Once more just to see you

[TW: Grief, death, substance abuse]

You should be dead.

Horror could not even begin to encapsulate the feeling that had begun to unspool with Thomas. Years of tightly wound pain snapped and began to unravel at the sight of her, she who would not be named. She who should be dead. And yet, a girl stood before him, the very image of his greatest sorrow.

He had been there when she was encased in that wooden box, her legs spindly as they stretched down, never quite touching the end of her new home. The deep green of her favourite dress gleamed faintly under the rheumy grey light of the funeral home, the colour of a green june beetle. He remembered taking her shopping, how she had stopped in front of a dress window, eyes wide, hands pressed against the glass that separated her from a dress that glittered like the wet wings of an insect. She laughed, pleading with him to let her have this luxury once. He had argued with himself then, that this was a frivolous material thing that he could not afford. But she deserved better than just what he could afford, she deserved to have all that was good and gold.

Now she looked like a crushed beetle tossed into a shoebox, pressed into a space too large to house her. He had tucked her in, adjusting the folds of her dress as if that could make a difference, like his hands could mould her back to the way she was. He did it before, so why not do it again?

He could still smell the faint sweetness of her hair, he had begged the coroner to let him prepare her. One more time to get her ready, once more to be who he thought he would forever be. He washed her hair with the same cheap shampoo she always used, the scent familiar and cruel.

From her beginning to her end, it would be Thomas that laid her to rest.

Now, he stood frozen in the doorway, throat dry, his hand white-knuckled around the frame. His other hand loosened its grip around his gun. A pained noise rasped out instead of the name he had spent years refusing to utter. Perhaps it was self-preservation that kept him silent. To speak would be to admit the unutterable: She was dead. She’s supposed to stay dead.

Still.

The girl before him fidgeted with the stack of flyers clutched in her hand. “Hey man, sorry if I caught you at a bad time, I’ll just go-”

“No!”

The word came out shrill, desperate. His hand twitched toward her, then stopped. Despite it all, he was still afraid that this was nothing more than a dream. That if he held her, she would disappear, an apparition birthed from his endless well of grief. She flinched like a frightened doe, edging back down the steps.

“No, please.” He tried again, forcing steadiness into his tone. It came out wrong, maybe it was the tone or the sound of his voice, but it had been long since he begged anyone. She looked like a deer caught at the barrel of a hunter’s shotgun. “Please. I’m really interested in…” His eyes darted to the flyer. “…sea turtles.”

The lie was clumsy. But the girl hesitated. And in that hesitation, Thomas gestured toward the sagging porch. “We can sit out here. You can talk.” It was no surprise that she was so spooked, moments ago he had barked through the door for her to leave, until frustration had driven him to fling it open and yell. He was disheveled and pale, his cheeks hollowed, skin coated with a thin, clammy sheen. He was sure he smelled of a watery vice too, though it hardly mattered, it was clear the very vision of him was a man who was intimately familiar with the bottom of a bottle.

The porch was a graveyard of neglect, leaves from last season were swept carelessly into piles. Cobwebs slung across the beams like party streamers. Though there was once a time where such things did exist.

Still suspicious, the girl eventually eased into the rickety rocking chair that was used to be inhabited by someone that loved it. “Okay.”

Thomas’s heart clenched tightly, like an arm had shot out to grip at the organ that raced wildly. And for a brief and terrible moment, it was like nothing had ever happened.

He had named her Abigail, “A father’s joy.”

She was a perfect seven pounds, the length of his forearm. The first time he held her, it was terror that flooded him; not instant love, but an irrational fear that lashed wildly against the confines of his ribcage. All his friends had spoken of that lightning-strike moment of joy and happiness when they first saw their children. How they felt their lives turned around for good.

But Thomas was full of fear, fear of screwing this up. Would he be a good father? Would he be enough? He had destroyed everything else in his life, yet this child was the first thing he did not want to fail. He wanted to be enough. He wanted to be everything he was not, because this fragile life in his hands was all the goodness he could ever hope to create.

A lifetime of self destruction that resulted in alcohol as a crutch, denied him of forming any possible good relationship. He had been a motherless boy raised by a father who did not want him. He had grown into a wanderer who drank too much, drifted too often, and could never hold a job. His solace was solitude, bottles and a fishing rod. Despite that, he still craved connection. He found it fleetingly in weary women who sought temporary comfort, and he was too weak to refuse.

His daughter was born of such weakness and at first, he thought of leaving her behind. He was good for nothing but to die young, a speck in a world that would not remember him. But when he saw her emerge, bloodied and screaming, her fist to the air as she cried out, he felt himself wanting to answer. When he held her calm in his arms, it felt like it was the first time he could be something.

Something good. Perhaps this was God’s mercy, that surely there must be something salvageable in him to create something as good as her. He wanted to be a father she could be proud of.

And now, Thomas was only a father with no child. There is no word in the dictionary created to describe that.

The girl before him talked about sea turtles while wearing the skin of his daughter. They shared the same soft, mousy brown hair, Thomas previously remarked it was the same colour as the soft tawny hair on a deer that was speckled with spots. Instinct made him want to reach, run his fingers through it one more time, like all the other times he did. Back then he did not treasure those moments enough, believing he had forever to do it. In the present, he hid his trembling hand beneath his thigh, but the ache in his chest would not be contained.

He wished he could dream. Ever since she died, he dreamt of nothing at all. No reprieve, no glimpses of her in the spaces between life and death. It felt like punishment: she was gone from this world, and even the gaps beyond it denied him.

Or maybe his mind refused to conjure up an image of her because it meant it had to be perfect. In the dream, he would scrutinise every inch, trying desperately to hold onto the image of her, but she kept shifting, slipping away, never staying still. Even as he forced himself to focus, to shape her into the child he remembered, sleep devoured him anyway, relentless and indifferent.

