Grade Eight – Ten Years Ago
“Your father’s dead.”
My mom didn’t pull me out of school that day. She just uttered the words through a telephone call. It was my eighth grade teacher Mrs. Meleni that asked permission to take me home.
I didn’t want to go home.
There wasn’t much of a home to come back to.
When I walked through the door, Mrs. Meleni accompanied me. If there was a law against that, she broke it. But I felt safer with her by my side.
My mom was in the living room with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. The radio was blasting punk rock and she sang her heart out as if her husband hadn’t passed away.
As if my dad wasn’t dead.
I was thirteen when I asked my mother how he died. She told me the alcohol took him. I know now that she meant he overdosed and the poison shutdown his brain.
Mrs. Meleni cried when she saw the state of my home. My mom was a functioning alcoholic, but an alcoholic nonetheless. She said if she could do basic household chores, show up to work and clean her car without losing it then why would she give up drinking?
I couldn’t argue with her. I was voiceless.
Mrs. Meleni asked if I wanted to be taken to child services and I remember laughing at her. I said, “I’m a little too old for help.”
What I really meant was, “Save me.”
When I went to my father’s funeral, my mom sobbed like a two year old who lost her favourite toy. I don’t know that she ever loved my father. I don’t know that she ever really knew him.
Did I?
Did he even love her? Me?
Why would he leave me if he loved me?
The house stopped stinking like booze. Dad was a spiller, Mom poured her drinks in lidded cups. The floors weren’t sticky anymore. I guess that counted for something.
Dad left a hefty inheritance for Mom and me, only he specifically stated in the will that I’d receive my share when I graduated. Back in the day, he had founded his own contracting company. He was smart, my dad, in his own way. He was sick too.
But I was thirteen. What was a thirteen-year-old going to do with thousands of dollars? I had no use for the money. Not then, anyway.
After the funeral, Mom disappeared for a few days. I think she went to Aunt Lisa’s; she came back wearing a red overcoat and some knee high stockings. Aunt Lisa’s was a strip club, I’d googled.
That night, I slept in my dad’s bed. I wanted to feel what he felt, every night, waking up and hating his life so much that he poisoned himself from the inside out.
Was I so bad? Was I a hard kid to take care of? Was I too needy? Too clingy? Too weak?
His room was dark and dismal, various shades of dark blue stamping every corner of these walls. Navy drapes, indigo sheets, chipped spruce paint.
Was blue a happy colour? I could no longer tell. He was sick, but he was out of his misery. A bittersweet dichotomy of some sorts.
I drifted off to sleep thinking about who I was. Who I wanted to be. What I wanted to achieve. Was I going to end up like my parents? One dead, another teetering between breathing and breathless?
I chose neither.
I chose Blu.
A part of me died that day.
Her name was Beatrice Louise Henderson.
