Sliding Down the Sky

by Amanda Dick

  “Jesus Christ,” Jack mumbled, from somewhere to my left.

  I glanced up, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

  “Sorry, about dragging you all the way over here,” I said, tripping over the words.

  “Easy, dude,” he said, putting his arm around me and literally dragging me down the steps to the parking lot. “Come on, let’s get you back to the motel and under the shower. No offence, but you stink.”

  I let him throw me in the car, and then somehow – I’m not quite sure how – we found ourselves back at my motel. He pointed me at the shower, tossed some clean clothes into the bathroom with me and shut the door. Then he called through the door that he was going out in search of some food and some black coffee – extra strong.

  I stood under the shower stream for God knows how long. It felt like hours. I leaned on the wall with one hand and hung my head, the warm water cascading over my head and neck, onto my shoulders and down my body. I wanted to wash everything away. The smell of the jail cell, the guilt over what I did to Sass, the pain of knowing I should’ve been with Mom, the shit-storm of feelings I had about Dad – all of it.

  Disappointingly, all the water did was wash my skin.

  I climbed out of the shower and stood there, dripping water all over the bathroom floor.

  Jack rapped on the door.

  “You coming out anytime soon? I’ve got food, and coffee. Lots of coffee.”

  I stared at myself in the mirror. There was a fresh bruise on my cheek. I had dark circles under my eyes. My five o’clock shadow was turning into a full-blown beard. In short, I looked the way I felt. Like shit.

  I dried myself off and threw on clean boxers and jeans, pulling a t-shirt on. When I came out of the bathroom, Jack had laid out enough food for a small village. The table was groaning with it, and he was already tucking in.

  “Come on,” he said, through a mouthful of burger. “It’s getting cold.”

  Suddenly, hunger reared up from deep inside me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I sat down at the table with him and unwrapped a burger. We sat in silence for a few minutes, eating.

  “Thanks,” I said. “For coming. I owe you.”

  “You’re welcome. So, what happened?”

  I shrugged, chewing. Where to begin?

  “Dad happened.”

  He frowned. “Yeah, and?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I spoke to the nice officer at the police station after you called me, making zero sense. He said you were picked up drunk and disorderly, fighting in a public place – a bar. So?”

  I took another bite of burger, which was surprisingly good, and tried to remember the details.

  “Dad was at the hospital,” I said, chewing around the words. “He tried to talk to me, but no way. Not happening. So I hit him, and damn if it didn’t make me feel better. They threw me out of the hospital. Apparently, they don’t like that kind of thing there.”

  The sarcasm filtered through as I sobered up. I could hear it, but I couldn’t stop myself. It seemed to be the only way to handle the madness my life had descended into.

  Jack regarded me carefully over the top of his burger.

  “So, reading between the lines, you ignored the advice I gave you about not letting your Dad get to you, you punched him, and then you went on to celebrate your success at the nearest bar, where you promptly got into another fight with someone you don’t even remember, about God knows what. That sound about right?”

  Apparently, sarcasm wasn’t just my own personal talent.

  “Yep.”

  “Wow,” he deadpanned. “Sounds like you’re really winning there, dude. Go you.”

  “I feel better,” I said, ignoring him as the food worked its way through my system and began to make me feel more or less human again. “This is a good burger.”

  “Glad you’re enjoying it.”

  He was frustrated with me, I could tell. He fought fire with fire. The frustration level must’ve been higher than I thought, because he didn’t try talking to me much after that. We ate our burgers in silence, then devoured the fries and the coffee. I’d have preferred a beer, but I wasn’t pushing it. He got up a while later, went into the bathroom, then came back with my phone. He sat down on the bed with his coffee and switched it on. Seconds later, we both heard the messages begin to beep through.

  “You’ve got a tonne of missed calls,” he said, flipping through them. “And three messages. No name attached, but all from the same number.”

  “Probably Coop.”

  “You should listen to them.”

  He was right, of course. But I didn’t want to.

  “Mom’s probably out of surgery by now,” I murmured.

  “Then you need to find out what’s going on. You need to get back there and see her.”

  “Like this?”

  “Yeah, like this,” Jack said firmly. “Drink your coffee.”

  He played the first message over the speaker, so we could both hear. I was right.

  “Callum, it’s Coop. Call me back, okay? I need to know you’re alright.”

  He played the second message.

  “It’s me again. Your Mom’s out of surgery. I need to talk to you. Call me back. Please.”

  Jack and I exchanged a glance. Coop’s voice was different. Something was wrong, he might as well have said so.

  The third message was worse.

  “I’m not screwing around here. Call me or get back to the hospital, I don’t care which, but your Mom needs you. Pull yourself together, for Christ’s sake!”

  I buried my head in my hands and groaned. I’d never heard Coop angry. I’d also never heard him desperate. It had to be bad.

  “Jesus,” I murmured. “I don’t want to be here. I just want all this shit to go away.”

  “I know you do,” Jack said, gently this time. “But you need to see your Mom. Everything else – your Dad, all that crap – let it go, at least for now. You owe it to your Mom to be there for her, and Coop needs you. You guys – you, Coop, Steph – you’re in this together, like it or not.”

