The Anti-Boyfriend(70)
Looking down into my coffee, I chuckled.
“You can talk to me,” he said. “What happened?”
Silence settled over us as I contemplated whether to tell him the truth.
“It’s a long story.”
“Do I look like I have somewhere to go? Talk to me.”
If someone had told me a few months ago that the first person I’d open up to about Carys would be my father, I wouldn’t have believed it. I downed the last of my coffee before crushing the cup and throwing it into a nearby trash can. “I broke up with someone I care about very much. I didn’t know how to face her every day. So I left. It was cowardly, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice. She lived right next door to me.”
Over the next several minutes, I told him all about Carys, Sunny, and the accident. At least by choosing to open up to my father, I didn’t have to explain how my past related to my present. He understood full well where I was coming from and why I’d freaked out.
“You know…” he said, “Fear of failure is a powerful thing. I always feared failing in my career. I definitely failed as a father, but that didn’t seem to matter as much to me a decade ago. I see things in a different light now.”
“I never really looked at my problem as a fear of failure,” I said.
“But it is. Your fear is of failing people, harming people. You have to ask yourself if you really deserve a life sentence for something that happened when you were practically a kid and wasn’t entirely your fault.”
“You know how I feel about that.”
“I know what you’ve made yourself believe, but it’s time to stop blaming yourself.”
“You were angry with me for so many years,” I said. “I’m surprised you’re telling me you don’t think it was my fault.”
“I might have been angry that it happened, but never once did I feel like you were in the wrong. That other car was going too fast, and it was a foggy night. You were momentarily distracted, trying to get where you needed to go. You weren’t drunk. You weren’t being reckless. Even if you hadn’t been using the navigation device and your reflexes had kicked in faster, you don’t know that you could have stopped what happened.”
“If you felt that way, why did you act like you blamed me?”
“Because I was bitter at life. I expressed that through my treatment of you, and I’m very sorry for that, son. It wasn’t fair. I’m sorry I didn’t say all of this sooner.”
Resting my head on the wall behind my seat, I let out a long breath. “The accident with Carys… It felt like the same nightmare all over again.”
“Yes, I’m sure it did. But no one was hurt. So there had to have been more to your decision to flee New York than the accident?”
“It wasn’t so much the accident as it was what the accident represented. It made me feel like I couldn’t be trusted to keep them safe. And the responsibility of a child is just so…huge. Literally, her life was in my hands—not only that day, but it would’ve been every day thereafter. So many opportunities to fuck up.”
“So you’d rather someone else raise this child you clearly care about, take care of the woman you love, because you’re scared to mess up? I got news for ya, that’s a good way to waste your life. And let me tell you, if you ever find yourself with a health scare like mine, you’re gonna wish you had taken life by the horns and let yourself love the ones you cared about when you had the chance. It wouldn’t be much fun for me to be alone right now. All I have is my family. I took your mother for granted for a long time. But she’s been my rock through all this, despite some rough years together. Where would I be without her—and without you and your brother—taking turns sitting with me so I don’t have to be alone?”
I turned to him. “I’m glad I can be here for you right now.”
“You’ve paid your dues. I’d rather you go back to being there for you.”
“I can’t leave you like this.”
“Sure, you can. You can keep tabs on me through Mom. I’m just a flight away if you need to come home again. Don’t use me as an excuse to hide from things you haven’t dealt with. You have to go back to New York eventually. You’re going to have to face her sooner or later.”
Would I? Or would I just give up the apartment and move somewhere else so I didn’t have to see Carys on a daily basis?
“I think she might be letting her daughter’s father back into her life. I don’t trust him. But I feel like I don’t trust myself either.”
“You hit the nail on the head. You don’t trust yourself. Faith in oneself is a risk. You need to accept that anything worth having is going to come with the risk of loss. Maybe the reason you haven’t been able to deal with things now is because you’ve never dealt with the past. You ran away instead.”
“How do I deal with the past now? It’s been a decade.”
“Maybe you need to see Becca, see how she’s handling life.”
My ex and I had grown apart quickly after the accident. She chose to end things, and I left town. But I’d thought about her a lot over the years. Only the more time that passed, the harder it became to make contact.
Maybe my father was right. Maybe somehow I needed to hear that she was okay.