No is the Answer

Christian Belmont

Christian Belmont did not remember learning how to ride a bike, or the first time he lost a tooth, or whether anyone had ever clapped when he brought home a decent report card.

He remembered the sound of his father’s truck in the driveway.

That sound had raised him more than either of his parents had. The low growl of the engine, the cough and rattle before it shut off, the door creaking open, the heavy boots hitting gravel one after the other. Those boots had a language all their own. Slow meant tired. Fast meant angry. Uneven meant drunk enough to stumble but not drunk enough to pass out, which was the worst kind of drunk, because it left his father mean and mobile.

Christian learned to read that language before he learned cursive.

He would be sitting at the kitchen table with a pencil in his hand, staring at numbers that refused to behave, and the sound of those boots would move through him like ice water. His mother would be on the couch in the living room, her body curled beneath an old quilt, the television flickering blue and white across her face. Sometimes she was awake. Sometimes she was almost awake. Most days she lived somewhere behind her eyes, behind the little orange bottles on the coffee table, behind a fog Christian could not enter.

“Mom,” he would whisper, though he knew better.

She might blink. She might turn her head an inch. She might say, “Don’t start, Chris,” in a voice so soft it barely counted as being alive.

So he would not start.

His father would.

Dale Belmont came through the door like weather. Not the kind people watched from porches with coffee in hand, but the kind that ripped siding loose and left branches broken in the yard. He was a broad man, thick in the neck and shoulders, with red in his eyes and beer on his breath and disappointment waiting in both fists.

Sometimes Christian had done something wrong.

Sometimes he had left a dish in the sink, tracked mud through the hall, missed a chore, breathed too loudly during a football game, or looked at his father in a way Dale decided was disrespectful.

Most times, Christian had done nothing at all.

That was the first lesson his childhood taught him: pain did not need a reason. People liked reasons afterward because reasons made pain seem organized. Reasons made it sound like a machine with buttons and levers, something you could avoid by stepping carefully enough. But Christian knew better. He knew pain could walk into a room already angry and choose you because you were there.

His mother never stopped it.

That was the second lesson.

She would flinch when Dale shouted. She would pull the quilt higher when Christian hit the floor. Sometimes she cried without making a sound, tears slipping sideways into her hairline as if even they were trying to leave quietly. But she never stood between them. Never grabbed the phone. Never packed a bag. Never said, “Enough.”

In fairness, Christian grew up hating that phrase—in fairness—because adults used it whenever they wanted to wrap cowardice in clean paper. In fairness, his mother had troubles. In fairness, Dale drank because he lost work. In fairness, Christian was a difficult child. Quiet, sullen, watchful. Not affectionate. Not easy.

People said that last part a lot.

Christian was not easy.

He was eight the first time he understood that being unwanted had a shape. It was an empty chair at the school Christmas concert. It was a permission slip unsigned for three days. It was eating cereal for dinner because his mother had forgotten groceries and his father had spent the cash somewhere loud and sticky-floored. It was standing in the nurse’s office with a split lip while a woman with kind eyes asked him what happened, and Christian knew, somehow, that the truth would only make things worse.

“I fell,” he said.

The nurse looked at him for a long moment.

Christian looked back.

Even then, he was good at making his face into a locked door.

By eleven, he could cook eggs without burning them. By twelve, he could forge his mother’s signature well enough to fool the school office. By thirteen, he knew how to hide bruises under long sleeves, how to sleep lightly, how to keep one ear open for his father’s truck, how to swallow anger until it sat in his stomach like a stone.

By fourteen, he had stopped hoping someone would notice.

Hope, he decided, was just another way the world tricked people into standing still.

He grew tall before he grew broad. For a while, he was all elbows and wrists and knees, a long, hungry-looking boy with too much bone and not enough softness anywhere. Teachers called him intense. Other kids called him creepy, or quiet, or, once, “serial killer farm boy,” which had been inaccurate on several counts.

Christian had never killed anyone.

He had also never lived on a farm.

He had, however, stared at the boy until the boy dropped his lunch tray and spilled chocolate milk down his own shoes, which Christian considered the first satisfying miracle of his life.

He did not have friends.

Friends wanted things. They wanted you to come over, explain yourself, laugh at the right places, tell secrets, trust them not to use those secrets later. Christian did not see the point. Friendship looked to him like handing someone a knife and hoping they admired the handle.

So he stayed alone.

Alone was clean. Alone had rules. Alone did not promise anything.

Then sixteen came.

It did not arrive all at once. It built itself slowly in his shoulders, in his back, in the hard muscle of his arms from hauling scrap, splitting wood, lifting things no one bothered helping him with. He shot up past six feet before spring had properly ended. By summer, his old jeans stopped fitting and his boots pinched and people who had once looked over his head started looking him in the eye.

Dale noticed too.

Christian saw it happen one humid night in July, when the kitchen smelled like old grease and stale beer and something sour from the trash can. His father came home late, drunk enough to sway, angry enough to look for a reason. Christian was at the sink washing a plate because the sink was full, because his mother had not gotten up all day, because someone had to do it and apparently God had drawn Christian’s name from a hat as a joke.

Dale stood in the doorway, breathing hard.

Christian kept washing the plate.