  He was right. It wasn’t about Dad, it was about Mom. One problem at a time. I held out my hand and he handed me my phone. I called Coop back.

  We made it to the hospital half an hour later. When we got there, I didn’t think they were going to let me back into the ICU. It was thanks to some smooth-talking by Jack and Coop that they did – and a promise from me, one that I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I was going to be able to keep. I guess I didn’t look like much of a threat now. I could barely manage to put one foot in front of the other. Everything was hazy, and it wasn’t the alcohol this time.

  I left Jack talking to Coop and went straight to Mom. She was still hooked up to the machines, a breathing tube in her mouth, but her head was swathed in bandages. The surgery had been and gone, and now we had to face the brutal reality.

  The drugs weren’t having any effect. They couldn’t find a way to stop the bleeding, they could only drain the blood, and they couldn’t keep doing that forever. We needed a miracle.

  I sat down beside her and held her hand. I was six years old again, but she looked ancient. She didn’t look like my Mom anymore. Where was her strength, her will, her dignity? There was no evidence of it there, in front of me.

  I closed my eyes, and I tried to remember the good times, but it wasn’t that easy. I kept thinking about Robbie, about the day he died, and how frantic she was. She wailed on Dad like a woman possessed. It was a side of her I’d never seen before and would never see again. In the months that followed that day, she was hollow, withdrawn, a shadow of herself. She wouldn’t come out of her bedroom for weeks afterwards. I had no idea how it felt to lose a child, but I know how much it hurt to lose a brother. I wondered if the grief was similar. I wondered if all grief was the same.

  I thought about her life with Coop. She seemed happy, relaxed. She didn’t have to look over her shoulder or wonder what mood he would
be in when he got home. I thought about how much I admired her courage. She didn’t let her life with Dad ruin her life with Coop. She let it go, and I couldn’t imagine how hard that would’ve been. I couldn’t let it go. I was haunted by it, by him. She was stronger than I was. I was the coward of the family, maybe even moreso than Dad.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut, keeping the tears prisoner behind them.

  “Callum.”

  My blood froze. That voice seemed to penetrate the air, pushing its way into my face like the fist it was so often attached to.

  I opened my eyes and turned around, but I didn’t let go of her hand. I needed to protect her from him, even now. Especially now.

  Dad stood there, looking for all the world like he belonged there. He didn’t. This was her space, her time. She deserved to have peace, especially from him.

  “I’m not here to make this harder for you,” he said, more than a little trepidation in his tone. “I’d just really like to talk to you. I think there’s a lot we haven’t said that we need to say, and whatever you’ve got to say to me, I’ll listen. I owe you that.”

  I didn’t want to talk to him about what he owed me. I didn’t want to talk to him, period.

  I let go of Mom’s hand and stood up. He steeled himself, as if he thought I was going to take another shot at him. I wasn’t.

  I just walked past him, past Coop, Steph and Jack, standing watching us from the waiting room, and to the elevator.

  He didn’t try to stop me. No one did.

  Chapter Fifty

  “I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the

  morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.”

  – Dean Martin

  Callum

  I’d picked a different bar this time, one in the opposite direction to the one I’d been thrown out of. I turned my phone off. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I knew what they’d say and I was sick of hearing it. All I wanted was a bottomless glass of whisky.

  I wasn’t used to drinking like this, not anymore. Since I’d met Sass, whether consciously or unconsciously, I’d cut back. Sure, I’d sat at the end of the bar during her shift, but that had been mainly to talk to her, to see her. Beer had been the last thing on my mind.

  God, I wished she was here now. What I wouldn’t give to wrap my arms around her and breathe her in. I wanted to call her, but I didn’t know what to say. Too much time had gone by, too much had happened. It had only been a couple of days, but nothing felt the same, and I was drowning in the unfamiliar.

  The only thing I knew for sure was that I needed to forget. Like I had in the past, I turned to my old friend whisky. Whisky would help me forget, whisky always did. The weird part was, I didn’t even feel like drinking. I just didn’t know what else to do. I wanted to shut my Dad’s voice out of my head, and I figured whisky was as good as a pair of earmuffs as anything in that regard.

  So, that was my plan. I was going to drink myself deaf.

  This bar wasn’t like the other one. It was quieter. There were only a handful of us in there, and all of us were spread out. Clearly not the place to come for conversation, which suited me fine because I had nothing to say to anyone. I sat at one end of the bar, an old guy sitting at the other end. The bartender was a woman, kind of chunky, with dyed blonde hair and dangling, ugly silver earrings. She was in her late fifties by the look of her, or she could’ve been younger, I’m not sure. I wasn’t very good at the guess-the-age game, especially when my mind was on other things. The important thing, the thing that made her a good bartender, was that she could read her customers. She didn’t hover and she didn’t make small-talk, but she was always on hand to fill up my glass. In my book, that made her pretty much perfect.

