The Long Road Downward

The Long Road Downward

When I was a boy, my father once told me that there were a thousand ways to die, but only one way to live: his way.

I have no doubt that my mother received similar words of counsel, probably even more nastily than I did. But with this warning, she and I proceeded to live out the next ten years his way --- the way of fear.

It was not a nice way to live, of that I can assure you, but it wasn't until I finally went to Hogwarts in my 11th year that I realized it. You know how it is with children. They're so adaptable, so accepting of whatever you place before them, be it feast or famine, and I was no different.

Certainly I cried and shrank into a corner when Father yelled at us or hit us, but it was just a way of life. Though I would've been hard-pressed to put my feelings into words at the time, I just assumed that other children lived that way, too.

When I entered Hogwarts, I discovered that this was not true. As poor a reputation as Slytherin House has outside itself, I found that most of my fellow Slytherins came from homes that were happy enough. Of course there were familial pressures exerted on them ('perform well', 'try not to be bested by those unworthy of you', 'marry within your station'), but there was pride as well. These little pure-blood kings and queens, shining and beautiful, strutted their way around the school as if they owned it. Heirs to fortune and greatness, possessing the noblest of magical surnames; Black, Lestrange, Rosier...

The real downward descent began slowly enough, or so it seemed. At 11, I first began to truly understand how my father was torturing us, reducing us, decimating us...leaving only every tenth piece of us intact, while taking the other nine pieces and quashing them beneath his boot heel.

During my first holiday back home, I found my mother more distant from me than I remembered. I only noticed it in passing, and I forgot all about her glassy eyes and bitter breath the first time my father bellowed in my face.

A robust man who had played Quidditch as a Beater throughout his years in Slytherin House, he had little patience for my pale countenance, thin frame, and my lack of talent in his sport of choice. Both my academic triumphs and social failures were equally contemptible to him and he had no compunctions in reminding me so.

With her fair skin and hair like the fall of a raven's wing, my mother was a lovely woman in her youth. Engineered by my grandparents only to entertain guests and breed more pure-bloods, she had little talent save for carefully structured small talk, and the ability to play her beloved harpsichord. Unfortunately, these were the sorts of things that my father cared little about, and he let her know in the same explosive way in which he informed me.

As my years at Hogwarts passed, Mother and I became more detached from one another, each of us too wrapped up in our own misery to care about that of the other.

It was a painful experience for me, growing into young manhood. I had enough trouble at home without having to go to school year in and year out, worrying about the likes of Potter and Black. School, which by all rights should have been a respite for me, became nothing more than the same sort of agony I faced at home. I had nowhere to turn, and it never occurred to me that my mother had been in the same hell for many years more than I had. I was a teenager, after all. What did I care for anyone's pain but my own?

When I was 15 and she collapsed in a faint one hot July morning, I still didn't care. Not really. I expressed concern like a good son and I helped her to her bedchamber...never once pausing to notice how I could feel the knobs of her spine against my fingers as I assisted her up the winding staircase. I did not bother to realize how her blue-black hair was no longer lustrous, how it crackled beneath my lips like so much dried hay as I placed a kiss atop her head.

When I knocked over a vial filled with an ugly midnight-blue liquid that sloshed thickly about like abscessed bile and my mother began weeping, I thought nothing of it. She'd been teary and irrational for months by that time, perhaps even years. It was just depression. Going through 'The Change'. One of those perfectly explicable things that the doctor from St. Mungo's had talked about when he came 'round to visit.

In my 16th year, just a few weeks before my 17th birthday, my father was killed by Aurors. As a Dark Wizard from a line of many others before him and a vocal supporter of the Dark Lord, he was not difficult to ferret out. It happened as I was on my way home for the Christmas holiday, and I was already at the estate by the time the news reached my mother.

I expected her to be thrilled. I thought she might put on a sad face for the public, but inside I knew she'd be dancing with joy. I was quite wrong. I have been told that I have tremendous intuition and perception, but it is one of my great failings that I cannot read or understand other people. Never has this been truer than in my last days with my mother.

Father's death broke her. Granted, she was already fractured beyond repair and had been for years prior, but this last was her undoing. It was no longer a gradual journey. It all happened with the shrieking ferocity of a sword thrust and there was no stopping it.

The first day was quite bad. She drank vial after vial of that hideous dark blue sleeping potion. Through her grief-stricken depression and drugged stupor she was barely coherent, but she told me enough that I finally understood that she'd been addicted to this potion for years, brewing more and more of it as her body became accustomed to each progressively larger dose.

The potion she brewed contained Selenium, which is not often toxic, but in heavy percentages can cause brittle hair, bitter breath, and weight loss. There were also narcotics in the potion, opiates, which fueled her addiction and contributed to the sleeplessness she sought to cure.

By the fifth day, I felt as though her constant crying and wailing would drive me mad. She kept asking for Father, begging for him not to hit her, wondering when he'd be coming up to bed, asking if he was still angry with her, apologizing to him for a lifetime of supposed wrongdoings. Twice she called me by his name, and I had to step outside the room.

In the intervening years (no doubt to assuage my badly used conscience) I've researched the subject thoroughly; 'Domestic Violence', as the Muggles so neatly label it. Most women are secretly thrilled when their abusers die. They may cry and pretend to be sad, but inside they're like capering faeries. It's only rarely that women turn like my mother: so terribly abused and shattered that they can't go on once the man who controlled every aspect of their lives is gone.

My mother, addicted to a powerful and lethal drug, incapable of making all but the most basic decisions about her day-to-day life, expected me to step in and fill the horrible void left by my father's death. I couldn't do it.

On the seventh day, after she awoke screaming from a nightmare, it seemed a mercy to both of us for me to raise my wand and speak one loud, flat word:

"Obliviate."