I felt like my body was weightless, but heavy at the same time. I leaned against the pillar of the porch. My hand instinctively went to my stomach. I felt sick and like pieces of my body were falling off, yet numb from head totoe.
“You should go. She’s taking this really hard. The sight of you is making me angry aswell.”
“Chad.”
I said his name and pushed myself off the pillar. I took a step toward him and had hoped for something. Anything. I didn’t know why, but I felt like I needed my brother. I knew we hadn’t been friends since I was little, but as warped as it was, I neededhim.
“Go back to your little college fuck pad, Ry. I’ll call you in a few days to let you know about the funeral. There are some procedural things that have to be done first with thestate.”
“Chad,” I begged. “Did,” I shook while I desperately tried to make myself ask the hard question as to if Dad had been killed or had done it himself. I quickly blurted it out because I feared he’d go inside. “Did Dad do it?” I swallowed the bile back down. “Did he killhimself?”
A shadow of anger flashed across his face as he stepped closer tome.
“Did Dad do it?” Chad repeated my question and shook his head. “No, Ry. He was murdered. By you.” I frowned when he walked a few steps closer to me. “You killed him when you got him in trouble. You killed him when he went to prison for the rest of his life.” He raised his eyebrows at me, challenging me to say something. When I didn’t, he slapped my chest and said, “Hope you sleep well with theguilt.”
He turned and went inside, letting the screen door bang shut. The wood front door quickly followed. My feet felt like lead as I walked away from my home. I took the bus to the Venice Beach stop and made it to my pier before the tears fellagain.
For hours, I sat alone at the place where I could be me. I could cry, be angry, pound sand. I did all of those things that night. Why did I even care about the news of my dad? He hated me. Or so Ithought.
My mom’s angry voice echoed in my ears,“Your father loved you and wanted to cure your impurities! Look what his love for you did! You sent him to prison! You got himkilled!”
I shook my head at herwords.
He didn’t loveme.
None of themdid.
“You were such a dirtyboy!”
I poured sand from one hand into the other while I considered her words. Was it because I masturbated a lot when I was a teenager? I remembered how upset my folks were when they found out about my self-discovery. I was beaten and whipped each time they caught me. Is that why I wasdirty?
Hours after the sun went down, I was still considering everything that had been said tonight to me. I thought about the last time I saw my father in prison last year. It was the only time I had gone to visit him. But, it wasn’t wrong of me to not want to go, was it? Not after everything he had done. I tried reasoning with myself and defending my decisions to never see himagain.
I started to visualize him in his cell. Had someone killed him? Had he feared for his life while he was there? Had he known someone was coming for him that night? Had there been a struggle? What happened to the other inmate? How did he get in my dad’s cell? How did he cut my dad’sthroat?
I doubled over and threw up in the sand. I covered it up with handfuls of sand and gingerly leaned back against my pillar. The pain in my back was starting to set innow.
Maybe another inmate didn’t kill him. He might have taken his own life. For whatever reason, this gave me more comfort knowing that my dad did it to himself than someone else doing it. I wondered how he did it. Wire? Or was it some chiseled down shank he made while outside in the prison yard? Had some guard slipped him a tool to end his life? Or maybe they gave the weapon to an inmate to take care of mydad.
Had some guard done it himself? Maybe some guard that hated child abusers killed mydad.
I thought about every possibility but settled onnothing.
* * *
The timebetween finding out of my father’s death and the funeral had been particularly hard for me. I cut class, and my heart wasn’t in baseball. I had been at a game when my family learned of my dad’s death, and somehow that was all I could think of lately when I stepped on the field. It even plagued my mind when I stood in front of my locker in theclubhouse.
I was having a hard time finding interest in anything at the moment and felt like I had been adrift. I floated between feeling like I was numb and barely functioning, to feeling like I wassuffocating.
Most of my time leading up to the funeral was spent down at the pier. I’d leave the house and walk to campus with my backpack. I had every intention of going to class but never made it. I’d firmly tell myself that this would be the day I’d make it to class. My feet didn’t even stop moving when I approached the classroom complex. Instead, I’d stop at a coffee stand near the classrooms, get a coffee and pastry and go to the pier. After the second day of doing this, I started to pack a beach towel in my backpack. I still took my books and tried keeping up with the reading material and assignments, but I wasn’t doing verywell.
The procedural things Chad alluded to took more time than I thought it should. Then again, this was my first experience with a family member’s death while in prison. Who was I to say that things were moving too slowly? I had no experience with this sort of thing. Ordeath.
I had been reading the list of instructions and tips for the development of a story plot for my first screenwriting class while thinking about my dad. Nothing in the stapled packet was sinking in, and I needed to have it turned in by the end of the week. I was able to concentrate for a few minutes and then tossed the pencil down and leaned against the pillar of mypier.
My mom and brother had traveled to Atwater twice since the news. They told my mom that my dad killed himself during the night. But the staff found that to no longer be accurate. They now had reason to believe that my father may have had help from a guard, or staff member. Security footage was being reviewed, and anyone who may have had access to my dad had been interviewed. I was confident that the truth would come out. From what I understood, the prison was almost brand new, and I bet it had the latest in video surveillance. But for now, my dad’s cause of death was being termed as “death by a self-inflictedwound.”
Fuckingcoward.
