24. Dante #2
His face looks more like it did when I knew him twenty years ago than how it appeared in his hospital bed at the end—but I'd recognize either version.
After all, I favor my father. We share the same strong nose and jaw.
The same thick dark hair, now sprouting around bark like vines reclaiming a statue.
The same cutting eyes I once believed held secret wisdom, before I learned what they actually concealed.
"Father," I whisper.
Despite standing a dozen feet away, he lifts his face.
"Michael." The branches of his tree shift, crackling with dry leaves. "Is that you, son?"
Part of me is frozen, unable to move. Another part wants to turn and run back through the screaming trees until this place is nothing but a memory.
"I'm here, Dante." Virgil's voice reaches me low and private. A sacred thread stretched taut between us.
I meet my poet-guide's eyes—the softness I once dismissed as weakness—and offer him a pained smile. Then I turn and face my father, closing the distance between us. "It's me."
"You ended up here, too, then. Damned place." He shakes his face within the trunk, bark rippling with the movement. "Damned god. Didn't attend enough confessions, I suppose. No appreciation for a busy man's schedule."
I almost scoff. Confession means nothing here. But I'm at a loss for words or reactions. I'd never intended to see this man again. And yet—
"I visited you in the hospital. When you were dying. You never woke, but I was there."
My father's brows rise. He nods slowly. "I think… I think I knew that. Felt you there, perhaps. Decent of you to come. We should have reconciled before then. That Dante pride, though." He shakes his head again, leaves rustling. "Gets us every time."
"Did you regret it, in the end?” My voice emerges thin, nearly soundless.
"Regret?"
Virgil stands close enough that I can sense him, but just out of direct sight, offering me privacy. Somehow, I don't want it. I wish he'd draw closer.
"What you did to me." My voice steadies. "How you betrayed me."
"Betrayed you?" He chuckles, and it's the same dismissive sound I heard a thousand times across dinner tables and in boardrooms. "Michael. This again? How many years have to pass before a man can be absolved?"
"You slept with my fiancée—"
He scoffs, but I continue.
"You abused my mother. Abused me. Abandoned us both."
"I prepared you." He spits the words, and leaves scatter from his branches, drifting around my feet.
"You were always a sensitive child. Such a soft little thing. Do you think you’d have survived in the world, thrived the way you did, if it wasn't for me?
" His eyes narrow. "I watched your career, you know.
People called me for references, and I gave them.
Pulled strings you never knew existed. But of course, you wouldn't acknowledge that.
You're a 'self-made man.' Never once thanking the shoulders you stood on to reach the top. "
"Shoulders I stood on?" The words tear out of me.
I slam my hand against my chest, and even though my heart doesn't pound in response, I feel the ghost of it, the phantom racing of blood I no longer possess.
For once, I'm not ashamed of the display. "You never did one good thing for me that didn’t have selfish motives.”
"Is that right?" He exhales, and it reaches me like a rot-sweet wind.
"You have no idea. Your childhood was a paradise compared to mine.
A goddamn vacation. You have no concept of how much easier your climb was with me clearing the path.
I learned early that mercy gets you devoured.
That people like us—people born without important names—don't get rewarded for being good.
We earn our way to the top. I taught you that. Me."
I stare up at my father, and it hits me with the force of revelation.
Even here, even rooted in hell, bark consuming his flesh, surrounded by the screaming damned, he is exactly who he has always been. Unchanged. Unrepentant. So thoroughly calcified in his own narrative that no amount of suffering has cracked it.
"You taught me to close myself off," I say. The heat has drained from my voice. What remains is something quieter. Sadder.
"I'm sorry if I wasn't tender enough for you, Michael.
" He sighs, theatrical and aggrieved. "The best I ever got from my father was the back of his hand. I had to act as my own father, my own mentor. As an adult, I read the Stoics. And their teachings clarified what I’d already learned to be true.
Emotions—they only complicate things. Cause problems. Learning not to feel, that's the path to success. Did I not teach you that? Did I not give you the gift that built your empire? Did I not let you go yet still help you?” He shifts within his trunk, bark groaning.
"Now enough of this. Find an axe somewhere and get me out of here.”
I look at the bark swallowing his body, at the twisted branches where his arms should be. "I cannot help you."
His face transforms. Rage creases his features until they're nearly indistinguishable from the bark surrounding them. "Easy enough to show up at a dying man's bedside, but when it requires actual effort, you abandon me. That's you, Michael. Always abandoning people when it gets difficult."
I blink at him. The blade strikes exactly where he aimed it—an old wound, precisely targeted. But something shifts in me.
"Emotions aren't a weakness." I hear the words leave my mouth and realize I believe them. "Thinking they were, that was the weakness. It cost me everything that mattered and gained me nothing of true value."
I sense Virgil's attention sharpen. I don't meet his gaze, but I can feel it. Can imagine the subtle brightening of his face, the smallest lift at the corner of his mouth.
"Easy enough to say now," my father growls.
"You weren't complaining when you enjoyed the penthouse and the portfolio and the executive car service.
When you dined with senators and watched your net worth double.
Fickle. You always were. No wonder you ended up in this pit.
Always chasing something new because you can't focus your mind long enough to—"
"It doesn't matter." I laugh, a real laugh, soft and wondering, and it's enough to silence him.
"What doesn't?"
"Your opinions." I shake my head slowly. "I spent my entire life wanting your approval. Your apology. Some acknowledgment that what you did was wrong. What a waste that was."
For once, he has nothing to say. I fill the silence.
"I don't need you to agree with me." I turn to Virgil. "Do I?"
"No," Virgil whispers. His hand hovers forward, suspended in the air between us, the ghost of a gesture, a supportive touch he cannot complete. But I feel him anyway. His presence. The way he has looked at me throughout this journey like I'm someone worth fighting for. Suffering for.
Someone worth loving, exactly as I am. Imperfect and afraid and broken.
"All I ever wanted for you was your own good, Michael." My father's voice has shifted, clipped now, defensive. "I sought you out, if you recall. I—"
"Okay," I say.
The word settles over me, and it reminds me, just slightly, of the light wrapping around that child. There's a loosening in my chest. A weight I didn't know I was carrying begins to lift.
"You can believe that,” I continue. “We've had two different experiences of the same events, and I don't need to change yours. I don't even need you to understand mine."
"Well, thank god for that." My father sniffs, and for a moment, his face looks more tree than man. "We've never been of one mind."
"No. We haven't." I release a breath I didn't know I was holding. "I just desperately wanted us to be."
I take a step closer and really look at my father's face, study it one last time. The features I inherited. The coldness I learned. The fear beneath the cruelty that I can finally see for what it always was.
"I hope you find a way out of this someday," I say. "I genuinely do."
"Michael." Something flickers in his voice. Almost desperate. Almost human.
"Goodbye, Father."
“Michael!”
I turn and walk back down the path, into the corridor of screaming trees. Virgil falls into step beside me. The faces around us howl and snarl and plead—you'll regret this, you're just like us, you think you're so much better, don't you, come back, come back, COME BACK—
But I keep my head down. My feet on the path. My shoulder nearly brushing the space where Virgil walks.
Because nothing they say can touch me now.
I've spent nearly forty years carrying my father's voice in my head, his judgments, his expectations, his endless catalogue of my failures. I let it shape every choice I made, every wall I built, every person I pushed away.
But his voice was never the truth. It was just noise.
And I'm done letting noise drown out everything that matters.