Free The Jake Helman Files Personal Demons by Gregory Lamberson Page B

feeble attempts to hurt him. In the end, his father had strode by him with nothing but his toolbox, left the trailer, climbed into his truck, and drove off without saying good-bye. Marc ran to his parents’ bedroom, where he found his mother crying on the bed. He went to her and she clung to him. In that moment, he realized that she depended on him as much as he depended on her.
    Sara sold the trailer and saved enough money to put a down payment on a home in which to raise her son: a dilapidated ranch house at the end of a dead end street. The roof leaked, the faucets dripped, and the fireplace had been filled in with cement. Ashamed of the peeling gray paint on the house’s exterior, Marc walked home from the bus stop with his back turned to the other kids who lived on Hunt Road. He blamed his father for the impoverished lifestyle that he and his mother had been forced to endure, but he felt glad to be free of the Big Bastard.
    He had no friends except for his mother. His junior high classmates taunted him with nicknames:
geek, nerd
, and
spaz
. They mocked the secondhand clothes that his mother bought for him at yard sales. His first bloody nose at the hands of a bully had terrified him, but he grew accustomed to them. Following his instincts, he learned to fade into the background of the school corridors to escape humiliation. Hiding became the primary activity in his life.
    He knew that his mother sympathized with his plight. She had been ostracized by her father for marrying outside the Jewish faith, only to be rejected by her husband, who had not been worth the trouble. She bought Marc a computer to show him that there was a larger world beyond Redkill, and soon he spent all of his free time online. The used computer had been an extravagant gift, considering their budget: their sole means of income had been disability pay that Sara received from the government each month.
    At thirteen, Marc discovered that his mother suffered from “spells,” during which she forgot her name and his. He blamed the Big Bastard for the gradual erosion of her mental faculties. She locked herself in her bedroom for hours at a time, raging at the walls. He kept her deterioration a secret while finishing high school, but her condition worsened. Eventually, she stopped leaving her room altogether, and he had to bathe her and prepare her meals.
    She paced her room at all hours, wringing her hands and calling out for her husband and her father. Marc learned to pacify her through role-playing games; sometimes he portrayed the Big Bastard, and sometimes he played the Old Bastard, whom he had never even met. He remembered the Big Bastard’s drunken roar well enough, and he imagined that the Old Bastard had been equally bullheaded. If his acting ability failed to convince Sara, she never let on. He forged her checks and deposited them into her meager bank account, withdrawing funds for their survival. Because he retained more of her memories than she did, it seemed logical to him that he should be the one to preserve her identity. And so Sara joined the canon of roles in his repertoire.
    Marc liked to pretend.
    Seeking refuge from his tortured existence in cyberspace, he created multiple identities to use in online chat rooms, each with a unique history and personality. He developed a flair for drama, but only within the confines of his isolated world. Outwardly, he craved normalcy and hoped to become an accountant one day. But he had no idea how to pay for his college tuition or achieve that goal. The demands that his mother’s growing insanity placed on his time made it impossible for him to get even a part-time job to supplement their income. He won a full scholarship to a local community college but was unable to accept it. By then Sara had been prone to fits of violence, and he dared not leave her alone, or entrust her care to a paid companion, even if he had been able to afford one. A nurse would have seen that his father had been