Sweet Ache

“Today is the anniversary of my dad’s suicide.”

I whip my head up to look at him, shocked by the confession I wasn’t expecting, the key he handed me to unlock one of his doors, and hurt for him all at once. My mouth falls open and then I close it, and open it again, having everything and nothing to say to him.

He keeps his eyes averted from me though. I know he’s hurting, can’t imagine the pain of having to live without a dad, but don’t know how exactly to soothe him besides just letting him know I am here for him in silent support.

“Hawkin.” It’s the only thing I say to him, his name softly spoken.

“No. Don’t…. I gave you the short version of it the other day. I’m sorry.”

“Please don’t apologize,” I plead.

He exhales a breath, his fingers still playing idly with my hair in a gesture so contradictory to the tumultuous emotions emanating off him. “When I was nine, I was home sick. My mom went to pick Hunt up from school and my dad stayed home with me. I went downstairs to get a toy—a Transformer—and he was there. He was ranting and pacing and nervous and the things he said confused me….” His voice fades off as my heart squeezes in my chest at the sadness that begins to suffocate the room around us. “He made me promise him things about my mom, about Hunter, about how I’d live my life…. Then he made me stand there and watch him load the gun … made me watch him pull the trigger.” Hawkin’s voice that is usually so melodic in tone is hollow when he says the last words, and the absence of his trademark warmth speaks volumes. Tells me this man understandably still mourns the loss of his father, the loss of his innocence, and everything else his father took from him that day that I can’t even fathom.

The silence around us is deafening as I reach out and lace my fingers with his, my thoughts racing over the damage that was done to his psyche that day. Questions fly through my mind: Why make your son watch? Why did he commit suicide? How can two sons left by their father end up at such odds when they probably used each other to get through it?

“What was his name?” I ask, unsure what else to ask but needing him to know I care.

“Joshua,” he says softly and then falls silent for a beat. “He told me …” He clears his throat from the emotion clogged there and it breaks my heart. His chest stills beneath my cheek as he reins in his emotion and continues. “My dad said that he was weak, loved my mom too much, and that he just couldn’t deal with it all anymore. By today’s standards, I’m sure he’d be diagnosed with depression, something that might explain things, but looking back through the eyes of a child, we never saw it…. He was just our dad. The man I idolize.”

I press another kiss to his chest, his heart beating erratically against my lips, and it’s not lost on me that idolize is present tense despite the amount of time that has passed. My mind turns to thoughts of my own father, who still seems larger than life. How as a child he protected Colton and me from life’s harsh realities and yet Hawkin was thrust right into them with a front row ticket.

“I’ll never understand why he did it, why he called me in there. Why he left us. It’s hard even now for me to admit how selfish he was for making me stand there and watch him. For making me promise to live a life by the standards he couldn’t himself live out. He saddled me with the burden of proving it’s possible to do what he couldn’t and survive….” He falls quiet, and I just lie there in silent reassurance, my eyes welling with tears I don’t want him to see. Tears for the little boy he was, the damage it caused him, and for the grown man still feeling guilt over it all this time later.

Scars run so deep sometimes, the invisible ones cutting the deepest of them all.

“He ruined us that day—my mom, Hunt, me. But the fault lies on me too because I still want to make him proud somehow by doing it. I can’t not. Something’s wrong with me, I guess … I don’t know.” He shakes his head and blows out a breath in frustration.

“Nothing’s wrong with you,” I murmur, not wanting to overstep my boundaries. “You’re just trying to honor your word. No one will ever fault you for standing by that.”

He just falls silent and I worry that maybe I said something he didn’t want to hear. All I can think about is this little boy with stormy eyes and the invisible scars he wears beneath the surface, the burden of being the man of the house after it seems like the house fell down around them.

“My mom has never been the same since. I’ve always said I lost her that day too. Our house was always filled with the sound of her singing or the classical music she was trying to teach us when the classics we’d much rather have been listening to were the rock variety. Then after … she was just this shell of herself…. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

“There’s nothing I can say,” I murmur; all of the words on the tip of my tongue wouldn’t express even an iota of what I really mean so I just keep quiet, pulling him in tighter to me, appreciating the fact that he trusted me with his story.

“Nothing to say.” He shrugs when he lifts his head up to finally meet my gaze. His eyes are heavy with sorrow and I wish I could take that away from him for a moment, a day, so that he can live free of the burden of it. “Hunter … I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “We were close for a while. We hit high school and he started to fall apart. Sports games without our dad in the stands, my mom so lost we had to turn to friends to teach us how to drive … He fell into a bad scene for a while.” He shakes his head and lays it back down, his eyes returning to the ceiling but not before I can see the pain, the guilt he carries in his eyes.