Page 1 of Ghoul

Hazel

Childhood Home, West Virginia

Circa 1991

Being young was not the same as being naïve. It was clear things were going to change when my parents’ divorce finalized, this I understood. My mind hadn’t painted an imaginary perfect future where Mom and Dad separated, and we were still together as a family. This wasn’t the 1940’s. People ending their marriage did not cause as much shock as it once had in history. I knew because I’d spent countless hours researching divorce when it was first mentioned by my dad. He tried to ease the topic into conversation over ice cream as if the amount of sugar we were pumping into our bodies would make the subject any less painful. It didn’t. Any way you went about it, divorce sucked.

The ink had barely dried on my parents’ divorce papers when Dad completely uprooted our entire lives. My friends and most of our family lived back home in West Virginia. Grams was the only relative of ours in this state that I knew of, so I guess that home was where you made it. We moved for him to be able to provide us with a better future. Allegedly, Cleveland, Ohio, was the exact location he needed to be in to climb the ladder at his so-called job. He had claimed to work as a police officer for years now, but I’d never witnessed anything that backed up his story. I was the type of person who needed to see things to believe them. Just because I’d never seen proof didn’t mean that he was lying necessarily, but it did not make me believe him either. I was more of a pessimist than an optimist. He was my father, so if I was going to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, it should have been him, but I didn’t.

Other parents who were in law enforcement, my friend Landen’s dad, for example, never made me think he didn’t work in the field they said. We saw him several times a week, driving past the school in his police car while we were outside playing. Dad, on the other hand, left so much to be questioned. I never so much saw a badge sitting carelessly on his nightstand after he returned from being gone all day, much less a uniform or car. The only thing he’d driven with four wheels in a very long time had been the box truck that brought us here. Usually, he was on his motorcycle, and I was behind him. It never made sense, but I never bothered to question it until I overheard Mom and him fighting the night before we left West Virginia.

“You’re not taking my kid into that Hell! It was your choice to hide the fact that you’re a cop and put yourself into danger. Not hers,” Mom frantically screamed, and something crashed against the shared wall between my bedroom and theirs. There was something different about her voice, it was desperate this time and lacking the fight and strength that was usually there. It was as if she had already lost the battle before a word left either of their mouths. I instantly got out of bed and hid beside their cracked bedroom door, listening to them argue with each other down the hall. Eavesdropping wasn’t enough; I had to see what was going on for myself. It wasn’t a new development for them to yell at each other, it had been happening for months, but the air in the house was stagnant. It was as if having the knowledge we were leaving tomorrow was making it harder for all of us to inhale oxygen into our bodies.

“She is our child,” Dad stressed, throwing the fact I didn’t only belong to her into her face, as he had done multiple times recently. Even though their marriage had been falling apart for some time now, neither of them would move out of the house. Dad said it was pointless for him to find somewhere else to live in West Virginia since he was moving us to Ohio. The judge granted custody to him, but he had tried to keep us together as a family for months now. It was Mom who wanted him gone, and she had to understand that by forcing him to leave, she was doing the same to me. The thing was, she didn’t seem to have a problem with that fact until tonight.

“It might not be ideal where I’m taking her, Karen, but she can’t stay here either. You’ve made that abundantly clear. Do you think I want to leave you here to let the drugs kill you? Because I don’t. I would die right beside you, but I have to protect our daughter. Even if it is from her own mother,” he admitted in a small defeated voice.

“I know,” she confessed in between sobs. It wasn’t long before I joined her in heartbreak. Tears burned my eyes and slid down my cheeks in silence. I inched closer to them to beg dad to stay. I didn’t want any of this, it was the two of them who had the problem. Not me. Why couldn’t they find a solution to this that didn’t involve moving eight hours away from the place I called home? I wanted to let my thoughts fly out of my mouth and into the air with volume, but I didn’t. I couldn’t make this about me. It seemed like I stood at the edge of their room unnoticed long enough to have aged at least five years, but it was less than a minute. Time passed differently in life-altering instances. Quietly, I crept backward from where I stood to let them have this moment. Even if I wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed and wake tomorrow, realizing this had all been a dream, I had to accept this harsh reality and not interrupt it.

I couldn’t change any of it. No matter how bad my insides hurt, I knew the pain Dad felt was worse. He meant what he’d said, if it wasn’t for me, he would die with Mom. She’d chosen her path, and she was always his until they had me. He was my protector up to this point, but something told me his armor wouldn’t be as shiny from this point on. Maybe it’d always taken both Mom and me to make perfection in his imperfect world. I would probably never know.

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