It didn’t matter the reason however, despite the ridiculous notion, Thomas was convinced that she was punishing him. He was not a superstitious man- the dead stayed dead- but he wondered if she just didn't want to visit her father in his dreams. Maybe he never gave her the life she really deserved, that in all his efforts to be better, he was only scraping the minimum. His guilt manifested into conviction that she was so angry with him for not being good enough that she refused to come to him. Come back home to the mind that is decorated with her.

His grief transformed into a snake that sat at the bottom of his stomach. Eating at his sorrow, it began to twist and coil about in the hollowness of his chest, braving to push up towards the column of his throat. He kept trying to swallow the sob that was forcing its way up, but the pain would not let itself be contained. His daughter was here, alive, yet not. Instead older, different. Her eyes were wrong: a deeper sea-foam green, instead of the confused colour between green and blue. They were meant to be the colour of thick glass, a teal soft and glassy. She was missing the mole on her right temple, the spatter of freckles on her face from long hours out under the sun with Thomas. It was like staring at a word too long, until it made no sense. The longer he stared, the more wrong she looked. Each discrepancy struck him over the head like a hammer: wrong, wrong, wrong. He was trapped in the beginnings of his dreams all over again, stuck scrutinising the wrongness of it all.

He was desperate for this to work, to reject the reality, but the reality and finality of it would not relent. Every detail of this girl, the wrong eyes, the unblemished skin, even her voice- raspy and low unlike the soft and gentle tone he longed to hear again, was another reminder that tried to shake him out of his illusionment. The world felt brittle, fragile, folding over and around him. There was only this cheap imitation, this stranger left to remind him of how much he lost.

Another thought slithered in, feverish and dark: What if he kept her? He briefly recoiled at it, even as it tempted him, an impossible, terrible solution to a loss he could not survive. A loss he was barely surviving, but he was surely not spared.

He was a hunter; he knew how to take what he wanted and hide it. He could easily grab her, take her into the belly of his house. No one would know and he could reclaim what had been ripped from him. There was no one for miles, a small house on the edge of nowhere, only close to a small fishing river. No one would hear her scream, no one would question a thing. She would disappear from the world, and he could have a family again. He entertained the thought that began to inflate in his chest, growing larger and larger, a hot fever running through his arms down to his fingers. All he had to do was lunge, and maybe he could be whole again. But even that impulse only deepened the ache; she was not his daughter.

His grief got heavier, as if it had a real weight and texture. His heart hammered in his chest, a desperate drum. He could save this girl like he did the last time he saw her, he could make her look like her, he could make her talk like her. He could raise her, he could make this work.

He could be a father again.

The cords in his throat began to quiver as the girl before him pitched her final effort to get him to donate to her school project on sea turtle conservation.

“Do you like fishing?” He finally croaked out, voice dry with lack of use.

His father was a decorated fisherman who preferred the company of the open space and fishes more than love and blood. There was nothing that tied Thomas to his father, other than the gift of fishing. His old man rarely spoke to him and treated him more as an inconvenience than a son- but he taught him to fish.

Perhaps that was love that he could not see, giving him the only thing in his life he would be good at. So Thomas would make his daughter fish, and give her this ability that was so precious to him. She was clumsy at first like all children are in the beginning, but soon, she was treading water beside him, water up to her thighs as she watched her line bob up and down. This was their tradition, a reverence, this was important. This was love; a river full of fish and a father acting as a guiding hand to his daughter who loved fishing as much as him. It was always the two of them, it should’ve always been the two of them. But she was too ambitious, she was always too excited, too reckless, just like him.

The weight of his words didn’t phase her as this imposter scrunched up her nose before shaking her head. The laugh that broke out of him was sharp and brittle. Foolish, foolish man. To think for even a second this could be his daughter. In his mind’s eye, he crushed this unsuspecting girl into dust. How dare she look like her? How dare she rub salt into an infected wound that refused to close? He reached for his wallet regardless, because what else was there left to do, but to pay someone once more to leave him?

It was evening when he came back home, the house eerily quiet. Ever since he had her, the house had never been quiet, there was no escaping where her little feet ran across, he could hear the sound of her laughter, the weight of the floor shaking as she ran from him. Frowning, he scouted the kitchen, the bedroom, the porch- she was nowhere to be found. Unsettling fear began to prick at his spine as he began to call out her name, a name he would ramble in prayers as he held her for the last time. What tipped him off was his fishing box, the box open, his lure gone.

She was never meant to fish alone, the river current was temperamental and unpredictable. Easy to sweep a child off their feet.

He ran out the door, desperate, his fishing pole missing from his shed, the bucket of his bait was left open. He ran towards the river, his heart stuttering at a small grey shape, floating downstream towards him. He jumped into the water, swimming, screaming, reaching for what remained of his daughter, her body washed and cleansed out by the water.

He was a man who never begged, but that night he held her pulpy skin to his face and prayed to whoever would listen. He would try to save her, but maybe because of all his past sins, this was God’s way of evening out the score.

Thomas closed the front door, staring back at the mess of his living room. The wreck of this house that used to be a home. Bottles strewn across the floor, even more on the table, others tucked into the crook of his couch. It had been more than a decade since she left, but the pain only mounted, it clung onto him like a leech. He was going to die soon anyway, at the rate he was going, he was already halfway to hell.

Grief was all he had left of her, so he would hold on to it. He did not want to forget, to move on from a memory of where his little girl and him still existed together. Settling back into the Thomas-like shape indent in the couch, he stared ahead at a broken fishing pole mounted above the fireplace, hoping to catch a glimpse of his girl even if only in a dream.