CARRIE, 1991:

I remember the first time I had to get my father out of a ditch because he had been drinking and couldn’t find his way home from the pub. I was eleven.

My mom tried to soften it, pretending it was a game. “We’re going to get Father, he’s fallen asleep on the way home,” she’d say, or, “He looks silly.” She tried to deny reality. But I was old enough to know it wasn’t a game. I felt terrible, like a knife twisting inside me.

I didn’t understand what was going on or why I couldn’t speak to my mom about it. I couldn’t talk to my dad either—he was lost in the bottle, full of anger and pity, refusing to talk about anything. So I did what kids do when they can’t talk about it: I played along, even though I knew it was pretend.

I made a counter on my wall and marked crosses on it. It was a sheet of paper where I counted the times we picked him up over several months. It was part of a map of Skye. I drew the crosses not where we’d found him, since it was usually the same spots, but around places on the island where I wished we’d gone instead, as a family. I hoped it would somehow make it happen. That was my first bout of magical thinking, long before a psychiatrist told me what it was.

Eventually, there’s only so long you can do nothing. That was true for my mother too. At first, she coped by arguing with him—telling him to pull himself together, not to hurt me, not to get fired from the job he’d barely managed to get with his shattered knee from the war. I thought it would help. It didn’t.

He kept drinking, and eventually, I tried to talk to him myself. One night, after pulling him from a ditch, I asked, “Why are you lying here?” He said, “Because I have nowhere to go.”

I said, “But you can go home.”

He said, “Yes, I suppose.”

The way he said it made me feel I could never ask him anything again—not until I got desperate enough to try. So I invented new games and kept going until, when I was sixteen, the game ended. My mother finally got a divorce.

But it had been five years, maybe more. And now that I’m grown up, I wonder: how long can we keep playing games? My father was the one who played the longest. I don’t have an answer. I just know it’s easy to play games. They’re the best way to avoid looking at the monster in front of you.

Just sit down and play.

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Photo by Egor Litvinov on Unsplash