“Dad, wake up! Ugh, I’m going to be late!”

  I had no idea what time it was, but with pain inside my brain no time seemed reasonable. My mouth felt like I’d been chewing on a bag of cotton balls that were dipped in honey. I tried to speak to but no sound escaped my cracked lips.

  “Dad!” Troy’s voice was growing more angry than frantic. Why was he yelling at me? Every time he did, it felt like someone was taking a bag of ice picks and banging them around inside my skull.

  “Jesus, what time is it?” I asked with a croak.

  “It’s 8:30! I’m going to be late again! Get up!” He shook me and the ice picks were joined by what could only be described as ‘a sudden urge to throw up for 25 minutes straight’.

  “Oof don’t… don’t shake me. I’m up! I’m up!” I said, not moving. I managed to pry an eye open and could see the clock directly in my vision. Sure enough, 8:30 AM.

  I wasn’t sure why I needed verification outside of a tiny hope there was some kind of mistake. Feeling like total and complete ass I wondered, why was that time important?

  “Oh shit!” I screamed, sitting up. Troy was late for school. Or, at least, he was about to be late for school.

  Sitting up so suddenly was not a good idea.

  With strained urgency I ran my way into the bathroom attached to my bedroom, and almost knocked Troy over in the process. My foot kicked something devastatingly hard on the way.

  Howls of pain escaped me as I continued hopping my way towards the bathroom. The first bits of the night before were making its way past my closed mouth. I shouldered the door, and it slammed into the opposite wall as I all but collapsed in front of the toilet.

  A vague part of me realized that the door handle slid into a hole in the drywall that was already there. With an enthusiasm I didn’t realize I had in me, I started to vomit. Basically anything I had ever eaten in my life came out of me. Maybe even things I had only thought of eating.

  This was not the first time I had done this as evidenced by the remnants of other mornings on the rim.

  “Jesus dad,” I heard Troy say softly from the bathroom door.

  The anger and slight panic had given way to contempt and disgust. And heartbreak. I felt each of these try to pierce my soul, but I was still numb from the night before for them to go far. Or maybe I had no soul left to pierce. Tears joined the stream of puke leaving my body.

  “I’ll be down in a minute,” I groaned in between retches. The porcelain bowl caused my voice to echo back at me. I cringed at the hoarse and pathetic sound of it.

  I did my best to clean myself up, but I was pretty sure there wasn’t enough toothpaste in the world to brush away the pure apocalyptic level of bile that had managed to come out of my body. I took a quick look at myself in the mirror, which was longer than I had looked at my reflection in at least a week.

  I did not recognize the person that looked back, and the amount of abject hatred I felt in my own eyes was startling. My short brown hair had slowly begun to turn grey on the sides, the top receding as if to say even it was tired of the sight of me. I felt new tears coming but I didn’t have time to throw any pity parties. I needed to get Troy to school.

  Scrambling down the stairs I tried to piece together what had happened the night before. It was all a dark, fuzzy, blur. Ultimately it could be summed up with me feeling sorry for myself, and then chasing that with liquor until I was numb.

  It didn’t work.

  It never worked.

  The numbness was never something I could hang onto and yet I was obsessed with it. I was trying to remember what had set it off but couldn’t conjure the images before I made it down the stairs. Troy wouldn’t look at me as I opened the door for him. He just marched out the door and straight towards the truck.

  Troy’s school wasn’t far from the house, but it was far enough that I didn’t feel comfortable with him walking there on his own. We lived deep enough into the city limits that he didn’t qualify for the school bus. He was 13-years-old and apparently that was old enough to ride the metro to school or get a ride.

  We also lived far enough into the city that taking public transit was just too risky and I felt it wise to take him myself. There was some overprotectiveness there but Troy had never pushed back on this. Well, he hadn’t until now.

  “I’m going to start taking the bus to school,” he said without looking at me, as if reading my foggy mind.

  I’d been waiting for him to lay into me for being such a mess (which I deserved) but it didn’t come. In a lot of ways it was worse that he didn’t. A part of me felt like that meant he was giving up on me, which was fair since it seemed like I had been giving up on myself.

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  Another part of me was glad for it. I was glad to be missing another lecture – lectures I had been giving myself daily. That side was where I had tried to feed the liquor the night before and it remained hungry for more. Always hungry.

  “I thought we agreed it was too dangerous for you to take the bus to school,” I said, squinting at the road. Did I forget my contacts? Everything was so blurry.

  “At this point it would be safer than letting you drive me. I’m pretty sure you’re still drunk,” he said, not looking at me.

  The words sank in, and I realized he was probably right. That was probably why the roads were so hard to focus on. I could only imagine what I smelled like.

  “Look Troy… I’m really –“ I began but Troy cut me off.

