His father’s eyes were dark and terrible. As if blindly, his father grabbed a bat from the umbrella stand and strode across the room. In a moment, he was upon them. Bill’s last glimpse of Marco was of the boy pulling up his shorts and running out of the room. Bill stumbled to his feet. His father swung the bat at him, catching him on the left side of his torso, slamming him to the floor. He lifted the bat over his head, his eyes still blank with fury.

“Daddy,” Bill pleaded. “Daddy.”

His father dropped the bat, hauled Bill to his feet and shoved him backwards against the window with such force the glass cracked.

“You do this shit in my house!” his father screamed. “Under my roof.”

Bill, slumped beneath the window, his side bursting with pain, sobbed, “I’m sorry… I’m sorry.”

His father, too, was crying, but, Bill thought much later, one of the many times he replayed the scene, had he had touched his father’s tears, they would have burned his fingers.

“I don’t know what you are,” he father said hoarsely, “but you’re not my son.”

The window glass had cut him and he was bleeding. His side shrieked with pain. He saw his father grab the Morrison poster above his bed and rip it down. He stomped out of the room. Clutching his side, Bill staggered to his feet, took a few steps, collapsed on his bed and sank into darkness.

Every Saturday, the night nurse played Casey Kasem’s Top 10 countdown on her transistor radio at the nurse’s station. When he had first come to, after surgery, he heard Carole King singing I hear the earth move under my feet… This week she had been knocked off as number one by a song about Indians: Cherokee people, Cherokee tribe, So proud to live, so proud to die. Five weeks. That’s how long he had been in the ward, long enough that the other six beds had turned over once, twice, three times. The broken ribs had begun to heal, the cuts to his back and shoulders from the glass had closed and the incision that marked where his spleen had been removed had gone from fiery red to pinched pink.

After the surgeon had inspected his handiwork, he asked a nurse, “Why is he still here? He can recover at home.” The nurse murmured a long response of which Bill heard clearly only the words “family problems.” The surgeon had cast a glance his way that Bill imagined was filled with revulsion. But then, he imagined that everyone who came near him knew all about the unspeakable thing he had done and was disgusted at having to breathe the same air as he did.