12/25/16, 11:21 p.m.
To: Eliza Mirk <[email protected]>
From: Wallace Warland <[email protected]>
Subject: You found me in a constellation
I know it’s weird for me to email you. I know we’re both at our computers, and you’re reading this, and I’m sitting in a pool of my own mortification, wishing I could delete emails after I send them. I couldn’t give this to you in person, because then you might read it in front of me. I couldn’t write it out by hand, because we’d be fifty by the time I finished, and that’s not going to work for me.
Normally when I write something, I know how I should begin. I don’t know how I should begin this. There are a lot of things I want to tell you, but I don’t want to scare you. I cannot explain in words how much I don’t want to scare you, and how afraid I am that I will.
So let’s start with this: I never lived in Illinois. I’ve always lived here, in Westcliff. I went to school on the other side of town, with Cole. I’m sorry I lied to you about it. It’s not that I didn’t want to tell you the truth, but if I told you where I was from, I was worried you would figure out the rest of what I’m going to tell you here, and I wasn’t sure I wanted you to know all that.
A while back, you said I looked like a football player. I said I played when I was little. That was only a half lie; I did play when I was little, but I didn’t stop until halfway through sophomore year of high school. I was pretty good at it too. Made varsity. I still have that letter somewhere. My teammates called me Warfield Wallace ’cause I fucked shit up.
No, sorry, that’s a lie too. They called me Warfield Wallace because it was alliterative, a play on my last name, and more intimidating than Wallace alone. And also because I FUCKED SHIT UP.
Sorry. I am not at the top of my game today.
I loved playing football. I loved hitting people, working in a team, and being with my friends. I loved winning. I loved how proud I made my dad. Not Tim, but my dad Dad, my biological dad. He loved football. He was a big guy, liked grilling out, Fourth of July fireworks, and throwing his kids into swimming pools. You could hear his laugh a mile away. Pretty much an all-around American. He wasn’t religious, but he read the Westcliff Star at breakfast every morning like he’d go to hell if he didn’t.
A little background about my dad: he never finished college. His family didn’t have the money. He got a job in a corporate cubicle, trying to sell things to people over the phone. Long hours, little pay. He was already married to my mom—not Vee—and she was pregnant with me. I don’t know if they got married because she was pregnant, or if she got pregnant after they were married. I guess it doesn’t matter. Dad didn’t like talking about that time, so I don’t know much about it. Mom left him before I turned a year old. I don’t remember her, so I was never upset about it, but my dad was sometimes.
A year or two later, he met Vee and they had Lucy, and things were good. Dad was the reason Lucy likes sports so much. He always wanted us to challenge ourselves. If something seemed too difficult for us, it was all the more reason to try. Lucy skipped a grade in school because of it. Dad challenged himself too—when he came home from work, he was louder and more colorful, full of energy. Wanted to help us with school projects or practice. Always put himself in the middle of everything.
There were dark parts too. He didn’t let us see those, but a few times I walked into the kitchen late at night and found him hunched over the table, head in his hands. When he thought he was alone in the house in the middle of the day, he stared out the front door like the street was some unreachable promised land. When we grilled out, he made extra food for everyone else and ate nothing himself. If he and I were the only ones around, he ranted about his job and forbade me from ever doing anything that made me unhappy, even if that meant going without food or clothes or a roof.
Have you seen it in your parents? That moment when they become people? I think you have. It sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? One day they’re parents, and the next they say something racist, or get a cut that takes too long to heal, or make a simple mistake driving, and a facade falls away and they become mortals like the rest of us. After the facade is gone, it can never come back.
That darkness made him mortal. I saw it in my dad before the day he died, and I denied it. I shouldn’t have. I should have told Vee, I should have told a doctor, I should have told someone. Over winter break of my sophomore year, we were driving home from a Christmas break spent in Tennessee with Vee’s family. It was only me and my dad; Vee and Lucy were coming home the next day. Dad was on one of his rants. He’d gotten a little time off from work for the holidays, but not much, and he made me swear I’d never get a job like his. I had never seen him so worked up before. I told him I thought it would be smarter to get a job that paid decently, at least at first. It wouldn’t be so bad, as long as I didn’t make it my life.
That only made him angrier. I know now that he wasn’t in his right mind. At the time, his yelling was incoherent, and when he stopped the car and told me to get out, I thought he was joking. It was almost January, freezing, and there were another few miles to go until home. He kicked me out right before Wellhouse Bridge and kept driving.
