Branches Book

BRANCHES

dessert at the dinner table at dad’s I stayed with you. Even when you didn’t come out of your room for hours at a time and left me in a dark house with almost no food in the fridge I stayed with you. One day as you lay in bed with all the lights out I asked you if maybe we could have dessert sometimes, only on the weekends, to have something sweet in our house every once in a while. You said yes, of course we could have dessert, even on some weeknights. I think I heard you crying on my way out, but I couldn’t be sure. When I went to turn on the lights you yelled, “No darling, keep the lights off. It’s so late and the light hurts my eyes.” I turned the lights off and left your room. I didn’t mention that it was three in the afternoon. There was no dessert that weekend, or the one after. Instead we ate TV dinners on the couch while sitting in front of the TV with ESPN playing in the background until you fell asleep, sometimes with a glass still in your hand. It was almost as if you couldn’t bring yourself to part with it, even in your sleep. You stopped picking me up from school a little while after that, but I didn’t mind because when my friends saw you they got scared; I could see it on their faces. One of them told me that when you smiled you looked like a skeleton. I walked to and from school instead, two miles there and back, even in the snow. I started asking my friends what drinking too much does to you, and with mischievous eyes of 4 th graders who were convinced they knew everything in the world and more, they confidently answered that “only the bad kids do it.” They made it seem dangerous, unpredictable, almost threatening; all of the things that you weren’t. You weren’t bad, I assured them, you were just a little bit sad and cried sometimes at night when you thought I was asleep but the walls are thin and I had no choice but to be witness to your fits of despair. They blinked in response and said nothing. They didn’t understand. But soon the walls didn’t matter because you left home and went to a hospital. Your body was sick because of the excessive drinking but so was your head, because you were sad and unhappy all the time. I felt like I was walking on eggshells with a woman who had once been my protector. I remembered a time when I was on my way home from my first day of second grade when I tripped and fell in our driveway. I skinned my knee and the blood was gushing. You put a Band-Aid on it and sat there with me, in the driveway, and hugged me so tight I thought I’d burst. Now your hugs hardly feel like human contact; I think I can feel the bones in your arms when you hug me for long enough.

107