His Dark Words

12 | Death of a Salesman

Whatever Grandma Martha said, I couldn't make myself feel any differently than before. 

Have you ever been just completely convinced that there was something you could do to change things, and that no one else saw it that way but you? 

I just have to figure it out then convince my Dad to see me... Maybe if I can figure out what's causing his illness then I can say just the right thing to make it go away?

Perhaps the key to this all is in the journal? Maybe if I can work things out from there and help Derrick then I can help my Dad too?

After breakfast with my grandparents I slip on some flip flops and walk down the wooden walkway to the beach with the book. I had meant to read it on the bus ride over... So much for that. Everything is such a mess... but it's hard to feel that way out here... Out here you could believe you were at the end of the world, or at least the edge of it. 

The soles of my flip flops smack against the wooden boards like the webbed feet of a tall, ungainly duck. I jump down onto the narrow belt of golden sand and look out at the wide, grey ocean. Dad was here. Almost every summer of his childhood. I wonder what he felt, listening to the seagulls' mournful cries jeering out over the buffeting sea winds. 

I pull my hoodie close around me and glance back at the little red house on its raised plinth. Without the ocean giving it that dramatic backdrop it's a lonely place. The tall grass makes it look wild, forgotten, lost. The red and white paint is flaking, eaten up by the elements and exposing the bare wood beneath. 

But he had been happy here... At least the pictures made it seem so. 

Seventeen. 

Did it really all change one day like that? 

Does it really work that way? 

Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? 

Or did they just not see it? 

Slowly eating away at him like the sea air on the side of the house that no one looks at...

The sand is cold. Flip Flops were a poor choice. I sit down on the end of the wooden walkway and cross my legs, trying to tuck my cold feet under me. I open the book slowly. It feels just as much a violation as the first time I read it, but I have to know, have to understand it all if I can....

I saw my Dad today for the first time since he left five years ago. I think I was remembering him wrong. 

It's not that I didn't recognize him. His hair was thinner, he'd put on weight, but he was still the same guy. It was something I couldn't exactly put my finger on... Like an aura he exuded, but not a color, just a feeling. 

He felt like desperation.

It kinda reminded me of when we put on Death of a Salesman in school. He was this sad, lurid figure and I was Biff, feeling like I'd seen him, really seen him, for the first time and I couldn't bear it.

Ever since he left I'd been dying for the day he would come back for me. But the whole time he was really, actually there in front of me I felt sick to my stomach, wishing he would just leave, disappear again so my memory of him would stay the same and I could go on waiting for my Dad to come back. My real Dad, the one I'd built up in my mind to be some kind of superhero. I never blamed him for leaving us. I guess I should've, maybe it would've made the whole thing easier.

He wanted money.

That's why he came back. He said he's living in a motel some way out of town. He wanted to get back into trading or make his own business, he just didn't have the funds to begin things. I stared at him, over the table in that diner.