When the road calls #4

READ #3 HERE: https://steemit.com/travel/@martibis/when-the-road-calls-3

I hear the familiar sounds of my dad coming home. The ring of the door chime, the soft closing of the door, and the tread of my dad’s footsteps on the stairs.   

“Hey dad.” I walk out into the hallway.   

“Oh… hey… how was your trip?” He looks tired, older perhaps, still wearing the same simple rucksack he had been using for years.   

I try a smile, “It was good, yeah, it was really great. How has life been here in Belgium?”    

“Oh, the same, you know.” We walk into the kitchen area, both of us standing there awkwardly for a moment, with nothing much else to stay.   

I want to flee the scene, “I’m going out into the city, I’ll be back tomorrow.”

He moves to the couch, sits himself down, without looking back, “Okay, see you.” 

After a year of barely talking we still couldn’t manage a conversation of more than five sentences. I guess we’ve gotten too used to living next to - instead of with - one another. 

I exit the house and start walking to the wooden quay, the riverside has always been my place to relax in this small, but bustling city. Where did it go wrong between my dad and me? It’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment. If there even is such a thing. We’re all just the consequence of all the combined moments in our lives and how we try to handle them. Are we not? 

In my pensive mood, the sound of an ambulance in the distance brings me back to a night long past.   

//

Wee-ooo, wee-ooo, wee-ooo, wee-ooo –  

The sound doesn’t stop. The room flickers between darkness and red. I wake up and climb out of the top bunk bed. My brother is still asleep in the bottom one. What is the commotion downstairs?  

Wee-ooo, wee-ooo, wee-ooo, wee-ooo - 

I open the white curtain just enough to peek outside. An ambulance stands in front of the neighbors’ bakery. I remember mum telling me the baker wakes early to make all the bread. Did something go wrong with one of the machines? His finger probably got stuck in the bread-slicing-machine. It seems most plausible to me. 

Wee-ooo, wee-ooo, wee-ooo, wee-ooo – 

A stretcher is quickly being moved to the ambulance, but it’s not the neighboring baker laying on it. It’s my mum - her head wrapped in bandage. Somehow, for a short moment, I had forgotten the fights my mum and dad had had over the last months. The fogginess of sleep is quickly evaporating though and it all clicks into place.  

I sprint downstairs as the ambulance races of. The sound of sirens, slowly fading within the noise of the city. Male, red-stained, shoe prints run from my mum’s room all the way to the streets. In the hallway downstairs, a female friend of my dad is crying.  

“What... is ha-happening?” I sense something has gone horribly wrong.  

She notices me and tries to stop her crying, her mascara entirely run down, “Your mum... your mum fell. It’s okay. She’s in the hospital now. It’s okay. It’s okay” She starts crying again, harder this time. 

That is the last recollection I have of that night, I can’t fill in the blanks, can’t tell you what happened afterwards. 

A few days later though, I would learn that my dad had hit my mum with a hammer - on the head - multiple times. 

//

Was that one of those moments where it went wrong?