Chris I watched my daughter fall in love. It was hard. But then, everyone said that it would be. While it was all transpiring, I spent a lot of time drinking and staying away. Josh would come to the house and would fall all over Lace as if I weren’t even there and I would cringe because that was my baby girl. It is true about what they say. You know, time being the antidote to all ailment. Seeing Lace with him was awful, but after a good while and some soul searching, it became bearable. Only because it had to become bearable of course. It had to be, or I would lose my daughter all together. That concept that as a father you could “lose” your daughter is a very difficult one to grasp. When you have a child, your world changes into something completely beyond the scope of what you could have imagined. It doesn’t quite make sense, this drastic learning curve, if you really think about it. Because weren’t we all at one time a child? The son or daughter of a mother and a father? But the learning curve undoubtedly existed. It was crippling. For nine months while my daughter was growing in my wife’s belly, I really did think that I knew what I was in for. I believed that I was made to be the world’s best dad. But the moment that I held Lace in my arms for the first time, everything that I thought I knew disappeared into her big green eyes. My whereabouts melted into my baby’s smile. The first time I held my child was almost spiritual. And my baby was “my baby” for years. She couldn’t do a single thing without either me or her mom and when she got older and could have done things on her own - she didn’t want to. She always wanted mommy and daddy there. If she ever tripped and fell and scraped her knee, the only remedy that would fix her was a “daddy kiss”. “I need a daddy kiss!” she would say between sobs. So, I’d give her a magical kiss and her breathing would even out and her tears would stop falling and sometimes she’d even give me a magical smile and it was like her smile could heal me while I was trying to heal her. Lace got older and older and she got more and more beautiful and she started playing sports and playing the guitar and all my friends told me at block parties that I needed to “get ready” because Lace was a “heartbreaker”. She sure did break my heart. My daughter wanted to hang around me and her mom until she turned seventeen. I felt goddamned special that my daughter chose to blow off her friends on Friday nights for me for all those years. But then, she met Josh. I remember the day she told me about the boy from science class. She was kind of shy around the whole topic, it was, it seemed, her first crush. But he told me, “Dad, a boy came up and talked to me today!” and I blew the whole thing off because for all I understood, boys talked to her all the time, Lace just wasn’t necessarily interested. But as I looked up to give her a polite humph, I noticed that she was blushing. Just barely, a light pink against her porcelain skin. I adjusted my response, “Oh yeah?” I said, “Can I get a name?” Lace told me his name, told me that they had first period science class together, and informed me that he would be picking her up for breakfast before class the following morning. I panicked a bit inside, my Lace’s first date? but of course I would let her go. That breakfast date turned into every morning very quickly, and I started drinking my coffee alone. The more and more Josh took my daughter out and the more times I walked into Josh sprawled on my living room couch, the more that I got upset. And like I said, I took to drinking and staying away for a while because all the sudden Lace didn’t seem to need me for anything. She never asked for a “daddy kiss” anymore. In fact, before bed she would go for a forehead kiss, literally coming at me like a bull with her head down and her eyes wide open - and that was just if she was feeling remotely affectionate. She didn’t need me to drive her anywhere anymore. She didn’t need help with her homework or advice about life. With Josh around, she seemed not to need my presence anymore. Or at least, that’s what it felt like to me. I would get sad and jealous and my wife would tell me I was being a baby. “Grow up!” Connie would tell me.
My wife was often right, so with that in mind, I tried to change. One day, Josh and Lace meandered into the house. Lace was laughing way too loudly and with a cadence I had never heard from her before, but I let it slide and I piped up from the recliner by the TV which caught them both off guard juxtaposed to my normal silence. “What’s up, guys?” I tried sounding excited, “pumped up”, something to get Lace interested in a conversation with her old man. “Hey, Mr. Norris!” Yes, if anything at all, Josh was polite. “You know you can call me Chris, man! What have you guys been up to today?” I looked at my daughter, but she still hadn’t said anything. “We went to the mall and grabbed a bite to eat.” God, how long had I been ignoring them? Lace seemed incredulous as she replied to me. “Very nice. Buy anything?” I could see that Josh had a small blue bag behind his right side. “Nope!” Lace smiled a very forced smile towards me and grabbed Josh’s hand, dragging him toward the basement stairs. Well, that went well. Connie For years and years, I did not worry about my daughter for a second. When I looked at her I saw myself and when I looked at myself I was not all around disappointed with how I turned out. Sure, she and I both loved too quickly and too fiercely. Sure, we did not manage our money well. Sure, we’d just about make ourselves miserable in a day to make someone else happy. But that’s not all bad. Hell, I ended up with a husband who is a complete hunk. I lived in a large house in a nice neighborhood. I was happy. So, when I looked at my daughter and saw myself, I had hope that she would also make a wonderful life like I did. When she would come home crying or would yell at Chris or I - I would shake it off and remember that I did the same things. I wonder now if I was so busy looking at myself that I was, actually, missing Lace. When Lace met Josh, I was glad. Finally, she had a nice boy to make her feel pretty and take her to parties and talk to her on the phone at night. I’m a relationship type of gal. I always have done better in a pair than alone. She never really talked about him too much in the beginning. She would just run in and out of the house, meeting him here and there. Lace never told a lie to me, but I would lie to Chris for her. Lace would tell me she was sleeping over at Josh’s and I would tell Chris that Lace was sleeping over at Kim’s. My mom had been too strict and kept me on a tight leash, which ultimately made me hate her. I vowed early on in Lace’s life that I would be the lenient mom, the mom everyone knew about and thought was cool. So, I was. Lace called me one day, years after all the puppy-love and the running around. She called me from she and Josh’s apartment. It had to have been close to one in the morning. “Mommy?” I started untucking myself from my bed, “Is everything ok?” Lace started to cry and I hurried through the dark room to the hallway. “What happened, baby?” “I don’t know if I want to be with Josh anymore?” I pursed my lips and paused, “Well, why not?” “I just don’t think he makes me as happy as he used to.” “Lace, this is how a relationship goes. You love someone and you get all those silly feelings and you hope they never go away, but they do. That’s life. You guys have been together for three years now… did you expect to always get butterflies or something?” The line was quiet for a while.
