The Monster Under the Bed Loves Me

Finding out my dad Adam loves me happens quite by accident when I burn myself badly. We live in Blanco, Texas, population 1,022. I am seven. I'm looking for ice in the freezer and my step-mother Laura has placed a boiling hot pot of tea on the top shelf to cool. I pull it down, searing my entire torso with the boiling tea. It is bad. My dad races me the seventeen miles to the hospital in Johnson City, and for once I am not afraid of his speed-demon ways in the car. He keeps up a steady stream of conversation with me, about nothing at all really, just hoping to keep my mind off the pain, which is agonizing. He's great in that kind of crisis, knowing just how far to joke, when to pull back and offer soothing sounds of empathy, when to shut up. He and my step-mother give me nothing for the pain before we leave for the hospital. Their organically inclined household isn't like mine now, where I have an embarrassingly large collection of pain pills and tranquilizers on hand. Adam and Laura don't believe in aspirin.

At the hospital the doctors do whatever they do to fix me up. I don't much remember much, though I do recall them wheeling me out to the car and not listening to me when I tell them that I want to shift the hospital gown so that my seven year-old penis isn't hanging there getting cold.

My realization about my dad loving me comes on the drive home. The first thing he does is stop for gas, telling me that the whole way to Johnson City, to the hospital, terror filled him since the gas gauge was on empty. He tells how he is frightened on the trip he might run out of gas but stopping for gas is unthinkable with me in so much pain. That's when it dawns on me that he loves me. He is not remotely a man given to confessing fear or confusion - in fact I don't remember him ever doing it before or since - but his reaction here to me being burned is unmistakably that of someone who is worried about a person he regards with actual love.

I am astounded.

I have given him little consideration beyond wanting to get away from him. Escaping Adam. A Lifetime movie title. I make him a villain without ever thinking of him as an actual person. You don't stop to ponder the humanity of the monster under the bed, you just stab him and run away.

Along with his booming roar of a voice, filled with damning expletives, I now most remember his smile, a sort of shit-eating grin - a self-satisfied smirk that sometimes shifts into a deep, striking kindness before inevitably at some point dropping back into something challenging and ugly. Violence comes even in the quiet times when a word of encouragement can somehow morph into a character autopsy. I am frozen around him. My heart stops. Time doesn't exist as I generally smile and chat away, presenting a face to the world so false it takes my breath away when I think about it now.

On the drive back to Blanco from the hospital, even with the pain of the burns on my chest rekindling and starting to overpower the drugs, thinking of my father having feelings and fears about me blows my mind. I use the pain medication as an excuse, consciously looking like I'm zoning out so I can ponder what I've learned. Adam loves me. The bad man loves me. I turn the realization over and over in my mind, looking at it from every side, wondering if I can turn it to my advantage. The answer hits me with a blinding, scarily adult sort of clarity:

If he loves me I can use that against him, since I don't love him. I know instinctively that not loving holds the tactical advantage over loving. I look at the situation from an emotionless, businesslike perspective, pondering how I might use this new information to gain my freedom from him. Rage may have threaded itself throughout my childhood self but this isn't like that. Realizing that our imbalance of affection will become a weapon of war is a coolly strategic observation, made without rancor. On some level I'm aware this is not the normal observation of a well-adjusted seven year-old.