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

wanted so badly was over, that he was an old man and that I had won. I could outrun him, outswim him, and if he wanted to step outside, he would find out that I could outfight him. Tatyana yelled at me to shut up. She was his favorite, she always had been, but backing him up on this? I hated her for it, as I hated the old man for not responding, for just standing there with his arms folded, like I had when I was getting taunted in grade school.
    Tashina, who’d now had three parents completely flake out on her, fled the dinner table. When things settled down, Tatyana and I found her sitting on the bed in the girls’ shared room. Tashina asked us if we ever thought about just walking out to the middle of a snowy field and lying down there and never moving again. In a rare moment of accord, Tatyana and I both instantly swore that we would never abandon Tashina, that she would always have us.
    At my mother’s insistence, we devoted one evening to watching The Prince of Tides . Sitting there in the darkness, the movie flickering before us, the silence only broken by my mother’s sniffling, I didn’t want to cry or scream or howl but merely to flick a switch, like turning off the TV: the world would fade, then dwindle down to a tiny white dot, then finally disappear.
    No one in my family said a word to me about the shooting.

    When I was a baby, I woke up every couple of hours during the night, crying for my mom. My mother’s friends told her that at some point, you have to let babies cry until they learn to comfort themselves. At nine months, I caught whooping cough. She lost thirty pounds while caring for me, terrified that I would die. After that, my mother couldn’t bear to hear me cry. Despite my father’s protestations, my mother always came for me.
    I was scared of the dark. On the nights that my mother didn’t sit with me until I fell asleep, I hid under the covers, breathing through only the tiniest gap in my blankets, drenched in fearful sweat until I finally succumbed to sleep.
    When I awoke in the night, I automatically ran to my parents’ bed. I remember my father’s wide, hairy, freckled back in the night. He was so much bigger than me, too big to be human, like an elephant, part wild animal and part geologic formation. I was twelve before I made it through one night in my bed.
    Having an oversized boy come into your marital bed in the middle of the night, each and every night . . . that must have beena huge barrier to intimacy. When I got news of the divorce, this much was clear: I had destroyed their marriage. My father was abandoning my mother because I was weak.

    The next year unfolded like a slow-motion film of a train derailment: the moment of hesitation from some minute anomaly, then the hurtling mass of metal slipping horribly sideways, the wrinkling of great sheets of steel, the folding of box cars, huge torn hunks of metal arcing dreamily through the air. Mentioning to reporters that I knew it was Wayne when I heard shots was enough to get me served with a subpoena as soon as I returned to campus. I was sequestered as a witness for the prosecution, which meant I could not talk to my friends or anyone else about what had happened. I found myself both mired in and deeply alienated from the most traumatic experience of my life.
    My personal tragedy of the dissolution of my family—the worst thing I had ever encountered—was eclipsed, even in its inception, not just by the shooting but also by the experiences of my classmates. A friend’s mother had dropped dead one Christmas, and her father had placed her with a foster family and signed over his guardianship of her. Another friend’s father was a career drunk who occasionally worked as a carpenter and dipped in and out of homelessness without complaint or even comment. Another friend’s father had been a government agent poisoned in prison by the CIA. Another friend’s stepfather had caught