Eliza and Her Monsters(47)
No, sorry, that’s a lie too. They called me Warfield Wallace because it was alliterative, a play on my last name, and more intimidating than Wallace alone. And also because I FUCKED SHIT UP.
Sorry. I am not at the top of my game today.
I loved playing football. I loved hitting people, working in a team, and being with my friends. I loved winning. I loved how proud I made my dad. Not Tim, but my dad Dad, my biological dad. He loved football. He was a big guy, liked grilling out, Fourth of July fireworks, and throwing his kids into swimming pools. You could hear his laugh a mile away. Pretty much an all-around American. He wasn’t religious, but he read the Westcliff Star at breakfast every morning like he’d go to hell if he didn’t.
A little background about my dad: he never finished college. His family didn’t have the money. He got a job in a corporate cubicle, trying to sell things to people over the phone. Long hours, little pay. He was already married to my mom—not Vee—and she was pregnant with me. I don’t know if they got married because she was pregnant, or if she got pregnant after they were married. I guess it doesn’t matter. Dad didn’t like talking about that time, so I don’t know much about it. Mom left him before I turned a year old. I don’t remember her, so I was never upset about it, but my dad was sometimes.
A year or two later, he met Vee and they had Lucy, and things were good. Dad was the reason Lucy likes sports so much. He always wanted us to challenge ourselves. If something seemed too difficult for us, it was all the more reason to try. Lucy skipped a grade in school because of it. Dad challenged himself too—when he came home from work, he was louder and more colorful, full of energy. Wanted to help us with school projects or practice. Always put himself in the middle of everything.
There were dark parts too. He didn’t let us see those, but a few times I walked into the kitchen late at night and found him hunched over the table, head in his hands. When he thought he was alone in the house in the middle of the day, he stared out the front door like the street was some unreachable promised land. When we grilled out, he made extra food for everyone else and ate nothing himself. If he and I were the only ones around, he ranted about his job and forbade me from ever doing anything that made me unhappy, even if that meant going without food or clothes or a roof.
Have you seen it in your parents? That moment when they become people? I think you have. It sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? One day they’re parents, and the next they say something racist, or get a cut that takes too long to heal, or make a simple mistake driving, and a facade falls away and they become mortals like the rest of us. After the facade is gone, it can never come back.
That darkness made him mortal. I saw it in my dad before the day he died, and I denied it. I shouldn’t have. I should have told Vee, I should have told a doctor, I should have told someone. Over winter break of my sophomore year, we were driving home from a Christmas break spent in Tennessee with Vee’s family. It was only me and my dad; Vee and Lucy were coming home the next day. Dad was on one of his rants. He’d gotten a little time off from work for the holidays, but not much, and he made me swear I’d never get a job like his. I had never seen him so worked up before. I told him I thought it would be smarter to get a job that paid decently, at least at first. It wouldn’t be so bad, as long as I didn’t make it my life.
That only made him angrier. I know now that he wasn’t in his right mind. At the time, his yelling was incoherent, and when he stopped the car and told me to get out, I thought he was joking. It was almost January, freezing, and there were another few miles to go until home. He kicked me out right before Wellhouse Bridge and kept driving.
The second before he hit the gas, my stomach dropped. Really dropped. Like it wasn’t there anymore. Sometimes the premonition of something happening is worse than the actual event, because you know it’s coming and you can’t do anything to stop it. He was going too fast for Wellhouse Turn, even without the ice on the road.
The Westcliff Star likes to lump my dad’s death in with the other accidents that happened there. That band bus. The drunk teenagers. The woman with the kids. They think it was the ice that sent him off the road, but I stood there and watched him and I know that car went straight as an arrow until the moment it disappeared over the hill. I sprinted across the bridge after him, fell on a patch of black ice, smashed my face on the ground, broke my nose. Got back up, kept running. There’s no good way to go down the incline at Wellhouse Turn, and I don’t remember how I tried it, but I know I broke my leg too before I got to the bottom. They were the kind of breaks you don’t feel at the time because of adrenaline and shock and fear. The car was at the bottom, sitting on all four wheels. Only when I got around to the other side of it did I see the smashed front of the car and my dad hanging out the windshield.
He was dead as soon as the car hit the ground. When you go straight off Wellhouse Turn that fast, you pretty much always are. I don’t remember calling an ambulance, but I remember my phone smeared with blood after I pulled it away from my face. I don’t remember trying to yank my dad the rest of the way through the windshield, but I remember sitting in the snow at the nose of the car, staring at his blank eyes while he lay across the accordion folds of the hood. I don’t remember the paramedics getting there and asking if I was in the car with him, but I must have said yes, because that’s how the story came out.
That’s what the Star does, right? Says “a man and his son” when they list off all the people who’ve gone over that turn? I only read the Star once after that, two days after, and I never read it again.