Stripping off his tuxedo jacket and bow tie, he unbuttoned his collar, ripped the silk lining out of his jacket, then tore the lining into two long strips. As his stepfather’s cursing grew all the louder and more vicious, Marcus wrapped the strips of fabric around his hands to protect them, then began scrambling up a wooden trellis covered with his mother’s climbing roses, now in full bloom. Reaching the top, his hands scraped and bloodied from the thorns—though not nearly as badly as they could have been—Marcus pulled himself up onto the roof of the screened-in porch and moved toward the window of the master bedroom.
Roger DuHaime, the man who had terrorized their lives for the last eighteen months, was pounding furiously on the bedroom door. He was demanding to be let in and threatening to get an ax and smash the door down if his wife didn’t comply immediately. Marcus’s mother was cowering in a corner, shaking uncontrollably. Her blouse was ripped and splattered with blood. Her nose appeared broken, and Marcus could see bruises and welts on her face and arms. As he scanned the room, he could see that the lock on the bedroom door was engaged and that his mother had tried to push the heavy oak dresser against the door for extra protection, though she hadn’t gotten it very far.
Marcus rapped on the window. Startled, Marjorie Ryker whipped around, fear in her eyes. She didn’t move. She didn’t say anything. She just gripped a cordless phone in her right hand. She shouldn’t have been surprised to see her son on the roof. She had, after all, warned him not twenty minutes earlier not to come through the front door.
“He just snapped,” she’d whispered to Marcus over the phone, the sense of urgency in her voice palpable. “I think he really means to do it this time.”
She had apologized over and over again for interrupting his date, his special night, but Marcus would have none of it. He’d told her to lock herself in her bedroom, call the police, and wait for him to get home and take care of everything. That’s when she had begged him not to come into the house, not to get into a confrontation with Roger. “Don’t get in his face, Marcus—he’ll kill you,” she’d warned him in no uncertain terms. “He’s been drinking all day. He’ll kill us both.”
But Marcus had dismissed her warnings. He’d told her he was coming. He’d protect her. Everything would be okay. All he asked was that she unlock and open her bedroom window so he could get her out quickly when he arrived.
Yet now that the moment had come, she seemed completely caught off guard. She just stared at him. She hadn’t opened the window, nor had she unlocked it, nor was she about to. Instead, she was backing away from him, terror growing in her eyes.
It occurred to Marcus that his mother couldn’t see his face. The sun shining over the Rocky Mountains was illuminating him from behind, making just a silhouette.
“Mom, it’s me, Marcus. Open the window,” he said.
But then came a chilling new sound. It was not that of an enraged man pounding on the bedroom door with his bare fists. It was that of an ax splintering the wood. Marcus couldn’t wait any longer. He slipped off his polished black dress shoes, plunged one fist in each, and then, wearing the shoes like boxing gloves, punched his way through the window.
For a moment Roger stopped hacking at the door and demanded to know what was happening. But when his wife didn’t respond, he started attacking the door all the more furiously. Marcus scraped the glass away from the window frame, then put his shoes back on, reached in, and unlocked the window. As he climbed inside, he immediately moved to his mother’s side. Her eyes registered both the relief of seeing her son and the simultaneous fear that at any moment her husband would smash through that door and hack them both to death.
Marcus knew he was running out of time. His mother would never make it across the roof and down the trellis. She was obviously in great pain after the beating she’d just taken, and he feared she could fall off the roof and break her back or neck. Not hearing any sirens yet, Marcus told her to go into the bathroom and lock the door. At first she hesitated when he said he wasn’t going to join her. But when he calmly insisted even as the hole in the door grew, she complied.
Splinters were flying through the room now. Marcus knew he had only seconds to act. He pushed the dresser in front of what was left of the door. Then he raced to his mother’s closet and flicked on the overhead light. Stepping onto a small wooden stool, he pushed away a row of shoe boxes, feeling around until his hands brushed the cold metal barrel of a Remington 870 Wingmaster. The dusty 12-gauge pump-action shotgun was more than thirty years old. It had been his father’s. His real father’s. After his death when Marcus was eleven, his mother had planned to sell it or give it away, just as she’d done with many of his things. Marcus hadn’t exactly begged, but he had made an impassioned and rather well-reasoned plea that the gun was a keepsake, a part of their family history, and that she should hold on to it until he was old enough to learn to hunt like his father and his grandfather before him. Impressed and surprised by his logic and articulateness at such a young age, she’d relented and tucked the gun away in her closet for safekeeping. Since then she’d probably forgotten about it.
But Marcus never had. Every few months growing up, he’d secretly snuck into his mother’s room and checked to make sure the shotgun was still there, that she hadn’t given it away.
As Marcus scrambled to find ammunition, and amid the murderous rage and deafening vulgarities, he could finally hear sirens in the distance. The police were coming, but it was clear they weren’t going to arrive in time. He continued working methodically through the cramped closet, shelf by shelf, drawer by drawer, until—in one of the shoe boxes—he finally heard what he needed. He ripped it open. Finding five shells, he quickly loaded two, pumped, then turned and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. He dialed 911. When he heard the call connect and an operator’s voice come on the line, he stepped back into the bedroom and tossed the phone onto the bed just as Roger DuHaime smashed through the door and shoved the dresser aside.
Suddenly Marcus was standing just a few feet away from a haggard, unshaven man in his late fifties. He wore a dirty pair of work jeans and a T-shirt stained with oil. His bare feet were tinged with the green of freshly cut grass. His filthy hands were shaking, and as he tightened his grip on the ax, he demanded Marcus put down the gun and tell him where his mother was.
Marcus said nothing. He just stood there and locked eyes with his stepfather, holding the shotgun low, at his hip, aimed at the man’s chest. DuHaime was soaked in sweat. His hair, what was left of it, was askew. His eyes were bloodshot and glaring with hatred but also confusion. He scanned the room, looking for his wife and not finding her. For a moment, it seemed he was going to come at Marcus, but Marcus did not move, did not flinch. Nor did he fire. He simply stood his ground and waited.
Then DuHaime heard Marjorie crying in the bathroom. The moment he did, his mouth broke out in a twisted smile. He glanced behind him and began to back up, away from Marcus and toward the bathroom door.
“This isn’t between you and me,” he growled. “This’s about your mother and me, and you’d best stay out of it.”
Marcus remained motionless. But calmly and clearly, he told his stepfather to put down the ax, back out of the room, and leave the house, and no one would get hurt. The man just laughed. Marcus repeated the instructions and explained precisely what was going to happen if his stepfather did not put down the ax and leave the room and the house immediately. But his words had no effect. The man did not comply. His stepfather was swaying now, side to side. He was laughing. He raised the ax, mumbled something incomprehensible, and lunged at Marcus.