I Swear I'll Make It Up to You

by Mishka Shubaly

  One day at lunch, we had gotten into a conversation about Charles Whitman, the disaffected college student who had climbed the bell tower at his university, killing sixteen people and wounding thirty-two others before he was killed. Whitman had been a punk, we decided. The way to maximize the body count would be to wait till everyone was gathered in one place—the dining hall at lunch, say—then seal off the exits and kill them all. (Seven years later, this would be the exact approach Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold took at Columbine.)

  Even if I put all that on the irreverent friends I’d made at Simon’s Rock, I’d fantasized about violence on my own. Tashina is First Nation, descended from the Cree Tribe on the Big River Reserve in Saskatchewan. The mascot at our high school, Sanborn Regional High, was the Indian. Our school was too poor to field a football team, but the windbreakers of our soccer and field hockey teams were emblazoned with the grim face of a cartoon Indian in a stereotypical Lakota Sioux eagle-feather warbonnet.

  Even at thirteen, I had understood that Indian Festival, our fall spirit rally of war whooping and face painting and toy tomahawks, was disrespectful white trash bullshit. By my sophomore year, I had alienated enough classmates that Indian Festival became the backdrop for a colorful fantasy.

  I conjured a scenario in which I had been put in charge of our class’s float for the parade. The final day of Indian Festival, the float was revealed to hold only a small teepee, out of which emerged Tashina, in the traditional war dress of her people. She muttered an ancient incantation, a song to “free the blood” that slowly and painfully burst the veins of all the kids in my high school. I, of course, would be spared, and I had envisioned the two of us gleefully bathing in the blood of our dying classmates.

  It’s not just that I could or should have stopped Wayne or should have died. I had basically willed the shooting to happen. My mother had wept over me when she picked me up. Galen’s parents must have gone insane with grief. How could I have been so stupid, so selfish, so horrible? I was as guilty of Galen’s and Nacunan’s murders as Wayne Lo. I wanted to tell my mom, to confess my sins, to get that sickening knowledge out of my heart, but I couldn’t yet speak. It was okay—we had time. Tomorrow I would be able to talk. I would tell her, and she would listen.

  Each winter, my mother wrote a Christmas letter to her sixteen brothers and sisters and all her faraway friends, updating them on the events of the year and wishing them happy holidays. That night, still not having slept, I noticed my mother’s annual family Christmas letter printed out on the pine dining room table my father had built. I picked it up and, walking into the living room, began to read it.

  My father had been working out in Vancouver since the spring. It had been our understanding that we would be joining him there. In the letter, my mother revealed that she and my father were getting a divorce.

  I could not breathe. I fell to the floor. Now the tears came, so hard and so fast that I felt like I was drowning.

  The next night, I pulled on my hat and coat and stepped out into the winter night. I exhaled a big, steamy breath and watched it swirl in the moonlight for a second before it disappeared. I felt the best I had since the shooting, the best I’d felt in a long time. I didn’t yet feel relief, as such, but anticipation of relief, like I’d finally got an appointment to have the dentist pull a rotten tooth that had been causing me pain for years. I started walking.

  I hiked the couple of miles out to the stone bridge that arched over the railway tracks on the way to the rope swing, the highest point within walking distance. I climbed up on the low retaining wall. It wasn’t that far to the train tracks below. I’d have to go down head first in order to actually die and not just fuck myself up.

  It was curiously cosmic when you thought about it. It took twenty-four hours for the world to spin on its axis, and it had taken twenty-four hours for my world to turn on its head. I waited for the sound of a car approaching, which would be my cue to jump. Just one quick, brave swan dive to end my life. I closed my eyes. In my mind, I could see Chuong, flying off the end of the rope swing, floating through the air, and then disappearing forever.

  No car came. I waited. Still, no car.

  I looked down into the darkness and saw nothing.

  My father was a coward, abandoning us the minute he saw his chance. To give up now, to tap out, to submit, would be to admit that I was a coward like him.

