A portrait of your father:
He’s driving the car as Johnny Cash plays out of the cassette player. He’s in his dark green Columbia jacket that’s zipped open to a faded tshirt underneath, that and jeans and sneakers and his glasses that are different frames than he had when he was older. His camera is a Nikon model a couple years past its due date, scuffed around the edges, but his dad would always say that anything you loved would be roughed a little — including people.
It’s the mountains, and his dad has the windows down and is drumming his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat of the song. He can’t help but reflect on how healthy he looks compared to the last time Draven would see him laying on a cot in his office — shaggy dark hair, color in his face and skin, never really chubby but filled out into his frame, active, alive. His father loves travelling. He loves being outside. He loves exploring.
“Dad,” he says loudly, because now he’s angry, and his father keeps driving, humming absently, mind lost in some partially-written story or project.
“Dad!”
His father looks startled for a second, like he’s been woken up from a dream. For a moment Draven is seized with horror at the idea that his father might kill himself again, just like last time, just out of nowhere take a gun and do away with it all. He doesn’t expect him to respond.
But he does.
“What? What?” his father says, and all his fears melt away instantly, because that’s the sound of his father, a woody tenor, capable of speaking softly but usually projecting loudly over groups of people, in forests, testing echos and giving orders, exploring, running to the edge and almost teetering at the brink, never seeming to fit in his body quite right but also seeming to not belong in anyone else’s. It’s been raised in anger before, but not routinely yet, and it shakes him to think that there will be a time where his father will scream himself hoarse at the drop of a hat. Drumming fingers and an extra lens cap in the cupholder. Dad.
He doesn’t have time to respond before the man driving the car does.
“This whole suicide thing is really shaking you up, you know that?” he says. The sky is clear outside; there are sheep grazing in a pasture they pass, Jeep wheels bumping over gravel road, kicking up dust. His father shakes his head, gestures with one hand off the steering wheel. “Like, fuck, you know? I’m dead. So what?”
“So what?” Draven feels anger boiling inside him, sits up straight in the passenger’s seat. “So what? Are you fucking kidding me?”
His dad cocks an eyebrow at him, looks at his son with attentive green eyes through thick square glasses in silence.
“You know what? I don’t care. I’ve spent enough time crying over your selfish ass.” Draven unbuckles his seatbelt. “Pull over. I’m getting out.”
Your dad speeds up the car.
“Oh. Oh, you’re gonna play this shit, huh?” Draven growls. “Dad-”
“You know why I didn’t leave a note, Draven,” he says, and that’s enough to reduce him to shaking, holding back tears in the passenger’s seat, stunned silence. It doesn’t bother your dad; he’s still drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, going just a little fast for comfort, always teetering on the edge, reaching for the moon and burning in the sky, coming too close to the sun.
