Sawyer
This time I don’t screw around with walking around the block in the opposite direction.
I walk straight to my dad’s house, two left turns, and it doesn’t take nearly long enough until I’m taking the porch stairs two at a time and pounding my fist against the door.
Too late, I wonder if I should have pulled it back, if he’s really, you know, dying, but what’s done is done.
The door swings open almost immediately to reveal Jem. Her dark hair is piled on top of her head, a little messy, like she’s been leaning up against the couch.
“Hi.”
“Hey, Jem. Is he home?”
She shoots me a look. “Where else would he be, if he wasn’t here?”
I lift one shoulder, then drop it back into place. “You’re here, so I’m assuming he is, too.”
A weak voice filters toward the door from the den, which is in the back corner of the house. “Who is it, Jem-bug?”
Jem looks up at me, her jaw squared like she’s debating whether or not to let me across the threshold, but then something shifts in her dark eyes and she steps back.
“It’s Sawyer.”
“Sawyer?” Even from here, he sounds nothing like the man I used to know, the thundering, red-faced behemoth who would shake the foundations of the house with his rage.
I follow his voice back to the den, but it’s not the den—not like I remember it, anyway. It’s been turned into a hospital room.
“I’m going to grab some food,” Jem calls from the front entryway. “Anything you want, Dad?”
“A shake,” says the skeletal being propped up in an actual hospital bed that’s been moved into the room. “Chocolate.”
I take him in.
There is no way a man in his state can drink a chocolate milkshake. Even getting it through the straw would be hard. A sharp ache zings through my chest. I’ve hated him for longer than I worshipped him, but the sight in front of me…
He’s wasting away.
There’s not much left of him at all, yet here he is, tucked into the hospital bed, the back on an incline so he can watch TV.
The ratty blue couch from my teen years has been replaced with something Jem must have picked out on sale—floral, inoffensive—and I can see where she usually sits, curled up on one end, because the other side is completely untouched.
My dad doesn’t have hair anymore, and he turns his skinny neck to look at me during the next commercial break. “Sawyer.”
“Hey.”
There’s a pause as we look at each other.
“You can come in, you know. I’m not going to—” The smile on his face is a cruel parody. “I can’t come after you anymore.”
“I can see that.” I try to crack a grin—God knows why—but it’s impossible to keep one on my face. My gut is a churning mix of disgust and despair and hate.
And something else.
Zelda’s face flashes up in my mind, her eyes wide, her expression hopeful. You could still go to school. I bet, if we got into another conversation about my dad, she’d say something like, you could still forgive him.
I can practically hear her saying it, and something cracks open, the first fissure in the thick wall I built around myself years ago. I don’t want her to have to tell me. I want to be…
It sounds ridiculous as hell, but I want to be the kind of guy who proves her right without her having to ask.
My jaw tightens. I’m not sure I can do it.
I take one step into the den. It smells like hospital and death in the room, and every cell in my body screams at me to go back outside, where it’s sunny and fresh, not stifling.
But this is what I came here to do.
And I see why Aunt Linda has been so insistent.
“What are you watching?”
It seems like the least loaded question I can ask, but my dad’s hand lifts from the blanket, picking at a remote control. The TV goes off with a click that echoes in the thick silence of the room.
“Come over here.” He motions toward the end of the bed. When I was a kid, he would have taken up the whole thing. Now his legs are only twigs underneath the blanket.
Well, there’s no point in dragging this out. I cross the room in four steps and sit down gingerly at the foot of the bed. Then, because I’m a grown man and not a scared little kid anymore, I look him in the eye.
His eyes are like mine and still, despite the rest of his body revolting against him, bright. Not with joy, though. With pain.
We stare at each other for a long moment.
“You’ve filled out.”
“I worked at it.”
“I can see that.” He smiles then. He’s echoing me, but I’m an echo of him, even if I don’t want to be. The truth of it comes like a sucker punch. “You doing okay?”
“I make a living.”
“Doing what?”
“I work for a guy in the city.”
“Doing what?”
What’s the point in lying? Is there any time left for that kind of shit? “I’m a heavy for a drug dealer in the city. He’s a dangerous piece of shit, but he’d rather not do his own dirty work.”
My dad nods slowly. “That what you want?”
I look down at the blanket, pulled up carefully to his waist, then back at his face. “Do you care?”
“Yeah.” He folds his hands together in his lap. “I was a monster, Sawyer. There’s no getting around it.”
My instinct is to shrug it off, tell him that he really wasn’t, but I can’t. I can’t do that. “You were.”
“But you don’t have to be.”
“I’m not a monster.”
“You really think that?”
Anger bursts like a rocket in my chest, but I force my voice to stay level. “You’re really going to call me a monster after what you—”
He raises his hands. It looks like it takes an effort. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Well, what did you mean?”
“Look, son, you can be pissed at me until I’m in my grave. Afterward, if you want. But I was saying—” He takes in a hard breath. “You think you’re doing the right thing? For yourself?”
I open my mouth to tell him that of course I do, but Zelda crashes into my mind again, and when her face slides away I feel a wash of relief like I’m back in that college kid’s room, glad he’s getting the money so I don’t have to hit him.
No. I haven’t thought for a while that this is a good thing, but there might not be any way out now.
“No.”
He considers me again. “You should do something else.”
“Why?”
“You’re too good for it, Sawyer. You’re too good. You’ve always been too good. It used to make me mad as hell when I was drunk.”
“Maybe.”
“Can I tell you something?”
I shift on the bed. “Sure.”
“Are you listening?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
I don’t want him to tell me he’s sorry. I don’t want to hear it. I want to keep hating him, for as long as I live, so it’s never a problem if he dies or does something else that’s fucked up, and hearing it takes the breath out of my lungs, squeezes tight on my throat.
“I—” I can’t find any words. I’m trying to get a breath. I have to get out, I have to go. “I’ll come around soon, okay?”
Then I’m walking out, shutting the door behind me, walking fast, walking right to her, hoping against hope that she’s home.