“Random?” I ask, holding up a LEGO man. Darcy shudders, indicating it belongs only in the garbage. “Then a couple of days will turn into a couple of weeks and…”
“And I get it. You’re trying way too hard to be Mom. She would pack toys in my bag for me to play with and you don’t even let me have friends over.”
“Oh, blah, blah, blah.” I shove his shoulder. “I’m twenty, so I have no option but to be cool.”
He rolls his eyes, hands me one sock.
“Isn’t this for your ‘Sock’ pile?”
“Define ‘Sock’.”
“I swear, Darcy—”
“I’m being serious, Charlee! It’s all I’ve got.”
I stare down the lone sock. One white sock with no partner. It’s nothing without its mate. Just a nobody for nothing. “Right,” I say, not meeting Darcy’s eyes, for fear of being made a fool by my ten-year-old brother. I dump it in the Random pile.
“And this?” I ask, holding up a folded piece of paper. “Garbage too?”
As I scrunch it in a ball to shoot for the can, Darcy lunges at me and swipes back the note. “You silly head! That’s like your one from Dad.”
I sit straight, blinking dumbly, until “like your one from Dad” slaps me over the forehead. The letter Dex gave me! Where are those jeans? Was I wearing jeans? Did I…oh, please, no.
I apologize and ask for the letter back, promising not to throw it away. Darcy gives me a glare before deciding he can trust me this time.
“Haven’t you read yours yet?”
“Well, I didn’t really know about it. What does yours say?”
I look down and catch the words, “my big, strong man” before the paper is ripped away. Giving Darcy a look, the best he can come up with is that he changed his mind.
“Okay, general points, then,” I say.
Darcy blinks and then there are tears. Real droplets of sadness trailing down his nose, cheek, chin and falling into his lap while he sits there, unmoving. “Go read yours. Daddy would have wanted it.”
I nod and sprint to my room, digging my fingers into pockets, in hoodies, skirts, shorts, jeans, sweats. In a moment of insanity, I even dig down inside to the toe of my shoes in case it’s stuffed in there. I can’t miss this letter.
Instead, I find that note I wrote tucked under my pillow. The one I keep putting back, even when I change my sheets. It was before I started chatting with Dex and an ice-cold sensation insta-freezes my core, stabbing me with a thousand needles—like pins and needles, but on an epic scale. I read:
Dexter Hollingworth “killed” my parents.
I’ve gone from believing that, to not believing it, to thinking maybe it was true, to closing the door on that forever. Dex was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I’ll never blame him for the tragedy he has to wear for the rest of his life. I rip the note into quarters, shoot it into the can and as I’m about to give up looking for my dad’s letter, I collapse onto my desk chair and it’s there: folded in a corner on the side of my desk.
I run back and bounce onto Darcy’s bed, even waving the letter at him to both make him laugh and show off my triumph.
When I touch the edge of the paper, my fingers freeze up. What if now’s not the right time? What if I should wait until Darcy is at school so he won’t see me cry? What if it’s better to wait several months until I’m out of the worst of the grieving stage?
Looking at the paper, I’m certain the words “Just wait” are written in invisible ink right there. This is the one chance I get to read Dad’s final words. I should be alone.
“I’ll just be outside,” I announce to Darcy before I stagger to the bathroom, where I fall into a heap at the bottom of the door, just the way I was when Dex found me and gave me this very letter.
Looking back, this letter seems somehow different. Anger—the Dexter-anger I’m familiar with—tenses up my shoulders, stiffens my arms by my side, makes me involuntarily grind my teeth. Makes me think, asshole. But that’s not fair. That was my anger directed at me for losing the most important man in my life. It wasn’t anyone else’s fault it was Dad’s time to go.
I clamp the letter between my hands and breathe in slowly. Just as I think I’m ready to begin, I realize I should have tissues ready, so I grab those from the counter and reclaim my spot hunched behind the door.