  Someone sat down next to me, and without looking up, it annoyed the shit out of me. There were at least eight bar stools between me and the next guy, down the other end. Why choose the one right next to me? I took another sip of whisky. This was taking longer than I had hoped.

  The bartender came over to us.

  “What can I get you?” she asked, addressing my new neighbour.

  “Lemonade, thanks. With ice.”

  My heart stopped. I turned to the side and my father was sitting there, his forearms leaning on the bar, seemingly without a care in the world.

  “Can’t you take a damn hint?” I demanded, fixing him with my most withering stare.

  He didn’t seem at all concerned. He just shrugged.

  “I’m thirsty.”

  I shook my head, dumbfounded. What was it gonna take? I stood up and prepared to go and sit somewhere else, but he put his hand on my arm.

  “Don’t go,” he said, his formerly calm demeanour crumbling. “Please. Stay. I won’t talk to you if you don’t want me to.”

  I faltered, standing there, drink in hand. Something about the way he said it got to me. He seemed different, a kind of different that I couldn’t put my finger on. Against my better judgement, I sat down again. I was too tired for this.

  The bartender served him his drink, and he thanked her. For several minutes we just sat there, the eighties soft rock billowing around us out of the sound system. I had a thousand things I wanted to say to him, but I said none of them. All I could think about was Mom, and what she would say if she was awake.

  Finally, I couldn’t stand it a moment longer. With my heart pounding, I turned to him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He seemed to take the question then kick it around for a while before answering.

  “I was here when it happened. I couldn’t just leave.”

  I frowned.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was visiting your Mom. I try to come for a couple of days every month. We’d meet for coffee, or I’d go over to her place, and we’d just talk. I was supposed to meet her the day she collapsed. When she didn’t show up at the coffee shop, I called and Coop answered. He was at the hospital with her.”

  I shook my head, the details swimming around in there.

  “What the hell would you possibly have to talk about?”

  I said it with a decent sprinkling of malice, not that he seemed to notice. His eyes, clear and blue, didn’t waver from mine.

  “Mostly it was just me apologising for the crap I put her through.”

  My heart felt like it was being sucked out through my eyeballs.

  The crap I put her through.

  That didn’t even scratch the surface.

  “I’ve been clean and sober for two years, four months, three weeks and a day,” he said. “And believe me, I’m counting. But that doesn’t mean I’ve wiped the slate clean. I can’t, I know that. What I did, the man I used to be, is something that I have to live with for the rest of my life. I know it’s something she has to live with too, and so do you. I can’t ever apologise enough for what I did, for the person I was, and for how that affected both of you. I wish I could, but I can’t. But regardless of that, I want you both to know that I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve the way I treated you, either of you. You deserved so much better. I loved you, all of you, and I was never the husband or father you needed. I’ll carry that with me for the rest of my life.”

  I wanted to look away but I couldn’t make myself. The music faded into the background, and his words were the only things I heard. That, and the frantic beating of my own heart.

  An apology. The last thing I’d have expected, particularly from him. He never apologised. He just left, and we tried our best to rebuild our lives.

  “You did me a favour that day,” he went on. “The day you threw me out. I knew I had to leave, that I was out of control, but I didn’t have the guts to do it. You were sixteen years old, and you had more courage and strength than I did, a grown man.”

  Courage? Strength? Was he kidding? Couldn’t he see the state I was in?

  He picked up his lemonade and took a sip. When he put his glass back on the bar, he stared at it. I
thought he was done, that it was over, and I was almost ready to get up and walk out, to leave him behind, but he wasn’t finished.

  “You blame me for Robbie’s death. Your mother does, too. She’s right, you’re both right. It was my fault, no one else’s. I did it, and I have to live with that every day. It was the guilt that tore me up inside. After he died… I considered suicide, but I didn’t have the guts. I was a coward y’see, and it wasn’t just the booze that turned me into one. I was a coward before the booze, too. The booze just helped me forget for a while. I thought I was hiding it – from you, from your mother – but I wasn’t. I know that now.”

  What the hell was I supposed to do with any of that? I saw Robbie disappearing under the car and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

  “You’re right,” I said, my voice wavering. “I do blame you for Robbie’s death. I blame you for a lot of things.”

  He nodded, then turned to look at me again.

  “I’m not asking you to forgive me. I don’t deserve that. I don’t deny that it was my fault. I know I can’t just snap my fingers and make the last thirty years disappear so we can start again. I really want the chance to earn the right to be your father, I want to be a part of your life – even a small part – but I understand if you don’t want me to be. I just had to ask.”

  My head was spinning. I had that dizzy feeling that comes with standing on the edge of a precipice, staring down into the void. The thing that frightened me most was that it was my own face that stared back up at me from out of the clouds.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  “Love is the most powerful energy there is.”

  – Lenny Kravitz

  Callum

  Having a drink with my father was the most surreal experience I’d ever had. It bypassed everything – reality, fantasy, and everything in between. There was no way I could forget my childhood. It was a part of me, it had shaped me, and I was still angry about that because I’d had no control over it. I didn’t think I’d ever forget it, or forgive him for taking Robbie from us.