Unfinished Business

CHAPTER 16: SOMETIMES ALIVE DADS ARE THE WORST DADS OF ALL

It knew exactly how to freeze me. It knew exactly how to get into the parts of my mind I didn't want to touch and the things I didn't want to remember. 

Since I'm a stupid little bitch trapped in a perpetual cycle of anger and self-loathing, it worked perfectly on me. Like I was some sort of little puppet or porcelain doll in a china closet, I was trapped in another horrible moment in my past. Maybe it was disdain at my own anger at Ethan, or the way that parties make me feel, or the still-lingering effects of the earlier scuffle between Blanche and Rosie, but something made me feel like shit and like I would never get better.

I was trapped in a moment from a few months before. It was identical to something that happened months before that, and just last week, and three years ago, and when I was twelve.

In the memory, my father was yelling. He was screaming his thin lips off about some grade I got. That time, it was because of an eighty-seven percent on a history exam. Before, it was because of something stupid I had said at a church event. After, it was the same: taking a little too long in the bathroom at a youth group function. Every time, it was something little that embarrassed him.

He was screaming in my head about how I was a disappointment, about how he was surprised I even had friends because I was so stupid, so annoying, so unlovable. His face was red like he was about to have a heart attack. Mom was no help. She just sat on the couch, looking at something on her computer. Her face was made up and composed like nothing was happening near her. Thank goodness Cash and Naomi weren't home yet, right? Thank god they couldn't hear anything that was happening, right?

I was stuck in this moment of weakness, of watching myself watch myself watch my father screaming, of the reflection of my own blank face in his glistening, perfectly white-teeth. I knew where the memory went next. That time, he didn't stop at yelling, or at putting his fingers in my face, or at getting mad when I flinched at every gesticulation. He didn't stop at punching the wall or the side of his big black recliner in the middle of the fucking living room. I could remember the feeling of his palm across my face, of my nose cracking, of blood flowing freely down my face, gathering in my philtrum, breaching my lips and my teeth. I remember the taste of blood on my tongue as I bit down on it and he hit me again, from the opposite direction. I remember the way my neck popped, and how that made him angrier.

It didn't leave marks, so it wasn't abuse, right? Right? So, in theory, I was fine. I turned out okay. It didn't affect me, not in any lasting way. Right? And he was correct about everything. I was worthless. I was unlovable. Even in real life, in the middle of the fight with the Eye For An Eye, I could feel and understand that. Rationally, I knew it wasn't true, but it was hard not to feel it.

Rationally, I also knew that the memory didn't end there. After all of Dad's yelling was over, I was hunched over the bathroom sink, trying pinch the bridge of my nose and get it to stop bleeding without using up Mom's precious fucking toilet paper. Apparently, I made the mistake of leaving the door open, and Cash came home and saw the state of me. He saw the tears and knew it wasn't just, in his words, "a normal stupid nosebleed because you don't drink enough water when you're not marching." After shooing away Naomi (who has never had to bear the brunt of Dad's anger or Mom's coldness, thank god), he helped me out. He didn't reassure me with words, but with his presence and with a point-by-point recollection of someone's playthrough of one of those Five Nights At Freddy's games. He used to watch that bullshit on the computers in the school library back when we were in junior high together, back when it was easier to be alive, back when things were fucked up but we didn't know they were fucked up. It's stupid, that that was what made me happier.

But it was. It was a hand on my shoulder and a sorrowful grin. It was the knowledge that someone knew exactly what was happening to me and, while he couldn't make it better, he could make it easier just by knowing about it. The bond of a shared shattered childhood was hard to break. (And, yet, somehow, I had broken it. Just a little, I had broken it.)