Edge of the Ravine

1

Chapter One

      I was only eight when my world first crashed down. In burning, fiery words of contempt and hatred, the last vicious phrase was spoken and the end had arrived just like that. Before then, I'd had no idea that it was so easy to unravel a marriage. Like taking a loose thread and pulling until you realized half the sweater had disappeared. By then, it was best to burn the thing and have done with it. And that's just what my parents did, finalizing their divorce the following February, instead of celebrating their Valentine's Day anniversary.

      Kids are resilient. They can get through almost anything if you give them enough information to deal with a situation, but not enough to haunt them forever. I guess that's why it didn't bother me so much when my father moved out to be with his girlfriend. Of course I wasn't happy about it, but I knew when the end had come that there was no flipping back to the beginning and rereading the entire tale.

      Teenagers aren't as resilient as kids. There's something chemical already combatting for control of their actions. And there are too many hormones that could be pushed in any one direction. For my older brother, who was fifteen at the time, the divorce revealed to him that his happy family was a lie. Three months after the divorce, he jumped from the roof of my father's apartment building. His was a closed-casket funeral.

      My father disappeared after that. Just vanished into thin air, as far as I was concerned. He didn't even claim me when my mother, who was an alcoholic by then, drove straight off a bridge a year later. By my ninth birthday, I was an only child and, as far as anyone else was concerned, an orphan.