Before I go to bed that night, I get an email from Wallace. Not a text or a forum message. An actual email. He doesn’t forward things. He doesn’t do chain messages. If he wants to tell me something, he either sends it to me live or tells me in person.
But I see his name come up, and I click on it without hesitation.
12/25/16, 11:21 p.m.
To: Eliza Mirk <[email protected]>
From: Wallace Warland <[email protected]>
Subject: You found me in a constellation
I know it’s weird for me to email you. I know we’re both at our computers, and you’re reading this, and I’m sitting in a pool of my own mortification, wishing I could delete emails after I send them. I couldn’t give this to you in person, because then you might read it in front of me. I couldn’t write it out by hand, because we’d be fifty by the time I finished, and that’s not going to work for me.
Normally when I write something, I know how I should begin. I don’t know how I should begin this. There are a lot of things I want to tell you, but I don’t want to scare you. I cannot explain in words how much I don’t want to scare you, and how afraid I am that I will.
So let’s start with this: I never lived in Illinois. I’ve always lived here, in Westcliff. I went to school on the other side of town, with Cole. I’m sorry I lied to you about it. It’s not that I didn’t want to tell you the truth, but if I told you where I was from, I was worried you would figure out the rest of what I’m going to tell you here, and I wasn’t sure I wanted you to know all that.
A while back, you said I looked like a football player. I said I played when I was little. That was only a half lie; I did play when I was little, but I didn’t stop until halfway through sophomore year of high school. I was pretty good at it too. Made varsity. I still have that letter somewhere. My teammates called me Warfield Wallace ’cause I fucked shit up.
No, sorry, that’s a lie too. They called me Warfield Wallace because it was alliterative, a play on my last name, and more intimidating than Wallace alone. And also because I FUCKED SHIT UP.
Sorry. I am not at the top of my game today.
I loved playing football. I loved hitting people, working in a team, and being with my friends. I loved winning. I loved how proud I made my dad. Not Tim, but my dad Dad, my biological dad. He loved football. He was a big guy, liked grilling out, Fourth of July fireworks, and throwing his kids into swimming pools. You could hear his laugh a mile away. Pretty much an all-around American. He wasn’t religious, but he read the Westcliff Star at breakfast every morning like he’d go to hell if he didn’t.
A little background about my dad: he never finished college. His family didn’t have the money. He got a job in a corporate cubicle, trying to sell things to people over the phone. Long hours, little pay. He was already married to my mom—not Vee—and she was pregnant with me. I don’t know if they got married because she was pregnant, or if she got pregnant after they were married. I guess it doesn’t matter. Dad didn’t like talking about that time, so I don’t know much about it. Mom left him before I turned a year old. I don’t remember her, so I was never upset about it, but my dad was sometimes.
A year or two later, he met Vee and they had Lucy, and things were good. Dad was the reason Lucy likes sports so much. He always wanted us to challenge ourselves. If something seemed too difficult for us, it was all the more reason to try. Lucy skipped a grade in school because of it. Dad challenged himself too—when he came home from work, he was louder and more colorful, full of energy. Wanted to help us with school projects or practice. Always put himself in the middle of everything.
There were dark parts too. He didn’t let us see those, but a few times I walked into the kitchen late at night and found him hunched over the table, head in his hands. When he thought he was alone in the house in the middle of the day, he stared out the front door like the street was some unreachable promised land. When we grilled out, he made extra food for everyone else and ate nothing himself. If he and I were the only ones around, he ranted about his job and forbade me from ever doing anything that made me unhappy, even if that meant going without food or clothes or a roof.
Have you seen it in your parents? That moment when they become people? I think you have. It sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? One day they’re parents, and the next they say something racist, or get a cut that takes too long to heal, or make a simple mistake driving, and a facade falls away and they become mortals like the rest of us. After the facade is gone, it can never come back.
That darkness made him mortal. I saw it in my dad before the day he died, and I denied it. I shouldn’t have. I should have told Vee, I should have told a doctor, I should have told someone. Over winter break of my sophomore year, we were driving home from a Christmas break spent in Tennessee with Vee’s family. It was only me and my dad; Vee and Lucy were coming home the next day. Dad was on one of his rants. He’d gotten a little time off from work for the holidays, but not much, and he made me swear I’d never get a job like his. I had never seen him so worked up before. I told him I thought it would be smarter to get a job that paid decently, at least at first. It wouldn’t be so bad, as long as I didn’t make it my life.
That only made him angrier. I know now that he wasn’t in his right mind. At the time, his yelling was incoherent, and when he stopped the car and told me to get out, I thought he was joking. It was almost January, freezing, and there were another few miles to go until home. He kicked me out right before Wellhouse Bridge and kept driving.