Page 13 of Under Pink Skies

“John,” I whispered, and my knees nearly gave out with relief. Officer John Ludgate, one of the two deputies that lived in Watford, barreled toward us through the crowd gathered outside the Roadhouse.

“I’m sorry, Officer Ludgate. Normally I can settle him. He seems—”

Another yell from my father cut off my words. This time, he directed it at Officer Ludgate’s new partner, who also made the sprint from the Roadhouse to Watford General. The partner was a stick-skinny baby-faced teenager who looked like he’d never hiked as a kid. My drunk, large, rather imposing father was now pressing him against the brick wall of the store and threatening all manner of violence against him.

“Fuck,” I swore as Ludgate leaped towards the wall to pull him off. No mantra or breathing exercise was going to bring me out of this.

“Collins, chill the fuck out,” Ludgate said, pulling my father off the other cop and shoving him away from the wall. “Let’s not do this here.”

My father rattled off a string of profane curses that had me wanting to melt into the sidewalk. There was no coming back from this. The entire town of Watford would soon know that my father wasn’t just a social recluse who didn’t trust people, but that he had turned into a vile, violent drunkard who held all matters of ill will against his own daughter. Once, these people would have been his friends.

This was exactly why I desperately tried to avoid it.

I could handle the shame on my own, because I could tuck it away inside, along with all the other dark parts of me I didn’t like on display. I could handle my father’s ugly comments and the way he treated the people closest to him. I could bear the weight of two people’s grief. I could take it. I was a master at compartmentalizing.

But having his struggles—and by extension, my own—out in the open like this had nausea churning in my gut.

“Have you considered putting him somewhere, Ms. Collins?”

Ludgate’s partner, who I was now realizing was probably close to my age, turned to face me as Ludgate continued trying to calm my father down, this time with his handcuffs in hand, waiting for his opportunity to cuff him and sit him down on the curb.

“No, no—Tilly! Tilly, where are you? Where’d you go?”

I closed my eyes at the wail that had returned to my father’s voice, trying to return to a calm place where I could take my emotions out of this situation.

I’d accepted a long time ago that my father would probably never recover, but that small, girlish part of me still hoped. I’d grown up fast in the time between my high school graduation, my mother’s death a week later, and my father’s nosedive into his addiction.

I tried to think of a logical and realistic way to explain my father’s grief to the officers, somehow making them see that he wasn’t a bad man who truly didn’t want to hurt anyone. There was so much anger inside him, at himself and at God, for taking my mother from him.

The alcohol gave his grief teeth and claws, determined to shred through all the good things still left in his life.

All the trauma and guilt he bore was given flight inside of a bottle. Inside the bottle, he didn’t have to feel. He didn’t have to look at me, his only child, and feel the weight of losing his life partner.

My father wasn’t an evil man. No matter how bad things got, I couldn’t see him in that light. This was my Dad. The man who came to all of my soccer games. Who brought Imogen and me lemonade in the evenings when we spent summer nights scouring the backyard for fireflies. The man who held me against his chest while I cried at my mother’s funeral, who let me sleep with her shirt, who didn’t always know how to comfort me but still showed up for me.

He wasn’t a dangerous man.

“Tonight’s just a bad night.”

“Seems to have a lot of those, recently,” Ludgate said, and I didn’t know how to reply. My father sat on the sidewalk, hands cuffed behind his back, still whimpering quietly to himself as he rocked back and forth. The whispers from the crowd gathered across the street seemed incredibly loud in the silence of the night.

There was nothing I could say or do to get us out of the situation. The damage had been done.

“Do you need us to take him for the night?”

Officer Ludgate’s voice pulled me from my thoughts. I tried to quell my shaking hands by pressing them into the pockets of my hoodie. My father was still moaning, his head forced between his knees, although he still couldn’t regain his bearings.

“What?”

My voice sounded distant, dazed.

“Do you want us to take him in for the night? We can book him for drunk and disorderly and property destruction. Even if it ishisproperty.”

“I . . .”

My head spun. The world around me was slipping through my fingers. For the first time in years, I realized there was no escape hatch. There was nowhere else to run.

“It’s okay, Abbie. We’ve got him. Let him sober up in the office tonight,” Ludgate said, squeezing my shoulder. “We’ll make sure he’s safe.”

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