When Manus was four, his father had hit him so hard in the head that Manus blacked out. When he’d awakened, he was in a hospital. His mother was sitting next to the bed, and her mouth had formed an enormous O of joy and relief when he’d opened his eyes and looked at her. He thought she had shouted, but he couldn’t hear her. In fact, everything was so quiet. It was as though he was under water.
People in white jackets did tests. He could hear a little, but only when people were talking very loudly directly in front of him. They told him his hearing might come back, that it was impossible to say. And that he had to be more careful near the stairs, because he had hurt himself falling down them. That seemed strange. He remembered his father yelling at him — in fact, his father yelling was the last thing he remembered hearing ever — but had he also fallen down the stairs? He wanted to ask, but it was hard to make himself understood. And anyway, what did it matter?
After that, his father didn’t drink for a long time, and he left Manus alone. A teacher came to the house and taught him and his mother something called American Sign Language. Manus liked it — a way to talk without making any sound. His mother worked hard to help him with it, but she also insisted that he watch her talk because most people didn’t know sign and he had to learn to read lips.
Manus went to the public school. It was hard. Some of the teachers remembered to face the class when they were talking so Manus, who always sat in front, could read their lips. But others didn’t remember, or didn’t care. There was a speech therapist who was nice, but Manus hated meeting with her. The drills she made him do were boring, and he didn’t understand the point. Why did he even need to talk? Early on, when the other kids made fun of him, he’d answered, and something about his voice only made them laugh harder. Silence was better. His mother told him he had to practice his speaking as much as he did lip-reading or he wouldn’t be able to make friends. But no one wanted to be friends with the deaf kid, the kid they called idiot and doofus and retard.
When he was ten, his father broke a hand at the mill and got something called disability. He started drinking again. And hurting Manus again. His mother tried to protect him, taking the hurt so he wouldn’t have to. Afterward, when his father was passed out, she would sign to Manus that it was all right, it hurt less than it seemed, less than seeing anything happen to her beautiful boy. He remembered she liked to call him that. And the smell of her perfume.
One night when Manus was fourteen, his father came home very drunk. Manus was doing homework at the kitchen table. His mother was cooking dinner, spaghetti and garlic bread, the sauce with mushrooms and sausage simmering in a big pot on the electric stove. Enough for lots of leftovers.
He could smell the alcohol the moment his father walked in. He looked up and watched his mother say, with a falsely cheery expression, that his father’s timing was great, the sauce was perfect now, it had been simmering all afternoon. His father said he wasn’t hungry. He looked around. Then he said the food stank. The whole place stank.
Manus thought the food smelled good. Spaghetti was his favorite. And his mother had worked hard to make dinner. For one tiny second, he forgot to be smart, to be a table or rug or wall. He glanced at his father. Only for that tiny second. But a second was enough.
“Don’t you fucking look at me like that!” his father had shouted, so loudly Manus could faintly hear it. “Who do you think puts the food on the table in this house? Who?”
It was bad when his father asked questions. Manus had learned there were no satisfactory answers. And once his father was asking questions, it was hard to be like furniture. Once his father had noticed you, not answering could make him feel like he was being ignored. Which he didn’t like. Manus didn’t know why. Manus preferred to be ignored.
So he did the best he could. He glanced down at the homework in front of him and kept very still.
“You look at me when I’m talking to you!” his father roared. He strode over to where Manus sat. “Look at me!”
His mother jumped between them. Manus craned his head to see her face. “He’s just doing his homework, Dom,” she’d said, her expression frightened. “How about some garlic bread?”
It was horrible when she intervened. Manus was always grateful for it, relieved to have his father’s rage diverted. But with the relief came shame, more and more so as he was getting older. And suddenly, instead of feeling afraid, he felt something else. He felt… angry. Which instantly frightened him more. What if his father noticed? He had to be still, really still, like always. Until his father was tired and went away.
But his father was looking for something, and he’d found it in that tiny flash of anger. He shoved Manus’s mother out of the way and swatted Manus open-handed across the head, blasting him and the chair he sat in to the floor. Manus saw stars. He saw his mother scream, “Dom, stop!” Manus looked up and saw his father cuff his mother across the face, saw her stagger back into the wall with a boom he could feel through the floor. His father moving toward her, bellowing, his fists clenched. And the anger he’d felt flare a moment earlier — an anger he realized years later had been building and building beneath his efforts to suppress it — suddenly detonated.
He lurched to his feet and leaped onto his father’s back, yelling something, not words, just yelling. His father tore him off like a scab and shoved him two-handed so hard that Manus actually flew through the air and slammed into the wall next to the stove. He saw stars again. Things became fragmentary. His mother screaming, “You leave him alone!” His father advancing on him. His mother, yelling something, picking up a chair and raising it, stepping in and bringing the chair down hard on his father’s head. A loud crack. A shiver running through his father’s body. Then his eyes narrowing to slits, his head rotating like a reptile’s, the huge body swinging around behind it.
“You little cunt,” Manus had seen him say as he turned, and though he couldn’t hear it, it felt like a whisper, which was so much worse than any shouting, so much scarier. His mother tried to raise the chair again and his father snatched it from her hands like it was a child’s toy and flung it across the room, then grabbed the edge of the table and upended it out of the way. His mother was terrified now, Manus could see that; she was backpedaling, her eyes wide, her mouth aghast. His father moved in like a dog on a cornered squirrel. He grabbed the back of her neck with one hand and drove his fist into her face with the other. Blood burst from her nose and she staggered. His father grabbed her shoulders, not letting her fall, and smashed her backward into the wall, pulling her into him and then smashing her into the wall again, the back of her head slamming into the plaster and ricocheting off each time.
Everything seemed to slow down. Manus looked at the stove. The fat cook pot of spaghetti sauce, the bubbles rising through the viscous red amid mushrooms and chunks of meat. He felt hate blossom inside him. It was a supremely beautiful feeling, enormous and clean and focused.
He took hold of both handles of the pot and pulled it off the stove as he advanced on his father, aware the metal was burning his palms but hardly feeling it. “Hey!” he roared in a voice he had never used before, never imagined. A voice his father had never heard. It startled him. He released Manus’s mother’s shoulders, and as she slid to the floor, he started turning toward Manus, flinching as he did so, his head turtling in, his arms coming up, something in Manus’s new voice having reached past the drunkenness and warning a primitive, animal part of his mind of danger.