Pelting hail bounced onto the windshield, doubling the struggle of my aging Saab’s frayed wipers. Sweeping trails of vaporized hail blinded my visibility as trucks roared by in the passing lane. I was being sucked along I-80 through the Poconos, heading for the Verrazzano Bridge and our sweet beach house apartment in the Rockaways. Joan, my partner, had urged me to put off the drive, but I needed to escape the farm and what I had learned about the horror of yesterday.

I gripped the wheel and squinted at the road, struggling to block out the image of the blood-soaked carpet where Dad had bled out from a gunshot through the heart. He died in the sunroom he had built, a small symbol of his years of labor revitalizing the farm. I felt deep sorrow … and equally deep anger. As I drove, I was forced to ball up my shirt sleeves and wipe the flow of tears streaming down my face, just trying to see the road.

Dad was a builder. I thought of the huge platform he had built for our Lionel trains that wrapped around the Christmas tree and took up a big chunk of our small living room when we lived in the downtown apartment. We could run three trains, one a passenger train that flew by snow-covered houses and a toy store of a tiny town, stopping at a train station to board miniature figures bundled in winter garb holding boxes of gifts to take to their Christmas destinations.

My favorite was a freight train that dropped lumber in a yard with the flick of a switch and had a loader to grab the plastic logs and move them to miniature lumber trucks. As the freight train pulled out of the lumber yard, it approached a road where gates would go down as the train neared the crossroad. Toy cars and trucks waited for the train to pass. Once it did, the gate would go up and we could move the traffic by hand across the tracks and down roadways that Dad wove throughout the platform, crisscrossing the train tracks in three spots.

After school, my neighborhood buddies piled into the cramped room to get a turn on the trains, imagining themselves living in the magical town Dad had built. Word spread about the display and soon, kids were showing up at the door who I barely knew. My popularity was sky high.

My older brother, Doug, a newly minted teen, acted too old to join in the play when kids my age were around. But after supper, when my friends were gone, he pushed Sid, my younger brother, and me aside, taking over, racing all three trains at the same time and staging crashes at crossings. He even hatched a plan to charge kids to play with the trains. A buck for fifteen minutes, fifty cents for himself and a quarter for each of us. Mom heard us scheming and nixed it.

We had been a happy household since Thanksgiving, full of holiday spirit. Dad was not drinking, we went to the movies, romped in the outdoors, chopped down our Christmas tree, and Dad built the incredible train platform around it.

But on the Saturday before Christmas, Dad and Mom had a fight. I think it was about money and Dad drinking again. Sid was at Grandma’s place. Doug and I had been out most of the day. When we got home, the train platform was torn apart as if the imaginary town had been hit by a severe earthquake. Mom looked like she had been crying. Also, she had a bad scrape on her right arm. She gathered herself to tell us that Dad, drinking heavily, had one of his bouts of meanness and had gone up to the hunting camp to stay. She didn’t know when he’d be back. As for the train platform, she told us to do our best to put it back together again. She headed to the kitchen to finish fixing supper.

Our Christmas wasn’t what we had expected. But Dad stayed away and the four of us had a peaceful holiday. I remembered how close Doug and I were that Christmas, including the time we spent together rebuilding the train platform to our liking. What Dad built, he often destroyed, and the rest of us would try to put it together again. Throughout my childhood, that became our family dynamic.

The storm was letting up, and the sun broke through the clouds. Nearing the top of the Verrazzano Bridge, I got a good glimpse of the Rockaways off to the right. Returning from where I grew up, the view reminded me of what home meant to me now.

An hour later I pulled into our driveway on Beach 128th Street, got out of the car, and let my senses take in the salt air and the crashing waves of the Atlantic. As I opened the door, our two black labs rumbled down the stairs with Joan just behind. Her hair was down, long and wavy from the moist air. She was wearing her heavy, oversized sweatshirt and bellbottoms. We embraced for the longest time as the dogs ran around us in circles with their tails slapping our thighs.

Gently, Joan asked, “Babe, what happened up there?”

I had to pause before answering. “He didn’t die alone. Sid and Mom were there. Mom is going to tell the local police it was a gun accident. That’s bullshit. They were all drinking. Dad must have turned on Mom. But after that, only they know what really happened. It was Mom’s little .22-caliber handgun. One shot to the heart.

Joan replied, “What?”

“Yea. Her gun. I thought we had escaped it all, but it just keeps getting worse.”

After a long beat of silence, Joan regained her composure. “Want to take a walk? Breathe some ocean air?”

I nodded yes, then looked at her, “Remember how much we loved the West when we drove across country?”

She pulled back and met my eyes, “I’ll never forget that trip.”

“It was the first time I felt free of them.”

At that moment, we both foresaw the changes coming in our lives. We held each other tightly as we walked the beach, watching our dogs run ahead, all of us feeling unleashed.

 

Michael Musheno has published extensively in university presses, including the University of Michigan and Chicago Presses, on issues of public affairs that draw upon the stories of others, mostly frontline workers in the public sector. He has turned to writing his own stories, two of which have appeared in earlier issues of RavensPerch.