  That was no way to live and a worse way to die. Things were terrible now, this was true. This was the absolute worst. Things could never again be as hard or as painful as they were on this desolate night. But if I could get through this . . .

  Galen hadn’t wanted to die. He had wanted very much to live. He had fought to hang on to his life, fought to the very end. He had been seventeen, a whole life of late-night smoking and pontificating and gently mocking idiots like me ahead of him. Gifted as he had been at math and physics, Galen had wanted to be a poet. If he were here, standing on this ledge with me, he would roll his eyes, ask me what kind of asshole I was, then turn around and go home.

  Carefully, I got back down off the low rock wall at the edge of the bridge. Then I turned around and started walking. You had to always keep trying, keep fighting; you had to never ever, ever, ever give up. I pulled my hat on tighter and hunched my jacket up around my ears. It was cold out, and I had a long way to go to get back home.

  Despite Wayne Lo’s killing spree, despite the impending divorce, against all reason, my parents elected to proceed with our planned family Christmas vacation at a WASP-y little ski resort in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The tickets were bought and paid for, and we didn’t waste anything in our family.

  I understood from the movies that if you punched a guy with a roll of quarters in your hand, you would break his jaw. Days before the flight to Denver, I got my mother to drive me downtown, and I dutifully got a roll of quarters out of the bank while she waited in the Aerostar minivan. “For the video games,” I told her. I intended to knock my father out.

  I once asked my mother why my father, who had tried unsuccessfully to prevent us from getting each of our four dogs, didn’t like them. She looked puzzled for a second, then explained that it wasn’t because he didn’t like dogs. When Dad had been a boy, maybe eight or nine, he’d had a dog he loved dearly, a cocker spaniel named Mickey. One day, another dog attacked and killed Mickey. The man who owned the other dog came over to Dad’s house with his dog to apologize to Dad’s father. Dad ran into the house, got a rifle, pointed it out the window, and shot and killed the other man’s dog.

  The story had blown my mind. Gleaning a moral from it had been impossible. My entire life, my parents had told us that if someone hit you, you weren’t supposed to hit back; you were supposed to tell a teacher so the person wouldn’t do it again. Didn’t my father’s actions run completely counter to this? But in the days after I got the news of my father’s betrayal, I finally figured it out: If someone hurt you, you took it. But if that person hurt someone you loved, you summoned up all the destructive power in your reach, and you took bloody revenge.

  When Tashina spied my dad and Tatyana waiting glumly for us at baggage claim in Denver, I wrapped the fingers of my right hand tightly around the roll of quarters. Dad looked grievously tired and beaten down. When he reached out to hug me, I stepped back and clenched my fist. In that instant, he looked so wounded that I froze.

  I couldn’t bring myself to punch him. I loved him. It made me hate myself. I wasn’t man enough to swing on the coward who had been my hero. So I was a coward too.

  Incredibly, my parents slept in the same room. My mother was constantly on the verge of tears, as clingy as my father was distant. I retreated into my music, listened to Dinosaur Jr. and Fugazi and Bob Dylan obsessively, fruitlessly searching obtuse rock lyrics for some explanation.

  I called my father out at dinner one night, accusing him of competing with me for everything my entire life, telling him the contest he had wanted so badly was over, that he was an old man and that I
had won. I could outrun him, outswim him, and if he wanted to step outside, he would find out that I could outfight him. Tatyana yelled at me to shut up. She was his favorite, she always had been, but backing him up on this? I hated her for it, as I hated the old man for not responding, for just standing there with his arms folded, like I had when I was getting taunted in grade school.

  Tashina, who’d now had three parents completely flake out on her, fled the dinner table. When things settled down, Tatyana and I found her sitting on the bed in the girls’ shared room. Tashina asked us if we ever thought about just walking out to the middle of a snowy field and lying down there and never moving again. In a rare moment of accord, Tatyana and I both instantly swore that we would never abandon Tashina, that she would always have us.

