The promise of a good night’s sleep proved untrue, though I can hardly blame Lloyd for that. Accommodations were comfortable enough, but my mind was a war zone.

  In my dreams, I found myself back in that house, the one I grew up in. The place where dread made me feel like a small child even after I'd reached manhood. I strode down the stairs and turned into the living room. There my father and mother sat on the couch, facing me. By the look on his face, I knew my dad was about to confront me over something.

  Every confrontation tended to go the same way. Whether I’d done wrong or not, something I did made him angry. That was the one unspoken rule in the house: don’t make Dad angry. It was a difficult rule to follow, because it seemed near impossible to guess what was going to set off his hair-trigger temper at any moment. People often use the analogy “walking on eggshells.” My childhood was a mine field, and once you heard the click of the mine being armed, all you could do was freeze and hope to figure out a way to minimize the damage.

  But you always knew you weren’t getting out unscathed. In my teens at least, corporal punishment had grown less common, because I’d learned how to surrender quickly and tell him exactly what he wanted to hear to squirm out of trouble. Still, the threat of violence was a Damocles over my head.

  There, standing at the bottom of the stairs, I knew that such a moment had come, and by the sight of his already flaring nostrils, I knew this would be a difficult one to escape.

  “I want to talk to you about something.” When he spoke, it was not in a furious tone. Rather it was akin to the sounds a Jack-in-the-Box made, reminding you of the countdown before something burst forth.

  “Alright,” was all I could say. Behind my back, I wrung my hands. Often, he’d mocked me for fidgeting when he was trying to talk to me. Said it made me look weak, and no one would respect me.

  He glanced at my mother, who said nothing, then returned his attention to me. “Something I discovered in the pages of your sister's diary. Something that happened right here, in this house.” He gestured toward the floor. “In this very room, no less, when you were thirteen and your sister was eight. You had a sleepover with your friend Mark, and you set up your sleeping bags here.”

  Prickly heat rushed to my face. I knew in an instant the exact incident he was talking about. For so many years I’d tried to bury it, pretend it wasn’t real. The greatest moment of guilt of my whole life. Trembling, I raised a hand to cover my mouth and braced myself against the wall as the room seemed to move.

  For a moment, all I could do was stammer. I forced out the words, “Don’t tell me that was real…”

  “PUT YOUR HAND DOWN AND FACE IT LIKE A MAN!”

  His shout was more threatening than any dog’s bark, more terror-inducing than a gunshot. My hand dropped to my side, clenched into a shaking fist.

  "Don't you dare try to hide from this!" he added.

  I gave a nod.

  “That was your sister’s virginity!” he bellowed. “And your ‘friend’ Mark took it from her. You were in the room at the time and you did what?”

  “I…”

  “What did you do?” he demanded.

  “N-nothing.” The confession rent my soul in twain.

  He rose to his feet and took two steps toward me. My gaze wandered to the door just behind me. An exit, but not an escape. If I tried to flee, he’d outrun me for sure. There was no way out of this. Whatever punishment he’d decided was suitable for the son who’d allowed his little girl to be violated I’d have to face it.

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  “Exactly!” he said. “You did nothing. You just let it happen. And then afterward, did you think,” his tone changed from furious to mocking, like a bad imitation of a mentally handicapped person, “Gee, I don't know, maybe I ought to tell Dad and Mom about this? Did that thought ever occur to you?”

  My whole body shook with such violence that my words came out garbled.

  “Speak up!” He shouted, his voice like the snarl of a mountain lion. “Be a man and own up to what you did!”

  I looked toward my mother, but we both knew there was nothing she could do.

  “I k-kept it a secret.”

  “WHY?” he demanded.

  My mother remained silent, watching the scene unfold with frightened eyes. Just like me, she dared not defy him. Twenty-one years he’d kept her paralyzed against his boundless rage.

  “I was afraid,” I admitted.

  “Afraid of what?” He said it as if it were the worst excuse he'd ever heard, as if I had nothing in the world to fear.

  A hint of frustration made its way through my terror, and I barked back, “Of what you’d do to me!”

  “You don’t keep those things a secret!” He shouted. "What do you think I'm gonna do to you now?" His voice had grown so loud, so forceful, I wondered if the neighbors might hear and call the cops for noise disturbance. But when had they ever done that? He’d spent so much time yelling at the whole family, ridiculing us and threatening us over every inconvenience. Either the neighbors couldn’t hear it, or they didn’t care.

  His nostrils curling in disgust, he said, “Do you have any idea how much that messed up your sister? She’s still writing about it in her diary, asking ‘why, oh why didn’t my big brother protect me?’ Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “I was molested too,” I blurted out.

  A look of confusion crossed his face. “What?”

  “When I was six,” I told him.

  He fell silent, his eyes widening as he looked me over, as if seeing me in a new light.

  Thinking that maybe I’d gained a little sympathy, if even just for a moment, I continued, “It was at that day camp back out west. They had a policy that all the small kids had to have another kid, an older buddy, go with them when they went to the bathroom. He was mine, and that’s where it happened.”

  “Oh…” my mother uttered as tears welled in her eyes. “Vince…”

  Whatever shock had given my father pause wore off the second my mother started to show pity. His face screwed up in fury once more and he continued his vicious tirade. “So, how could you let that happen to another person, especially your sister?”

  “I was fifteen by the time I realized how awful that is,” I said. “Before that, I thought it was normal.”

  “Don’t lie to me!” He stepped toward me once more. “You kept what happened to your sister a secret. That means you knew it was wrong!”

  “I just knew I’d get in trouble!” I yelled back. “And in this house, I can get in trouble for just about anything!” Something in me boiled, transmuting my fear into anger. Cowering from him had only fueled his disgust at having such a weak son. A disappointment from the earliest days. Maybe if I fought back this one time I could gain some ground. “You ask me why I didn’t tell you? How about all the times you smacked me around, insulted me, and said you were going to kill me? You think that makes you someone I want to tell anything? I’d keep a thousand secrets from you, some far worse than this, just to stay alive.”

  He took a step back from me. For but a moment, it looked as if the weight of guilt was crashing down upon him.

  “You want to blame me for this.” I pointed at him. “But it’s you! You made it impossible to talk to you about anything important.”

  That accusing finger pulled his hair trigger, and he lunged. In an instant, he’d flung me up against the wall and his fingers seized around my throat. As the pins and needles sensation crept over my face and my chest started to tighten, I recalled the pistol in the back of my jeans and reached for it.

  It wasn’t there.

  Unarmed and unprotected, with my mother watching in silent horror, I beat my father’s face, trying to hurt him just enough to let go, but each impact did nothing to faze him. He only tightened his grip, his lips open, seething through his gritted teeth.

  I woke with a startled cry, sitting up in bed. The room was dark, but the moonlight shone through the window, and after a few moments I remembered where I was: the carriage house above Lloyd and Carol’s garage. I traced my fingertips along the bruises on my neck. They stung, letting me know that at least that much was real. Then came the flood of other memories, suppressed from the dream, as I recalled ending my father’s life.

  I wanted to tell myself that I was safe, but I couldn’t know that was true. It seemed inevitable that the police would find me. I’d be convicted soon enough and consigned to a prison cell. Who hasn’t heard stories about prison rape, and cell mates who get violent with the new guy?

  There was no way out. Life under my father’s watch had been my first circle of Hell. Prison would be the next. I hung my head in my hands and wept.