I take that long breath again since it seems my lungs have collapsed like two plastic bags with all the air sucked out. I fold open the pages and read:
Charlee,
I love you so much more than I can write down, so it’s taken me four tries to write this first line without blotching up the paper. If you’re reading this I’m either a) such a vegetable I have no hope—in which case stop kidding yourself, accept the veggie stew I am, and turn the damn machine off! or b) I’m gone.
What do I think about as I write this?
Dragging you off your bed by your ankles for six am training sessions. Stripping your pillows and sheets away in the hope you’ll have to get out of bed (and having no such luck). Tallying up scores with you of how often I could hit your mom in the head with that beach ball before she’d yell. Forgetting to feed you because we were too busy playing video games. Kissing your forehead after a bedtime story, twice, because you always wanted a second kiss from me. Attempting to have “the talk” with you at fifteen. Being informed I had “the talk” with you approximately two years too late.
Seeing your name on the scoreboard for fastest swimmer and telling strangers that that superfish is my very own daughter.
Charlee, I’m not sure I want more of these moments. You get what you’re given and if I had any more time here, I bet I’d screw it up. You were a better daughter to me than I was a father to you. Between these moments there were the weeks I’d be away for stretches at a time, sometimes nonstop, for work. Plans, trips, meetings.
The way I see it is when your mother and I were given you as our daughter, we were given an angel to look after. It’s time we leave you to be your own person; it doesn’t mean we’re gone.
Don’t you ever for a second doubt your worth. You have a place on this Earth as a miracle of patience, love, kindness, care and part-comedian all packaged into one gorgeous daughter of mine.
I fought as hard as I could, but this is all the time I’ve been given.
I’ve loved every second of it because of you. Because I had and will always have you, no matter what form I’m in.
I don’t stop existing. I’m you, always.
All that matters are your choices; you’re only limited by your actions. Remember that. Don’t let anything or anyone hold you back from what I know you’re capable of.
Love always,
Dad.
31. Jack of All
Dexter
I figure it this way: Murphy’s Law applies to those few events in your life that matter the most. Take now, for example. I haven’t seen Dad at home for a couple of days. He hasn’t run away. While I’ve been at the mechanic’s, he’s been home, then he leaves for work later in the day, comes home, by which time I was out again at the gym or with Elliot.
Taking this extreme bad luck in mind, I barge through Dad’s spare room. Operation Uncover History has begun and he will probably find me now. Good.
On one side is the window I crouched behind when I listened in on his plans. On another side is a pile of paper shaped like a desk, with an actual desk possibly still somewhere underneath. But I’ve been there, shuffled through that. The single bed in the middle of the room is much the same. However, it’s now that I’m thinking otherwise that I notice the shelves and sliding cupboard.
I go to the cupboard and push the door along the tracks. When it opens, a number of eras are revealed. One side of the eye-level shelf holds videotapes, probably too drowned in dust to be salvaged, but I keep them in mind. On the same side, the shelf below, are photo albums. The labels say stuff like: “Lisa’s 30th”, “Jack’s first day at school” and “First trip to the Rockefeller
Center”. There’s miscellaneous stuff, too. Old T-shirts splattered with paint, a drill set, etc.
I wipe the top of the videos, swiping away a thick layer of dust. I brush that off on my drawstring pants and twist my head sideways. The videos are all labeled with white stickers that are curling at the edges. One of them is marked “Mick and Walter’s camp trip to the Murray River”.
“Those won’t work. I’ve already tried,” a voice says from behind me.
Dad stands in the doorway, hands shoved in his pockets, nodding at the video I have pulled out.
“What have you been hiding? You were friends with the man I accidentally killed?”
Dad grunts and crouches beside me, taking the video and turning it over in his hands. “Do you think those services could save the tape and convert it to DVD or some shit?”
“Probs,” I say. I tap the video spinning in his hands. “You have plenty of explaining to do, old man.”