  At my mother’s insistence, we devoted one evening to watching The Prince of Tides. Sitting there in the darkness, the movie flickering before us, the silence only broken by my mother’s sniffling, I didn’t want to cry or scream or howl but merely to flick a switch, like turning off the TV: the world would fade, then dwindle down to a tiny white dot, then finally disappear.

  No one in my family said a word to me about the shooting.

  When I was a baby, I woke up every couple of hours during the night, crying for my mom. My mother’s friends told her that at some point, you have to let babies cry until they learn to comfort themselves. At nine months, I caught whooping cough. She lost thirty pounds while caring for me, terrified that I would die. After that, my mother couldn’t bear to hear me cry. Despite my father’s protestations, my mother always came for me.

  I was scared of the dark. On the nights that my mother didn’t sit with me until I fell asleep, I hid under the covers, breathing through only the tiniest gap in my blankets, drenched in fearful sweat until I finally succumbed to sleep.

  When I awoke in the night, I automatically ran to my parents’ bed. I remember my father’s wide, hairy, freckled back in the night. He was so much bigger than me, too big to be human, like an elephant, part wild animal and part geologic formation. I was twelve before I made it through one night in my bed.

  Having an oversized boy come into your marital bed in the middle of the night, each and every night . . . that must have been a huge barrier to intimacy. When I got news of the divorce, this much was clear: I had destroyed their marriage. My father was abandoning my mother because I was weak.

  The next year unfolded like a slow-motion film of a train derailment: the moment of hesitation from some minute anomaly, then the hurtling mass of metal slipping horribly sideways, the wrinkling of great sheets of steel, the folding of box cars, huge torn hunks of metal arcing dreamily through the air. Mentioning to reporters that I knew it was Wayne when I heard shots was enough to get me served with a subpoena as soon as I returned to campus. I was sequestered as a witness for the prosecution, which meant I could not talk to my friends or anyone else about what had happened. I found myself both mired in and deeply alienated from the most traumatic experience of my life.

  My personal tragedy of the dissolution of my family—the worst thing I had ever encountered—was eclipsed, even in its inception, not just by the shooting but also by the experiences of my classmates. A friend’s mother had dropped dead one Christmas, and her father had placed her with a foster family and signed over his guardianship of her. Another friend’s father was a career drunk who occasionally worked as a carpenter and dipped in and out of homelessness without complaint or even comment. Another friend’s father had been a government agent poisoned in prison by the CIA. Another friend’s stepfather had caught him looking at his Penthouse magazines the day before Thanksgiving and with a “You really want to know what a woman is like?” had dragged him to the kitchen and plunged his hand deep into the semifrozen cavity of the Thanksgiving turkey defrosting in the sink. My story was so banal it hardly merited mentioning.

  Zack took a little pity on me, and though he wouldn’t allow me to compromise my sequestration, he shared with me one tidbit of happy news: Wayne Lo had been getting the shit kicked out of him with such regularity while he awaited trial that they had put him in solitary confinement for his own safety.

  My roommate, James, was clever and insightful but not particularly touchy-feely. His parents were happily married and, like most parents of Simon’s Rockers, very well-off. He couldn’t understand what I was going through as money got tighter and tighter. He extended bland sympathies when I told him, but that was about it.

  Still, he was a comfort to me. At night, we’d climb into our beds at the same time, put the slow version of the Pixies “Wave of Mutilation” quietly on repeat, watch the star field screensaver, and talk—about girls, about music, about Galen—till we fell asleep.

  One night while I was on the phone with my father, trying to figure out where I would go for the summer, he ventured that I would be welcome to come and live with him.

  “Yeah? That might be cool,” I said.

  His job in Vancouver had soured, as all his jobs seemed to sour, and now he was in California. I was still unsure about our relationship, but California sounded appealing, especially during the nadir of a Massachusetts winter. Just the two guys . . . it might be really cool.

