8

I woke with fire in my eyes.

The burning building was only two blocks east of me, and my open window framed the blaze damn near perfectly.  I hopped out of bed and stood at the window and shook my head at the spreading calamity.  The sky flared and ash rained down over my block like ignited confetti.

When I turned back to the bed, Billy was sitting cross-legged in the center of my mattress.

He wore his baseball cap and was casually tossing the ball a foot into the air and catching it in his glove.

He said, “Daddy, you didn’t come see me play.  It was last Saturday.”

I shut my eyes trying to will my phantoms back into my past, into my mind, anywhere but here in front of me.  But that was the whole point.  They were always in front of me, always in my ear, always interacting with me in one way or another.

I kept my eyes shut but I could hear the ball slapping into the glove and the steady breathing of my dead son.

“Why, Daddy?  Why weren’t you there?”

A groan worked itself out of the center of my chest and up my throat and into my brain.  I snapped my eyes open.  I took a step closer.  He didn’t vanish.

“Bill, you never got a chance to start little league,” I said.  “You were only a year old when your mother ran a stop sign up in Tarrytown and broadsided an SUV.”  I kept my voice steady.  I spoke as if I was speaking to a small audience at one of my book signings.  I spoke as if I was reading poetry, as if the words I was reciting were the most beautiful in the world because I had strung them together and given them life with my blood.  “She was drunk.  She got into a fender bender.  It wasn’t a bad crash.  She wound up with nothing more than a bruise on her chin.  But she didn’t hook your car seat up correctly.  You were improperly strapped in and facing the wrong way.  Your neck snapped.  We had an open casket.  You looked perfectly fine.  Everyone hugged her and while she wept but all I wanted to do was kill her.  I still do.”

“Daddy, next Saturday will you take me to the ice cream parlor so we can get chocolate–”

“You’re not a ghost, Bill.  I don’t know what you are.”

“Daddy!”

“You’re not here.  You’ve never been here.  You were dead before you took your first step or spoke your first word.”

I laid down in bed and my son continued to sit beside me, throwing the ball up, catching it again.  I wanted to cry and couldn’t.  I thought if I could cry he would disappear, at least for a while.  But he didn’t.

The ball went up and he caught it once more.  And again.  And again.  And the city burned a couple of streets over.  And that sound kept working up out of my chest.