Blood on My Hands

wrong! Slade, tell them!”
    But with his hands cuffed behind him and my arms around him, Slade doesn’t move or speak. For a moment, everything is still. Then Chief Jenkins gently says, “Let go, Callie.”
    I’m still looking up at Slade. Tears have begun to roll down his cheeks.
    And that’s when I know it’s true.

Chapter 47
    THERE WAS A boy who lived with his mother and father and older brother and sister. They were a happy family until one day when his mother was too tired to get out of bed. And then everything began to change. No one spoke about it in front of the boy, but the mood in the house became tense and sad, and his father’s and older brother’s and sister’s faces were always grim. His mother went to the hospital and his sister cried when she made the boy his breakfast and packed him off to school the way his mother used to do.
    And the boy felt sad.
    His mother came home a few weeks later and soon lost all her hair and took to wearing scarves and hats. She started making his breakfasts again, but often by dinnertime, she was too exhausted to cook. At first there were still moments when she was happy and full of energy, but gradually they were outweighed by days when she was exhausted and the house was gloomy and quiet.
    It went on that way for a while, and then one day his mother went back to the hospital. A few days later the boy’s father took him to the hospital and the boy saw sad faces on the nurses and doctors when he went down the hall, holding his father’s hand. The boy and his father went into a room and there was his mother in bed, only she looked more like a grandmother and was now wrinkled and pale and thin. She held his hand and cried and the boy knew something very bad was happening.
    Then the boy’s father walked with him back to the car and it was the first time the boy had ever seen his father cry. And the boy felt very, very sad.
    At the funeral, with many crying people, the boy watched his mother’s casket go into the ground, but it was hard to believe that she was really inside it.
    For a while the boy lived in his house without a mother, and his father and sister and brother tried to do the things his mother had done, but of course, they could not do any of them as well. And then a new woman started to come around, and after a while, the boy was introduced to her children, and then one day there was a big party and the woman and her children moved in with them.
    At first things seemed better again. His father was happier. The new woman wasn’t the same as the boy’s mother, but by then the boy understood that his mother wasn’t coming back. So he tried to pretend that the woman would be his new mother and he tried to get along with his new brothers and sisters. Then the new woman had a baby and suddenly the boy had a half sister named Alyssa.
    A few years passed and then his father wasn’t happy anymore and there was yelling and fighting—things the boy had never heard at home before.
    And then the new woman and her children left, and while things at home once again became melancholy and quiet, at least it was peaceful. The boy and his sister and brother grew older and made friends and spent more time outside the family. The boy never stopped feeling sad, but slowly he built a wall against the memories and tried to stay on the other side of the wall as much as he could. Sometimes he would think of his mother, and an invisible door would open unexpectedly and he would be pulled back through it and into the gloom, but after a while, he could always go back through the door to the other side.
    Then the boy met a girl and everything changed. For the first time since his mother had died, he truly believed that he might be able to stay on the good side of the wall forever. And even when the invisible door opened, as it still did now and then, he found that thanks to her, he could usually grab the doorframe and pull himself back out.
    By then his brother and sister had moved on, leaving him with Alyssa and his father, whose life was drywall, and the EMS squad, and the television, and a bottle. Deep down the boy had always known that drywall and the EMS squad would be his life, too. That his father was depending on him. That he was the tape and mud that held the gypsum boards of his father’s life together. That without him it would all collapse in a heap.
    And the boy believed he had no choice in this matter. His deepest, greatest fear was that if Lamont Drywall and