I wake up every morning exhausted from the burial. In the dream, I am so worried that everyone will find the body and know what I’ve done. In real life, I didn’t kill him. I hit him as hard as I could, twice, before he pushed me off of him. But I wanted to kill him. Then I called the police and told them that it was my Dad that had hit me. They called the Department of Children and Families. He got in trouble. We had only seen each other here and there over the years. He’d come in on birthdays, sometimes. He’d come in to make my mom and me dream about a different life. This time, he’d said I could live with him in his nice house.
I could tell after a week of school that the whole idea of having a kid, even a teenager who didn’t need much, had gotten old for him. I tried to be perfect. I tried not to talk too much. I heard him on the phone with some woman who wanted to come over, I guess. He told me it wasn’t working out, and I hit him.
My Dad kept saying, “How could you?” when the police came and I kept crying, “How could YOU?” I wasn’t acting. I lied about his hitting me, but I couldn’t find the thing to tell the police that they would care about. He hadn’t paid his child support for my whole life. He had let mom skip meals so I could have food.
He wore nice clothes and drove a nice car and had a respectable career while we froze in that little box at night, where all the neighbors were fighting over their heroin. He’d given me hope that I had finally been good enough so he would take me in now that mom was so sick with cancer.
I tell you, I couldn’t hit him hard enough.
I’m with my aunt now. I’ve got a lot of the Carson services. My aunt got someone to talk to about learning to raise me up for the next few years. I got a mentor. We have a therapist who comes in to work on helping me become part of this family. They tried to give me a guy-therapist at first. Apparently there aren’t a lot of male therapists and everyone wants one. I told Carson that someone else could have him. Nice guy, but I couldn’t deal. I guess I have anger issues. They gave us a lady instead. I also got my own counselor, just for me. We talk about how hard mom fought for me. She loves that I am a fighter, too, she says, but wants me to fight for good things. She wants me to fight for my future, for my idea of myself as a person who is, you know, worth good things. I can’t imagine either one.
I still dream of burying my Dad and feeling so guilty. We talk about grief and loss. She is helping me build a little box of remembrance for the things I’d spent my nights hoping for as a child—the things that I lost that day Dad decided I was in the way. She believes that my hope is buried in that dream. We’re going to find it, she says. I like her.
By JAC Patrissi
