Jenna screams.
“Give up the boy!” Donny Ray says, legs straddling me. “I’m taking him!”
I can’t see anything, can’t even feel my own body. I only feel rage—rage so powerful that it explodes within me like a thousand bottle rockets. In a flash, I spring upward. Donny Ray flies into reverse and smashes into the wall, but before he can regroup, I’m on him again, hands gripped tightly around his neck.
“Daddy, stop! I can’t breathe!”
The sound of Devon’s voice startles me. I see my hands clutched around his neck. I see him choking for air.
I see his shock and horror staring me in the face.
“Oh no . . . God . . . OH, NO!” I shout, instantly releasing my hold on him, unable to fathom what I’ve just done, or for that matter, how. But I don’t get a chance to figure it out, because something heavy and hard hurtles into the back of my neck. The room swarms into a spin all around me, and my vision blurs as I drop to the floor.
I lift my head in time to catch Jenna racing through the doorway with Devon draped over her shoulder. My son’s frantic, sobbing screams echo down the hall—soon after that, I hear the sound of tires as they burn rubber on the driveway, and the walls of my once-unyielding world, cracking, crumbling, and falling all around me.
75
THIS IS HOW IT ENDS
I was more and more on alert after my father came home from the hospital looking like Frankenstein. The message on my radar was clear: Danger. Madman going madder.
One night a series of violent slams rattled my door in its frame. Walls shook. The hardwood quaked. Things flew off shelves and crashed onto the floor.
Then, this.
“I’LL KILL YOU, GODDAMN IT! YOU HEAR ME? I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!”
I crawled under the bed and held my face to the floor, the only thing beneath me, a puddle of tears.
This is it. We’re here. This is how it ends.
The door crashed open and with surprising force, slammed into the wall—but that paled in comparison to the view of my father’s feet, furiously stomping toward me. There was nothing to do except wait for what was coming next. I knew it would only be a matter of seconds before he killed me.
Instead, his angry howls descended into dull and helpless whimpers. Then he spoke again, but this time his tone was weak and pleading.
“Please . . . Please . . .”
I swallowed air, turned my head toward him, and tried to listen.
“Please . . . don’t . . . ,” he murmured through tortured sobs. “Please don’t take him from me. Don’t take my boy.”
I peered out and saw my father sitting on the floor. Body hunched over, arms wrapped around knees, face pressed against them. Moaning and weeping.
And in an instant, it all made sense. The towel crammed down the drain. The nightmarish receiving tower constructed of knives. The charts, the diagrams. The stern warning he’d given through the window glass.
The man in the drain.
Through all his madness, there was only one desire left in his shattered mind, one determined need. To keep from losing me.
Even after I’m gone, my love will still be with you. You’ll always feel it deep inside your heart.
I crawled out from under the bed and scrambled to him.
He looked at me, and beneath his tearful eyes, I saw it—I saw love—pure and whole and real.
My father and I embraced, holding tight to each other before this moment could slip away from us, as we both knew it would.
With his face pressed against mine, our tears and sobs mingling, he whispered into my ear.
“Christopher . . . you are my everything.”
76
I come to with my face flat against the floor, and it takes a few seconds to ground myself in the moment. Then my bruised neck delivers a harsh reminder. I lift my head and look at the papers still covering the walls and scattered throughout the room.
One thing I can feel grateful for is that this time I know it was simply a matter of passing out from injury and exhaustion, rather than losing minutes that become more precious all the time.
I heave my body off the floor, and memories of what happened here rise to the surface, nearly bowling me back over.
I tried to kill my son last night.
It wasn’t intentional, just a product of misunderstanding. I was only trying to protect Devon, but through my mind’s jumbled jigsaw of skewed perceptions, I did just the opposite.
I became my father.
No, I was worse than him, and as that reality settles, a boundless and exponential ache swells within me. It doesn’t matter what I tried to do—it matters what I did. Fear is indelible, it’s irreversible, and once inflicted, you can never take it back. That kind of damage, I know so intimately, because more times than I could count I was victim to it. Damage that is now intricately woven into my wiring. Damage I’ve now handed on to my son. Jenna said I worked long and hard to prepare Devon for the possibility of losing my mind, but in a matter of minutes, I managed to reverse that process.
I’ll never get over this one. Never.
Donny Ray.
I saw him. He seemed so real. But seeing Devon materialize beneath me—my hands clenched tightly around his tiny neck as he choked for air—says otherwise.
Then comes the ultimate and most brutal shot of reality. My wife and son are gone. They have left me, and now I am truly and unequivocally alone. Just my unraveling mind and me as we continue to helplessly whirl through this terribly broken world, struggling to draw a flimsy line between reality and fiction.
I look out through the window at my world of pain, everything so monochromatic, so desolate, mere shadows of what I once loved, all of it stripped away.
How do you walk on faith when there is none left?
I try to put one foot in front of the other, but as I move through the house, with each step, nothing but emptiness greets me, both from throughout and within.