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Stuart McCormick had never once raised a hand against his kids.
He’d be the first to admit that he wasn’t a great father. Hell, he probably wouldn’t even qualify as a halfway decent father.
(A decent father would be able to put down meals for his family that weren’t made up of expired pop-tarts and stale bread. A decent father wouldn’t rent out his garage to dangerous drug lords and kingpins just for an extra buck to spend on scratchy lotteries or cheap booze, knowing full well that his children were sleeping right next door through a wall that was only inches thick, only inches away from some of the most precarious people in the town.)
But Stuart McCormick never hit his kids. Never. No matter how drunk or high or angry or fucked up he was, he never, ever , hit his kids.
And then, one day, with no forewarning or indication, Kevin ran away from home.
Kevin was the McCormicks’ firstborn. He had been conceived out of wedlock, when Stuart and Carol were only juniors in high school. Stuart had worked at the time, a job with more integrity and honor than any “career” he’d come to possess in his later years, at the local car shop. He only worked part time, since he was seventeen and still in school, and didn’t make nearly enough money to support even just himself financially, let alone a wife and a kid.
But he was young and in love, and the woman he was in love with was a devout Roman Catholic, with neither the resources nor the will to get an abortion, who would rather die where she stood than “give birth to no bastard child.”
So Stuart dropped out, and started working full time. Carol followed suit two months later. Against the behest of both their families, they left home on inflated hopes and a rickety income, and Stuart put down a deposit on a run down old excuse of a house whose list of health code violations was so long, it had to be printed in point eight font to fit in the allotted five pages the realtors gave them to sign.
Shortly after moving in, the kids got hitched at city hall. Carol wore a ratty, filthy white dress that had belonged to her long-dead aunt and had been collecting dust for years in her family’s attic, and she carried a bouquet of weeds Stuart had picked for her out of their new home’s backyard.
He thought she was the prettiest thing he’d ever saw.
Their honeymoon consisted of a couple days’ stay at a cheap motel only a block away from their house, shitty fake IDs, and three nights spent wasting Stuart’s most recent paycheck at a low security bar.
(Apparently, Carol wasn’t too worried about fetal alcohol syndrome. Said “My momma drank like the devil when she was pregnant with me and both my sisters, and we all turned out fine!” )
It was the happiest either of them had ever been.
And then Kevin was born, and the lofty world of drunken delusion they’d been living in came crashing down at their feet.
Postpartum hit poor, young Carol like a sixteen wheeler barreling into a squirrel. She got moody and mad and weepy and violent, and Stuart had no idea what to do. She lost twenty pounds in a week, gained thirty in three days, and then lost another sixty in the following two months. She began to beat on her husband, threatening at least twice a week to either leave or kill herself and the new baby if he didn’t “FIX THIS!”, never once clarifying what on earth “this” was.
Eventually, Stuart had had enough. Enough of his harebrained wife. Enough of his wailing child. He stopped coming home after work. Stopped saving up for little things like flowers for Carol or a new toy for Kevin. Instead, he headed straight to the bar after finishing up at the auto shop, and drank until he couldn’t even remember his wife’s name, then stalked home at twelve in the morning, ignoring Carol’s shrill shrieking about how late it was and what an irresponsible jackass he was being, ignoring Kevin’s loud pleas for attention and blubbering, hungry whimpers. He crawled straight into bed and woke up the next morning with a hangover that made his head feel too heavy for his neck and made his limbs seem too stiff for his body, then went to work and started all over again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The cycle continued for nearly six months, until one day, just before his nineteenth birthday, his boss pulled him aside and informed him that “this wasn’t going to work out.”
Despite the fact that he was still half-drunk and could barely keep his eyes open, Stuart understood that that was code for “you’re fired. Pack your shit and get the hell out.”
Stuart didn’t go to the bar that day. Instead, he sulked his way back home and, head bowed, with all the confidence of a kicked puppy with his tail tucked between his legs or a kid who had been caught drawing on the walls, he told Carol he was out of work.
She threw a fit and broke a plate over his head, and Kevin screamed and cried so loud, the neighbors called the cops.
It took over thirteen months after that for Stuart to find a new job—
(If there was one thing harder to escape in a small town where everyone knew your name than the gossip and the drama, it was a smear on your employment record. No one wanted to hire the guy who had no education, little experience, and who had been fired from his last job for being a lazy, useless drunkard.)
—and eighteen more to admit that he was an alcoholic. Kevin was a toddler by then, and he still had trouble walking and had yet to say his first word. When Carol and Stuart took him to the doctor, the first thing they were asked was whether or not the mother had drank or smoked during the pregnancy.
