____________

Drake

 

 

 

Sixteen years ago…

 

 

“You’re drunk. Again.” I glared at my father, a broken mess in an armchair in his study. I turned to get the hell out of this room that stank of sweat and the sharp tang of addiction. I could barely watch as my father, the once great Pierson Blackwell, became a sniveling, cowering wisp of a man those last few months after she died. I couldn’t fucking watch him destroy himself. “Clean yourself up,” I said over my shoulder, my voice hardening. I felt relief when my insides froze over the pain, hiding it from me as if through a thick sheet of ice. I paused at the door and turned to stare at him once more. My lip lifted in a sneer. “You’re disgusting.”

My father mumbled something into his hands.

“What was that?”

His admission came out between his fingers like a hiss. “I killed her.”

I froze, my hand clenching into a fist around the door handle. “You…”

“If it wasn’t for me, she wouldn’t have needed those drugs. If she didn’t need those drugs, she wouldn’t have taken too much that day and…and…”

My lungs released a fraction. He hadn’t actually killed her. He blamed himself for what she did to herself. The same thing he was doing to himself with that fucking bottle.

I strode towards the side table and grabbed the half-empty bottle of Macallan. He grabbed the other end and the liquid sloshed onto my wrists.

“Leave it,” he begged, his acrid breath wafting all around my face.

This close I could see how the alcohol had made his once vibrant face soft and sallow, yellowed his eyes and corroded his teeth with decay. I felt bile rising in the back of my throat. I snatched the bottle away from his weak hands, stepped over to the partly open window and threw it out. He moaned like he was in pain as it flew out across the lawn and landed somewhere among a bed of lilies. My mother’s favorite flowers.

I turned back to him, pouting at me like a sullen child in his armchair. “Why did you do that?”

“Pull yourself together, old man.” For once be the father you should have been.

I began to walk out again. I knew it wouldn’t fucking help, taking away that bottle. He would just pull out another one from his myriad of stashes around the mansion. Why did I even try?

“Please, don’t leave me like this,” he begged. “Take this. End my suffering.”

At that, I spun.

He had a gun, a fucking gun in his hands, holding it towards me like an offering. “Let me be with her in Heaven.” He fell towards me, his knees hitting the floor before he crawled towards me, the gun handle out.

Dear God. Kill my father. How could he beg me, his only son, to do such a thing? Did he think I could actually do it? Did he think I actually would? As payback for all those years of tears and bruises? How I hated him, but I could never kill him.

I shoved him back, his sniveling sending a mix of repulsion and disgust and pity through me, the taste of it bitter in the back of my throat. “I’m not going to kill you.”

“Please, I can’t do it myself. I can’t…”

“You don’t deserve death. You deserve to live with what you are and what you’ve done.”

“I can’t. She won’t let me rest. She’s everywhere, in my dreams, in the shadows, whispering, blaming me.”

“Jesus Christ…”

“If you loved me you’d do it.” His watery eyes pleaded with me. Trying to guilt me, manipulate me into taking the gun.

“I don’t love you.” I spun, determined now to reach that door and get the fuck out of there. How far my father had fallen, and it scared me to watch him.

“You son of a bitch,” he snarled behind me. “You were always such a fucking disappointment.” I knew he was trying to anger me, to get me to turn around and snatch that gun off him. His words fell against my deadened heart and slid off. “You know you were never really mine. You’re a bastard belonging to one of your whore mother’s lovers.”

I flinched, but I kept walking. Perhaps it would have been a relief to think that I wasn’t really his. But I looked too much like him for there to be any doubt.

I paused at the door, my repressed anger sliding down my throat like a pill, and I said the words I would die regretting. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you should just kill yourself.”

He didn’t respond. I stepped out of the room and closed the door behind me, the clicking sound of the lock releasing a flood of guilt at the words I said to my own father. I am a terrible son. I should go back in there. Apologize.

My pride won out. He had hurt me too many times. I was too fucking weary from our fights, our arguments that never would resolve anything.

I let go of the door handle and took a step away.

That’s when I heard it.

Bang.

I’d never forget the sound a gun made when it went off, the sharpness inside your ear, the pressure against your eardrums, the way it seemed to penetrate your skin with electricity, making your body flinch. Even muffled through that wooden door.

I’d never forget running back into my father’s study, seeing the spray of blood all over the back of the armchair and the wall behind it. I collapsed by his side and I gripped his shoulders.

And all that blood on my hands.