by Barry Lyga
As it should be.
I dart out the front door and then I’m gone as if I’ve never been here.
And soon, it will be as though I never were.
I am going to join Lola in the memory hole.
It is my proper place. It is where I deserve to be consigned.
Perhaps there’s some sort of memory hole equilibrium, and when I go in, Lola will come out. Maybe then Mom will look at pictures and dig out the baby shoes and allow herself to remember. Once she forgets me, maybe then she can remember.
And that, more than anything, will count as me doing something productive.
I almost don’t make it. The day has gotten cooler as night falls, but the air is still and sticky, making it feel hotter.
I coast down one last rise-fall in the road, then drift onto the shoulder, then onto the grass. Almost on inertia, almost like the tide, almost as though the world itself has turned in this specific way at this specific time to make it happen, I glide to the brush and scrub and trees near the trailer.
Hopping off my bike, I let it clatter to the ground. Then I lean against the poplar for a moment, catching my breath. The world spins some more, as the world is wont to do. I close my eyes against its motion, fumble for the Magnum.
It’s easy to load. I have more bullets than I need. I load them all anyway.
I take a deep breath, tree bark against my naked neck, tugging at my hair. The abrasion is good. It reminds me I’m alive, that I haven’t done it yet, that it still needs to be done.
If only it were raining. It would be the perfect night.
It’ll have to do.
My phone has been buzzing and cheeping. Texts and voicemails from Mom, finally home, wanting to know where I am, their character increasingly terrified.
I turn off the phone.
I feel light. Effortless. Gravity has no hold on me.
I’m going to do it. I’m really going to do it.
The last thing I’ll do.
I’ll do what I need to do.
And then I’ll put the barrel in my mouth and angle it up so that the bullet is sure to go through my brain and I’ll pull the trigger and at last it will all be over.
There’s nothing to stop me.
I’m amazed. There’s absolutely nothing to stop me.
I open my eyes. Take up my usual position. I watch the trailer for a moment, just as though this were any other night.
I inhale a deep, long, clean breath. I am pure and holy. The gun weighs nothing in my hand.
I approach the front door.
I knock.
Moments pass.
The door opens.
“Sebastian?”
I say, “Hi, Dad.”
He invites me in.
Of course he does. I’m his son. Why wouldn’t he invite me in?
He doesn’t know about the Magnum, now tucked into the waistband of my pants, cool and smooth against the small of my back.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” he says. “Wasn’t even sure you remembered where I lived. Been so long.”
He stumbles through the trailer. It’s not a double-wide, just a plain old trailer, and he seems gigantic within its cluttered confines, a stooping, looming troll from a children’s fairy tale, lurching around its own cave.
Sweeping empty chip bags and a dog-eared paperback from a chair, he offers me a seat.
“I’m gonna stand for now.”
He nods slowly, resigned, as though accepting a diagnosis. Then he settles himself onto a blue-and-gold love seat that has been weathered by years of the same body in the same spot, contorted into the same angles.
“Can I get you something?” he asks. “I think I have some Coke in the fridge.…”
He has sad eyes, my father. I never noticed them before. Or maybe he only allows them to be sad here, in his den, in his pauper’s castle, where the air is tangible with sweat and bad dreams and cheap beer and stale chips. Maybe in this place, his armor is at its weakest. Maybe.
“If I’d known you were comin’,” he says, filling the air now, clearly discomfited by my silence, “I’da cleaned up a little. Look, it’s, uh”—he checks his phone—“not even eight yet. Why don’t I take you to dinner or dessert or—”
I can’t take it anymore. I thought maybe there would be one last conversation, but I can’t take it. I reach behind me, draw the Magnum. It comes loose without friction, and I level it at him.
At this distance, it’s nearly impossible to miss him, even with the slight, surprising shake in my hand. I steady the gun with my off hand. My father’s face is split by the sight at the end of the barrel.
“Oh, Sebastian,” he says.
When I thought of this moment—and I’ve thought of it often, over the years, obsessing over it, designing it in my imagination over and over, tweaking and revising—I imagined him lunging at me, going for the gun. Not that it matters. In such a confined space, when I pull the trigger, he’ll take a slug. If the first one doesn’t kill him, it will slow him down enough for me to finish him off with the second.
And then a third, for myself.
At a distance, it’ll be no more than three pops. As remote as the trailer is, no one will suspect anything. Three pops, far off. Two in rapid succession, then a pause, then the third.
I wonder how long it’ll take them to find the bodies?
“Oh, Sebastian,” he says again. “Son, what are you doing?”
He seems unafraid. He hasn’t twitched since I pulled out the gun. He shows no signs of ducking or dodging or leaping for me. If anything, he’s settled back into the worn love seat even farther, hands placed on his knees. He shakes his head.
“Talk to me, Sebastian. If you’re planning on doing it, talk to me first.”
“Why? What makes you think you deserve conversation?” My throat clogs as I speak. I clear it vehemently, disgusted with my body for betraying its human frailty.
“Not saying I do. It’s just… don’t you think we should at least say good-bye?”
