Hugging Hazel

This is an excerpt from the Second chapter of my memoir, The Long Run Home

Today the memories go deeper. Stride for stride, I’m here, with my partner, hearing my team cheer me through the 102nd street transverse, but with each beat my heart is burying me further down into the past.

And there I finally am. Small. So small. Maybe 5. My hands gripping the molding between the living and dining rooms. So small I go unnoticed.

My dad is angry. About what? Maybe jealousy. Maybe money. Maybe jealousy about how much money my mom was making. It never really mattered. What mattered was the alcohol. The easy access to guns. So many guns.

And bullets.

And the combination of all three.

My mom was begging with him, pleading, I didn’t know about what, I just knew my dad had a loaded shotgun and was trying to walk out the door. And for some reason, my mom didn’t want him to go.

On any other occasion she’d want as much distance between us and that gun as possible. But not tonight. And I didn’t know why. I watched, crouched down between the rooms, as she spread eagle in the doorway, begging him, beseeching him, not to go.

And then he leveled the gun at her. Told her either she got out of the way or he’d kill her and her kids next.

I watched my dad tell my mom he’d kill me. I’m not sure I’ve ever let that sentence sit in front of me before. But there it is.

I wasn’t special though, I never had been. I was just one of the three kids he intended to murder if she didn’t move.

And so she did. She relented and he charged through the door hell bent on killing something else.

We didn’t have to wait long. I don’t actually remember the sound of the shotgun. I don’t know if that’s because I was somewhere else in the house as my mom hustled the children together, or if my brain has simply wiped that trauma from my memory.

What I do remember is somehow worse. My brothers are in the car, my mom and I are on the side porch. And there’s Hazel, the German Shepherd with a disposition like sweet cream. There’s a hole in her stomach, but she is still with us, laying down, her head alert, looking up at us, whimpering as my mom pushes me toward her.

“Give her a hug and say goodbye,” and I do. I hug the dog who is bleeding it’s guts onto the cement I played hopscotch on earlier that day. I give it a hug and a kiss and I say goodbye.

I won’t demean you by explaining that my mom is using me to offload an adult emotional task onto a child. I won’t explore how she delegated distress or made me responsible for the psychological closure she was incapable of.

I won’t linger on the space I had to cross alone, the chasm of a side porch that opened between the one parent I still thought was protecting me, and the childhood friend I had to close the coffin on.

How that taught me to perform care instead of acknowledge my own feelings, how I learned compliance over reaction in a moment of crisis, how I was emotionally abandoned at the threshold of loss.

Because I wasn’t allowed to linger on those things either. That hug. That hug that has traveled with me over decades, over relationships, over animals I’ve loved and lost and moments I have wanted to scream for sanity, but kept my mouth shut as I was trained to. That hug lasted seconds.

I walked over and hugged Hazel. I said goodbye, I said I love you, and then I walked back. In obedience, calmly, unsure of where my dad was, where his gun was, if he had any bullets left.

And then we piled into the car with my brothers and drove to the side of the road somewhere. Between a cornfield and a corner store, where we’d get ice cream sandwiches in the morning.

My mom told us we’d have a competition, to see who could fall asleep first, her way of trying to turn a terrifying moment into a game. To keep us from asking questions.

Like were we going back tomorrow. Would he still be there. Would we have to hug him. Would it happen again.