“I guess not.” “Okay, so stop this craziness. I know you love him.” “Yeah.” “Go back to sleep.” “Yeah.” Lace I started playing guitar when I was young. I would play it for my parents and for some of the neighbors on the street, but I never liked it too much. I loved to sing. I never told anyone in my family that. I knew that if I told them, then they would parade me around and make me sing to everyone that passed, and I didn’t think I wanted that. I loved my parents, truly I did. But they just thought that I was very transparent, for some reason. They never really took the time to get to know me. Anyway, one day my boyfriend, Josh, convinced me to sing for him. So, I did and of course he was just “so in love” and told me that I had “the voice of an angel”. After practicing for him a couple of times here and there, I got the courage to sign up for an open mic in Athens, which is where Josh and I were living. I played the open mic, just a couple of covers, and people really liked me. They clapped more for me than for anyone else and after the event was over, the owner asked me to come back next week. So, I came back the next week. And I came back the week after that. I enjoyed the open mic’s a lot in the beginning. I enjoyed them even more after Josh started bringing his drugs into the house. I would look forward to Wednesday nights more than you could imagine. A night to get away from Josh’s glazed over eyes and his lazy friends sprawled all over my couch. I knew I couldn’t leave Josh forever, so I would just leave for a few hours. No harm, no foul. Chris Right when I felt like I had gotten in with the kids, Lace dropped a bomb on Connie and me. We were eating dinner and watching the news and she told us she was moving out. She said it very casually, like it was just her decision and like there was no need to talk about it. I looked at Connie, and Connie seemed uninterested. “Um, you’re doing what?” Lace glanced over at me, burger in hand, “I’m moving out.” “And where do you think you’re moving to?” “Josh and I are going to Athens.” She wasn’t even looking at me anymore. Seeing how bored she seemed with the conversation made my blood boil. I put down my plate, grabbed three beers from the fridge, and headed to the basement. Lace moved out three weeks later. She didn’t ask for help. Lace When Josh asked me to move in with him, I thought that it would be a great idea. I felt like a grown up. I was 19 and frankly, needed to be out of the house. So, when he asked, I said yes. But when he kissed me afterwards, I kept my eyes open because there was a little part of me that was saying no, no, no. I told my parents the news that night over dinner. I was hoping that one of them would beg me to stay. Maybe I would have. But mom kept her eyes on the TV and dad just went downstairs. I hoped he’d ask to help me move, but since he didn’t, Josh brought some of his buddies to the house and they hauled my childhood into a U-Haul and we headed off for Athens.
