Dad, No One Will Laugh at You Anymore chapter 05
The moment my body left the bridge, cold air flooded my nose and throat, and the ice-cold water swallowed me whole.
Yet all I felt was relief. For the first time in my life, I felt light.
The wind screamed past my ears, and it sounded like it scattered every time I had ever heard those words. The last thought that crossed my mind was the sentence I had never said out loud.
“Dad, this time, no one will really laugh at you anymore.”
I did not know how much time had passed before I drifted up from the bottom of the frozen river. I floated slowly into the air above it.
Near the bridge, Brady was slumped in the snow. He wailed so hard the sound barely came out human. His voice shook apart between sobs as he called my name over and over, choking on the words “I am sorry.”
I drifted closer. I looked at his ashen face, the tears and snot smeared together, and I wondered if he would carry that guilt for the rest of his life the same way I had spent mine trapped by those two words.
Before long, everyone from Uncle Ray’s house came running.
Dad stood out in front. His hair was a mess, and one of his shoes had come off somewhere behind him. The clothes he always kept neat were streaked with snow and mud. Nothing remained of the man who cared so much about appearances, who lived in fear of being laughed at.
He dropped to his knees at the edge of the ice and saw my body. His entire frame went rigid.
He did not cry. He only stared, his lips trembling as he failed to force out a single word.
Uncle Ray reached down to pull him back. The sound finally broke out of him. A raw, guttural wail cut through the falling snow and echoed across the empty neighborhood. It was the kind of sound that made something inside anyone who heard it turn cold.
“Kellen! My Kellen!”
He pressed himself against the ice, reaching toward me but not daring to touch, calling out again and again. ” Come back! Dad was wrong! Dad will never say it again! Please come back!”
I floated beside him. I reached out to wipe the tears from his face. But my hand passed through his cheek and touched nothing.
So this was what it meant to be gone. You could not even reach the people you loved the most.
I watched him drop to his knees on the ice. He slammed his fists against the frozen surface again and again while the words “Dad was wrong” spilled from his mouth in an endless loop.
His knuckles split almost at once, and blood smeared across the ice. He did not seem to feel it. He kept going and kept apologizing.
In all those years, he had never told me he was sorry. Not when he pinched my arms until they turned purple, not when he kicked my chair out from under me and split my head open, not when he left me shivering in the cold.
Every time, he believed he was right. He believed it was for my own good. He believed it was to keep people from laughing at me. Now he finally apologized, but only after I could no longer hear him.
The police arrived with an ambulance. Red and blue lights flashed across the snow and across Dad’s blank, frozen
face.
The paramedics lifted my body onto a stretcher, and the moment they pulled the white sheet over me, Dad lunged forward and seized the railing with both hands, refusing to let go. His nails dug into the fabric until his knuckles turned white.
“Don’t take him! He’s my son! He’s just upset. He’ll come back!”
No one could talk him down. In the end, it took two officers to pry him away.
He collapsed in the snow and stared after the ambulance as it disappeared down the road. His eyes were hollow, like a lost child who did not know where to go.
Snowflakes settled on his hair and face, building up in a thin white layer. He sat there without moving, as still as if he had frozen solid.
I followed the ambulance to the hospital and watched the staff wheel my body into the morgue. When the cold metal drawer slid shut, I realized that nothing in this world had anything to do with me anymore.
The bruises, the pain, the flinch response carved into my bones, and the word that had echoed through every corner of my life all faded to nothing beside the cold of my body.
I drifted back to Uncle Ray’s house. The living room was wrecked. Snack shells and candy wrappers littered the floor. The food on the table still gave off faint wisps of steam, but no one had any appetite left.
The relatives sat scattered across the couches and murmured in low voices. Some sighed. Some shook their heads. A few whispered when they thought no one listened that his obsession with appearances had caused it, that a perfectly good child was gone because of it.