  “It’s an option. There’s room here for you. Of course, you would have to pay rent.”

  “Rent? Dad . . . I just turned sixteen.”

  “You’re out on your own now, which is what you wanted. I think it’s appropriate for you to contribute. We’ll work out something fair.”

  “Dad . . . I’m your kid. Aren’t you legally obligated to, like, feed me and stuff until I’m eighteen?”

  “Mishka, you have always made the argument that you’re a special case and that ordinary rules shouldn’t apply to you. You’re out of the house, you come and go as you please, you drink alcohol, you smoke cigarettes. I pay rent—why shouldn’t you?”

  I got off the phone as quickly as I could and fell back on my bed. I had been using the word “unfair” to describe my relationship with my parents for so long that, though entirely accurate here, it seemed completely inadequate to describe the situation. It was insane. He was insane. And to invite me in just to push me out like that . . . it was making me insane.

  I made the mistake of voicing my displeasure to my friends. Zack told me, once and for all, to shut up. Zack had grown up a clumsy, skinny weakling utterly dependent on his glasses and his comic books in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a town enamored with its history of backbreaking industrial and agricultural labor. His childhood experiences hadn’t exactly bred sympathy or a high tolerance for whining. When Zack’s father came out of the closet and split with Zack’s mother while Zack was in high school, he had endured public humiliation beyond all imagining, he informed me, and I was to never bitch about my parents’ divorce again. It hurt, but he was right, I told myself. My troubles, troubles that were ruining me, in the grand scheme of things, well, they were nothing. Life is hard. Harden the fuck up, soft boy.

  I hated my father that winter, but by then I had hated him for years. I hated him because I loved him and he ignored me. When my father wasn’t away on business trips for Atomic Energy of Canada and then the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he had only been a token presence, returning from long hours at work just to disappear after dinner into his basement wood shop and a six-pack of Budweiser tall boys. I missed him, and I expressed it by constantly pestering him when he was around.

  I couldn’t have been more than six, shadowing him around his basement workshop, when he finally tried to engage me. He plopped me in an office chair in front of a computer. I still remember the green flashing cursor on screen and the built-in keyboard, a cutting-edge machine at the time. My father explained to me that a computer was so smart that it could solve any problem.

  Okay, fine, I had a problem for it. I laboriously typed into the computer “How do you work?”

  My father saw it coming and began hemming and hawing before I’d written my third word. Then, when I’d fin
ally finished, he began trying to explain himself out of the corner I’d painted him into, telling me I hadn’t asked the computer the question in a language it could understand.

  I burst into tears. I had beaten his challenge and found a question the computer couldn’t answer. My father couldn’t stand that I had outwitted him, so he’d changed the rules. He had cheated.

  When I was in second grade, I asked my father to help me design a trap to kill Jason Frederick, the class bully. On my instructions, he drew a deep pit full of jagged blades concealed by a thin camouflage covering. Then he drew Jason Frederick approaching, holding an ice cream cone. Then he drew a little holder on the side of the pit to catch Jason’s ice cream cone when he fell in. I decided then and there that my dad was an asshole. This was a serious situation, Jason had to be dealt with, and my father was mocking me, his only son! On that day, I wrote him off, and I held fast to my disappointment in him.

  As the winter wore on, it became clear that my father intended not just to shuck off his wife of nineteen years like an ill-fitting coat but to ditch the children too. Had he ever liked me? My father clearly preferred Tatyana over me—she was quieter, tidier, more orderly, less wild. Tashina had only come to live with us at the age of four, when it had become clear that her father, my mother’s brother, couldn’t afford to take good care of her. Though my father didn’t have the disdain for Tashina that he had for me, they had never really bonded. It occurred to me that when Chuong moved out to New Hampshire with us, my father stopped trying to connect with his wife’s extended brood and resigned himself to being a stranger in his own home. Had he felt anything other than relief when Chuong had run away?