Turning your wrist until you fall to your knees in pain. Agony. Is he going to snap your wrist, continuing to turn it? His face is livid, engorged with blood. The elation of revenge. So many years in preparation, now released, explosive. Lionel kicks you down onto the ground, grunting as he kicks your back, legs, your unprotected belly, with his heavy boot. Horror washes over you, your brother will kick you to death and leave your body here to rot in this wild place only a few hundred feet from Black Rock Street . . .

There comes a rush of adrenaline to your heart like a shot.

Somehow you have crawled away from him, the kicking boot, you have managed to scramble to your feet, though your body throbbing with pain, and the disbelief of pain. Like a wounded animal you are running from the predator, empowered by fear, terror. You have no choice but to take the downward, dangerous path, the path that is partly eroded, a nightmare path of exposed roots like desiccated nerves, no choice but to flee skidding and sliding down this path, toward the riverbank, for your maddened brother is blocking the way to the street, and the underbrush is too thick for you to take any other route back to the street.

Lionel is screaming at you but isn’t going to follow you—not down the steep path. He doesn’t trust his legs, his coordination. His eyes.

Frustrated, he picks up something to throw at you as a spiteful child might do—a clump of dried mud.

“I’ll kill you. Murder you. Cunt! Rat!”

Making your way down the path, sliding partway on your buttocks, afraid to stand upright for fear of losing your balance and falling. It is at least thirty feet to the riverbank below. Trying to think clearly, to recall where there’s a fork in the path that will lead uphill through a hillside of brambles and into the strip of land behind the old house. If you can do this—if the path doesn’t collapse into the river, or you don’t fall—you can escape between houses, you think. There are no fences dividing the properties. Even if Lionel pursues you, you have a chance to escape him.

But it has been years, this stretch of the path is badly overgrown. Thorns tear at your clothes and skin, you are bleeding from a dozen small cuts. Panting through your mouth, sweating. There’s a harsh odor here of something chemical, like nitrogen.

You remember—the smell of the river, beneath the Lock Street Bridge. Discolored water like thirty-foot snakes. You are nauseated, gagging. As if the earth is crumbling beneath you, you are in danger of losing your balance, falling onto the rocks below . . .

But now, suddenly—the fork in the path. Overgrown, but you have found it. Struggle uphill, on hands and knees. Grabbing desperately at exposed roots, at grasses—haul yourself forward.