Who knows how long things would have gone on like that if he hadn’t gotten paroled? I’ve already told you about Kirstie and Andrew, the next generation in a long, unbroken line of fuckups. I had hoped that his son would be the thing that set Andy right. Made him whole. Fixed what that awful thing had broken. At first, when the pair moved in with me, I thought it might just do the trick.
They say having a kid does strange things to a person – that for some people, it brings out the worst in them. They see that little version of themselves, still perfect, still scar-free, and they lose their minds a bit. All of their own wasted potential becomes an open book in front of them, and instead of facing it, instead of sitting down and reading it line by line, they slam it shut and walk away. There’s still time left for me, they tell themselves as they leave and never look back.
Andy seemed, at least at first, to be cut from different cloth. Some folks see their children, and they realize that there is only one true path to immortality. That crying, shitting ball of skin they cradle in their arms is a link in a chain that connects them back through the ages, and in that chubby body, they see the lives of their most ancient relatives. All the lives they lived, all those paths converging, all those random chances, realized in your own child. In that moment, their life’s work becomes clear. Protect them. Guide them. Teach them to not make the same mistakes that you did.
That was Andy in the early days. Me, him, and Andrew, making a strange house in the same town we grew up in. We might have made it, and I thought, or maybe just hoped, that we would. But it didn’t take long to realize it was just a dream, something whispered in my ear when I was half-asleep.
It wasn’t Andrew. He was a baby then, little more than a mouth to stick a bottle in, or a body to cuddle up with under the covers. And it wasn’t me. I was half-curdled, sure, but I always had been, and that boy, that little thing I never asked for – well, he made me feel something I hadn’t known for a long time. Dad had needed me. Andy, in his way, had needed me. But for years, no one else in the world did. That little Andrew though, he needed me like he needed oxygen. He needed me to feed him, to warm up that bottle to stick in his mouth, to rock him whenever he woke in the middle of the night. I did these things, and a thousand others, grudgingly, or so it might look from the outside. But I was always good at keeping secrets. The truth was, I loved it.
No, it wasn’t me who unraveled. It was Andy. He just wasn’t there. He was hollowed out, like a pumpkin scooped out and filled with nothing more than air and candlelight. It was the Toy Thief of course. I imagined what it might do to a person, to have someone else inside them. Did it leave a hole? Was there an empty spot where they pushed part of you aside to make room for themselves? Or was it even worse than all that?
Maybe it wasn’t an empty spot. Maybe it was, quite simply, a dead spot. That everything that horrid, low darkness touched had gone terminal and just crumbled into dust. That when Andy cut it out of me, it wasn’t just that creature that was dying in the open air, flailing like a fish out of water. It was Andy as well. The best part of him, disappearing like so much smoke. God, it makes me cringe just to write it.
It was there though, clear, bright, easy to read. It was in the way he would scrunch his face up whenever Andrew wouldn’t stop crying, as if his body were incapable of patience and understanding. It was in the way he would hold the boy, his boy, and stare out into the yard, watching birds like a catatonic old mutt, never noticing when Andrew was awake, was crying, was threatening to roll out of his lap and onto the floor. It was in the way he would sneak into the boy’s bedroom at night and stand there, staring at his crib. I’d watch on a monitor, breathless and exhausted, wondering when, dear God when would he finally go to sleep? He wasn’t safe around his own son, and as much as it killed me, I couldn’t deny it. I told him as much. I always was the first to talk, never one to keep my mouth shut, even when I should.
Why?
Why am I like that?
Why have I always been like that?
“You’re going to hurt him,” I said.
I can still remember the day. Andy was sitting in a rocking chair, staring at the TV, not watching it, just gazing right through it. Wheel of Fortune was on. I think it was the wheel that had caught his attention. The way it spun and spun, clicking like some kind of…
Like some kind of toy.
He was giving Andrew a bottle, and the boy was finished. He kept pushing it away, his fat fingers struggling to get air, and I stood there, watching, letting it go further than I should, because I needed to see. I had to see. The milk was running down his cheeks, over his chin, and then, without warning, up his nose. He was coughing, choking, unable to even cry, and I reached for him, snatched him away.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
I stormed out of the room and left Andy sitting there, his eyes watching me, half-glazed.
I didn’t see him again for a few hours. Andrew was sleeping, and when I realized how long it had been since I laid eyes on Andy, I went looking for him. He was still sitting in the rocking chair, but the TV was off. So he just stared out the window, dead to the world as far as I could tell. A man might make it through prison like that, might even make it through a simple, dead-end job day after day. But a father can’t be dead inside, not without someone getting hurt.
“I know you’re there,” he said, proving me wrong.
I walked in and sat down across from him. “What is it?” I said bluntly. “What is… all this?”
“Whenever I hold him,” he said, “something’s… off.”
I shook my head in frustration. “Everyone says it’s hard at first. I mean, it takes time to learn how to be a dad.”
“No,” he said softly. “I love him. I know that. But something isn’t right.”
I shifted in my seat, wondering why he refused to look at me, to actually see my eyes.
“What is it?”
“My hands,” he said, holding them plaintively before him. “They can’t… they don’t work right. I touch him. I feel his skin. But I can’t…”
“Can’t what?”
He turned toward me now, grief and fear blooming in his eyes. “I can’t hurt him. I’m supposed to hurt him. My hands,” he said, pleading. “They can’t do what they’re supposed to do. I’m not supposed to be… this.” He motioned to his chest, staring at his skin. He quivered and rocked, scratching at his skin the same way you might scratch at a wool sweater, rubbing his knuckles like his bones were uncomfortable, like they wanted out. It was a painful, awful, and miserably pitiful thing to see.
“Fix me,” he said, reaching for me. “Please, you have to fix me. It’s gone. The dark. I know it is. I felt it die that day.”
My fingers itched, and I nodded. “I know it is too, Andy. I felt it too. So all of this,” I said, touching his chest, “it’s all you. You can beat this thing. I know you can.”
The tears on his cheek were the first real signs of emotion I had seen from him since he moved, and somehow, they made everything worse. I could have dealt with the anger, the blind fury that had made him smash the globe so long ago. Anger was something that made sense to me. But this. This pathetic thing in front of me was too much.
“He needs you,” I said. “Out of everything else on this planet, he needs you.”
“No,” he replied, his voice rising and hitching. “He needs Andy. Andy would be a good father. Andy would know what to say. And Andy wouldn’t expect to feel anything more than skin when he touched his son.”
“That’s you,” I said. “It’s all you.”