I am Veronica (bwwm)

Broken pieces (27)

~Song: Demons~

Chapter twenty-seven: Broken pieces:

"I don't know where to start." He rubbed his hands over his face and sighed. "I guess I'll start from the very beginning. My mom who you have already met, had a drug problem when she was in her early twenties. Her mother found out about her and helped her get into rehabilitation, maybe 'helped' is too light a word. More like forced. Anyway, that's how she met my alcoholic dad.

"Not the most romantic beginning I guess, but whatever. So fast forward a few years and my mom is married to David DeVito and she's a few months pregnant with Lea. Lea's born and three years later I come along. My parents have their shit together finally, my dad has a respectable corporate job and my mom is a housewife.

"It's fairly normal and it seems like everything would be alright, right?" His eyes looked so far away. I was afraid to touch him. "Well that's too easy. The whole reason it started was because my father got let go at the office and that's when things started to go wrong. I was eleven and Lea was fourteen, my mom was maybe six months pregnant? Something like that.

"My father. . . started drinking again, first he started coming home later than usual, I remember waiting for him to come home one night when I was supposed to be sleeping. I heard him come in and stumble around. Lea started to sneak out once it got worse. He would come home and yell and throw stuff around. . . beer bottles, chairs, books. My mom was lucky he never threw anything at her when he was in one of his rages. But that didn't matter. He still made it worse.

"I got out of school early one day because of a freak snow storm and I guess my dad didn't have a backup plan for when we got home that day." He said. He wasn't looking at me, he was looking at the wall behind me. He was in a different place and time right now. "I get home and I see my father on the couch getting all handsy with this lady. So what does he do when he sees us? He asks her to leave, saying, 'they'll finish up later' then he gives us both ten dollars he got from God knows where and commands us to keep our traps shut and not tell mom. We told her anyway.

"But she wasn't prepared for when my dad's mistress comes over a week later when he's out -- surprisingly -- looking for a job and Lea and I were at school. No, she wasn't prepared for a nineteen year old to come swinging fists and throwing angry words, she couldn't defend herself even if she had been." I felt sick listening to this. "So my mom is lying on the floor, battered and bleeding and no one even knows until we get home about two hours later. So we rush to the hospital to get her treatment and she's gone into labour and it's way too early for this baby to be born, yet somehow we make it to the hospital and get her in a room. I wasn't in there because from what I've heard childbirth is pretty graphic, I was only eleven.

"But from what I eavesdropped later that night this is the gist: He was born a month earlier than expected, his lungs were underdeveloped so he couldn't go home with us that week, he was losing oxygen by the time we made it to the hospital so they had to do a C-section to get him out, and there was a good chance that he would have died." He paused. His eyes were filling. "Andy. . . is a fighter. He really is. My bastard father could have kept him from living because of his stupid choices in life, but he fought through it.

"Our 'family' returned to as normal a routine as we could, given the circumstances. My father still came home drunk every now and then, he and my mother still fought, Lea still snuck out. . . that was our normality.

Andy did eventually get to come home with us, but we ran into problems again. My mother had been prescribed oxytocin for her pain and she started abusing the pills. My dad had left to go somewhere and Lea and I went to go check on Andy and we found him spasming and shaking in the crib, she screamed for my mom but she didn't come.