Two weeks later, after running several tests and doing innumerable labs, the McCormicks got a call informing them that their son had autism, and that his inhibited brain development was almost definitely a result of his severe exposure to alcohol poisoning in the womb.
(Ironically enough, the night they received the news, it was Carol who got drop dead drunk and Stuart who hit her and told her everything that went wrong was her fault.)
Still, despite major setbacks, a constantly plummeting credit score, and a debt balance that seemed to get exponentially bigger every time you blinked, the McCormicks stood fast. They held their heads and raised their special little angel the best they could, and although Carol and Stuart fought almost nightly, be it with flying fists or with outraged obscenities, Carol still tucked her child in and read him a bedtime story every single night, and Stuart always made sure that he got a present on every holiday and birthday, no matter how small the gift or how tight the budget.
By the time Carol got pregnant with her second, she and Stuart were seasoned veterans.
(And yes, there were moments of weakness. Moments where the still-young couple attended some not-so-innocuous meetings with a not-so-christian cult in an attempt to gain some sort of otherworldly aid or guidance that god just hadn’t been keen on giving them. But, despite their falters, the McCormicks made it through the second pregnancy almost just as smoothly as they had the first, with a little less alcohol and a whole lot less reckless abandon.)
Kenny McCormick was born obscenely underweight, coming in at just under four pounds, and nearly died that very first night in the hospital. But he was also born with a notable lack of fetal alcohol issues.
Stuart and Carol considered that a win.
By their third child, the McCormicks had a routine. A system. Their kids would more or less take care of themselves, with Kevin proving to be a surprisingly competent big brother and Kenny working himself to the bone right from the get go in an attempt to make life better for his baby sister, despite being only three at the time that she was born. Stuart would come home tipsy more often than not, Carol would yell at him for being a shitty head of household, Stuart would shout at her for ruining his entire life, and on most nights, there would be a small scuffle in addition to the exchange of insults. On good days, they’d make up and get high and fuck. On bad days, one of them would end up unconscious. Usually, there wasn’t too much blood or broken glass to be cleaned up in the aftermath. After the fight, the family would settle down to eat “dinner”. On good days, everyone got their own pop tart and half a piece of toast. On bad days, there’d be two pop tarts in total to split between the five of them. Every now and again, Stuart would lose another job. Every now and again, Carol would threaten to leave and never come back.
(The McCormicks treated their domestic abuse just as they did their cocaine stash: it was distributed evenly between man and wife and was kept far out of reach of the kids.)
Carol always sat the children down after a particularly bad fight and told them that no matter what happened, mommy and daddy loved them and would never hurt them. Whenever Stuart saw one of the kids flinch back upon witnessing him strike his wife, he’d wrap them up in a big bear hug and show them that “Mommy’s just fine, see? Ain’t no thing.” No bruise either of them sported could ever outshine the smiles they gave their children when they caught them looking.
Stuart never once raised a hand against his kids.
(It was the only thing he ever did right.)
And then his eldest child, his firstborn, that sweet, softspoken boy who loved harder than anyone he’d ever known, left home.
And something in Stuart broke .
He’d worked harder at raising that kid than he’d ever worked at anything in his life. As the years had worn on, the only thing he and his wife could ever manage to work together on, the only thing that didn’t tear them apart, was taking care of Kevin. They both wanted him safe. They both wanted to make up to him what they’d fucked up before he was even born.
The only time they ever loved each other the way they had when they were younger was when they were with Kevin. Only ever with Kevin.
And then he was gone.
And Stuart fell apart.
The kid was only fifteen. Fifteen . His reading comprehension was stuck stagnant at the level of a fifth grader’s. He still didn’t speak unless spoken to, and even then, only ever responded in curt, stunted sentences. He was too polite, too humble, too good for his own good.
He’d never make it out in a world that beat you down simply for existing.
At first, Stuart held out hope that his son’s sudden disappearance was simply a whim of teenage rebellion. That Kevin would come back in a couple days time, and that the family could forget all about the whole ordeal. After all, it wasn’t as if he’d never run away from home when he was the kid’s age.
(He tried not to think about how the last time he left home, he never went back. Never sent a letter or made a phone call, despite the fact that he lived only a couple of miles away, and would’ve been able to make the trek back to his folks’ place on foot if need be.
His mom and dad were dead, now. It had been fifteen years since he’d seen them. He hadn’t gone to the funerals.
He couldn’t remember what his last words to them even were.)
Kevin didn’t come back.
And Stuart did the one thing he knew how to do. The one thing he could do best.
