He woke with a gasp. Immediately, my stomach clenched, instincts whispering, bad idea. His eyes were cloudy as he struggled to focus, his dark hair sweaty, breath shallow, rapid, like he’d just run a race. For a second, the face that stared back at me was a stranger’s.
“Dad?”
His voice was garbled. “Who are you?”
My heart squeezed painfully. “Jessica,” I whispered.
His gaze listed to his nightstand. He extended a clumsy hand, groping for an orange bottle just out of reach. It fell to the floor, top popping off, white pills scattering.
“Goddammit.”
“I’ll clean it, I promise.” I held up the drawings. “I drew you a story.” I peered around the paper. “Once upon a time, there was a king, see—” I pointed to the picture. “He had a beautiful wife who was the queen and a daughter who was the princess.” I pointed out the drawings of my mom and me, which I was proud of, as I’d done very good noses. “One day”—I switched to the next piece of paper—“an evil witch cast a spell on the king, and he fell into a deep sleep. It was up to the princess to break the curse. She—”
“Get off.” My dad’s voice grew sharper. “I need to rest.”
I moved closer to him, lifting the drawings. “Dad, see? It’s you and me, and Mom, in the story. I made us into kings and queens. Your wife and daughter—”
“I don’t have a wife or daughter.” He rose abruptly and I lost my balance, tipping off the bed to land, sharp, on my knees and elbows. My father stumbled from the bed and dropped beside me, sweeping the spilled pills into a pile with shaking hands.
My eyes filled with hot tears, knees and elbows burning. But I didn’t let myself cry. I watched him, his trembling fingers.
“I’m young,” my dad said out of nowhere. “I have my whole life ahead of me. I’m going to get out of this shithole town and go to DC. Use my damn degree and stop wasting my potential.”
Hunched over in the darkness, arms spread over the floor, my dad looked nothing like the king I’d drawn. I was frozen and afraid; I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. For time to race backward and deposit me, safe, back in my room.
My drawings were scattered, but I was too scared to pick them up. Instead, I crouched, watching my dad put the pills back in the bottle. Then he slumped against the dresser and looked at me. Really looked.
“I hate it here,” he whispered. He squinted at the light over my shoulder, which came from the door I’d left cracked open. His pupils turned to slits, like a cat’s. “I really do.”
“No,” I said, feeling my chest cleave.
As he dropped his gaze from the light, his pupils dilated, the blackness pooling in each eye. I watched the change with horror.
“Why do you insist on dragging me down?” he whispered.
I scrambled back, head hitting the wall.
“It’s supposed to be better than this.” His eyes were now twin black holes, pupils drowning the white. And I knew, with sudden clarity, that I didn’t hold the cure. I was the thing making him sick.
My mother flung open the door, and light flooded the room. My father shrank back, and they stared at each other for one horrible, frozen moment. And then they started screaming.
Hours later, I let my mother hug me, apologize, cry. She brought my drawings back, and I let her put them next to me in bed, waited until she left the room before I tore them to pieces and stuffed them in the trash. For days afterward, I told her I was okay. For a year, I stayed quiet, especially after we moved from Bedford to Norfolk, so my dad could transfer to a different branch of the steel company.
I pushed the memory of his sickness, and its cause, so far down it formed a tiny rupture in the center of me, a small black hole of my very own. And no matter how many years passed, I never looked inside.
Until senior year of college. Home for Christmas, when I woke from that nightmare gasping, still feeling the cold gun pressed against my forehead, still seeing the drowning pupils of the drug dealer, and the dream terror was replaced, by sinister sleight of hand, with the sudden rush of memory, unburied after fourteen years.
Only hours later, we got the call: my father had been found in a motel room, arms splayed over the side of the bed, dead of an overdose.
No one came to his funeral. When my grandparents arrived at the burial plot and saw it was just me, my mom, and the priest, my grandmother burst into sobs so violent my grandpa had to hold her to keep her from crumbling. Instead of hugging us, patting my shoulder like she did when I was young, my grandmother pointed a trembling finger.