grandfather. My niece. Elisabeth. In my office, I lean on my desk and stare at a picture of us. She’s five in the photo, and she looks at me in it as if I’m the center of her universe.
Considering the other options in her life back then for center of the universe contention, I’m guessing I was the best and only pick. She lived with me, my father, my brother—her father—and her mom in a two bedroom trailer. Her grandfather was a sloppy drunk who liked to hit, her father was on the road to repeating the pathetic drunk genetics and her mother was so sad all the time that she would put anything in her body that would wipe her memory clean.
That left me. A teenage boy who didn’t have a penny to his name or enough common sense to think half of his decisions through.
I read somewhere once that a boy’s brain doesn’t develop the ability to understand the consequences of actions until later in his teen years. Part of me wants to believe it’s true. If it is—there’s a reason I was a bastard. If it’s not true, then I’m just a bastard.
The latter is probably my truth whether I want it to be or not, and it’s the reason I don’t sleep at night.
At eighteen, I had limited and straightforward thoughts and they went like this:
Baseball.
Playing in the minors.
Playing in the majors.
Becoming a star.
Getting out of town.
Getting out of the state.
Running as far away from my family as possible.
Running from my brother.
Running from his girlfriend.
Running from my father.
Just plain running.
Here’s the thing. I succeeded…at all of it. Excelled at running. I’m now in my thirties and recently retired from playing major-league baseball. I have more money than even God would know what to do with. I have investments and portfolios and a cushy job as a sales rep to keep myself occupied, because staying still drives me insane.
Staying still means I have time to listen to those annoying voices in my head. Means I have to live with demons who like to remind me of the past.
I used to lay in bed at night in my room in our trailer and as the wind shook the thin walls, I would imagine living the life I have now. I own a house that’s big enough that voices echo inside it. I have fast cars. I have enough land that I could farm it and feed a small nation. I have a beautiful wife who I love, who loves me and is my best friend.
I have it all.
It. All.
Because I ran. Because I stayed single-minded. Because I acted and didn’t give a damn about any consequences, any fallout, any hurt. I ran and I won…and I traded Elisabeth’s life for mine.
I left her behind by lying to myself and to her, saying that I’d be back as soon as I could. A lie. One I made myself believe as she hugged me goodbye. One she also believed as she kissed my cheek one last time.
Now she’s dying. Not a physical death, an emotional one, and from the first eighteen years of my life I know that an emotional death is the worst kind there is. It’s the least humane, the most painful, and if it goes on for too long there’s no cure.
And now I’ve fooled myself again by believing that if I finally kept that promise, I could save her—but really I wanted to save myself. I wanted the nightmares to go away. I wanted the demon in my head to cease chattering. I wanted peace and stillness and silence, but got none of it. Instead, failing my niece has created an explosion of anarchy.
Simple truth—I screwed up and I don’t know how to make us right, especially when everything I do is wrong.
The door to my office opens. Just a turn of the knob and a slight push in. Centimeter by centimeter, my wife, Allison, peeks in. I put down the picture frame and meet her eyes. There’s hesitancy in them. There’s also pain, and that causes a ripple of an ache in my chest. I’m a bastard, I don’t deserve her, yet in spite of all that, in her eyes, there’s also love.
In a white nightgown and with her blond hair pulled up into messy bun, she crosses the room. When she reaches me, she brushes her fingers along my jaw, the pads of her fingers soft against the stubble on my chin. “Come back