He drank.
He drank until he could barely stand upright. Until the world became fuzzy at the edges. Until he wasn’t a father or a husband or even a man any longer—just a vessel for booze; no responsibilities, no obligations, no stress. Just the burn of whiskey going down his throat, and then numbness. Peace.
This time, he stayed one step ahead of his employers; he quit of his own volition before they had any opportunity to fire him. Then, he stole the money Carol made doing her dishwashing gig at the restaurant down the street off the nightstand and spent all of it on hard liquor.
He downed three bottles of Smirnoff in one sitting, while his kids were at school and his wife was at work. Then, he had lunch, followed by another two bottles of Bacardi.
His vision was blurry and his movements were stunted, but it wasn’t working.
He could still remember that Kevin was gone.
So, he drank a pint’s worth of Hennessy, figuring that if he was dead, he wouldn’t have to remember anything anymore.
And then the front door opened.
And Stuart was mad .
Carol’s shift wasn’t over till two, and last he’d checked, it was only one-thirty. If she was back early for some reason, or if—god forbid—she’d been sacked, and came home only to witness her deadbeat husband wasting away, drinking down all that was left of her hard earned money, well; she might just kill him.
Which wouldn’t have been so bad, except Stuart knew that she’d bitch . She’d bitch and she’d bitch until his goddamned ears fell off for lack of hearing anything other than her interminable bitching and berating. She wouldn’t let him die without a decent lashing, and the more Stuart thought about it, the more he decided that it was disgustingly unfair. After all, there had been two people who had failed Kevin as parents. What right did she have to bitch at him ? Ungrateful whore, she’d never even cared about him in the first place. He’d given up his whole life for her! He could’ve been a doctor, or an engineer, or at least finished high school , but instead he was an unemployed day-drinker with a wife who would probably be happier if he did overdose and die since she’d be the one to get his life insurance money, and kids who hated him so damn much the oldest left without one fucking word.
“Hey Dad!” A voice drifted in from the living room, interrupting his carefully calculated drunken stupor, “we’re back. Karen got sick and had to go to the nurse’s office, and they said she had a fever ‘n stuff, so I brought her home early.”
Stuart didn’t register a word of what whoever was calling from the next room over had said. His mind was too preoccupied, too sluggishly focused on the blurry yet paradoxically distinct image of Carol . Carol, and her flushed face the night they fucked for the first time. The night they conceived Kevin.
“Do you know when Mom’s coming back from work?”
Carol, and her loopy, seventeen-year-old girl signature stamping the documents that gave them the house he’d bought for the two of them. For their family.
“Could you call and ask her to pick up some cold medicine on her way home? I checked the cupboards, we’re out.”
Carol, who had been the prettiest damn thing in city hall the day of their wedding.
(Which, perhaps, wasn’t saying much—the drug addicts in the holding cell and the sobbing middle aged woman filing for a restraining order were hardly competition for her radiance—but that didn’t matter; she’d be the prettiest person in every room to Stuart.)
“...Dad? Are you listening?”
Carol, cradling Kevin in her shaky arms for the first time in the maternity ward.
“Dad?”
Carol, telling Stuart he was worthless.
“Dad, what the hell?”
Carol, kissing Kenny’s cheek and holding him to her chest after some kids beat him up at school.
“Are you in your and Mom’s room?”
Carol, waving a gun around and screaming hysterically.
“Oh god, Dad, are you drunk ?”
Carol, gripping tightly to Karen’s little hand when the people in the garage were being too loud.
“Fucking hell.”
Carol, shouting at Stuart that if he didn’t find a job sometime soon, she’d kill him, the kids, and then herself.
“Dad, what’re you—“
Stuart didn’t know how it happened.
He didn’t feel it when his grip on the empty bottle of Hennessy tightened. He didn’t feel himself standing up and ambling his way over to the door of his bedroom. He didn’t feel his shaky hands, his white-knuckled clutch on the neck of the glass bottle squeezing with an anger that had built in him slowly and steadily and then all at once, much like the level of alcohol coursing through his veins. There was a persistent buzzing in his ears, an unidentifiable ache behind his eyes. He didn’t feel his breathing hitch or his posture stiffen, didn’t feel it when his side slumped in a drunken stumble against the cracked doorframe.
What he did feel was the weight of the bottle when he swung it with all the sloppy strength in his intoxicated body as soon as the door to his bedroom opened.
Swung and smashed it right into the side of his eleven-year-old boy’s head.
