Chapter 1
I never liked my dad. I mean, sure,
I loved him. Heck, I did more than love him: I idolized him. I thought he was a
god. I mean, well, he kinda was. I just never liked him.
Wait. That’s not true, not exactly.
I was about 7 years old. I’d been
playing on the old bridge that crossed the stream on our property. We always
called it a stream, but at some point I realized it was really more of a small
river. And Dad had told us not to play on the bridge, that it was dangerous.
Not that any of us needed to be told that—everything about the bridge, from the
rusted girders to the rotted planks, screamed “danger.” That’s probably why all
of us—well, almost all of us—played on it as often as we did…although, of
course, rarely together.
Anyway, I was on the bridge one
day, marching back and forth, pretending I was playing the bass drum in a
marching band. I was in the zone I sometimes got into when I was really deep
into a story in my own head, otherwise I would have known better than to do
that there—I mean, even for a 7 year old, it was really stupid. But the rhythm,
the sound of my feet stomping on the wood, those thumps, so satisfying, the way
the sound echoed off the water below…it all sent me right into what was
basically a trance.
I snapped out of it the moment my
foot broke through the board. As I fell, I reached out to grab something,
anything, but the other planks all snapped, virtually shattered, as I tried to
grab them. As I tumbled, I heard a klang
and realized a moment later it was the sound of my head hitting a girder.
The water was cold—it was always
cold. It woke me up a little, but not as much as you’d think, probably because
of just how hard I’d hit my head on the beam. The shock of the cold sent my
pulse racing, but it was also like getting hit in the chest: it froze my
muscles. I was dizzy from hitting my head and couldn’t get my bearings, had a
hard time figuring out which way was up. Then I realized I was upside down, but
I couldn’t right myself—for some reason, I could look past my feet to see the
surface of the water, could see, dimly, the wavy sun up above, but I couldn’t
reach it. Later, I found out it was because one of my feet was still stuck
through the board—and it was a big plank and of course it floated, so I
couldn’t get back to the surface, back to air.
The sun started to dim and I knew I
wasn’t going to make it. I was wondering why my dad wasn’t there to save me,
the way he saved so many other people, and knew, just knew, that was exactly
why he wasn’t: he was off somewhere, saving someone else, and not his son. He
wasn’t there for me the one time I needed him.
And then the sun went out.
The world exploded around me. There
was a huge whoosh and all was white water and turbulence and air bubbles and
the concussive blast slammed me down before I felt arms wrap around me and pull
me up.
There were only one pair of arms
like that in the whole wide world. As he laid me down on the warm grass and bent
over me, I saw a look on his face like none I’d ever seen before: he looked
terrified. My dad. The Zar. Looked scared.
I would never, in a million years, have believed there was anything that could
have made him look like that.
And then I threw up on him.
I didn’t know it was going to
happen, didn’t even get that brief warning you usually get. I’d swallowed a lot
of water and it just all decided to come back up right that instant. He didn’t
get mad, didn’t turn away or yell “gross!” or anything, even though it would
have been a reasonable response. Instead, he simply rolled me onto my side and
waited until I was done and then used his hand to gently wipe off my face. The
hand that could crush diamonds, cleaning spittle off my chin, wiping it on the grass.
That’s not when I liked him. That
came a little later, when he was carrying me home. I felt weak and still dizzy
and my mouth tasted horrible and I was embarrassed and wondered if I was going
to be punished for once. I looked at him, at the sunlight glinting off his
hair, at his strong chin and chiseled nose and the eyes that threw terror into
men everywhere.
My dad.
“Thank you,” I whispered. I didn’t
mean to whisper, but it was as loud as my voice would go. With the wind
whipping by, there was no way he could hear me.
He heard me. He’d been staring off
into the distance, lost in thought, the weight of the world on his shoulders,
as usual. Now he looked down at me and for just a moment a hint of that scared
look came into his eye. Then the corner of his mouth twitched in what might
almost have been a smile from anyone else.
“You’re welcome,” he said in that
voice that could rattle a supertanker. He looked off into the distance, then
did the recon scope so familiar to all of us in the family, quickly but
smoothly looking in every direction, west-north-east-south-sky-ground, casually
assessing the situation, making sure no enemies were laying in wait.
He looked towards our house down
below again, still well over a mile away but rapidly approaching; we’d be there
any second. “It was my pleasure,” he added. And his arms tightened just the
tiniest bit, so little that I might almost have thought it was just the wind.
But it wasn’t. And I knew it. And for a man so deliberate, I knew he had to
know I’d know. Which meant he wanted me to know.
That was the one and only time I
remember really liking my dad.
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