In My Dreams I Hold a Knife(60)

My eyes filled with hot tears, knees and elbows burning. But I didn’t let myself cry. I watched him, his trembling fingers.

“I’m young,” my dad said out of nowhere. “I have my whole life ahead of me. I’m going to get out of this shithole town and go to DC. Use my damn degree and stop wasting my potential.”

Hunched over in the darkness, arms spread over the floor, my dad looked nothing like the king I’d drawn. I was frozen and afraid; I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. For time to race backward and deposit me, safe, back in my room.

My drawings were scattered, but I was too scared to pick them up. Instead, I crouched, watching my dad put the pills back in the bottle. Then he slumped against the dresser and looked at me. Really looked.

“I hate it here,” he whispered. He squinted at the light over my shoulder, which came from the door I’d left cracked open. His pupils turned to slits, like a cat’s. “I really do.”

“No,” I said, feeling my chest cleave.

As he dropped his gaze from the light, his pupils dilated, the blackness pooling in each eye. I watched the change with horror.

“Why do you insist on dragging me down?” he whispered.

I scrambled back, head hitting the wall.

“It’s supposed to be better than this.” His eyes were now twin black holes, pupils drowning the white. And I knew, with sudden clarity, that I didn’t hold the cure. I was the thing making him sick.

My mother flung open the door, and light flooded the room. My father shrank back, and they stared at each other for one horrible, frozen moment. And then they started screaming.

Hours later, I let my mother hug me, apologize, cry. She brought my drawings back, and I let her put them next to me in bed, waited until she left the room before I tore them to pieces and stuffed them in the trash. For days afterward, I told her I was okay. For a year, I stayed quiet, especially after we moved from Bedford to Norfolk, so my dad could transfer to a different branch of the steel company.

I pushed the memory of his sickness, and its cause, so far down it formed a tiny rupture in the center of me, a small black hole of my very own. And no matter how many years passed, I never looked inside.

Until senior year of college. Home for Christmas, when I woke from that nightmare gasping, still feeling the cold gun pressed against my forehead, still seeing the drowning pupils of the drug dealer, and the dream terror was replaced, by sinister sleight of hand, with the sudden rush of memory, unburied after fourteen years.

Only hours later, we got the call: my father had been found in a motel room, arms splayed over the side of the bed, dead of an overdose.

No one came to his funeral. When my grandparents arrived at the burial plot and saw it was just me, my mom, and the priest, my grandmother burst into sobs so violent my grandpa had to hold her to keep her from crumbling. Instead of hugging us, patting my shoulder like she did when I was young, my grandmother pointed a trembling finger.

“It’s your fault,” she said, eyes blazing at my mother. “You trapped him with your pregnancy. You made him miserable. You killed him. And look!” She flung her arms at the empty grounds. “No one even cares he’s gone. He was supposed to be somebody.”

My mother took two steps forward and slapped my grandmother hard across the cheek. She staggered back, mouth open, and my mother strode from the burial plot, out of the cemetery, never looking back.

So in the end, it was just the three of us. My grandparents and I stood silent as the priest read the burial rites and my father’s coffin lowered into the ground. It was a freezing winter day, and I’d left my coat in the car, but the strange thing was, I could barely feel a thing. There was this snowy fuzz, a blanket of white noise, both inside my skin and out. As the dirt fell, shovelful after shovelful, two voices echoed in my head, on a loop timed with the soft patter of earth hitting the coffin. My father’s voice, pulled from the recovered memory: I’m supposed to be better than this. And my grandmother’s: No one even cares he’s gone.

I did, of course. But perhaps I didn’t count.

When the holiday break was over and I returned to Duquette, I avoided everyone, sleeping during the day, walking around campus at night, when Heather and Caro were asleep. Sometimes I had clipped conversations with my mom. Strangely, she’d started calling me, which she’d never done before.

Then one night I got back to my dorm and Caro was waiting on my bed, tears in her eyes. Somehow, though I hadn’t told her, she knew what had happened. She wanted to hug and talk, to be my best friend, but I pushed her aside, told her I wasn’t ready. She’d just nodded and thrust a sheet of paper at me before leaving.

I dropped to my bed, looking at the paper without interest. It was a poem by Mary Oliver. I scanned until I came to the last line, a question: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

I sat up with a surge of anger. Why should I be satisfied with one wild and precious life? A vision of my father’s grave flashed, three small figures huddled around it. It wasn’t fair. People deserved more than that, more than a small, brief existence, only to fade away in the end.

Tears stung my eyes. I tore the poem and stuffed it in the trash. One life, full of mistakes, and not enough time—not enough chances—to do it right. It wasn’t enough. Who was this Mary Oliver, encouraging people to accept smallness, while in the meantime she was famous? While in the meantime, she knew her life would be infinite—her thoughts and words repeated for hundreds of years. I wanted that. I wanted to become big enough, important enough, to never really die. Then I would never get trapped in a hole in the ground like my dad, with no one around to care.