Chris The first few weeks without my daughter were incredibly easy. Connie and I rekindled our dying sex life. We got drunk almost every night and never had to worry about when Lace was coming home from wherever she was with God-knows-who. It was nice. But when the honey-moon phase was over, I started to miss Lace coming home at night, even though she would always ignore me anyway. I missed her bull-like “kisses”. I missed her watching the news with us over dinner, even though those nights were few and far between. It had been a month since she had left and I finally called her. She answered on the fourth ring. “Hello?” She sounded different. Her voice was kind of far away. “Hey baby, how are you?” “Yeah, I’m good.” “Things going well with Josh?” “Yeah, good.” “How do you like Athens?” “Good.” “Okay, well… I just wanted to check in.” “Yeah, thanks.” “Okay, I love you.” “Love you.” I held the phone to my ear for a few more minutes after she hung up, just listening to the dial tone. Lace One day, after things started getting bad at the apartment, I played an open mic at the bar. I got on stage and noticed that the crowd had really thickened since the first time I had wandered in. The room was full and everyone was staring at me. I hadn’t really gotten nervous in a while. But this was a different sort of day. My guitar felt heavy in my lap, my body felt heavy on the stool, my tongue felt heavy in my mouth. I was playing originals regularly now, and I could hear people shouting out names to my own songs, asking me to play them. “Dandelion! Play Dandelion!” “Sunshine Woman!” “Hungry!” I was overwhelmed. I started playing Dandelion because it was the only one that I could remember the words to. As I sang the words, though, the words that I had written, my head got cloudy. It was garbage. These words were fake, not at all what I wanted to say. But people were singing along like they understood but they didn’t understand, the couldn’t have. “You peel back the scabs on my healing heart, didn’t give me any time to clot, I just bled right out.” My voice started fading away. I could feel my mouth moving, feel my vocal chords straining, but I couldn’t hear a thing. I saw people in the crowd, their mouths were all moving. They were smiling. And then I couldn’t see much anymore and my guitar fell off my lap and onto the floor and shattered into a couple of pieces and I fell off the stage and hit my head and I shattered into a couple of pieces. The bar owner called Josh and looked after me until I came to. By then, the bar was closed and everyone was gone. The owner told me that he had called Josh and little over an hour ago, but that he needed me to wait outside until he got there so that the bar could close. Josh arrived about fifteen minutes after I went outside. The apartment was only a 10-minute walk from the bar. I never asked him what took so long. People talked about the bar incident for a while, or so I heard. Everyone in town watched the video where I “lost my mind”. Well, they watched all of it but for the middle part where they all got up to get popcorn and
think up some very decisive words to say to me. I didn’t really listen to what anyone had to say, however. Instead, I receded into my apartment and into my mind. I never went back to that bar. Josh My friends would ask all the time if I really loved her. And yeah, I mean, I did. But I loved a lot of things. I thought that her moving in with me would be good, but it fucking blew at first. I didn’t really realize how much she didn’t know about me until she was always around and I couldn’t hide those things anymore. Like the fact that I was a drug user and dealer. I started with smoking pot, of course. And then cocaine became a regular deal for me. I was popping oxy’s almost daily. Lace handled it fine, I guess. She was kind of a bitch about it at first, but Lace was the type of girl that would just give in eventually. She didn’t have much of a spine, honestly. That was cool sometimes, but sometimes it was really aggravating. Like all my friends had strong personalities and they’d get around Lace and be uneasy because she was so fucking passive. No one ever really knew what she was thinking, and that’s kind of sketch. Especially for drug users. Eventually though, Lace started spending more time sleeping in our room. I didn’t know why for a while. But during that time, my friends and I started shooting Firefly in the living room. Heroin, I mean. It became regular. One day, though, Lace walked in while we were using and I thought she was going to lose her shit, but she asked if she could try. I was surprised. So were my friends. Lace was cooler when she was high. Everyone’s opinion on her changed, including mine. It was badass. Lace My parents never called, really. I called a few times, normally late at night, and normally just to talk to my mom. I was miserable. And everything was getting worse instead of better and no one really knew or even cared to know. So, one day I walked in on Josh shooting up heroin on my couch. I already knew he was using, so I wasn’t surprised. But I was surprised when I let him tie the top of my arm tight with a band and I let him stick the syringe into my veins. And I was surprised when I fell in love with the feeling. We got high almost every night after that. It really bonded us. I never called my parents again. I wondered if they missed me. Chris It had been a few months since I’d spoken with Lace. I didn’t want to bother her. Connie said that she called sometimes when I was sleeping. I took it personally. Connie and I were headed towards divorce. We didn’t really talk much anymore. I was drinking a lot. Connie It had been a while since my husband and I had a real conversation. We said some words in passing every occasionally. Honestly, I would try to make him jealous by exaggerating me and Lace’s relationship. It made me feel better about how broken our relationship truly was to pretend that it wasn’t. Lace Josh was selling the date rape drug around town but the market apparently had leaned elsewhere and we were in a scramble for money. I was three months pregnant with our child and neither of us had real jobs. Josh was
less than thrilled for the baby, so he upped his drug usage which took up what little cash we did have. We started selling to anyone who would buy, foregoing the careful route and taking the route of less resistance. Josh would take money from users around town with the promise of drugs that would not come. He became known as the biggest scam around the scene. One night we were so barred out on Xanax and high on Heroin that when the men - no, they were just boys when the boys broke into our apartment with guns and cacophony, we didn’t even flinch. I remember looking at these red-faced college boys and being aggravated that they would dare to interrupt my favorite movie. One of the taller ones pointed the gun in our direction, so Josh got up and did what they told him to do. The intruders headed toward the door with the brown paper bag Josh had gotten them from our room - the brown paper bag with the drugs and the money. Before they all left, even in tow with what they had come for, the taller one stood in the threshold of our home and shot Josh in the head. I looked at the shooter, bothered by his presence, and he looked back at me. I don’t quite remember, but I think that he had hazel eyes. Sometime after the men had left and the movie was over, I crawled over Josh’s body to take what was left of the heroin.