I was eight years old when my parents got divorced. As a child I suppose I never understood what divorce meant; I simply observed the typical behavior of my parents. My mother would yell at my father, call him a fuck-up, call him an alcoholic.
My father would grunt, nod in agreement, and retreat downstairs. My father didn’t speak much, not unless he had to. Even today we don’t have novel-length conversations. He asks me about my day, comments on whether or not I need a haircut, and occasionally on a losing sports team. He’s a man of very few words, but he never says anything that he doesn’t mean.
He never told my mother that he hated her, never spoke a cross word in her name.
There were the fights, the arguments that made me plug my ears or run outside, escape to my tree house or my secret place in the woods. I used a pocket knife I got from Johnny Massa in first grade to mark my flight from home. I never got to count all of the little marks I made with that rusty blade.
The tree got cut down when I was eighteen.
My mother lived upstairs and my father moved downstairs. My brother Matt and I shared a room. Our house was tiny. My parents only planned on having one child when they bought the house, but I was an accident. They had nowhere else to put me.
Just like we had nowhere else to put my father.
So my mother put him in the basement.
Neither of them spoke to each other, we never ate dinner together, went anywhere as a family. My father would go to work an hour early to miss my mother, sometimes stay out late. My mother would take us to school, go to work, fix us dinner, and then go to bed.
She would never fall asleep -- at least not right away. I had a feeling she would stay up late, listen for him, for when he got home, listen to the footsteps as he retreated downstairs into his basement.
Then the little lamp by her bed would flicker off. I imagine she just lay there, staring at the wall or the ceiling -- or the darkness that stood in the way of what she wanted to see.
My brother and I would do the same thing, whispering across the room, questioning the other as to whether or not he was awake. We would have contests -- Whoever fell asleep first would lose. Most of the time it was me, or it was me pretending to lose, refraining from answering my brother when he asked me if he had won, staying as still as I could when he climbed out of bed and tiptoed across the room to poke me. I was very good at not laughing, very good at not making a sound, not smiling. I was very good at pretending to be asleep, at ignoring everything.
When he had determined that I was sleeping he would sneak back across the room and crawl into bed. I would only wait a few minutes before he would start to snore, and then I would climb and creak my way down the stairs into the kitchen.
I had to move slowly to avoid waking the monster.
I could make it to the bottom of the stairs before he started making noise. I would close my eyes and wait, listening, beating myself up that I didn’t think to bring my can of monster spray. I would put my hands over my eyes when the stairs started to moan so I wouldn’t be tempted to open them when the monster came to eat me.
I would stand like that for minutes until the creaks stopped and listened, only to smell the monster.
I could never understand the odd mix of smells, but they would quickly disappear.
“Why are you out of bed?” My father would chase the monster away.
“Water.” I would whisper and attach myself to his leg.
He would pat the top of my head and slur his laugh. “I’ll get it for you.” He would push me off of his leg and disappear into the darkness for a few minutes. I would close my eyes and wait for his return, listening to see if I could hear the monster from the basement.
I would hear the cupboard door whine before closing loudly, ice rattling around in the tupperware bowl we kept in the freezer, the tap water exploding out of the sink. Then nothing. A brief moment of silence, then shuffling feet across the floor. My father would put his hand on my head again, and I would take the water.
He would pat me on the head, “good night” me, and then he would slip away into the basement to fight off the monster. I would run up the stairs, spilling half of the water in the glass my father had given me on my way.
#
My father left his basement and took the monsters with him.
My brother left for college.
My mother no longer had to pretend the basement didn’t exist.
I no longer had to pretend to be asleep.
Once a week I would stay up later than usual, flashlight in hand, stolen family picture album with me under the covers.
Our family vacation to my grandfather’s house in Pennsylvania when I was six: the road trip, the numerous accidents along the way. Mostly pictures of me sleeping in the car, later staring at my great grandmother like she was an ancient witch. I could imagine her, slinking out of her rocking chair and onto a broom.
The wedding album from before my brother’s or my time. Photos of my mother with a smile, of my father in something other than his work shirt and jeans. My grandparents, all living, my uncle Joe with his wig on backwards to make my brother laugh.
