Just like I’d felt that first night when I knew someone had hurt her. The rage had filled every part of me, making me want to beat the hell out of the man who’d put his hands on her body. I knew then I couldn’t be around her without wanting to protect her.
She sighed in her sleep, and an ache in the pit of my stomach pinched at me. I wanted to touch her, to hold her in my arms and listen to her gentle sighs for the rest of my life. That even having me in her life would be the biggest mistake she could make hung over my head like a truth so ingrained there was no way to deny it.
I didn’t want to think that way, though. I wanted to think she could be mine and I could be hers, and we’d protect each other from the world outside these rooms.
I knew differently, though. The man who’d hid away in these rooms—in this club—would bring nothing but bad to her life. My demons made that certain. They’d rear their ugly heads and show me for the man I really was.
A monster. Violent. Ruled by my rage.
Maybe this time could be different. I had been able to love once, a long time ago. Didn’t that mean I could be the kind of man I needed to be to love again?
But that had been before I let my demons take hold and control me.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember a time in my life when I wasn’t this person. Had I ever been anything but filled with anger? From the minute I could understand her words, my mother had told me the story of what I was. Why she’d named me Kane. Then later when I first showed signs of my demons, she pulled me close and urged them on, welcoming them when she should have been chasing them away.
My mother held my hand and smiled down at me as she led me from the school principal’s office. The anger of a third grader had horrified him, but she simply used the same old reason to excuse my behavior.
“Boys will be boys, Mr. Truesdale. It’s just his nature.”
He’d shaken his head in disagreement, disturbed by my hitting a classmate until he bled and my mother’s easy dismissal of it, and given me three days detention. Almost as if the punishment was a badge of honor, my mother simply smiled and took my hand to lead me out to our car. I knew there would be no reprimand when we got home.
“Kane, what did that boy do to deserve what you did to him?” she asked in the same pleased tone she always used when I got in trouble for hurting others.
I looked down at my hands in my lap and saw his blood under my fingernails. “He said I didn’t have a dad so I’m a bastard.”
Never turning to face me, she kept her eyes on the road and asked, “Did you do as I said to?”
“Yes, mama. I said nothing. I just hit him until they pulled me off him.”
“No words, right? There’s no point in speaking, Kane. People don’t listen to words. They listen to fists.”
“Yes, mama.”
We drove home saying nothing else, but she took my hand again as we walked up to our house and led me to the kitchen. “Sit down and I’ll get you a bowl of ice cream.”
Still in her black and white waitress uniform, she served me three large scoops of my favorite treat, cherry vanilla ice cream, in my favorite blue plastic bowl. I’d done what she’d told me to do, and now she rewarded me.
Placing it in front of me, she kissed me on the forehead and smiled, her happiness going all the way to her blue eyes. “That’s my big boy. Principal Truesdale doesn’t understand you. Do you know what he thinks you should do when someone says cruel things to you, Kane?”
With the sweet taste of cherry vanilla on my tongue, I swallowed a spoonful of ice cream and nodded. “He says I’m bigger than everyone else, so I have to be careful I don’t hurt them.”
“No!” she screamed, scaring me. “He’s wrong, Kane. Your being bigger has nothing to do with how you should treat people. When someone hurts you, you hurt them back. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, mama.”
“When I was carrying you, I knew who you were. I chose your name the same night your father left me after I told him about you. Kane, like from the Bible’s Cain and Abel. I knew you’d get what you deserved in this world, but you’d have to fight for it.”
I listened to her tell the story of Cain and Abel and how I was like the son of Adam who killed his brother with his own hands. Not a day had gone by since I’d been old enough to understand her words when she didn’t tell me that story. I was Cain. My name may have been spelled a different way, but I was him.
Cain. The first murderer on Earth.
“When someone hurts you, they deserve to be hurt, Kane. You did nothing wrong today. You understand that, right?”
Scraping the last of my treat from the sides of the bowl, I smiled and nodded. “Yes, mama. I did just like you tell me to all the time.”
She kissed me on the forehead again and leaned back in her seat. Tired from a long day at the restaurant she worked at waiting tables for tips, she smoothed her brown hair back from her face and closed her eyes. “You’re going to have people tell you that what you do is wrong, Kane. As you get older and bigger, they’re going to say you shouldn’t be who you are. They’re going to want to change you. They won’t be able to, though.”
“Okay, mama.”
She opened her eyes and cupped my cheeks in her palms. “This is who you are, Kane. Don’t let them tell you it’s bad. Your demons are the only protection you have in this world because no one else will take care of you.”
“You will, won’t you, mama?”
“I won’t always be here for you, baby. When I’m gone, I want to know I’ve done all I could to make sure you’re ready because the world is a harsh place where no one will care about you more than you care about yourself. Remember that always.”
“Even my father?” I asked, hoping the answer would be different this time.
“Especially your father. He’s what you need to watch out for in this life. Look at us. While he and his precious wife and sons live in that big house, we live here in this tiny shack. Why? You’re as much his son as those two are, but you have my name instead of his because he’s too ashamed to claim you so we get to live like this.”
“I like our house, mama.”
She pulled me into her arms and held me close so the smell of other people’s food she wore on her clothes filled my nose. “We deserve better, Kane, but the only way you get better in this life is if you take it, by force, if necessary. Remember that.”