Page 29 of Black Waters

A guard had to grab Crash around the waist and restrain him because my brother was being ripped from the only kindness he’d ever known. Tears rolled down my face as I pleaded with my father. “Let us take him. Please don’t do this. We won’t tell anyone. I swear it!”

My father’s eyes swelled with tears I never expected, and he spoke between gritted teeth. “The Russians will kill you for me trying to trick them again. I have already buried one son; don’t ask me to bury two more.”

In horror and slow motion, I watched as he pulled out a gun and put it to my mother’s temple. “But I will bury her if you two don’t do as you’re told.”

Crash and I wailed simultaneously. “No!”

My mother’s body shaking told me this man was crazy enough to pull the trigger.

Mr. Thompson looked back and forth between Crash and me, not taking the gun from her head. “Am I understood now?”

We both nodded frantically, repeating, “Yes… Yes… Yes,” willing to agree to anything as long as he didn’t kill our personal angel.

My mother rolled her shoulders back and stood tall. “Then let me stay.”

Crash and I gasped. She was offering to sacrifice her body to stay with and heal a son’s broken heart, and she was offering to leave another son behind, knowing I would be well cared for by the man who truly loved her. She turned to Harold, even though he held a gun to her head. “We could be together again.”

My biological father seemed engrossed in the thought of having my mother again. His gun numbly slipping from her temple told me so. His eyes shone almost as if he was seeing his own personal Holy Grail.

“No, no, NO!” Crash cried out. He pushed our mom to me. “Link! Take her! I won’t let her do this for me! Take her now!”

He was sacrificing his heart for her life—her abused body and tortured soul. No one will ever be so worthy of honor in my eyes as that young man. My friend—my brother—was the best person would ever know.

Mom reached for Crash; my father reached for her. Panic spread through me as I saw an awful future take shape in my mind.

“Take her!” Crash screamed through his tears, pushing her hand away from him. So I did. I scooped up her little frame and retreated from her immediate threat—from both of them, the man who could ruin her and the son who could break her.

As Harolds Senior and Junior watched us continue to slowly back away from them, my mother cried in complete misery. “Harold! Please!”

I didn’t know to which Harold she was crying or if she was crying out to the entrapment we couldn’t avoid nor deny. Either way, my mother was to lose.