Chapter 1 – Rupture
Brody POV.
“Erica! Where’s my bottle?”
I was sitting in my room, inflating balloons—dozens of them, including my favorite, the transparent ones—when Dad’s yells startled me.
“Erica! Where have you hidden my bottle, you bitch?”
Dad was home.
He had been out all day, working his “ass off”—as he used to put it—while I spent the last five hours alone in my room, doing what I did best.
Inflating balloons. Decorating the walls with them. Covering the open windows and the backside of every door in my home. I did this once every week, and I did it without fail.
Nothing beats boredom more than having hundreds of balloons adorn every inch of space in the crummy little apartment we called home. Sometimes, that’s all we can hope for; replace the void left behind by loved ones with colorful objects. Like balloons.
I have been doing this for the past two years, especially since last year. I had to. I needed some color in my life, some means of escape, and balloons caught my fancy more than toys.
I love balloons. What’s not to love about them? They are always colorful, always floating, always trying to escape, just like my thoughts.
“Erica, where the fuck—!”
Dad came stumbling into my room, interrupting my thoughts. It wasn’t easy, though, disrupting my thoughts. I had made a habit of daydreaming at will, my mind drifting off into a world that wasn’t mine, escaping reality whenever I felt like it, but always ending up bursting like a balloon, with a loud ‘pop’.
It’s called ‘rupture’. I learned it in school.
“Dad … Mamma’s gone,” I murmured. “Don’t you remember?”
Dad stared at me with bloodshot eyes, exhaled sharply, turned around, and stumbled out of my room.
“He must have forgotten,” I whispered to myself. “That’s what happens when he gets too drunk.”
I got back to inflating balloons. I started naming them last year. Each one was named alphabetically, as if they were my friends.
In a way, they indeed were.
I had very few friends, none of them close enough to be invited today, though they all wished me at school this morning.
Still, I felt more comfortable with my balloons. They never judged me, never taunted or mocked me, and never referred to Dad as a ‘juicehead’ or a ‘boozer’.
Unlike my schoolmates, who did.
I always felt hurt when they did that—call him names behind his back, behind my back—as if he was a circus clown. He wasn’t. He was an actor, a movie actor, who was once hailed as a rising star, an artist with great potential.
That dream crashed a couple of years ago, and he took to the bottle. I didn’t blame him, even though Mamma did. But even she would never call him names or taunt him behind his back.
A loud thud startled me once again. Followed by a series of clanging noises. They came from the kitchen. Dad must have stumbled and fallen down looking for his drink.
I had to get up. I had to get out of my room. I couldn’t see him getting hurt.
Not today. Not ever. Especially not today.
I walked to the kitchen in slow, steady steps, only to find Dad crawling on the floor, holding his knee with one hand and his forehead with the other.
Utensils and crockery lay strewn all over the floor, some broken, some not, just like they were this very day last year.
Dad looked in agony. He was grimacing and squirming.
He must have hurt himself while falling down. It wasn’t new to him, it wasn’t new to me. We were both accustomed to these minor tumbles in and around the house sporadically.
It happens when adults have had too much to drink. They tumble and stumble.
That’s why I had got all the windows covered with my balloons. No one would be able to snoop. There were just too many neighbors around, and I didn’t want anyone to know what went on inside the four walls of my home.
I stepped forward and extended my arm. “Here, Dad.”
He looked at me with glassy eyes and grabbed my hand. I noticed a bump in his head. Must have hit it on the table when he fell.
“Thanks, buddy!” he mumbled and groaned. “Sorry for the … this mess. Can’t find my … my drink …”
“I will get it for you, Dad.”
I turned around and ran to the balcony where the washing machine was kept. There wasn’t enough space inside the tiny apartment, so we did our laundry out on the balcony.
That’s where it was. The bottle.
I opened the lid of the machine, picked it up, and returned to the kitchen with bated breath. I was scared he might find out that it was me who had hidden that bottle inside the washing machine. I didn’t want him to know. I didn’t want him to drink once he was home …
Not today.
But I couldn’t see him in pain, either. Certainly not today.
That was the difference between me and Mamma. She would try to hide his bottles and make him angry and upset. I would never make that mistake.
With shaky hands and a racing heart, I handed him the bottle. It was almost full, but I knew it would be empty in an hour. I just prayed he would not probe why it had gone missing.
Thankfully, he didn’t.
“Hey! There it is … Thanks, buddy!” He grabbed the bottle with both hands, his eyes shining in joy and greed, and began to gulp it down seated on the floor.
I sighed. There was no point hiding that bottle. It was a futile effort. He needed to get drunk much more than I wished for him to be sober, even if for just one day.
I felt happy, though, because he looked happy. And that’s all that mattered.
I turned around to leave, only to stop in my tracks as he called out to me from behind.
“Brody, come here a sec.”
I walked over to him, and he lunged forward to hug me, embracing me in his strong arms, his breath stinking.
“Happy birthday, champ!” he mumbled.
“Thank you, Dad.”
“You turn eight today, don’t you?” he chuckled.
“No, Dad. I turned seven. You’re kidding. I know.”
He indeed was. He could forget about Mamma and everything about her, but he would never forget anything about me.
He kept holding me in his tight hug, and for a moment, it felt like he would never let me go. Those few seconds made me forget everything—my loneliness, the balloons, and even Mamma's absence—making me feel as though I was daydreaming again.
“What do you want, Brody? Ask for anything you want …”
He was smiling. His eyes were red, but his gaze was kind. I remembered at that moment what Mamma had said to him last year during one of their epic arguments, “If you were even a quarter as good a husband as you are a father, I wouldn’t be forced to take this step …”
“I want—” I hesitated and lowered my gaze.
“What …? Tell me,” he prodded, holding me by the shoulders.
“I want Mamma to come back,” I muttered under my breath, my heart pounding loudly.
His face changed color. His eyes narrowed. His jaws tightened, and so did his grip on my shoulders.
He shook me and growled, “Your Mamma isn’t coming back. You get it? She is never going to return. She left us, and we don’t need her anymore. Get used to it, okay?”
“Yes, Dad.”
Just then I heard a loud pop from my bedroom window. And I knew what had happened.
A balloon must have burst.
A rupture.
My birthday was over.
