If Forgiveness Is All It Takes

“I’m sorry, son.” 

There’s silence for several long beats before I huff, then turn and walk away.

“I said I’m sorry. Don’t be like that.” 

I stop, abruptly. It’s like my feet have sprouted roots and they’ve buried into the cemetery soil and deep down into the center of the Earth. I hope the damned roots are burning to ash in the outer core. That’s the part that’s supposed to be molten, right? 

“Are you even listening to me?” 

I sigh. It’s an impressive sigh, going all the way up from my toes. “Yes, dad. I heard you.” The roots still won’t let me move. They’re not real, of course, but they feel real. They won’t let me walk away, not when there’s a little boy living deep –deep– in my soul who longs for those words to be true. I ruthlessly shove him back down. 

“Well?” Dad says, like he’s said it several times already. Like there’s an obvious answer and he’s impatient for it, tapping his foot, watching his watch. 

“Well, what?” I glance at him. I can’t remember what we were talking about. ‘Talking’ is, perhaps, a bit of an inaccuracy. He’s been talking for the last… hour? Hour and a half? I’ve been spacing out. Huh, I wonder if the “spaced” in “spaced out” refers to actual outer space with stars and planets and stuff or just a space outside oneself. Might need to look that one up later. 

“Well,” he says, stretching the four-letter word into an impressive nine syllables, “do you forgive me?” 

“Oh.” I blink. “No, of course not.” 

“What?” He demands. “Why not?” 

I blink at him again. Has that been the point? I’d long since quit trying to ascertain the theses of his rants. Sisyphus, meet boulder. It was useless to try to glean any sense when he got going. Why try so hard –to listen, to understand, to do better– only for your efforts to never be rewarded? So, I stopped trying to push the issue up the proverbial mountain. I let the boulder roll down. I wonder, absently, if it crushed a few houses at the bottom.

But forgiveness? This particular rant was about forgiveness? About me forgiving him? 

“I’m not going to forgive you.” I try to say it as a statement, but my what the hell are you smoking? expression must make it sound like a question. 

“Of course you are! Are you stupid?” He seems to get a second wind, riled up all over again. I can hear the stage call, let’s take it from the top! and smother my long-suffering sigh.

I try to interrupt. “Dad, we’re dead.” I put my hand straight through my own headstone to illustrate the point. I wiggle my fingers on the other side. “It shouldn’t matter what I think anymore.” Not that it ever mattered while we were living. 

He rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes, obviously. Do you think I’m an idiot? I’m still your father so you still gotta respect me. Clear?” 

It’s a cruel joke from the universe that even death couldn’t save me from my father’s company. Somewhere, some deity is laughing their ass off at my expense. I hope I at least make quality entertainment. 

“Uh-huh.” 

“Now, where was I… Well, this ghost business is awful. There isn’t a goddamned thing to do other than float around twiddling our thumbs while the world passes us by! My office replaced me in a week– a week! Forty years for that company and they replaced me in a week!”

“Uh-huh,” I say again. Usually, I only need to sprinkle in occasional signs I’m still paying attention to him, like tossing little bits of kindling into a fire. A pine cone here, a twig there. Eventually, he’ll burn out. It’s always easier to just let him burn out. One time, in the beginning of our wondrous (heavy on the sarcasm) new reality as freshly minted ghosts, I’d tried to just… float away. Outrun him and his ranting. The thing is, there are no noise-cancelling headphones for ghosts, and dad can get loud when he’s irate. Oh, and apparently, ghosts’ voices never get tired; we could scream for eternity without breaking a sweat. I guess it makes sense, since our throats aren’t real. Anyway, it’s not an experience I’m chomping at the bit to repeat. Thus, bits of kindling. 

“And don’t get me started on your mother’s new– new– boy toy-! It’s like I never mattered!” I zone out again, letting dad ramble, watching as snow begins to fall, covering the bouquet of flowers on my headstone. I wonder who put them there. “For some reason, I’m stuck here with all these betrayals and unable to pass on, and there isn’t a goddamned thing to do! I can’t work, I can’t fish, I can’t even watch those brain-rotting TikToks your generation is obsessed with.” 

“Right,” I reply, making a vague noise of agreement. I’m not about to tell him I figured out we can hijack certain old-school computers to surf the web. It’s how I planned to double-check that fact about the Earth’s core. Don’t ask me why, or how— for some reason, I can’t find much scientific research on ghosts. 

“So, you see, some of my buddies–”

“Your ghost buddies?” I interject, amused. Did you know a group of ghosts is called a ‘fraid’? A fraid. I need to buy whoever came up with that a beer. Like, metaphorically, obviously, since we ghosts are incorporeal and alas can no longer drink beer. 

In classic fashion dad keeps right on talking like I haven’t spoken. “–they think that the reason I haven’t passed on yet is ‘cause I’ve got unfinished business, here on Earth. I’ve got things I need to do that I didn’t do before I kicked the bucket. And I think they’re right. So, I’ve been making a list–”

“Is it a very long list? Does it stretch to the sun?”

“–and going through the things. I’ve gone to Hawaii like I’ve always wanted, and took a ride in a private jet! And so many more things–” 

I’m assaulted, briefly, by all the things I never got to do that I usually don’t let myself think about. Like take Jenna on that date I’d finally convinced her to go on, or that summer trip with my friends from high school we’d meticulously planned and replanned. Or finish the project for my engineering class I’d been so damn excited about. I wonder if my group finished the robot without me… I never checked. 