“Think you’re too good to say hello?” Dale asked.

“No,” Christian said.

The plate was white with a blue ring around the edge. There was a chip near the rim. Christian remembered that chip with absurd clarity. Even years later, he could see it. A small broken place in something ordinary.

Dale stepped closer.

Christian dried the plate.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

Christian looked.

For the first time, he did not have to look up.

His father saw it. The change. The height. The width beginning to settle across Christian’s chest. The boy becoming something less convenient to hurt.

Dale’s face twisted.

Maybe he swung because he was drunk. Maybe he swung because he was afraid. Maybe he swung because men like Dale Belmont believed fear was something you beat into other people before it could show on you.

Christian caught his wrist.

That was all.

He did not hit him back. Not then. He simply caught his father’s wrist in one hand and held it there between them.

The room went very quiet.

On the couch, his mother stirred beneath her quilt.

Dale tried to pull free.

Christian held on.

He was surprised by how easy it was. That was the terrible thing. Not that he could do it, but that the monster from his childhood had bones and tendons and breath like anybody else. Dale Belmont was not thunder. He was not fate. He was not the whole world.

He was a drunk man in a dirty kitchen whose wrist fit inside his son’s hand.

“Don’t,” Christian said.

One word.

Flat. Low. Final.

Dale stared at him, red-faced and panting, and Christian watched understanding crawl into his father’s eyes. It was not remorse. Christian would have recognized remorse if he had ever seen it. This was calculation. This was the animal knowledge that prey had become uncertain.

Christian released him.

Dale stepped back.

After that, the house changed.

Not enough to become safe. The Belmont house did not know how to be safe. But Dale stopped swinging so freely. His anger turned into mutters, insults, slammed cabinets, thrown bottles, ugly words tossed like lit matches.

Christian took those better than fists.

Words were easier to hate.

By seventeen, he worked after school and on weekends, saving money in a coffee can hidden behind a loose board in his closet. By eighteen, he left with two duffel bags, one hundred and seventy-three dollars, and a black eye he refused to explain to the old man at the bus station who kept trying to make conversation.

“Rough night?” the man asked.

Christian stared straight ahead.

The old man cleared his throat. “Weather’s supposed to turn.”

“Then wear a coat,” Christian said.

The man blinked.

Christian did not apologize.

That became the shape of him.

Sharp answer. Hard stare. Closed door.

People mistook it for arrogance, which suited him fine. Arrogance kept them away. Rudeness was useful. Silence was better. If someone decided Christian Belmont was unpleasant, impossible, a bastard with boots and a bad attitude, they usually left him alone, and Christian had built most of his life around being left alone.

He took jobs that asked for his back, not his heart. Loading docks. Construction crews. Night repairs. Anything with tools, weight, sweat, and a boss who did not ask what he was feeling. He became good with his hands because hands made sense. Broken hinge, replace it. Dead battery, charge it. Split board, cut a new one. Machines did not lie about why they failed. Walls did not pretend love and then cave in on you.

People did.

He rented small rooms and then smaller houses. He owned little and kept less. His refrigerator contained eggs, hot sauce, sandwich meat, and one suspicious jar of pickles that had followed him through three moves like a curse. His idea of decorating was putting a chair where a chair belonged and then daring anyone to comment.

No one visited.

That suited him too.

At twenty-eight, Christian Belmont had the look of a man carved instead of born. Tall, solid, unsmiling, with shoulders that filled doorways and eyes that made liars nervous. He moved through town like he had somewhere to be and had already been disappointed by everyone on the way there.

He was not cruel, though plenty of people called him that.

Cruelty required wanting to hurt.

Christian usually wanted the opposite. He wanted people to stop needing things from him. He wanted fools to stop mistaking kindness for weakness. He wanted men with soft voices and clean shirts to stop getting away with rot just because they knew how to smile at the right people.

He wanted, though he would never have admitted it, one person in the world who could look at him and not see a problem to solve or a weapon to fear.

But wanting was dangerous.

Wanting had teeth.

So Christian told himself he did not want anything. He told himself trust was a fairy tale people invented because sleeping beside someone with both eyes closed sounded romantic instead of stupid. He told himself love was either a leash or a lie, and he had no interest in wearing one or believing the other.

He became hard to feel.

All edges. All bark. All badly timed comments and narrowed eyes and a voice like gravel being shoveled into a metal bucket. He could clear a room with one sentence. He could make a crying woman furious by offering solutions when she needed comfort. He could ruin a tender moment by saying something like, “Well, that was emotionally damp,” and then wonder why everyone looked offended.

But buried under all that iron was a boy who had once listened for boots in the driveway and wished, just once, that someone would come home safe.

Not kind. Not cheerful. Not even loving.

Just safe.

Christian did not believe in safe anymore.

He believed in locks. In distance. In keeping cash hidden and exits clear. In never needing anyone badly enough that they could ruin you by leaving. He believed in making himself too big, too blunt, too difficult to be used as anyone’s punching bag ever again.

And if, somewhere deep beneath the scar tissue of his life, there was still a heart capable of tenderness, Christian had buried it so well he could have sworn it was gone.

He was wrong, of course.

But no one had gotten close enough to prove it.