And then my father, a big man with hard, square working hands, a man who wears armor even when he’s naked, breaks down. He bawls like a child who’s been hurt for the first time, no reserve, no restraint. No shame. Tears explode from him; great sobs wrack his body; his chest heaves uncontrollably.
“Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Oh, fucking Jesus.” There’s no Jesus here. Jesus doesn’t want to be here in this dingy shit-trailer, in this hovel of desperate, slovenly contrition. Jesus has abandoned us; God, too. There’s no one to watch. No one to care. No one to offer absolution.
Except.
“My kid was dead,” he blubbers. “She was dead, and it was my fault and it’s everywhere, it’s on the news, it’s in the papers, it’s online, and you know what some liberal blogger asshole says online? Some fucking asshole from up north? He says, The best solution to a bad toddler with a gun is a good toddler with a gun. He says, If only the little one had been armed.” He grabs at his hair, his beard, pulling, clawing. “My kid is fucking dead and it’s my fault and I’m grieving and he’s making fucking jokes, that cocksucker!”
He stands, springing up from the love seat so quickly that I don’t even react, arms outstretched, and he screams, “So do it, then!”
If only it were raining.
Ten years ago, I raised a gun and I fired.
If it were raining, it would be a perfect night.
Do it, then! my father cried, and the voice inside me shouted it at the same time.
And I can’t.
I can only do it by accident.
And the gun falls from my numb fingers and I collapse, weeping, into my father’s arms.
The gun lies on the shabby throw rug, glimmering in the middling light of my father’s trailer. I lie crumpled in my father’s arms, the two of us wrapped together, now on the love seat, weeping against each other, snorting, snuffling. From somewhere, he’s produced a handkerchief, which he hands to me. I accept it and wipe my swollen eyes, blow my nose. I hand it back to him.
“I was going to kill you,” I whisper, “and then kill myself.”
He tightens his embrace. Kisses the top of my head as though I’m a child. And I am. Of course I am.
“I’m sure,” he says. “And you think that would have fixed things?”
Would it have? Billions of people in the world; billions of planets around billions of stars in the universe. Would removing my father and me from the map of reality have changed anything? Two fewer lives in a world that never acknowledged them much in the first place. Would it matter?
“I wouldn’t have felt bad anymore. It would have fixed that.”
“What about your mother? How do you think she would have felt?”
“She got over Lola. She could get over me. It would be easier, without me.”
“Sebastian,” he says quietly, twisting out of our tangle, holding me at arm’s length. Staring into me. “Sebastian, look at me, son. Your mother ain’t gotten over Lola. You know that as well as I do. You know she ain’t gotten over it, and she never will. Just like I never will. And, yeah, Sebastian, I’m sorry, but you never will neither. It ain’t how people are built.”
“So we just go on like this? Feeling like shit for the rest of our lives?”
It’s the first time I’ve ever sworn in front of my father. He pretends not to notice.
“We all deal with it in our way. Your mom, she can still function, see? That’s good. That’s a good thing. Someday, she’ll be on the other side of the clouds. On the other side of the storm. She’ll be able to look behind her and see the darkness. And she’ll always be aware of it, and it’ll always be there, hovering, but it’ll be behind her, see? You’ll get there, too.”
“But not you.”
He says nothing, still staring at me. Then he breaks away, pulls back. Looks up at the ceiling. “You’d pulled that trigger, maybe. But, no. I’ll never come through. I don’t deserve to.”
“I want you to come home.” The words surprise me; that I mean them surprises me even more. And I’m weeping again, snotty and teary like a little boy.
He carefully folds the handkerchief to expose a clean panel and hands it back to me, saying nothing as I blow my nose and wipe my eyes again. I can’t look at him.
“I can’t come home,” he says. “There ain’t a home for me there no more.”
“Mom still has your things. She hasn’t thrown them out.”
“Home’s not about things. I don’t expect you to understand. Home is something else. You and your mom, you’ve made a home. You’ve repaired a home. You don’t need me coming in there.”
Need…“Yeah, but what if we want you?”
He smiles sadly and nods. “You sure you’re speaking for both of you?”
I have no answer for that. I don’t know how it happened, how it all fell apart. There were the fights, but people fight. And there was Lola, but sometimes those things drive families closer, not farther apart.
Why couldn’t we be one of those families? Why do we have to be us?
“I just want something normal,” I tell him. “I just want to feel normal.”
“I’m proud of you for not pulling that trigger,” he says softly. “That had to be a hard decision to make. And if you’d only come here to kill me, that might have been okay. But you got a whole life to live.”
“For Lola.”
“No!” His outrage is immediate and wounded; he heaves and I flinch. “No! Not for her! For you. Your job is to live for yourself, Sebastian. You only get one life. You get one… one chance.”
Shot. He was going to say one shot.
“One chance.” He sniffs. “One chance to close the door, to ignore the bell, to put it away. One fucking chance. Don’t blow yours. Don’t carry the burden. That ain’t your job. It ain’t for you to carry her.”
“Then who does?”
He wipes a tear from his eye. “Leave that to me.”
I look at the gun, still on the floor. He looks, too.
“Where did you get that?”
I tell him. Where. How. When.
He sighs and checks his watch. “All right, then. I’ll get it back there. Make sure no one ever knows.”
“How?”
“Don’t matter how. I’ll figure it out. Party’s still going on. No one’s paying attention. I…” He shakes his head. “Just don’t worry about it. It’s the least I can do. I’ll take care of it.” He stoops to pick up the gun. For some reason, I expect him to pluck it gingerly, to take the very edge of the grip between his thumb and forefinger, to hold it from its tail like a dead rat.
But instead he grabs it up, points it at the ceiling, flips open the cylinder, and empties each chamber. Checks that it’s empty, then double-checks. All done with cool efficiency, bloodless confidence. He puts the ammo in his pocket and jams the empty gun into his waistband. When he turns to look at me again, it’s with the look of a gunslinger.
“I can’t stop you from killing yourself. If that’s what you truly want, no one can stop you. I can’t be around twenty-four hours a day, looking after you. But if that’s what you want, don’t you think you owe it to your mother to talk to her first?”
Mom: Where are you?
Mom: Where are you?
Mom: Where did you go?
Mom: You’re not answering. Pick up when I call you!