He still sometimes dreams of it. The day his father visited him. The day things changed. He sleeps, innocent and firmly tucked beneath sheet and quilt, and the visions come to him.
By the end, his face was a mess. Tears left thin salty tracks on his cheeks, his mouth dribbling with spit and rage. His father’s face was the opposite: an austere landscape of desert-dry crinkles and a lightly grimacing mouth.
His father had surprised him. A month after starting his Junior year he was once again settling into dormitory life. He had begun to gather about him a cluster of new friends, a gaggle of new opinions about who he was and how the world worked. Reinventing himself for the umpteenth time since leaving home. And then the old man had to come and shatter all that. In the end, he thought the man hadn’t been forced. He thought the old man had come specifically to devastate him.
The old man stood in the doorway, tweed cap in hand and tan jacket on, staring into the face of a stranger. The boy was tall now, and thin, tufts of wild brown hair and his mother’s eyes. A long, sloping nose and pointed chin. Stark contrast to his father’s strong jaw and glowering brown eyes.
“Can I come in, then?”
“Oh. Right. Yeah, of course.”
The boy didn’t know what to call this man. He supposed “Dad” was appropriate, but it just never came out naturally. He awkwardly stepped aside and shut the door behind him as his father surveyed his living quarters.
“Spaceous. Quite nice. You share it, I assume?”
“Yeah. Roommate’s just gone out. Had a date,” he paused, trying to address the man directly, “Dad,” he ventured, “Why are you here?”
The old man had recoiled slightly at the familial term. He spun to face the window, looking out over the moonlight grass of the quad, still littered with evidence of that day’s relaxation. He sighed.
“I’m not sure how to tell you this,” he began, lying, “Your mother’s died.”
There it was. Point-blank, no punches pulled. It hung in the air like the heat of a jungle, all pressure and smells and the occasional insect. He heard the boy began to stutter and blubber, a coffee pot beginning to percolate.
“Wh—What?”
“Your mother. She… she didn’t do so well after you left. I didn’t want to worry you,” the old man was speaking through clenched teeth now, biting back a bitter smile, “She had to be hospitalized and… she didn’t make it.”
“Well what happened?!?” The boy’s heart was pounding. He wanted to destroy the man before him, he wanted to kill him for his calm, for the clinical and patronizing way he was reciting the facts of his mother’s death. But he couldn’t make himself move. He was frozen, everything sped up. Thoughts came faster than the tongue could move, and possible action plans were all thwarted by the single, monolithic factor: the absence of his mother from this life.
“You don’t need to know the details. I can tell you’re very upset and we can speak about this later. I just thought you should know. Be told. In person.” The last words came out a bit too harsh, as though proving what the boy already suspected. The old man was rubbing it in. If not enjoying it, at least getting some sense of recompense for what he viewed as the massive wrong of the boy’s very existence.
“Tell… me.” The words came out strained. The boy breathed deeply now, trying to relax himself.
“We can speak about this tomorrow. I’m staying in town.”
“Tell me!” The boy shouted. His voice filled the room, and his fist reflexively shot out, slamming against the heavy wooden door. Numbing tingles of pain radiated up his arm, but he didn’t care. The old man’s eyes had widened at that.
“She took her own life. She had trouble with you leaving. She was so attached, and she didn’t adjust well. They took her… to the hospital. She cursed me. Damned me. Somehow she got ahold of something, killed herself. Ended it. I guess life wasn’t living without you.” The last words dripped with cool venom.
“How can you not care? What did she do to you? Was she so awful?”
“You didn’t see it, boy. You never could have. She forgot me. Forsook me. For you. From the day you came home, she doted on you, worshipped you. As though you were the key to her fucking happiness. As though you held all the answers she thought she’d found with me, when I was just a means to some other end. And that end was you. She thought you were special. They all fucking do.
“Look at you, here, in this hallowed hall of learning,” his voice rich with sarcasm, he went on, ranting and raving, “People kissing your ass night and day, telling you how special you are and how wonderful you are. Smiling at you, giving you A’s, pats on the back, it’s been your whole life. But what about me? I was nothing more than a sperm donor. You’ll never understand how that feels. To be left behind, to be forgotten by someone who had loved you, who had promised to stay with you through thick and thin… In sickness and in fucking health. Well she left me for most of her health and came back in sickness only to tell me to go to hell! I’m worthless. I’ve been worthless your whole life. Whereas you bring happiness and glory wherever you go. I’m jealous of it. But more than that, every time I see you bring a smile to someone’s face… every time I see happiness in your life, all I can think of is my mistakes.”
It was the most the old man had ever said to the boy. They both realized this in the silence, as his words reverberated off thin walls. The old man was gasping, and suddenly appeared very small. He had let out all he’d held onto for the past 20 years. And now he was empty.
He gruffly repeated that he was staying in town and would see the boy in the morning. The boy stepped out of his way, quietly fuming. The heat of tears in his eyes and on his cheeks. The door opened, and the old man said over his shoulder, “You were her everything. That was too much responsibility for you to have. Good night.”
The door closes, in his dreams. Only for the knocking to start so the whole thing can play out again and again. His feet twitch and his face contorts in the darkness, his head turning from side to side as though he could deny what he knew to have happened.
What he knew to be true.
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