yeah, anyway, I was, umm, kind of messing around with this girl, right? Tracy. Anyway, we stopped for a while ‘cause we were both too, umm, stoned to really enjoy it. I thought she was asleep, ‘cause the stuff she’d taken sometimes does that, right? She was kind of lying on my arm, and when I snapped out of it I wanted to get loose. I was hungry,” he confessed, as though it were somehow a cardinal sin.
“I’ve heard that happens,” she couldn’t entirely repress a small smile at that.
He flushed. “Mum! Anyway, I tried to pull my arm free, but she was too heavy. So I leaned over and shook her to try to wake her up enough so she’d move, except she didn’t react at all. I thought she was dead. Like, I thought she’d OD’d or something. I kind of freaked out.” He cringed at the memory. “I shook her really hard and kind of yelled —I don’t exactly remember what. Then she opened her eyes, and I freaked out even more, because they were sort of rolled back in her head or something, and she turned around and bit me.”
“Oh, Pat!” she hadn’t meant to say anything, but she was horrified.
“Anyway,” he pressed on, stumbling over his words as he rushed to get the rest of his story out. “I was able to pull free then, because she had to sort of sit up to bite me. I ran away. I don’t know what happened to her,” he rubbed a hand over his face, looking even more haggard than before. “I was really afraid she’d hurt me more.”
Marlene squeezed his uninjured shoulder reassuringly. “It’s perfectly understandable that you were afraid, sweetheart. Perfectly normal. Who knows what else she might have done if you’d stayed?”
Patrick shrugged, then grimaced, she couldn’t tell if it was from pain or discomfiture. “I’m not exactly proud of it, Mum. I mean, for one thing, I left all my friends to deal with a girl who was obviously tripping really badly and was violent and possibly psychotic. I left her behind, too, instead of calling for help.”
“I expect you weren’t thinking very clearly,” she stroked his hair, noting with mild alarm that he felt very warm to the touch.
“No. By the time I really came to my senses I was almost home. I have no idea how much time passed. It all happened really fast, but it might have been an hour ago for all I know. I hope they’re all right,” he said, holding his head with one hand as though it was too heavy to hold up on its own.
“You feel warm,” she murmured soothingly. “How do you feel?”
“Pretty sick, actually,” he was starting to shiver. Perhaps delayed shock, but she was willing to bet that he was running a fever.
“All right. I’ll go downstairs and run you a bath. We’ll use the bathroom in the basement so as not to wake your father. You can get clean, and I’ll find some clean pajamas for you. Stay home today. You can get notes from one of your classmates another time.”
He nodded, looking as though he hadn’t really registered what she’d said. She left him slumped tiredly in the chair, and padded her way carefully to the basement they’d refurbished two years before. Another one of those home improvement projects in which she’d tried to lose herself, to no avail. As she made her way down the stairs, she heard Patrick call after her.
“Thanks, Mum.”
It had been quite the deal, too, and after the installers had worked for the better part of two days levelling the subfloor and removing all the screws sticking out of it (they explained carefully and in great detail to her that the old floor had been very poorly installed, and that it would affect the way the new floor would look) before laying down the tiling and the grout, it had looked splendid. It had looked splendid, that is, until about ten minutes afterward, when the front door scraped a horrible groove in the beautiful new tile. She had very nearly wept when she saw it. The installers were very understanding about it, and had planed the door a bit for her so that the floor wouldn’t suffer too much, but there was only so much they could plane the door without creating a gap that would let in all the cold winter air.
The one good thing about this latest state of affairs, was that she always knew when Sean and Patrick were coming and going. She supposed she’d grow used to the sound eventually, the way she’d grown used to so many things. Well, perhaps she wouldn’t have to grow used to it. It was unlikely that she or Sean would want to stay in the house after the divorce, although she had many good memories of the place. Maybe she would stay. Perhaps Sean would force her to move out. Perhaps she ought to move out, and forge an entirely new life for herself.
The front door scraped against the tile again, a more hesitant sound this time, as though whoever it was was trying not to attract notice. Patrick, then, and not Sean out on one of his nocturnal perambulations. She glanced over at Sean’s side of the bed, not surprised to find it empty. He was probably asleep on the bed in the guest bedroom. She glanced at the red numerals of the digital clock on her nightstand, trying to muster enough concentration and awareness to tell the time. Good Lord, was it really five in the morning? She reached out, fingers fumbling for the light switch, and blinked in the sudden glare, a lightbulb-shaped shadow appearing before her eyes. She blinked more to get rid of the retinal image, and then checked her watch. Yes, definitely five. Well, five minutes after five. She had to be up in less than an hour, she thought with some dismay. She was well past the age where she could afford an interrupted night’s sleep. Where on earth had Patrick been all this time? She hadn’t seen him since, well, in days, really.