Without speaking, Dad agrees and takes me to the car. I hop in the passenger seat. Dad comes out of our street and turns the opposite way we need to go for work, the shops, things like that. I only go in this direction to go fishing occasionally or if I’m heading across to one of the towns outside of Melbourne.
“Here,” he says. “Read this. It’s finally been released publicly.”
“What’s been…” but I’m stunned into silence.
The newspaper dad’s flopped onto my lap is turned to the fifth page where some random reporter I may never be able to personally thank has published an article detailing fault of the Mason’s Ski Lift Resort accident as responsible by wear and tear, undetected by safety checks, which were too far apart.
Screw “unthankable”. I’m going to find the reporter’s email on the news site and explain my gratitude.
After fifteen minutes of silence, the lanes narrow and the corners turn into the type where you can’t see the end of them. Most of the sky is blocked by the tops of trees, which span at least three lengths of our car and have trunks wide enough to hide two bodies behind them.
But Dad also misses the gravel turnoff for the path to the lake for fishing. Not that we have rods, hooks or bait with us, but it was the only thing I could hang on to.
Then it hits me. The only other thing out this far is the crash site. I almost ask where we are going, but I keep that thought to myself. Dad would have said something if he needed to, and I don’t plan to rush or stop what’s going on.
As we round a corner, the spot where Jack and Lily crashed through the barrier appears. Dad slows the car in the shoulder of the road, kills the engine and slips the keys in his pocket.
“Come here, would ya,” he says without meeting my eyes.
We walk the length to the crash site. There are four crash barriers spanning that corner. Corrugated, reinforced steel that doesn’t stand a chance against a car swiped off the highway by another driver.
This walk is by far the longest time anyone has taken down this strip. No matter it’s the same distance, Jack and Lily have crashed ten times already and I’ve only walked several body lengths. The blood that drips from Jack’s ears is a constant flow. Lily’s face is untouched, even in death. Not a bruise, not a single drop of blood. Not from the front of her face anyway.
Eventually, when my shoulders have transformed to structures made of weathered steel, ready to buckle after scores of years, we stop at the middle barrier where Jack’s truck, the eighteenth-birthday gift our parents bought him, crashed through and crumpled against the tree that doesn’t show a single scar, unlike us humans.
Unlike the Hollingworth family who haven’t had a dinner together at the table since.
Dad strides up to the barrier, crouches next to it, his hand resting on the top. “When that fucker killed my boy, and your Lily, your mom and I had four thousand dollars to pay off on our credit cards and had a home loan that was always one payment behind the bill.”
I lean against the barrier, rest my hands by my side and look to the steep cliff on the other side on the road where the trees climb forever up that mountain.
“Yeah, we’ve been a bill behind every payment for as long as I can remember.”
“Walter gave us ten grand. We had so many expenses, not just with the funeral, but because of the suspicious circumstances that we used it all one way or another. Had one hundred bucks left over for ourselves. That went on the credit card bill.”
“That was kind,” I manage.
“Do you know how I thanked him? I sent him an email with the words: ‘Appreciate the money. Jack would have been happy.’ Didn’t even say the words ‘thank you’. I hadn’t seen his face since Jack’s funeral. Before that, since before Tahny was born. Over the years Walter’s called or emailed a few times. Occasionally I’ve picked up or replied, but mostly I just think about how the world should have less people like me and more people like him.”
Dad looks up. It’s a sight to see his red eyes. The rims are puffy and the color of a tomato. But he just sits there, holding all that pent-up frustration inside, unlike the way he usually screams or hits something. Until he does.
Dad stands up, clenches his fist, and hammers into the barrier. He pumps his fist into it repeatedly. Those edges are sharp, so when he shows no sign of stopping after the fifth hit, I leap up and wrestle him away. He elbows me from in front, but I squeeze his arms tighter and say, “That barrier isn’t you or your past. You need to stop.”
For a moment I think I’ve made a mistake because he freezes. I think I should have said “isn’t the guy who killed Jack” or “isn’t Walter”. But it’s clear the barrier is more than just a physical wall. It encompasses Dad’s mistakes. He shrugs out of my grip and slumps back over it.
