Collateral(27)
Boom, boom, boom—my heart banging like a drum. Zeth stares at the car, eyebrows pulled together. Michael does the same thing. “What is it, boss? You see something?”
Zeth shakes his head. “I don’t know. Check the wheel arches.”
Michael drops to his knees and begins checking out the underside of the car, while Zeth forcefully prizes the hood of the car open. It’s Michael that finds the device. “Fuck, Zee.” That’s all he says. That’s all he has time to say. He jumps to his feet, and then Zeth’s grabbing hold of me around the waist and running. I lose my shoes. My ribcage and still-wounded shoulder are gripped with pain. Zeth shouts something, but I don’t hear what he says. My jackhammering pulse drowns everything out. And then it comes.
Strangely, it’s not the sound of the actual explosion that sticks in my memory; it’s the sound of shattering glass. The beautiful stained-glass windows in St. Finnegan’s church splintering as the bomb that was hidden in the wheel arch of our car detonates.
Sky.
Concrete.
Sky.
Concrete.
Sky…
I see the concrete coming for me. I feel the weightlessness in my stomach. I feel a multitude of forces, like grabbing hands, pushing and pulling me in eight different directions. I feel the oxygen being sucked from my lungs.
And then I feel nothing.
“Are you ready, baby? Oh my god, Paul. Watch. Watch.”
A high-pitched whistling sound is piercing my eardrum. I have no idea when I’ve ever felt this bad. My head…my head is killing me. It literally feels like my brain is revolting against the rest of my body, intent on causing me so much pain that I simply expire. Fuck. There’s a lot of thinking involved in trying to move myself into a sitting position. My shoulders, elbows, wrists—every single joint in my body—feel like they’ve been dislocated and roughly forced back into place.
I can smell sugar. Something sweet.
“I can’t believe it¸” a woman’s voice whispers. It is a whisper, soft, the words deeply felt, but the volume of the words is loud. Ear-splittingly loud. I have no idea what the fuck is going on. I risk opening one eye, then the other, and the pain in my head increases. I’m looking at a bright rectangle of white light. Dark shapes move within the light.
“He hasn’t even realized. Look,” the female voice whispers again. I squint, trying to clear my vision, and things begin to take proper shape. A cinema screen. I’m staring up at a cinema screen. And on the screen…
“He’s such a big boy. I had no idea he was gonna grow so fast.”
“Yeah, he’s gonna be tall like his dad.”
My mother. And my father. Well, the man I remembered as my father, before Charlie ruined my fucking life and announced he was actually my dad. My father’s arms are wrapped around my mother’s waist from behind, his chin resting on her shoulder, and two of them watch as a pudgy little baby holds his dimpled arms above his head and takes staggering, teetering steps down a long pathway.
“He’s got your eyes, Paul,” another voice says somewhere in the background. “So dark. He’s gonna terrorize the ladies with those eyes.” My mom turns to the camera—she knows they’re being recorded—and pokes her tongue out at the person filming. “Oh, shut up, Dee. I can’t bear to hear that. He’s never going to grow up. He’s just gonna be my little boy forever and ever.”
Dee, whoever she is, laughs. “You’re going to be the most overprotective mother, aren’t you? Your child’s not going to bring a woman home until he’s already married her for fear you’ll hate her on sight.”
In the background, the baby tumbles backward, landing on his butt. There are enterprising stalks of grass thrusting their way out of the cracked concrete where he’s sitting now, the green blades reaching for the sky. The baby focuses, wrapping a dumpy little fist around a handful, and tries to uproot them.
“No, Zeth. That’s not for eating, baby boy.” My mother frees herself from my father’s embrace and lifts the baby—me—from the ground. She then turns and presents me to the camera, as though I’m a trophy she just can’t bear to stop displaying to the world. Even then my eyes were darker than your average chocolate brown. I reach out with dirty, muddied hands and try slapping them against the lens of the camera.
“No, baby. That’s Duchess’s new camera. You can’t break that. Psycho Charlie will get mad.”
“Hey, please don’t call him that. And don’t call me Duchess, either. I hate it.”
My mother turns her huge, wide eyes on the camera, looking right down the lens.