It was a lonely, long drive home. His thoughts kept looping around, and it was driving him crazy. When he pulled up to his house in Strong Edge, he didn’t want to go inside. He wanted to crawl into the tree house and stay there until someone arrived to save him. There was a gaping hole inside of him, yearning to be healed. After everything that had happened, it was hard to go inside the house.
The light was still on in the kitchen, which meant his parents were still up, waiting for him.
Parents.
Sal gave a dry chuckle. He remembered Charlie’s words: he had to forgive them, if not for his own sake, then for Charlie and Carl’s sake. If it hadn’t been for his doctor parents, he wouldn’t have Carl.
He got out of the bus, slammed the door hard, and walked to the front door of the house. Sal took a couple of deep breaths, slapped his face a few times, and entered the house.
The atmosphere was quiet, dull, and dark, like in a graveyard. The house suddenly lacked color and life. Angel didn’t come to greet him like she usually did.
Sal removed his shoes and waited for his parents to appear. He knew he should just stay quiet and wait for the storm to abate.
“Sal is that you?" A soft voice sounded from the kitchen. "Is Carl with you?”
Who the fuck else would it be, Sal thought to himself. He walked to the kitchen where his parents were sitting like two ghosts at the kitchen table. “Sal we don’t know what you were told today, but—” His father had spoken with a shaky voice. His mother was sniffing like crazy, and Sal knew she'd been crying.
“Just stop. The thing is I forgive you. What you did was shitty, but I forgive you. You only did what you thought was right.” There was some truth to the words despite the rage inside of him.
“Sal, you're not thinking straight. Whatever this man said to you...” His father was grasping at straws.
Sal laughed. The atmosphere was suffocating and tragicomic—they still believed they could lie to him. He took a chair and turned it around so his chest would be against the backrest when he sat on it.
Sal inhaled a big breath of fresh air and stared at his father, nailing him to his seat. “What are you hiding, Dad?”
His body still ached from the flashes back at Charlie’s place, and a shooting pain went through his skull as more images came trampling through.
He got into white supremacy when he'd said he was a lost fourteen-year-old boy who had hooked up with a rough crowd. He'd shaved his head, waved swastika flags, and learned to hate.
Sal tasted blood in his mouth, and he had to pull back from the vision. He wiped sweat and blood from his face while his parents seemed to have turned into stone.
“A fucking Nazi?” Sal snorted. “Do you still have the tattoo, Dad? Is that why you took me away from Charlie? Because he was black?”
His father was sweating bullets, and his mother seemed ready to press the panic button.
"Don’t look like that,” Sal said to his father’s terrorized face.
“Mom saved you. You took her name and put that shit behind you, but one can’t help but wonder.” Sal rose to get a glass of water. He drank and splashed some of the water on his face. The cool water felt good on his warm, tingling skin. When he was done, he turned and began to drum his fingers on the kitchen counter.
“The picture you showed me, the one with the man you claimed to have been my grandfather—who was that?”
“It was something we had made,” his mother replied in a dry whisper.
Sal decided not to dig any deeper. There was only so much he could take at one sitting. “I’ll do you a favor…look at me.” Sal pulled his parents into a trance, put them under his spell. “This is what happened: I came home, I forgave you, you accepted, and everything's peachy. Right?”
His parents nodded mechanically.
Sal snapped his fingers.
“I'm glad we had this talk, son,” his father said pleased.
“Now we can put all this behind us,” his mother added.
The scene was surreal, and Sal left the kitchen bubbling with laughter. He opened the door to the basement and went down into Carl’s old nest.
Carl—they hadn’t even asked about him.
Sal laughed hysterically as he sat on the old sofa. For a moment he went insane, the darkness swallowed him, and he blacked out.