I was folding clothes, inhaling the smell of the dryer sheets that still clung to them. Angie was in bed. It was kind of late, but not that late. Craig was out with friends and I was waiting for him to return home. Sometimes it felt like it wasn't exactly fair. He was 14. I was suddenly the parent of a 14 year old. You're supposed to be able to build up to these things, to acclimate experience and knowledge through the years so that when your kid is 14 you'll have some kind of a clue. You're not supposed to just suddenly have a 14 year old to deal with.
And he wasn't a normal 14 year old. Nope. Not my step-son. He was badly scarred, damaged, a victim of abuse. He covered up a lot of the time. He tried to play it like everything was cool, but I knew better. I'd seen the bruises on him that night when he came to stay, after I'd dragged him out of the cemetery. Angela had described them a little but I had to see for myself. Maybe I needed definitive proof, something to hang over Albert's head. He'd lifted his shirt when I asked him to, not looking at me, and I'd winced at the fading yellow and dark blue and purple that covered both sides of his rib cage and stomach.
And there wasn't just that. His mother had died, and this was a grief we shared. My beloved wife, my soul mate, his mother. We were both still grieving for her in our way. But I was an adult, an adult who had had a solid, love filled, violent free childhood. My foundation was stone. His was rotting wood. What had he had? His parents divorced when he was eight or so, his mother died when he was 11, his father abused him. For all of that I thought he was coping pretty well. What were a few nightmares? A poor appetite? A tendency to flinch away from people and to tighten up against physical contact? Was that too great a price to pay?
He came home, hiding his face, and by the set of his shoulders I could tell he was upset.
"Home already?" I said, folding a dishtowel.
"I don't want to waste the summer," he said, and I heard the shaking in his voice. Then he turned toward me and I saw the puffed eye, the cut under it, the tears in his eyes threatening to fall.
"What happened?" I demanded, the towel put down and forgotten.
"I got in a fight," he said.
He got in a fight. With his father. I felt this anger like a tidal wave wash through me. What in the hell was wrong with Albert? He was, there were no words. If he had been there right then I may have killed him. I shook my head and listened to Craig tell me that he hated his father and never wanted to see him again. I tried to go near him and see if his eye was okay and he jerked away from me. I backed away, sent him up to bed.
I sat down at the kitchen table, the half folded basket of laundry in front of me. I put my head in my hands. He hated his father. Had he ever said that before? He didn't really talk about him much. Neither of us did. In the back of my mind I thought he'd go back with him, and I thought that was what Craig had been thinking, too. Did I think Albert could pull it together? I wasn't quite sure.
He didn't talk about him much, but he was always there. I saw Craig thinking about him in his reactions to me, to our family. It didn't surprise me that he hated him, but I thought he loved him, too. It was complicated.
Of course I wanted him to stay with me, in a way. I didn't really look forward to the battle with Albert that might ensue.