Sweet Child of Mine (Don't Cry)

A Story by SpiritWalker

Bearing witness to a teenager's decent into mental anguish, Joe does what he can to help. This is a dark story; don't let it get to you. Not my usual writing.

He was sobbing behind me. Sobbing like a child that was too scared of his father hearing him cry for his mother; short, stifled gasps and hiccups racked his body from his head, tucked under a death-grip of hair, to toes, curled together under his contorted legs in some vain attempt to express his anguish. I knew how he cried, so I didn’t even need to turn around to know he was pressing his forehead into his bent knees, rocking back and forth in time with forceful inhales and feebly controlled exhales that morphed into silent, completely silent, wide-mouthed, body shuddering, hair-ripping screams. If I turned around, both hands would be grabbing weakly at his scalp, clenching beautiful black-as-night locks in two already-thinning spots on either side of his skull, his fingers doing what they could to disobey his tight forearms and prevent him from tearing whole chunks of hair out. His shoulders would be absurdly tight right at the base of his neck, so tight that he’d feel soreness for days afterwards, again to quantify the pain he. His left hand would occasionally scratch at his chest, right over his heart, as if he was trying to pull whatever was scorching it out of his flesh, and he wouldn’t stop until he felt something else hurt or blood coat his fingertips.

He’d want Alex in that very moment when his chest burned, want the relatable, lovable, reliable, trustworthy, tireless, comforting cousin, Alex Warner, to clasp his arms around and roar silently into the shoulder of. He’d want Uncle Christopher, Alex’s father, to throw something at Trevor, his own father, for being such a failure to his son, such a useless old hag at a time of dire need, who drowned himself in a bottle every moment he wasn’t complaining about his wife being dead, or his house falsely being a work of animal excrement, or his racked-up gambling debts, or his pills not working, or his useless son, who spent every moment he wasn’t protecting himself and his sisters from Trevor’s blind rages doing exceptionally well in school, working his way to an athletic scholarship, holding down two jobs, missing his dead mother, crying ceaselessly into the night, and telling everyone in the world that he was going to be just fine.

But Alex wasn’t an option for him anymore, not after what happened to Trevor.

I’m Joe Warner, a guy in the family who is one, adopted, two, just a little under a decade older than Alex, and three, king of my generation in the splintered family of Kian Warner’s son’s, their children, and their supporters.

And I just walked in on this little crap show.

Alex called me when a fight broke out at the Trevor household somewhere in the ballpark of midnight, three nights ago. Trevor was drunk again, Christopher was howling at him, Michael was screaming at both of them, and Jake was trying to contain Alex, who’s monstrous rage was ready to take over his body and end Trevor for clocking his nineteen year-old son hard enough to break his nose. Of course, no one heeded his warning signs, so his rage broke free of Alex’s mental barriers and all but tore Trevor to bloody ribbons. Thankfully, Aaron and his little sisters, Megan and Katie, were already gone in the twenty seconds it took their dear father’s limp body connected with the floor amongst an eruption of horrified bellowing from his brothers. It never crossed anyone’s mind that Alex would attack one of his own uncles, or that he’d do so without thinking for a second about repercussions, but it happened. No, that horrid, useless, depressing excuse for a man and father didn’t die; however, I don’t picture him looking like himself after the mangled bits of his body manage to reconnect to form a human being again. He’d lost partial control of his left arm from severed nerves, had to get part of his spleen removed from being so destroyed, and needed assistive breathing until he was out of his coma.

But he was alive. Technically.

Anyway, I took off after Aaron, leaving the girls at Alex’s house, which was three short, stubby buildings down, and in the care of his mother, who was more than concerned when I gave her a ten-second rundown of the events at Trevor’s; she was almost to the point of hysteria, in fact. I didn’t have time to explain all the details because I had to hunt down that explosive Aaron before he hurt himself. Or someone else.

Fast-forward three days of family hell that involved Aaron and the girls staying in my house until a decision about the rest of their lives was made by ten people who knew zilch about what it was like to live in the shadow of an abusive parent and one person that not only knew what it was like to be horrendously abused by a parent figure, but that also knew the intricacies of raising children not to be damaged goods in the absence of their parents. Aaron and I were in a room on the upper floor; the girls and my wife, Olivia, were in a room on the lower floor. No, it wasn’t impossible for us to part rooms for a while, especially if it concerned the aforementioned tumultuous life of children that did nothing to deserve such a thing.

Aaron wanted to sleep on the floor. He wanted to throw a big comforter down and lay on the carpeted ground to sleep, instead of taking the nice, soft, warm bed that I offered him in the spacious guest room we shared. He also didn’t want to be alone in a room, so the problem wasn’t sharing a bed with me, but comfort, as he said. I knew he wanted to sleep on the floor to give himself some room to cry without disturbing me at night, but hell if I was about to let him go through this alone! Even if it meant I simply witnessed him fall apart before my eyes and did nothing, nothing to quell his chaotic thoughts, hair ripping, silent screaming, anxious rocking, and heart-clawing, I wasn’t going to leave him on his own! He clearly hadn’t slept well in months, and was now 30 hours into not sleeping at all, so his mind was bound to shut down at some point.

So I joined him on the floor tonight. And tonight may have been the moment he needed me to.

I rolled over, reaching a hand blindly in the darkness that I slept and he cried in to connect with his tense shoulder, uttering a thoughtless word or two of comfort as I wrapped my arm around his back and pulled him towards me, reaching my other hand around to yank his blanket haphazardly over him after feeling just how cold he was. I was not a sappy one when it came to dealing with people, and I certainly was a far cry from Alex and his comforting abilities, but something about the sheer tormented sounds that didn’t escape Aaron made me worry about the state of his mind and how much this awful set of circumstances was going to affect him. It would’ve been criminal for me not to at the very least try to consolidate him.

He continued to cry silent tears into the pillow and blanket, which he had balled into his clenched fist and tucked right under his chin. I didn’t quite know what to do, but something in the back of my mind said to rub my hand up and down his spine in slow circles. I planned to talk to him about what happened, about how Alex was still the same person and wasn’t someone to be afraid of, that he wasn’t a monster, and that he still loved Aaron as much as he always did: to absolute pieces; but it didn’t work that way. Instead, he fell asleep almost instantly, succumbing to the blissful mercy of numbness that was sleep.