Chapter 1: The Better Man
“There was a new ponderousness in him, as if he had suddenly found himself bearing the weight of a too-heavy world”
The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
About an hour after midnight, he woke up gasping for air from a dream he could not remember. After trying to regain his breath while propped against his comfy pillows, he pulled himself out of bed and made his way to his mother’s room. It really was a room that his parents shared, but as his father rarely frequented it, he grew accustomed to calling it his mother’s. Even though he was a fourteen-year-old boy, nightmares plagued him often, and he constantly woke up screaming or out of breath as he was today. Whenever this happened, he would walk past the living room, where his father usually lay asleep on the sofa with lights from the television dancing across the beer bottles scrambled around him, across the long dark corridor while hastening his steps, to his mother’s room at the end of the hallway. No matter what the time was, the door was always open, and his loving mother embraced him, told him that everything was okay, and put her arms around him until he fell asleep.
Tonight was different. The usual faint scent of alcohol was gone from the living room, his father’s crumpled form was nowhere to be seen on the sofa, and even the television that never turned off seemed to be fast asleep. Somehow, scared by the unusual silence, he frantically ran past the living room and down the hallway to his mother’s room. As he reached the end of the long dark corridor, slightly panting in the heat, he saw something that frightened him more than ever. His mother’s bedroom door was closed. He started shivering as his body broke out in cold sweat and a million different scenarios brushed past his head. Did his mother hang herself? Did she leave him for good?
Trembling with fear, he slowly went up to the door, curled his sweaty fingers into a ball, and knocked. After a brief pause, he heard what seemed to be faint brushing sounds of bedsheets coming from the room. Had it been 20 seconds? 30? As the door finally creaked open, he wiped his sweaty palms on his shirt, ready to run into his mother’s arms. However, it wasn’t his beautiful mother that stood there. Out of the small crack between the door and the doorframe, his father’s sweaty and unshaven face poked out. When the boy stood there dumbfounded, his father said, “mommy is sleeping, you might as well do the same kid.” Maybe because of the flash of annoyance that passed through his father’s face or maybe because the boy had never dared to defy his father before, he took his father’s words to heart and sprinted back to his room. His footsteps echoed through the silent apartment as he ran across the dark corridor that seemed to be endless. When he finally reached his room, he hastily locked the door behind him and crumpled down on the floor with his back sliding against the door. Only when he heard the little click of the lock did thoughts start to formulate in his head.
Bundled up in a ball, he began to chide himself. “It’s a good thing that they are back together,” he thought. “You should be happy instead of being such a wuss.” However, no matter how hard he tried, he could not deceive himself. He knew too well. The weeks, or even months, of silence until they magically made up, which would only last until another fight breaks out in a month or so at most, that is if he was lucky. The last one was almost two weeks ago, and he heard the entire thing as he pretended to be asleep in the backseat of his father’s Mercedes. It was on the way back home from the airport after his first year at boarding school. Exhausted from his flight, just as he started to drift away, the shouting match that he almost forgot about at school started again.
Well, it wasn’t really a shouting match; it was more like his father shouting at his mother about how he was always the one that brought food to the table while all she did was squander his money. The heat from the hot summer day suddenly overwhelming him, he lay there rigid, trying to mute his father’s slowly rising voice shouting about his mother’s credit cards being maxed out. As his cheeks lay on the cool leather of the seat, he started to make his usual fake snoring sounds in an attempt to shut his father up. A trick that he mastered over the years, the snoring usually worked and had quelled his father’s indignation in the past; however, it did not seem to work that particular day.
When his father’s rants first started, he genuinely thought that his family was broke and that they were going to lose everything they had. After all, his father was always screaming about how the family was in debt and how his mother was the problem. As he grew older, however, he soon found out that, while there were families that were much wealthier, they were pretty well-off. Nonetheless, he was surprised when his father told him that he was going to study at a boarding school abroad. When his father first asked him, the boy thought, “Boarding school? I thought that was only for sons and daughters of famous CEOs!”
It didn’t really matter what he wanted because when his father wanted something, the only way to avoid the ever so frequent rants was to appease him. That was why the boy ended up leaving his little port-side city in South Korea to start his freshman year of high school in the United States. During the first few weeks, he felt sorry for his mother for leaving her alone with his father. On the weekends, he would nervously sit by his phone, waiting for a phone call notifying him of a divorce or his mother’s disappearance. However, as the months went by at school, he grew accustomed to the uneventful and peaceful goings of school and forgot about his life back home. At school, he didn’t have to pass on messages between his parents even when they were a mere foot away. At school, he didn’t have to sit through his father’s rants about money. At school, he didn’t have to feel guilty about every purchase he made.