When I shake myself out of it, dad is still talking. “But nothing seems to be working. And the more I think about it, the more I think you’re the problem. The solution. You’ve got a grudge against me, so as soon as you forgive your old man I can be off.” 

I stare at him, mouth hanging open a little. I snap it closed with a click. It makes sense, I have to grimly admit, that he’s not really apologizing. I try hard not to be disappointed, and I think I fail. Dad is still staring at me like he expects a response though, so I say bluntly, “That’s not going to happen.” 

“What the hell, son!” he bursts out. “Don’t be so sensitive, it’s been ages already. Just let the damn thing go.” He switches tactics suddenly, instead going for a rather clumsy guilt trip: “I did so much for you, fed you and clothed you. Gave you a roof over your head. Changed your shitty diapers!” The idea of my father willingly touching a dirty diaper is so ludicrous I want to laugh but it won’t come out past the sudden tightness in my throat. Dirty diapers make me think of the girls, and every one of their disgusting diapers I changed when he was off at the pub. “The least you can do is try to help your old man pass on. Don’t be so damn selfish. It’s just a few words, it’s really not as hard as you’re making it out to be.” 

It’s just a few words. Just. A. Few. Words. As if that’s all forgiveness is. It takes me several long moments before I’m able to speak through the storm of emotions wreaking havoc on my insides. 

“You killed us,” I say finally. There’s so much incredulity in my words that it’s dripping off them, pooling on the frozen cemetery grass between us. “You goddamn killed us and you want me to forgive you?!” I’m furious all of a sudden, for the first time in what feels like an age. My anger is a slumbering giant, prodded awake by a gunshot. It’s tearing at my seams, boiling inside me until I’m a goddamn whistling kettle. “You had one job! One! All you had to do was pick me, Millie, and Rosie up from their school and drive us home, because lord knows actually attending one of your daughters’ recitals is too much to ask! Never mind your engineering-major son found the time in the middle of midterms. And still– still! You couldn’t even do that much for us. No, instead, you went to the pub. Got drunk. And even then, you could have called someone else to get us. Waited for mom to get off work. Called a taxi! Done literally anything other than driving drunk! But nooo, the bottle and your pride were more important than the safety of your family and everyone else around you.” 

“I wasn’t–”

“You wrapped your car around a tree going sixty in a school zone!” I’m screaming now. The only small bit of fairness in the world is that the girls had passed on peacefully to the true afterlife, unlike the two of us. I gasp in a breath. It suddenly feels like I need air even though my lungs aren’t real. My voice is choked by emotion when I spit, “You killed us. How can you expect I’ll forgive you?” 

He sputters like a splintered faucet. “Why, you-! I never- That’s not– You’re making it seem like I didn’t love you kids.” 

I stare at him for a long time. His ghost looks the way he did at the moment of death, thinning hair stuck to his sweaty forehead, clothes torn, and bits of windshield stuck in his skin after he went through it, since, naturally, he hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. As a ghost he is translucent, so I can just barely see the shadows of winter-dead trees behind him. Looking at him, I feel no fatherly love. No fondness or respect. Maybe a touch of fear, but even that’s worn off as time in this limbo goes by. All I feel is a deep well of hatred I’ve been trying to ignore. Maybe it’s been there all my life, slowly filling up with each missed science fair and disinterested dismissal, each scathing review and long-winded drunken tangent I’d been forced to sit silently through. The car accident, though… his actions had taken my little sisters from the world. Robbed them of a chance to grow up and grow old. To see the world and find love and purpose and make all the dumb mistakes kids make that make them wise as adults. For that, I wanted him to burn in hell. 

Finally, I speak. My voice is quiet and measured but no less frigid for it. “If my forgiveness is the thing you need to pass on then you better get a whole lot more comfortable with your new reality, dad.” I spit ‘dad’ like he’s an insult to the word. To call him a father would be like calling a nuclear blast ‘redecorating.’ Technically true in only the most abstract sense. 

“You-!!!” He’s so mad the veins in his forehead are nearly bursting. His complexion is still its ghostly grey, though, not the splotchy red I remember from his living tirades. “This could be why you’re still here too! It’s really not that hard, just say you forgive me, then maybe we can both get the hell out of this damned place!” 

I’m momentarily stunned by the idiocy. I lean closer and enunciate every word, my tone cold enough to freeze over hell. “You still don’t seem to get it, dad. I won’t be the one to put your demons to rest, and I will make sure you suffer for what you did. If I have to spend eternity here just so you do too, then that’s a price I will pay happily.” 

I take a moment to enjoy a spark of dark satisfaction from the shock splashed across his face. The slowly dawning horror. I think he’s just realized that if this is truly why he’s stuck here, then he’s never getting out. He’s shacked to the Earth and I’m stood just out of reach, holding the key. 

I leave him there. As I glide out of the cemetery and pick a direction at random, I feel a strange sense of relief. I’ve chosen my path. Drawn my lines. It’s rare for us to be the instruments of our own justice, the hands of karma herself. Maybe the universe doesn’t hate me so much, after all. Maybe, it has given me a twisted sort of gift. This, indeed, is a price I will relish paying.