Shivering slightly in the chill air she crawled out of bed, pulling on her dressing gown over her flannel nightgown. Shoving her feet into the brown carpet slippers Patrick had given her for Christmas four years ago, she shuffled tiredly to the head of the stairs, and then, slipper heels flapping, made her way down, clutching the bannister for balance. She could hear her son rustling about in the entrance, although what he was doing she couldn’t begin to imagine. She shuffled to the entrance and flicked on the lights. Patrick hadn’t even bothered to turn them on, preferring to blunder about it in the dark, for reasons which escaped her.
“Patrick?” the scuffling sounds stopped. “What on earth are you doing?”
Patrick stood frozen in the entrance, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming Jeep.
“Oh, uh, Mum. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“You’re making enough noise to raise the dead, my sweet. Where have you been? I haven’t seen you since breakfast yesterday, and all you did then was grunt at me before taking your coffee with you to school. You look dreadful,” she said, suddenly noting how pale he was, with dark circles under his eyes, his hair plastered to his forehead, although it wasn’t raining outside.
“Oh, I just stayed out too late,” he mumbled, embarrassed.
“I should say so. Do you know what time it is?”
“Not really. Late?”
“It’s five in the morning.”
“Wow.” He tugged vaguely at the sleeves of his coat, which he’d been trying to remove for the past minute or so. “I didn’t think it was that late. We must’ve lost track of the time.”
She shook her head, pulling her dressing gown closer around her shoulders and re-tying the belt more tightly around her waist. “Pat, I’m starting to think your father is right about these friends of yours. It’s not good for you to be out at all hours during the week like this. You have your studies to think about, and it’s nearly exam time. You need your sleep, and this has to be taking time away from your term papers...”
“Since when do you agree with Dad? You’re divorcing him, anyway, isn’t that what you told me yesterday morning? I did get that, even if I was only grunting at you over my coffee,” he added rather bitterly.
“Just because I’m divorcing him doesn’t mean he can’t be right about some things, Pat,” she gave him a pleading look. “I’m not angry at you. I’m worried. You look terrible, and this will make your grades slip, and I’d like you to do well.”
“Wouldn’t want to disappoint you, would I?” he said bitterly, finally extricating himself from his coat.
“That’s not fair. You know I just worry about you. Have you been doing drugs?”
“Mother!”
Marlene sniffed. “Don’t sound so shocked. It’s not like I was born yesterday, Pat. Are you high?”
He fumbled with a coat hanger, unwilling to look her in the face. “It’s only pot, Mum. It’s not like it’s anything dangerous. Besides, you must have done it when you were my age.”
“As it happens, I didn’t. But that’s irrelevant, anyway. What’s relevant is that you’re coming home at all hours, and paying no attention to your schoolwork, and wrecking your health.” She stopped and stared at him then. He was wearing nothing but a ratty t-shirt underneath his coat, and was probably frozen half to death. “Patrick, what on earth is that on your neck? Is that a bite mark?” she exclaimed.
“Mum!” he cried, anguish evident in his tone. “Just leave it be, all right? It’s not important, and it’s none of your business!”
“Well!” she drew herself up, unwilling to retreat entirely into righteous indignation just yet, but sorely tempted. “Since when has the welfare of my only child been none of my business? You’ve got blood on your t-shirt, for one thing, and believe me when I tell you that the human mouth is filthy. If you don’t clean that out, you’ll get an infection for sure. Whoever your lady friend is, she certainly wasn’t gentle.”
“It wasn’t like that,” he muttered, staring at the floor.
She felt herself relenting in spite of herself. Whatever he did, he was still her little boy, and she was never more reminded of that than when he acted as he was doing now: like a naughty ten-year-old caught sneaking sugar from the bowl.
“Come into the kitchen and I’ll help you get cleaned up. I have disinfectant in the first aid kit. It wasn’t your girlfriend?”
“Not exactly,” he mumbled, shuffling after her into the kitchen.
“Not exactly?” she echoed, hearing the uncertainty in his voice. A doubt began forming in her mind. Surely not? “It wasn’t a boyfriend, was it Pat?”