Just a few weeks before Parents Weekend his sophomore year, the boy lay on his double bed with his legs stretched out in front of him, grimacing as he tried to push his memories of home out of his thoughts. Telling himself that he ought to forget it and go to sleep since he had a chemistry exam the next day, the boy turned on his sides and pulled his blanket up a bit to cover his face. Lying there trying to suppress the meaningless memories, the boy slowly drifted off to sleep. The next day, the memories retreated back into the dark chambers of his mind, and the boy, without being troubled a single bit, went to take his chemistry test.
Back to his absent state of mind, the days flew by as he kept to his books, at least until it was time for parent-teacher conferences. He had tried to convince his mom not to come, but soon enough, he found his mother waiting for him in front of his dormitory. After the usual hugs and kisses, they attended all the required classes and went out to Boston for the weekend. In their five-star hotel room near Back Bay, he felt guilty for staying at a hotel that probably charged more than $300 a night, a price that would have his father jumping up and down in anger. Thinking about the hostile atmosphere his father would’ve created if they were all together at the hotel, the boy was relieved that he could spend time with his young and beautiful mother, free from his father’s tantrums.
However, it wasn’t long until he noticed that something was off. His mother jumped and hurriedly picked her phone up whenever it made a sound. The little pings that the alert system on her iPhone made notifying her of a new message seemed to trigger an electric jolt in her body. While shielding the phone away from him, a smile would tingle on her lips as her fingers flew across the cell phone screen. Once, he was on her phone talking with his grandparents and, when it made the now ever-so-frequent pinging alert, his mother snatched it from the table, violently jerking the earphones out of his ears. It didn’t seem to matter to her, his dear mother, that blood was starting to trickle down his left ear as her fingers, once again, danced across her phone. It was as if his loving mother, his protector and pacifier, that used to put her arms around him, telling him that everything was okay, was gone. Her attention was not on her only son, whom she had not seen in almost four months, but on her phone, and the boy could sense his mother slowly drifting away.
That was when he started to suspect. The signs were clear after all. The shielding of the phone, the smile that brushed past her lips as she typed away, she might has well been screaming at him. However, intent on enjoying this brief father-free moment with his mother, he tried to keep his mind a blank. He was successful at first, but his suspicions started popping back up as the hours went by. When they were eating a steak dinner at some fancy restaurant, his mother’s phone buzzed, and he couldn’t help but ask himself, “Is it him?” When they were watching a movie together on Netflix and his mother started to text someone, he asked himself, “Should I confront her about it?” As he found himself suppressing his desires to hack into his mother’s phone and to scroll through her messages, the little time he had with his mother that was supposed to be so carefree and enjoyable turned difficult to stand and he wanted to go back to school more than ever, where everything was simple.
The three days that he had with his mother passed painfully, and it was only when he returned to his dormitory that he let his suspicions run free. He asked himself, “Couldn’t she be messaging one of her girlfriends?” But as soon as he asked the question, he thought, “How clueless are you? The signs cannot be clearer. A more intelligent question would be why she was abandoning her marriage.” Again, the answer came to him almost immediately: “The countless fights about his mother buying an expensive handbag and maxing out on her credit cards, it really wasn’t difficult to answer. His father was always mad at his mother for spending all his hard earned money and his mother, while she never spoke up, always defied his father in her own ways, issuing new credit cards and making cash deposits to pay for her designer shoes. It was always about the money, wasn’t it?”
With a newfound anger and frustration raging inside of him, he thought, “Only if my father had been smart enough to attend a decent college or if my father could’ve become a CEO, my dear mother would’ve never walked away from me. It was all his fault for being so incompetent and inept! If he was as rich as my friends’ fathers, my mother would’ve stayed by my side!”
Indignant at his father for being the loser that he was, the boy found himself cringing with an almost crazy zeal for becoming a more successful man than his father. He was going to be richer than his father ever was, rich enough so that no wife of his would dare to walk away. Back at school, he wielded his anger into his academics, intent on putting himself in a position that would secure him a wealthy future. Brushing past praises and looking for ways to boost his grade, staying up night after night making sure that all his homework assignments were flawless, throwing himself at additional assignments for extra credit, the boy aggressively grabbed at opportunities to better his chances of going to an elite college that would land him a lucrative job on Wall Street or Silicon Valley.
Even knowing that the world wasn’t so simple, he convinced himself that having enough money would prevent anyone from walking away from him ever again. He wasn’t going to be like his incompetent father that let his beautiful wife slip away from his hands. He wasn’t going to let anyone walk away from him. Even now, determined to be the better man, the boy trudges on, carrying his ever growing backpack full of memories and only letting his indignation rage inside of him, towards his million dollar dream of success and merriment.
