I Swear I'll Make It Up to You by Mishka Shubaly Page A

coward, abandoning us the minute he saw his chance. To give up now, to tap out, to submit, would be to admit that I was a coward like him.
    That was no way to live and a worse way to die. Things were terrible now, this was true. This was the absolute worst. Things could never again be as hard or as painful as they were on this desolate night. But if I could get through this . . .
    Galen hadn’t wanted to die. He had wanted very much to live. He had fought to hang on to his life, fought to the very end. He had been seventeen, a whole life of late-night smoking and pontificating and gently mocking idiots like me ahead of him. Gifted as he had been at math and physics, Galen had wanted to be a poet. If he were here, standing on this ledge with me, he would roll his eyes, ask me what kind of asshole I was, then turn around and go home.
    Carefully, I got back down off the low rock wall at the edge of the bridge. Then I turned around and started walking. You had to always keep trying, keep fighting; you had to never ever, ever, ever give up. I pulled my hat on tighter and hunched my jacket up around my ears. It was cold out, and I had a long way to go to get back home.

    Despite Wayne Lo’s killing spree, despite the impending divorce, against all reason, my parents elected to proceed with our planned family Christmas vacation at a WASP-y little ski resort in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The tickets were bought and paid for, and we didn’t waste anything in our family.
    I understood from the movies that if you punched a guy with a roll of quarters in your hand, you would break his jaw. Days before the flight to Denver, I got my mother to drive me downtown, and I dutifully got a roll of quarters out of the bank while she waited in the Aerostar minivan. “For the video games,” I told her. I intended to knock my father out.
    I once asked my mother why my father, who had tried unsuccessfully to prevent us from getting each of our four dogs, didn’t like them. She looked puzzled for a second, then explained that it wasn’t because he didn’t like dogs. When Dad had been a boy, maybe eight or nine, he’d had a dog he loved dearly, a cocker spaniel named Mickey. One day, another dog attacked and killed Mickey. The man who owned the other dog came over to Dad’s house with his dog to apologize to Dad’s father. Dad ran into thehouse, got a rifle, pointed it out the window, and shot and killed the other man’s dog.
    The story had blown my mind. Gleaning a moral from it had been impossible. My entire life, my parents had told us that if someone hit you, you weren’t supposed to hit back; you were supposed to tell a teacher so the person wouldn’t do it again. Didn’t my father’s actions run completely counter to this? But in the days after I got the news of my father’s betrayal, I finally figured it out: If someone hurt you, you took it. But if that person hurt someone you loved, you summoned up all the destructive power in your reach, and you took bloody revenge.
    When Tashina spied my dad and Tatyana waiting glumly for us at baggage claim in Denver, I wrapped the fingers of my right hand tightly around the roll of quarters. Dad looked grievously tired and beaten down. When he reached out to hug me, I stepped back and clenched my fist. In that instant, he looked so wounded that I froze.
    I couldn’t bring myself to punch him. I loved him. It made me hate myself. I wasn’t man enough to swing on the coward who had been my hero. So I was a coward too.
    Incredibly, my parents slept in the same room. My mother was constantly on the verge of tears, as clingy as my father was distant. I retreated into my music, listened to Dinosaur Jr. and Fugazi and Bob Dylan obsessively, fruitlessly searching obtuse rock lyrics for some explanation.
    I called my father out at dinner one night, accusing him of competing with me for everything my entire life, telling him the contest he had