For most children.
I was not, nor had I ever been, a normal child.
Death wasn’t a disembodied cloud, drifting far above my innocent head. It didn’t just brush me and then move away. Death was always a thing, a personification that had always existed.
Like Santa Claus.
But instead of the red jolly man, the black and imposing thing did not come giving gifts. That menacing presence came and snatched things off me. Little pieces here and there, leaving empty spaces in the mosaic of my family.
Always violent. The endings of the men patched into the Sons of Templar were not anticlimactic, withering away in old age and senility.
No, it was always a rapid and violent end.
I was spared some of the violent endings.
Some were inevitable.
Like the time, right after my first day at school, when I’d been sitting on Dad’s workbench, swinging my boots, sucking on a lollipop and daydreaming of that boy I’d seen. Then my magical daydreams of princes and princesses and all those simple fantasies that can only be made in youth were snatched away with the screeching of tires and shouts and chaos.
There was always chaos.
“Rosie, baby, stay there and don’t move until I say,” Daddy shouted, dropping his tools with a clatter and sprinting toward where the black van had stopped. It was parked funny.
I wasn’t focused on how Evie would yell at the grown-ups for blocking the parking lot because there was more than that to focus on.
Red.
Blood.
It stained the cracked concrete of the parking lot.
I blinked, just in case I was seeing something that really wasn’t there. Like how I had been just seeing that boy smile at me and say hello and take me for a ride on his horse even though he’d never smiled or talked to me.
But it stayed.
And it got worse when I saw the blood was coming from Sonny.
He wasn’t moving.
He was staring at me.
But not in the way he did when he pulled a penny from my ear. There was no sparkle in his eyes. No twinkle. There wasn’t anything in them.
My lollipop tumbled to join Daddy’s discarded tools on the ground, where the blood would eventually creep up and swallow it away.
That was only the first, and most dramatic, time.
When I’d met the man called Death.
It didn’t happen often, but I saw him more than Santa Claus.
He had been taking pieces from the mosaic of my life, but I managed to glue what remained together, still smile and pretend to forget about the thing called Death.
That was until he grabbed me by the throat and smashed every piece of my mosaic apart.
It was when he took Daddy.
I didn’t see the glassy stare of Death replace the fond gray gaze of my father like I had with Sonny.
I wished I had.
It would’ve been bad. Horrifying. Terrifying.
But it wouldn’t have been—couldn’t have been—as bad as Evie walking woodenly toward me. Like a zombie. Like a stranger wearing her skin and impersonating her almost perfectly.
Almost.
“Rosie, it’s your father,” she said, the rough husk somehow disappearing from her voice. It was the audible version of cardboard.
My stomach dropped, in a hideous and unbearable way, and it didn’t stop dropping. Like a pebble tumbling into the black depths of a well.
“He’s dead,” she choked out, her shaking hands pulling me into an uncharacteristic embrace. “Your dad’s dead.”
Evie didn’t hug. She wasn’t like the other moms: she didn’t bake, didn’t dress in pastel, didn’t join the PTA.
She wasn’t even really my mom.
But my real mom was even less like a mom than Evie.
And Evie loved me in her own way. But it was never in a way that hugged me, held my hand or kissed me on the forehead.
Yet she did all three now, like if she did something as completely uncharacteristic as show me affection that maybe it might work to distract me from her words. Take the burn away from them.
But it only intensified the pain.
There was no moment of blessed numbness as a child tried to reconcile the distant concept of death and wrap it around the constant figure of their parent.
There was none of that.
Only Death’s gaping and toothless smile as it engulfed my father, snatching him away, showing me that I’d never see him again.
He was gone.
Sonny’s stare replaced Evie’s eyes, tears streaking through her makeup.
That was my father.
Not exactly the same, but it would’ve ended in blood.
My seven-year-old self knew that.
We were at war.
My seven-year-old self knew that too.
Because I wasn’t allowed to play after school. Or ride my bike with the neighborhood kids. I was only allowed out if at least two people with at least two guns on their hips came with me.
I knew that because even when I tried the hardest, I could only coax the smallest smile from my father’s marble face. Because sometimes he didn’t hug me good night because he didn’t come home at all. And sometimes he hugged me so tight I was sure he was going to squeeze my eyes right out of my head. He hugged me like he never might get to do it again.