My grandparents were mostly dead now, uncle Joe had accepted his baldness, and my father was still wearing the same clothes. The wedding dress was now hanging in the basement, falling every now and then from the hanger to collect dirt. My brother once made me try it on, it would “make me cool” he would say.
It just made my mother angry.
When she would go to the bathroom late at night I would turn the flashlight off and pretend to be asleep. The toilet would flush and the faucet would run and then her door would close. I would sneak back down the stairs with the album, careful not to step on the last stair, replacing the book of the past before she woke up the next morning. Not that she would go looking for memories that she hated.
My brother wouldn't come home too often. When he did he would go out with his old high school friends, avoid home as much as he possibly could. They would drink cheap booze and smoke cheap cigarettes under the one bridge in our town. They would throw their beer bottles into the river and watch them sink.
I watched a lot of things sink. Never a beer bottle.
My mother told me not to be an alcoholic. She told me not to be my father or my brother. I was her angel. She would grab my cheeks and call me her sweet everything before she went back upstairs and closed her door.
Some days I would sneak back down into the basement and sit in the dark, waiting for the monsters to come out.
I wanted to be like my father. I wanted to scare away the monster. I never got the chance. He never came back.
I left for college.
#
“What are you drinking?”
“Iced tea.”
“Oh.”
I had enough of trying to find monsters by the time I was twenty-six. There were enough monsters in the world without me trying to find any more. The only monsters were the monsters in my son’s closet.
I wiped a bead of sweat off of the beer in front of me. “Dad.”
A grunt.
“Remember, when I was nine or ten or, whatever age it was... And I would come downstairs for a glass of water. And you would somehow scare away all of the monsters from the basement and get my drink?”
A man of many words.
“How did you do it?”
A shrug. “There were no monsters.” I envisioned him patting my head, ten years old, standing at the bottom of a staircase in the dark.
“Listen. I don’t, uh, I mean I don’t know how to say this. Or if you want to hear it. I mean, you probably don’t.”
No grunt this time. He just stared at me, waiting for me to go on.
“I, well. She...”
He stirred his drink with his straw, over and over again, around the glass. We both stayed silent for what seemed like an eternity. I was pretty sure that he understood what I was trying to say.
“Mom. She... she died... Last night.”
He looked up from his drink in silence, his hand still on the straw, stirring, always stirring. He nodded slowly and let the straw go. He waved over the waiter and said something to her, a woman that reminded me of my wife.
“She had cancer, you know. Well, you don’t. She didn’t want me to tell you, wouldn’t let me.” It had been a long time coming.
“Your brother told me, Peter.”
It was my turn to watch him in silence.
“He told me a year ago.”
“And you never went to visit her?” I clutched my drink a little too tightly. I was afraid it would explode, I would explode.
“I tried.”
“You tried?”
He offered no more.
The waiter came back with a tray of drinks. A beer for him, a beer for me.
He covered the check.
#
It rained the morning of her funeral. We stood under large black umbrellas.
My brother stood with his wife on one side, I stood with my wife and son on the other. We never looked at each other.
I waited to catch a glimpse of the father, just like I waited at the top of the stairs waiting to catch a glimpse of the monster that had so long fascinated and terrified me. I did not laugh, did not smile. I had pretended, like I had in bed, to feel nothing.
He never showed. Not in the small crowd, not on the hill far away.
My brother and I went our separate ways. He went back under his bridge to sink bottles of beer, I opened the car door for my wife and fastened my son into his seat.
#
I stayed home from work. I slept during the day and sat awake at night. I listened to the rain, the wind, I listened for the monsters.
I listened to my son whimper, “Daddy?”
I waited for his second call and slipped out of bed, across the hallway that I had crossed many times in the dark.
I turned on his lamp and watched his head poke out from under the covers. I watched his eyes light up. “Daddy.” He pointed at his closet, whispered. “There’s a monster.”
I would pick up the bottle of water labeled “monster spray,” just like my mother had done, and go over to the closet, open it slowly. I would spray it a few times, wait, close the closet, and set it down again.
“Did you kill the monsters, daddy?”
I patted my son’s head, sat down on the floor next to him and closed my eyes.
“There’s no such thing as monsters, Peter.”
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