(Some part of him, some small, screaming part of his being—the part that still believed Carol was the prettiest woman in the world, that still held on to the useless hope that Kevin might miraculously come back some day—begged for him to stop, but he couldn’t hear it. It had drowned in booze and bereavement, was lost in time. A seventeen year old boy with a sense of audacious blind faith who just couldn’t afford to look back.)
The bottle, now shattered, proved excellently efficient in tearing open the flesh of the prone, crumpled form at his feet.
Stuart McCormick had never once raised a hand against his kids.
But as he kicked over and over and over at his son’s skinny, fragile body until ribs cracked under the weight of his boots, until blood coated a desperately needed fresh paint job over the peeling wallpaper, until blossoming bruises gave way to broken bones and even more broken screams, Stuart couldn’t help but feel some sick sort of reprieve.
(It was almost scary, he thought. How much Kenny looked like he had when he was little. It was the first thing Carol had said when the doctors wrapped him up in a blanket and settled him into her arms: “Aw, Stu, look at ‘im. He’s got your eyes.” )
At some point, the feeble, fractured keening beneath him stopped. But Stuart didn’t. He kept kicking and punching and beating until his daughter wandered up to the door.
It was her frightened, faltering whisper of “Daddy?” that finally brought him to a halt.
Karen McCormick stood in the hallway, her face red and her eyes wide, holding shakily to a torn blanket that her big brother had no doubt draped over her in his best efforts to ward away the chills and discomfort brought along by the flu she had caught. Her gaze was flitting from her dad, hunched over, arm raised above his head, a manic expression dancing in his eyes, to her brother, curled and crumpled on the floor, limp and bloodied and broken.
Shards of glass were caught in his cheek and his eye. The peeling brand label was still adhered to what was left of the broken bottle. Blood dribbled from his half-open mouth.
His concave chest stood perfectly still.
Stuart McCormick had killed his son.
(He wouldn’t remember it, of course. No one would. The next morning, Kenny would wake up just like he always did in his bed without so much as a mark on his body, and when he trudged into the dining room, his father would be seated at the table with a cup of coffee and a newspaper clutched in either hand, a plate of whatever reheated leftovers they’d had the night before waiting on the middle of the table, his mother bickering with his little sister about taking her cold medication. And when Stuart clapped his hand on Kenny’s shoulder as he sat down for breakfast, he’d wonder why his son flinched away from his touch. He’d wonder why his eyes would flit about any room the moment he entered it, as if frantically eyeing the nearest exit. He’d wonder why the boy would glare daggers at him any time he touched the back of his hand to Karen’s forehead to feel her temperature or patted down her messy hair.
When he dropped the kids off at the bus stop, Kenny wouldn’t meet his gaze as he muttered goodbye, would grab Karen by the arm and hop out of the pick up truck with a rigidity and tension in his movements that looked comically out of place on his slight, adolescent stature.
And Stuart would wrack his brain wondering what he’d done wrong—or rather, what he’d done differently , seeing as he’d always done something wrong. He would come up with nothing, and assume Kenny was just having a bad day, and would make note to ask him what was wrong before shooting up in the middle of the afternoon and forgetting all about it.)
It wouldn’t be the last time Stuart beat his son. Kenny started intervening more often in his parents’ fights, knowing what his dad was capable of, fearing his mother wouldn’t be as lucky as he had been. Sometimes he’d even instigate an altercation against his father if he sensed the man was getting too tense, hoping that letting him blow off some steam would prevent him from exploding on some other undeserving victim.
(Karen sure as hell wasn’t safe anymore. Maybe she never had been.)
And in six years, when a seventeen-year-old Kenny broke down drunk and told Kyle about—god, everything —Kyle would laugh weakly and tell him he had a martyr complex.
(He might have been right. Sure, he still thought the whole not dying thing was an intoxicated joke, but maybe Kenny really did find some sick, heroic pleasure in taking the fall for someone who couldn’t get back up again.)
After all, he never let his dad accept the consequences of what he did. He made sure the man beat him dead, every time they fought. Made sure he finished what he’d started, so that the next day, everything just.
Reset .
Lather, rinse, repeat.
(And in that way, maybe, he was more like Stuart than anyone had ever known; living life like a broken record, waiting for the same shitty tune to restart day after wretched day.)
The McCormicks’ lives were never perfect.
( Reset .)
And Stuart knew he was far from the perfect husband and father.
( Repeat .)
But one thing he knew, with absolute certainty .
( Reset .)
Was that Stuart McCormick had never.
( Repeat .)
Ever.
( Reset .)
Ever .
( Repeat .)
Raised a hand against his kids.
( Reset .)
And may god strike him down if he ever did.