Chapter 8: Mother's Pain

‘’The deepest wounds are not those that bleed, but those that break the heart in silence, hidden behind the faces we love.’’

— The Morph

True pain taught us its language early on. Alex, already acquainted with both emotional pain through neglect and physical pain—whether a battered face, a slashed neck, or the clang of dental tools and the metallic taste of blood—nightmares deeply carve themselves into his young emotional memory. But some wounds run deeper than empty spaces in a mouth. Some echo through hallways and bounce off kitchen walls, finding new forms in the people we trust most. The Soviet-era apartment complex in Klaipeda rose like a concrete promise against Baltic skies, its white bricks clean and sharp as new teeth. Alex's family had moved here seeking space to heal, grow and become whole. 

Alex's stepfather had embraced his mother, kissed her head, and promised, "No more running and living with grandparents; no more all living in one room.  From now on, we're one family."   But like his hidden smile, now carefully measured to conceal decay, their new home would soon reveal itself as another place to hide pain rather than heal it.   And for Alex his stepfather's promises felt like Novocain—numbing, temporary, masking something that would soon pierce through. The dental chair had taught him that trust, once broken, leaves gaps that can't be filled.  His mother was about to learn the same lesson, though her teacher would be far more cruel than any Soviet dentist.

Their new beginning came wrapped in hope as delicate as tissue paper.  The golden blue towel hanging in their bathroom would soon serve a different purpose than intended, becoming a makeshift bandage for wounds that no one saw coming. Pain, as Alex had learned in that dental chair, doesn't always announce itself with sterile tools and clinical precision. Sometimes it arrives wearing the face of love, speaking through familiar voices, leaving marks that no mirror can fully reflect.  For a moment, their move from the cramped single bedroom of their previous life seemed like salvation. As very smart proverb once said we cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them. And here, no new thinking emerged—only old patterns dressed in new wallpaper.

Soon the forgiveness flowers withered. The laughter died. Friends, loud music, and never-ending arguments over bottles all played a role in his stepfather's addiction taking root in the larger space. Eleven now, Alex transformed from class clown to angry spectre, convinced the world meant only harm for him.  He roamed Klaipeda like a feral cat, inhaling glue on rooftops, getting high on motorcycle gasoline under balconies of flats, and testing every boundary until they broke. His mother's defeated words echoed: I’ll never come back to this school to hear complaints about you! You only bring me shame. Do whatever you want with your life! And Alex needed no motivation to turn more destructive.

Another night came that carved itself into Alex's memory with the precision of a surgeon's blade. He was lying on his bed, almost midnight, his headphones failing to drown out the familiar overture of another evening's descent. First came the music—Soviet pop songs growing louder with each emptied bottle of booze. Then the laughter, sharp and artificial, more friends coming along, scratching against his nerves like fingernails on glass. His mother's voice rose above it all, first placating, then pleading, a sound he'd learned to recognize as the prelude to chaos. The bass from below thumped through his mattress like a racing heartbeat. Alex could taste the sourness of fear in his mouth, mixing with the lingering phantom pain of his dental wounds. He knew this dance and had memorized its steps—the gradual crescendo of voices, the sudden silence before the storm, the way the air itself seemed to thicken with anticipation.

When the first crash came, it echoed through the apartment like thunder! Alex's body moved before his mind could catch up; muscle memory developed through countless similar nights. The hallway light cast strange shadows, transforming familiar faces into grotesque masks. His stepfather's friends, their eyes glazed with vodka and indifference, swayed like poorly strung puppets against the walls. In the kitchen, time stretched like heated glass. His stepfather held his mother by the hair; her head yanked back at an angle that made Alex's stomach lurch. The overhead light caught the tears on her cheeks, turning them into brilliant, accusatory diamonds. The air reeked of alcohol and impending violence—a smell Alex would never forget—sharp and sweet and terrible. 

"Leave her alone!" he bellowed. His voice sounding foreign to his own ears, child-high and trembling. The moment he grabbed his stepfather's arm, he felt the man's rage transfer like an electric current, hot and immediate. The world tilted, spun, then slammed to a stop as his back hit the closet. Pain bloomed between his shoulder blades, but it was nothing compared to what came next. His stepfather's hand found the diving mask—Alex's prized possession, a symbol of summer freedoms and underwater escapes. The scene quickly moved from fighting kitchen to living room, and the diving mask transformed from toy to weapon in one fluid arc. The sound it made against his mother's skull wasn't loud—more like the muffled crack of ice breaking underfoot—but it seemed to echo forever. Time fragmented like the mask itself. His mother's scream came in waves, rising and falling like a broken siren. Blood appeared, first in drops, then in streams, painting abstract patterns on the living room carpet and furniture. It looked almost black under the dim lights, soaking in like spilled ink, each droplet carrying away another piece of their facade at normalcy.

The chaos that followed moved like a film played at the wrong speed. Friends suddenly animated, wrestling his stepfather into the kitchen, their shouts seeming to come from very far away. Someone was making a phone call, voice thick with drink and guilt. A police officer—one of his stepfather's drinking buddies—arrived with an ambulance, his uniform a mockery of protection, his words stumbling over each other as he tried to explain away the inexplicable. No charges were filed. No official report detailed how a mother's blood had painted their hallway and living room floor, how a child's diving mask had become a weapon and how trust dies in incremental blows.

The night settled back into its routine, like a disturbed pond returning to stillness, hiding its depths. In his room later, Alex could still hear the echo of that crack and could still see the way the blood had looked against the floor. He understood then that some nights don't end when the sun rises—they live on in the marrow of your bones, in the spaces between heartbeats, in the moments before sleep when memories rise like dark water. 

By twelve, Alex had become a shadow walker in his own life, a ghost drifting between the cracks of two families, neither fully claiming him, both leaving their scars. The diving mask incident had shattered more than just glass and skin—it had fractured the already fragile illusion of unity, revealing fault lines that ran deep beneath their family's foundation. His shoulders curled inward like protective branches, his body instinctively shielding a heart that had learned its lessons in trust too early, too brutally. Dressed in black, he became a living metaphor for the darkness he carried, his rotting teeth hidden behind carefully crafted smiles that never reached his eyes.

Each forced eviction—there would be three in total—drove the wedge deeper, the final one marked by his stepfather's hands around his throat, his mother's helpless protests fading like dying leaves in autumn wind. The people he encountered seemed to arrive with detailed maps to his vulnerabilities, as if his wounds gave off a signal only predators could detect. Their new apartment, once a symbol of fresh beginnings, had become instead a battlefield where blood ties tangled with chosen family, where love and violence danced too close to distinguish one from the other. As Alex stood between these warring forces, he felt himself splitting like a sapling in a storm—one part reaching toward biological roots, another toward grafted connections, neither strong enough to hold him steady.

The divide was no longer just between families; it ran deep in his very core, a chasm widening with each betrayal, each disappointment, and each moment of choosing between equally painful loyalties. In the space between what family should be and what his had become, Alex learned that sometimes the deepest wounds are the ones that force us to grow in new directions, even if that growth leaves us forever changed, forever searching for solid ground in a world of shifting loyalties.