Before I called 911, Eli and I went through what we would tell the police. It was an accident. Grandpa tripped and fell. Daddy tried to help. They questioned me and Eli separately, but whatever the boy had seen, he told them the right thing. He was a good boy.
I put him to bed, then went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I vowed to prove my father wrong, to be a better father to Eli than my father had been to me. That Eli would never become like him. Like me. Alcoholism had plagued my family from time immemorial, like some ancient curse. But it would stop here.
I went in to take another look at Eli. He was asleep and looked so innocent, his face unlined by worry or grief. I gently took his hand in mine and swore a silent oath that I would never drink again.
Then I cleared the house of booze. I took my father’s remaining rum down to the drain in the floor in the basement laundry room and emptied each of his bottles, one by one. Then I got my remaining stash of bourbon from out of the nearby alcove and poured all of that down the drain as well.
The next day I called professional cleaners to clean up not only the mess of blood, teeth and tongue in the kitchen, but also the recliner, the ashes that surrounded it, the sticky film of dried urine nearby. Clean the whole place, as deep as you can, I told them.
And Eli and I started our new life, just the two of us. I got back in AA and began running, and even dating a bit. Eli was doing well in school.
Things began to seem normal.
Until the next October.
#
As Halloween approached again, I learned the hard way that the old cliché you hear about the one-year anniversary of a loved one’s death being hard is dead-fucking-on. I’d be out grocery shopping or running errands and for brief instants I could swear I could see him. Someone would catch my eye and something about them – the set of their mouth as they perused a menu; or their gait; or a turn of phrase, like “a couple three” – would remind me of my father so strongly that for a dizzying moment I felt the uncanny sense that he was somehow there. When I got a letter from the Cremation Society a few weeks before Halloween telling me that “the anniversary of a death can stir up many emotions all over again and may come when you least expect them,” I thought to myself “no fucking shit,” and threw the thing in the trash.
So when I started smelling him, I thought it was more of the same. First it was the familiar sour bite of alcohol; the smell that always seemed to ooze out of his nose, even when he was passed out in the living room. But then I began smelling his odor, the peppery, oily musk of his dirty clothes and his lived-in recliner. And then the smell of old piss, the ammonia funk that emanated from his bucket.
At first I suspected Eli. “Are you peeing on the floor?” I asked him.
He looked at me as if I’d asked him something bizarre, then he said, “No, Daddy. It’s Grandpa.”
“What do you mean?”
“Grandpa was here. That’s who you’re smelling.”
At the time, I wrote it off as the one-year anniversary getting to him, too. But as the month went on, he began to have night terrors. The first time, I heard him in the middle of the night, yelling in a fearful timbre. I came to his room and saw him thrashing around and crying in his bed, Star Wars sheets tangled and knotted about his body, his eyes open but sightless, terrified. I took him out of his bed and held him tight, stroking his hair and repeating “shhh, Eli, shhhh, your daddy is here, you’re safe.” But I couldn’t awaken him—he just kept writhing and crying in my arms until dawn’s first sickly light filled the room and it was time to get him ready for school.
Soon, this was happening every night—Eli waking me up in the middle of the night with frightened screams, followed by my futile attempts to comfort him as he flailed and shuddered in my arms. Feeling helpless to alleviate his terror, I took him to a pediatrician, who told me to start giving him children’s melatonin—or “nighttime vitamins,” as I referred to them with Eli.
But the night terrors continued, even when I upped the dosage—from the two pills recommended on the side of the bottle, to three, then four. If anything, the higher dosages just seemed to send him deeper into his nocturnal deliriums, which he could never remember in the morning. So I stopped giving him the melatonin, and started having him sleep in my room. He’d keep me awake, tossing and turning as he struggled to sleep; then thrashing in fear once he finally lost consciousness.
Soon the nightmares came for me, as well. During my brief snatches of sleep between Eli’s fits, I’d have visions: my father’s shattered face, broken teeth in that bloody abyss of his mouth; his feeble pawing at my face as the life sputtered out of him; his final look of unfathomable paternal love even as I choked the life out of him.
The sleepless nights began to take their toll, and I began to have the thoughts that had derailed my previous stints of sobriety—
I needed a drink.
I deserved a drink.
I could handle it this time.
I got a prescription for Ambien after checking with my AA sponsor. He told me it was OK, but warned me about taking more than one pill in a night. “I shit you not,” he said, “one night I doubled up on it and went to bed. I woke up in my car; it was running, and I was sitting outside the liquor store.” We both laughed at that, but then he looked into my eyes and told me, “For real, though, be careful with that shit.”
The Ambien helped me sleep for a while. But my dreams were even worse than they were before. They would usually feature the dark alcove in the basement, seething with a febrile, violet pulse, like some malignant organ. I supplicated myself before it, kneeling and accepting from it a bottle full of Eli’s blood, feeling a pleasant burn as it poured down my throat and into my belly. I’d awaken from these dreams with a start—parched, my blood feeling poisoned and my skull pounding, as if I’d actually been drinking.
I began doubling the prescribed dosage. Then tripling it. My dreams were less vivid then, just phantasmagoric blurs: the alcove downstairs, still thrumming with evil; the burning sensation of booze as I gulped from the bottle; the smell of festering urine and unwashed, diseased flesh.
And the sounds of him. My father. Laughing a wet, snuffling chortle.
But I kept it together. I continued to get Eli to school each day, both of us pale with dark rings around our eyes. I kept going to AA and was on the verge of getting my one-year token, a goal that had always evaded me even in my prior stints of sobriety.
I thought if we could get past the one-year anniversary we would make it. We’d be fine.
But then Halloween night—the anniversary of my father’s death—rolled around.
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