The second before he hit the gas, my stomach dropped. Really dropped. Like it wasn’t there anymore. Sometimes the premonition of something happening is worse than the actual event, because you know it’s coming and you can’t do anything to stop it. He was going too fast for Wellhouse Turn, even without the ice on the road.
The Westcliff Star likes to lump my dad’s death in with the other accidents that happened there. That band bus. The drunk teenagers. The woman with the kids. They think it was the ice that sent him off the road, but I stood there and watched him and I know that car went straight as an arrow until the moment it disappeared over the hill. I sprinted across the bridge after him, fell on a patch of black ice, smashed my face on the ground, broke my nose. Got back up, kept running. There’s no good way to go down the incline at Wellhouse Turn, and I don’t remember how I tried it, but I know I broke my leg too before I got to the bottom. They were the kind of breaks you don’t feel at the time because of adrenaline and shock and fear. The car was at the bottom, sitting on all four wheels. Only when I got around to the other side of it did I see the smashed front of the car and my dad hanging out the windshield.
He was dead as soon as the car hit the ground. When you go straight off Wellhouse Turn that fast, you pretty much always are. I don’t remember calling an ambulance, but I remember my phone smeared with blood after I pulled it away from my face. I don’t remember trying to yank my dad the rest of the way through the windshield, but I remember sitting in the snow at the nose of the car, staring at his blank eyes while he lay across the accordion folds of the hood. I don’t remember the paramedics getting there and asking if I was in the car with him, but I must have said yes, because that’s how the story came out.
That’s what the Star does, right? Says “a man and his son” when they list off all the people who’ve gone over that turn? I only read the Star once after that, two days after, and I never read it again.
My dad didn’t hit ice. He wasn’t drunk, or falling asleep at the wheel. When they asked me how it happened, I said I couldn’t remember. I still say that. I haven’t even told Vee, but I think she guessed. My dad didn’t want to be here anymore. He was tired of his job, never having enough money, being yelled at by strangers. He was unhappy. Viciously unhappy.
I didn’t stop talking on purpose. It just happened. A year ago I couldn’t talk to anyone for anything. I’d like to say I tried and nothing came out, but I didn’t try. Even trying was terrifying.
I could still write, though. I was into Monstrous Sea before Wellhouse Turn happened, but I didn’t tell anyone about it, because my friends wouldn’t have understood. After Wellhouse Turn, I couldn’t do anything because of that broken leg, so I spent all my time writing fanfiction. I love playing football, but writing makes me happy in a way sports don’t. We’ve talked about this before. Having the breakthrough that lets all the light in.
I spent another year and a half in my old school being That Kid Who Survived Wellhouse Turn and Never Spoke Again. I didn’t go back to football after my leg healed, so most of my friends floated away. I thought about going to Wellhouse Turn, that maybe being back there would help, but every time I drove past I couldn’t bring myself to stop the car. So I never did.
Things got better. Vee married Tim. I started working with Bren and her dogs. I stayed online and practiced my writing. I forced myself to talk at home, and to Cole and Megan and the others when we started hanging out at Murphy’s, though I still can’t do it when big groups of people are around. I started senior year at my old school, but by then I was the local freak show exhibit, so Vee and Tim let me transfer to Westcliff, where only football players might recognize my name.
The only other person I’d ever met in school who liked Monstrous Sea was Cole, and he’s the kind of dick who doesn’t hang out with you in public if it’s not his ideal social situation, so we only talked to each other at Murphy’s. And then I met you. You had this whole sketchbook full of Monstrous Sea fan art, and you actually stood up for me. Most people never do that; what kind of two-hundred-pound guy needs someone to stand up for him? I really thought you hated me at first. Or at least thought I was stupid. Most people think I’m stupid because I don’t talk and I write slow.
But you wrote back. And you love creating things. And you get what I mean when I say I don’t want to spend my life doing something I hate. If you know what you’re meant to do, if you know what you love, why not do that? Find a way to do it, find a way to make money doing it. My dad hated what he did, and I think it made him hate himself. I don’t want to hate myself. I don’t want you to hate yourself.
I know we’re both not the most socially adept people. I’m writing this all to you in an email because I’ll pass out from stress if I try to say it to you in real time, even with a screen between us. I’m almost passing out from it right now, and we’re in different places and I don’t have to send it if I don’t want to. I should end this before something bad happens.
I like being together. I like feeling like nothing is wrong with me. I like being able to think about something else at night instead of Wellhouse Turn. I know I should see someone about the talking, but for now I’m good with this. I’m happy.
I hope you’re happy too.
Wallace