“Why, Dad. What happened? I mean, Jack, Tahny and I never even saw you speak to him.”
“When your mom was pregnant with Tahny, I suspected Walter was the father. Us Hollingworths and the Mays? We were closer than that damn Uncle of yours who hasn’t called for one of your birthdays. A couple of times, Walter even told me he took Lisa out to pick a Valentine’s Gift for Melissa.
“Your mom and I thought I was sterile—I had the mumps as a child, I was a heavy smoker—plus I didn’t recall us doing anything around that time, so being the idiot I am, Walter and I had a massive blowout, both of us had a broken rib and exchanged worse words. Anyway, would you believe he forgave me as soon as we were released from the hospital? I hadn’t even apologized, for Christ’s sake!”
I trail off, thinking as Dad says this. How would it feel to have someone forgive you for possibly the worst mistake you made in your life, when you didn’t even have the chance to wrestle with your pride and be able to say sorry first? I know I needed the time to forgive myself, as Dad needed. Except Dad didn’t get to come to his own terms. I’m just learning how it’s eaten him up all this time.
“Took me a month to accept the apology that I should have given first, and several more months to decide to put it behind us. By that time we’d become strangers—as if a friendship from childhood didn’t make two cents’ worth of difference.”
“What happened?” I say, uncrossing my ankles and recrossing them the other way.
“Nothing. I never worked up the courage to talk to him about it. It wasn’t until the Mason’s ski lift accident that I realized I had to make amends. We spoke on the phone a bit. He was desperate to loan me money to get me out of my mess again, but I’d never learn if he kept bailing me out. That Mick was a different guy than this one.” Dad points to his chest. “So I decided I was going to save ten grand to pay him back. Looking back, that’s a fucking ridiculous thing to do.”
“If you could go back, what would you have done?”
Dad grins, but it’s a fake thing. Forced up at the sides of his mouth, filled with sarcasm. Or maybe it’s years of pent-up guilt, and now that it’s too late all he can do is laugh about it. “How far back we talking, young man?”
“Not the fight or anything. Just when the accident occ
urred. Why didn’t you visit him, anyway? Mom was with him daily, and it killed her.”
“Don’t you think I know all that? Why do you think I’ve spent every other night at the pub? I couldn’t just walk through those doors and announce I had decided to apologize because my ex-best bud was dying. I’d be kidding myself. That’s a worse insult—a forced apology because he’s dying anyway. I thought it was better to prove myself and show I could pay back the loan and that would be a better way to make amends after all the years.”
“It’s just money,” I say.
“Just money,” Dad mumbles. As if suddenly remembering his bloodied hand, he rips off the hem of his T-shirt, and wraps it around his knuckles.
“Wanna go back?”
“Yeah.”
The walk back is even longer, if that is possible. Then the car somehow is right there.
“Mom said Tahny’s pissed about something to do with this. Is she on Walter’s side or something?”
Dad howls with laughter. He clasps my shoulder to steady himself but he can’t stop guffawing, which forces him to stop walking and bend over, pressing his hands to his knees.
When he rights himself, he says, “Oh, no. Tahny is just a spoiled brat. She’s still jealous after all this time that Jack got a car for his birthday and angry he smashed it up and angry and perhaps jealous that it was Jack who was gifted ten grand, but he wasn’t alive to enjoy it. I tried to explain to her that the only reason the money came to our family was because Jack had died, but she didn’t seem to get it. She’s a girl, though. I don’t get her head. That’s what your mother told me.”
Didn’t figure that. Maybe Tahny isn’t such a slut after all. Maybe this Hollingworth family really is a complete bunch of strangers. Wish we weren’t.
On the ride home Dad announces something.
“Walter, the little prick. He gave us a parting gift.”
“Still accepting your apology before you’ve had the balls to admit anything, hey?”
“Something like that.”
Drowning in You Page 24