I should say, I’ll say that with a bullet, and then pull the trigger. Arnold in Commando. Sly Stallone in Cobra. Eighties tough-guy action movies, unapologetically laden with testosterone and helpless women and groan-inducing comebacks.
And I remember, suddenly, with no warning, the day Dad left. I was six. I clung to him, to his leg. A tear splashed onto the dirty brown leather of his boot. I said, I don’t want you to go. And he said, I don’t want to go either.
And I couldn’t understand it. If he didn’t want to go, then why was he going? Couldn’t he just not go, then?
But I didn’t say anything. Because it seemed so simple. It was too simple. And for years I wondered if I’d been wrong, if I should have said something. If I’d spoken up, if I’d said, “Then don’t go,” then maybe he would have said, “You’re right! That’s it!” and stayed. And maybe then we all three could have gotten better together, and he wouldn’t have become my personal boogeyman, and the curdled love I felt for him wouldn’t have blackened into hate.
“You left. You left us.”
“That’s not what I did.”
“Don’t lie to me!” I scream. “You went away! She died and I killed her and you left because of me!”
He shakes his head fiercely. “No. I left because of me.”
I don’t even know what that means. It’s adult crap, something adults say to throw us off. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of him. Tired of me. I want it over. I can end it. It’s my choice; I’m in control. It’s always been my choice, and I’ve always been in control.
But instead I hear myself say, “Why did you even have that gun?” There’s a note of pleading in my voice, and I can’t shake it out. “Why was the stupid thing in the house in the first place?”
The gun wavers, even stabilized by both hands. I don’t want it to waver; I will it to remain still. Even shaking, the gun sight never leaves my father’s face.
“I had it because I had it,” he says, his voice heav
y and drowning. He’s slumped down even farther; there’s no way he could get up and come at me without taking two bullets.
“Because you had it? What kind of crap excuse is that?”
“Because that’s what we do here,” he insists, a note of admonition in his voice. I have a gun trained on him and he’s admonishing me. “We have guns. We take care of them, and they take care of us, like a good dog, but this dog turned, Sebastian, this dog went rabid and snapped and—”
“The gun didn’t turn. The gun didn’t do it. I did it.” The Magnum is getting heavy; it was never designed to be held at full extension like this for so long. I flex my muscles to keep them limber. “I did it. Like what I’m doing now. Don’t blame the gun. Blame me. Blame you.”
“You don’t blame no one for an accident, Sebastian. That’s why they’re accidents.”
“Bull. You left the gun out. I used it. It’s our fault.”
He shakes his head slowly, gnaws at his lower lip. “That what you think? That what you’ve been thinking? All this time? You think it’s right to blame a four-year-old for something he can’t even understand?”
“You told me to go away. Not to touch the gun. I didn’t listen. My fault.”
“You’re right,” he says, now not even looking at me, not even looking at the gun, just staring down at his hands, twisting and turning over themselves in his lap. “But not about it being your fault. But, yeah, it’s someone’s fault. Damn thing never should have been there. I never should have had it. I wanted to protect us. From what? I don’t even know. It’s Brookdale, for God’s sake. What was I protecting us from? Fucking raccoons?”
When he looks up at me, not blinking or flinching at the sight of the gun still leveled at him, his eyes are red and wet.
“You don’t get to cry. Not for her.” I struggle for a moment, the gun too heavy. Then I recover and my aim is true. “You don’t have the right.”
“Maybe not. Can’t help it, though. In the morning, your mother would bring her into the bedroom. To nurse her. For breakfast, you know?”
“I don’t care.”
“And she’d lay her down in the bed next to me,” he goes on, as though the person with the gun hadn’t said a word, “and I’d look over at her and she’d look over at me, and she would stare for a second and then she’d break into this huge smile. Like she was thinkin’, Oh, this guy! I remember this guy! And I swear, it was the best part of my day. Everything else, no matter what happened that day, it was downhill. Had to be. Because I had the best thing in the world first thing in the morning. Such a lucky bastard. I got the best thing in the world when I opened my eyes every morning.”
Against my will, I think of her, of Lola. I shove the memory away, but it comes back, and maybe that’s the way it should be. I should be thinking of her when I do it. My vision blurs with tears, but it doesn’t matter—the shimmery shape of my father is still at the end of the gun sight.
“Best thing in the world. And someone rings the doorbell and I don’t even think, Sebastian. I don’t even think!”
I blink, blink, blink. Tears drop. My father’s hands are clenched into fists and he beats one of them on the arm of the love seat. Thum. Thum.
“I just go answer the goddamn door! Like I’m a robot! Ding-dong! Coming, master! Fuck! Leave the gun right there. I was cleaning it and I was done and I’d loaded it because, hey, it was for protection, right? It was for protection, and what good is it if you have to load it in the middle of the night? And I just left it there and went to the door, and it was some goddamn Jehovah’s Witness, and by the time I got rid of him…”
My father is in my sights, but all I see is Lola. He is warped by tears into Lola.
“I’m headed back to the gun, thinking, Oh, crap, I can’t believe I did that. Thinking, That was close, and I hear… Oh, shit.” He shakes his head viciously. “No,” he says. And again. “No.” And over and over, and my lips move with his, silently repeating his No.
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 w
eeping 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.”