“Mum!” he howled. “No!”
“Shh,” she flapped a hand at him. “You’ll wake your father. It was just a question, Pat. Perfectly natural of me to ask, especially nowadays when it’s so common for young people to be homosexual.”
He groaned. “Mum, it’s not any more common than before.” He let himself fall onto one of the kitchen chairs, which creaked alarmingly under his weight.
She sniffed disdainfully as she poured rubbing alcohol onto a cotton wipe. “Well, there are certainly a whole lot more of them around now than when I was your age. This is going to sting,” she added, dabbing at the wound in his neck. Whoever the girl was, she had very nice, even teeth, she thougth irrelevantly. Good orthodontist, most likely. Patrick hissed as the swab came into contact with the open wound in his neck. “Sorry, I did warn you it would hurt. Why don’t you tell me what happened with this girl, then? It was a girl who bit you, right?”
“Yes.”
“So tell me what happened. Did she bite you on purpose?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “She, umm, she was doing harder stuff than I was, and I wasn’t really paying that much attention. You know.”
“All right. So what then?”
He shifted uncomfortably on the chair. “I don’t think you really want to know, Mum, to be really honest.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Okay, well, anyway, we were at Jay’s place, in the basement. We were all on the couch —it’s big enough for five people— and mostly we were all kind of half-asleep or whatever.”
“Mm-hmm.” Marlene was careful not to break his train of thought, but since he looked as though he didn’t want to continue. She wasn’t sure why she was so bent on hearing his version of events, but for some reason it seemed very important.
“Yeah, anyway, I was, umm, kind of messing around with this girl, right? Tracy. Anyway, we stopped for a while ‘cause we were both too, umm, stoned to really enjoy it. I thought she was asleep, ‘cause the stuff she’d taken sometimes does that, right? She was kind of lying on my arm, and when I snapped out of it I wanted to get loose. I was hungry,” he confessed, as though it were somehow a cardinal sin.
“I’ve heard that happens,” she couldn’t entirely repress a small smile at that.
He flushed. “Mum! Anyway, I tried to pull my arm free, but she was too heavy. So I leaned over and shook her to try to wake her up enough so she’d move, except she didn’t react at all. I thought she was dead. Like, I thought she’d OD’d or something. I kind of freaked out.” He cringed at the memory. “I shook her really hard and kind of yelled —I don’t exactly remember what. Then she opened her eyes, and I freaked out even more, because they were sort of rolled back in her head or something, and she turned around and bit me.”
“Oh, Pat!” she hadn’t meant to say anything, but she was horrified.
“Anyway,” he pressed on, stumbling over his words as he rushed to get the rest of his story out. “I was able to pull free then, because she had to sort of sit up to bite me. I ran away. I don’t know what happened to her,” he rubbed a hand over his face, looking even more haggard than before. “I was really afraid she’d hurt me more.”
Marlene squeezed his uninjured shoulder reassuringly. “It’s perfectly understandable that you were afraid, sweetheart. Perfectly normal. Who knows what else she might have done if you’d stayed?”
Patrick shrugged, then grimaced, she couldn’t tell if it was from pain or discomfiture. “I’m not exactly proud of it, Mum. I mean, for one thing, I left all my friends to deal with a girl who was obviously tripping really badly and was violent and possibly psychotic. I left her behind, too, instead of calling for help.”
“I expect you weren’t thinking very clearly,” she stroked his hair, noting with mild alarm that he felt very warm to the touch.
“No. By the time I really came to my senses I was almost home. I have no idea how much time passed. It all happened really fast, but it might have been an hour ago for all I know. I hope they’re all right,” he said, holding his head with one hand as though it was too heavy to hold up on its own.
“You feel warm,” she murmured soothingly. “How do you feel?”
“Pretty sick, actually,” he was starting to shiver. Perhaps delayed shock, but she was willing to bet that he was running a fever.
“All right. I’ll go downstairs and run you a bath. We’ll use the bathroom in the basement so as not to wake your father. You can get clean, and I’ll find some clean pajamas for you. Stay home today. You can get notes from one of your classmates another time.”
He nodded, looking as though he hadn’t really registered what she’d said. She left him slumped tiredly in the chair, and padded her way carefully to the basement they’d refurbished two years before. Another one of those home improvement projects in which she’d tried to lose herself, to no avail. As she made her way down the stairs, she heard Patrick call after her.
“Thanks, Mum.”
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Date: 2006-11-10 05:16 pm (UTC)