PART 2 — THE MARKS
My mother’s voice was so quiet that for a moment I wondered whether I had heard her correctly.
“Because your brother has seen those marks before.”
I looked through the ambulance window toward the hospital entrance. My nephew was being carried inside by a paramedic, wrapped tightly in a white blanket. His tiny face was barely visible above it.
“What do you mean, before?”
Mom didn’t answer immediately.
I could hear traffic moving behind me, the distant siren of another emergency vehicle, and the muffled voices of police officers speaking to my brother.
Then Mom said, “Not on a newborn.”
My stomach tightened.
“Then where?”
“On you.”
The word hit me harder than anything else that night.
I stared at the hospital doors.
“On me?”
“When you were born.”
I couldn’t speak.
I had spent the entire evening believing the marks belonged to my nephew alone. Small reddish patches scattered across his skin. My brother had called them dirt. Then he’d tried to wash them away in the most horrifying way imaginable.
But now Mom was telling me I had once carried the same marks.
“Why don’t I remember that?”
“You were a baby.”
“That doesn’t explain why nobody ever told me.”
“Because your father didn’t want you to know.”
I felt a coldness move through me.
“Dad?”
Mom breathed slowly.
“There were things in this family we thought would stay buried.”
I glanced back toward the bathroom.
My brother was being placed into a police vehicle. His face was pale, his clothes soaked, and a paramedic was checking the back of his neck where I’d struck him.
Even from that distance, I could see that he was looking toward the hospital.
Toward his son.
Toward the baby whose skin had terrified him.
“What did Dad know?”
Mom didn’t answer.
Instead she asked, “Did your brother say anything else?”
“He kept saying I didn’t understand what the marks were.”
“And then?”
“He told me to ask you.”
Mom closed her eyes.
“He remembered.”
“Remembered what?”
“The first time he saw them.”
I waited.
Finally she said, “He was six years old.”
I looked at the hospital doors again.
“What happened when he was six?”
Mom’s voice trembled.
“Your brother found an old photograph.”
“What photograph?”
“One of you.”
That made no sense.
I had hundreds of childhood photographs.
“What was different about it?”
“You were lying in your crib.”
“And?”
“You had the marks.”
My mouth went dry.
“Mom, why would a photograph of me scare him?”
“Because he wasn’t supposed to find it.”
The line went silent.
Then Mom whispered something that made my blood run cold.
“He wasn’t the first child in our family to have them.”
