Page 257 of Falling Backwards
I don’t know why, but it’s true.
Except of course I know why.
Voice weakening even more, I start telling Maggie about all of that.How it rubbed me the wrong way to be included in the group text in the first place because it felt braggy and like some kind of slight, the same way being mailed the family holiday card did.I tell her how my dad called Ryan‘son’and said he’s never been more proud than he is of Ryan’s accomplishment.How he has never told me he’s proud of me for anything, how I can’t recall him reaching out to say it even when I graduated high school—and how he didn’t attend the ceremony because Wendy had some kind of dance event.
It takes me many long seconds to be able to get out, “That…hurts.”
Maggie releases my arm and gingerly starts rolling to face me.I hear her hiss in discomfort and I want to tell her not to agitate her knee, but then she’s still and her hand is carefully skipping up my chest, my neck, until she can fit it to the side of my face.
“Oh, Luke.”It’s barely a whisper, but I can still hear the heaviness of her heart in it.She rubs her thumb beneath my eye as if to swipe away a teardrop.
The sweet motion undoes something in my chest that I hadn’t realized was wound up; the way I feel about these things I’ve said, as well as about the ones that are still to come and the ones that remain true from years ago, prick at my eyes.
The words come spilling out.
“I was here before them,” I say in a waver.“I’m his biological child.And he just shoved me off to the side and found some kids he likes better, kids who make him proud and who call him‘Dad’because he fills that role for them and who he’s happy to spend all the fucking time in the world with.And I know he has Reese, so that’s his biological child, too, but it just feels like now he’s foundtwosons to replace me.Nothing about how he always treated me has changed.Nothing has gotten better after all this time.”I sniff.“In the group chat, he called Ryan his son and said,‘That’s my boy!’and talked like he’s never had another son do anything special basically right in front of me.And it hurt because it—it wasn’t the first time he’s acted that way, you know?He’s found me unimpressive for so long.”
I turn my face into Maggie’s hand.I can hear her trembling breaths, can feel the tremble in her thumb still swiping beneath my eye.
I don’t wanna cry over him,I think, trying to blink back the tearfulness climbing up in me.
“Is that the problem?Me not being good enough?”I ask.“Not mature and accomplished and smart and wonderful enough?Or not having anything in common with him?Do the others like things he likes and so it’s easy for him to wanna be around them?Is Ryan’s award something my dad rooted for because he and Ryan bonded over it and they like the same stuff and Ryan hasn’t been a disappointment the whole time my dad has known him and—?”
“You arenota disappointment,” Maggie cuts in.“All the things he’s done…leaving you, not respecting your wishes about things, not supporting you the way he supports the others…all of that is whathehas done.It’s whatheis doing.It’s not what you deserve.He’s the disappointment.He’s the letdown.You are amazing and so worth knowing that if I had his phone number, I would call him right now and tell him how enormously he has messed up by not including you in his life.”
I don’t wanna cry.I don’t.I won’t.
Between what she has said, her soothing touch, and the thought of a phone call, it’s happening.
A hot teardrop escapes my eye and slides right down to her hand.Her thumb takes care of it and then her knuckles go across its wet path, and her exhalation is a fragile puff that only brings more of my tears on.
That, and….
“Hecalledme.After the group chat thing.Because I never said anything to congratulate Ryan.And I didn’t answer the call, so he left a voicemail, and he was…so mad.He was so mad at me for ignoring the chat.He yelled so much.”
Where our hands are still clasped between our bodies, her fingers clench mine, and mine clench back.
My chestaches.
My eyes do, too, and my throat.
I try to arrange the words that will describe all the things he said, the things he accused me of, but the only one blaring in my memory is what came right before he ended the voicemail.
“He said he’s ashamed of me.”
It has been stuck in me like the sharpest splinter and now it is all but wrenched out of me, too quickly to prepare for, too ruthlessly to be able to breathe around.
And yet I find enough air to choke out, “He said it out loud.He didn’t just make me feel that way.Hesaidit.”
I can’t tell if Maggie’s whimper is more from that or from her knee protesting her sudden move to gather me into a hug.As I turn and wind my arms around her, too, I’m hit with both a sense of being rescued and of worried guilt.
I tell her, “I don’t want you to hurt your knee trying to—”
She shushes me.“It’s okay.It’s all okay.”
I also can’t tell whether she’s saying that more about her knee or my heartache.
I only know I can’t avoid the weight of what my dad said sending me into weeping.