  “Save it dad. Apologies without action are just lies,” he said.

  What 13-year-old talks like that? He must have heard that from his counselor. Or maybe Trisha?

  My insides twisted against the pain of what he was saying. It boiled up and pushed against the wound I had been trying so hard to bury. There was nothing to say so instead I focused on the road, and on keeping myself from crying.

  The last thing I wanted to do was add more to what he was going through by becoming a blubbering mess before I dropped him off at school yet again.

  We remained quiet for a bit and my mind drifted as we got closer to the school. I thought back to last year when we had moved to this area and how scared he had been to go to a new school.

  We both had needed the fresh start and he had been worried people were going to give him a hard time. Instead he had flourished while I floundered and struggled. At 45 I was worse than stuck, I was sinking backwards.

  “Can you stop a few blocks away? I don’t want anyone to see you,” he said, still not looking at me.

  Feeling like I had been slapped, I pulled over and stopped down the street like he had asked. Before he opened the door I said, “I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”

  He looked at me with the full force of his anger, unable to speak at first.

  “I wish a lot of things dad,” he said, the full weight of his rage coating the words. “I wish I wasn’t embarrassed of you. I wish you weren’t killing yourself slowly with booze and who knows what else.”

  “I wish you would just get your shit together,” he continued. “And I wish mom was still alive, even though if she saw you like this, she’d leave you. I wish she was still alive so you could have someone you cared about enough to stop doing whatever bullshit it is you are doing.”

  “But most of all,” he said, his eyes welling up, “most of all I wish it had been you!”

  He was screaming at the end, his voice cracking not just from emotion but because it was still changing. His rage and hate froze in my mind as he slammed the car door. He stormed off towards the school and I just watched him, too dazed to move..

  A part of me wanted to get out and just grab him up into a bear hug. To promise, right then and there, that I would get my shit together. Every word he said was an echo, because I’d been saying something like that to myself ever since his mom died.

  She had taken a part of me along with her. The best part of me that I felt, deep down, could never be resurrected. Instead I was left with this other part of me that just wanted to get another bottle of booze and fade away into oblivion.

  These two parts warred with each other as I watched him walk towards the school, head down. When had he gotten so tall? He was still way too thin, but that can happen for some kids when they get a growth spurt.

  He would be turning 14 soon, and that thought hurt even more. One more birthday Trisha would miss. One more birthday where I let my son down.

  I felt the tug of regret at thinking I would still be in this place for his birthday. That I had already resigned myself to at least another month of wrecking my liver. Of the truth that even in the face of his anger I still wasn’t thinking about stopping to get a bottle.

  It all felt so impossible and so hopeless. I lost my wife, then myself, and now my son - and it continued to snowball inside me.

  The pressure continued to build behind my eyes.

  The haze grew as I pulled out into traffic. I was on autopilot which was a terrible place to be. I didn’t want to drink, and I didn’t want to keep doing what I was doing. There was just no tolerance left for any sort of discomfort anymore.

  I had become a coward, running away the second things became even the slightest bit difficult. I witnessed myself in that moment as my body drove itself to the liquor store.

  I should have wanted to go home and shower. I should have wanted to start cleaning up the disgusting state my room and bathroom and house were in. I should have wanted to wake up from the fog I had placed myself in and start being there for Troy. But I was locked away in this witness state, banging against the glass of my obsession to feel nothing as I drove.

  It was like a robot had taken over and was directing me while I was lost in the coding. It was cold out but I didn’t care as I got out and walked into the liquor store. Everyone that worked there all knew me by now yet I always pretended like I was rarely there. Even though I was there every day I played the game of acting like I wasn’t sure what I was going to get.

  I always made my way to the same bottle of scotch eventually. I had long ago convinced myself that alcoholics didn’t drink scotch. They drank things like vodka or sweet flavored whiskey or shitty bear. No reasonable, hard drinking person would choose something with such a strong and distinct flavor like cheap scotch. Somewhere in my brain that had made sense and I had latched onto it.

  Today was different.

  Today I walked straight to the scotch aisle, straight to the bottle, and straight to the counter. All the while I stayed stuck in some sort of out-of-body, fugue state. It was like some sort of switch had triggered and shut down the last portion of caring I had left. I grunted a barely incomprehensible response to the counter person as they rang me up.

  Cash dropped onto the counter, and I left the store without waiting for change. The bottle felt heavy in my hand, wrapped in the brown paper bag the clerks were required to put it in. The firm curve of the neck felt safe and it made my entire body feel warm as I walked to my car.

  Once inside, I finally allowed myself to take a deep breath. This would be the last one, I told myself. Just this last one and then I would be done.

  I felt the familiar lie bounce around my brain.