Page 52 of Puck Me Back to Life

I was a large baby, apparently. Broad-shouldered even then, which sounds impossible until you see pictures of my father. The delivery had been difficult. There were tears, surgical repair, too much blood, too much panic.

My grandfather explained it to me once in the calm, gentle voice he used when he knew I needed the truth but also needed not to be destroyed by it.

“Your mother died because medicine failed her, Ashford. Not because of you.”

I was fifteen when he said it. Fifteen, angry, already taller than most grown men, and still young enough to want badly to believe him. Fifteen years later, I remember every word.

The problem wasn't understanding it logically. Logic had never been the issue. I knew babies didn't choose to be born. I knew newborns didn't reach into the world and decide who lived or died. I knew, in the cleanest part of my mind, that a hemorrhage was a medical emergency and not a moral verdict.

My father never let it stay that clean. He never let me forget what happened.

Not directly at first. When I was little, it showed up in small ways. The way he looked at me sometimes when he thought I wasn't paying attention. The way his voice changed whenever somebody mentioned her. The photographs that disappeared from the house one by one until there were almost none left. The tension that settled over every conversation about family, as if my mother were a ghost neither of us was allowed to mourn in the same room.

As I got older, the resentment became harder to hide.

By the time I reached middle school, it wasn't hidden at all.

Every argument somehow found its way back to her. Every disappointment, every failure, every bad grade, every broken dish, every late practice pickup, every bad day that had nothing to do with me and somehow ended at my feet. The message stayed the same.

If I hadn't been born, she'd still be alive.

Kids are stupid. They believe things, especially when those things come from the people who are supposed to love them.

I believed it for a long time. Part of me probably still does.

I toss my phone onto the counter and lean against it as the delivery app waits open and ignored. The screen eventually dims. My reflection appears faintly in the black glass of the microwave across from me, and for a second I see myself at sixteen instead of thirty.

Already six-foot-three but still bracing every time Dad walked into a room.

The memory arrives the way bad memories always do, without manners and without warning. Dad screaming in the kitchen. Me screaming back. A chair knocked over. Something breaking against the wall. The sound sharp enough that I still remember it better than the words.

I remember his face.

Not anger but hatred.

Real hatred.

The kind a person usually reserves for enemies, not sons.

The worst part wasn't that he hit me. By then, getting hit had become part of the weather in that house. Bad storms came through, did damage, and eventually passed. The worst part was realizing I had gotten big enough to stop him.

Hockey had changed my body. Years of skating, lifting, checking, and fighting for space in corners had packed muscle onto my frame. One day I looked up and realized I wasn't a scared kid anymore. I could hit back. I could win.

That realization should have felt empowering. Instead, it felt awful. Because once I wasn't afraid of him, all that remained was the understanding that my father hated me.

The final fight happened my senior year. I don't remember what started it. Most of our fights blur together now, a long chain of slammed doors, raised voices, and old grief wearing new clothes. I remember yelling. I remember him shoving me. I remember shoving him back. I remember the moment we both realized I was stronger.

The silence afterward was worse than the fight.

He looked at me like he was seeing a stranger.

I left that night.

My mother's father picked me up.

I still remember his truck pulling into the driveway. Still remember throwing clothes into a garbage bag because I didn't own a suitcase. Still remember waiting on the porch in the dark, not because I hoped Dad would stop me, but because I hoped he wouldn't.

He never came outside.