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Tanner has always known his Dada to sometimes lay on the floor of his bedroom.
When he was putting him down for a nap or after kissing him to sleep. Sometimes in broad daylight and sometimes in the dark hours of the night.
And she lay down on her bedroom floor
He cannot remember a time when he did not do that.
He'd thought him silly at first. His silly Dada who chose the floor instead of the bed! His silly Dada who loved him so much he would lay down and stay there, staring at him and Penny all night long.
Momma had thought it stupid. But she’d always had a smile at the ready when she saw him do that. Her silly husband with his sweet, silly antics.
The chemicals that makes her laugh
Then he'd been four and Dada had disappeared for months!
Momma told him he was sick and he needed help. But no matter how much he'd begged and screamed and cried, she had refused to let Tanner see him. Saying that Dada and her did not want him to see how ill he was. That they would visit him when he was feeling better.
Don’t seem to be working anymore
That's when he starts laying on the floor. Watching the hours go by in the dust glittering through the air. Light turns to dark and dark turns to light. When the house is quiet, when Momma isn't up yet, he can nearly imagine he is there. With him. He can nearly smell his Dada, feels his arms around him. Hear his deep, gravely voice singing him to sleep.
When he is there, he can imagine his Dada is laying on the floor, somewhere, out there, looking at him, never blinking. Like he is afraid Tanner will disappear if he closes his eyes for a second.
Like he is afraid of himself.
She tries her best, but it hurts her chest
And when Tanner sees him, in the small, sad little room. Four white walls and a bed, the bracelet Tanner made for his last birthday the only colors in the place, looking soooo empty. So hollow. Not his Dada. When Tanner sees him, this ghost of him, he lays down on the bed with him (not the floor, because even then, even five, he’d known. He’d known Dada couldn’t have taken it), never taking his eyes off him. Afraid he will lose him.
Is it how Dada felt, all these times? When he’d looked like he wanted to cry but he couldn’t even find that much feelings in himself.
And even though her sun is gone
Dada comes home, still empty. Still sick. They try to hide it from him but Tanner knows. He hears the retching in the middle of the night, he sees how Dada pretends to eat but only takes in birds’ portions.
He hears him cry, when he thinks they’ve all gone to sleep.
But then, Dada starts sleeping on his bedroom's floor again. Starts watching over him and Penny like he used to. He sings them to sleep again, and takes them to school and the park and to ice cream. He plays with them and the dog outside and it feels like the best days ever. And the next time it is Dada’s turn to read them a bedtime story, Tanner pretends to fall asleep and wait. It’s hard, because Dada is really bad at sleeping and it takes forever for him to finally close his eyes and Tanner is really sleepy!
But he waits. And finally, Dada falls asleep! Tanner slips from under his covers, tugging at the blanket to bring it with him as he pads onto the floor, quiet as the stray cat Dada feeds behind Momma’s back. His and Tanner’s little secret.
(In all the months that Dada was not there; the cat didn’t come.)
And in the dead of the night, he lays down in front of him, heaving his blanket over both of them as best as he can, and goes to sleep in his Dada’s arm, tucked close to his heart.
She’d like to love her child nonetheless
Tanner has never doubted his Dada’s love for them.
He had always made sure they knew, Penny and him, that they were the most beautiful, the most amazing, the most precious miracles he and Momma had made together.
Sometimes he hears some of his friends at school talk about their tough Dads and their “men don’t cry” style and he doesn’t know if that’s love at all.
His Dada kisses his booboos and puts antiseptic on it and cuddles Tanner after he is done. He does full-on surgeries on his broken toys with auntie Yoyo, explaining everything to him as they work and giving him his plushies back with plasters and bandages and a three week recovery course, trusting Tanner to follow their instruction to the letter.
He comes to every game he can and every school play and he makes bunny shapes out of their apple pieces and Mickey pancakes just for him and Penny. And he once ruined some of his best clothes repairing one of Penny’s projects for school. It had been full of glitter and sticky red paint and hot glue and by the time he was done, the evening clothes he had been wearing for a work event were thoroughly ruined.
He had taken Tanner for hot chocolate and cookies after his ADHD diagnosis, telling him how much he loved him and how this did not change anything. And maybe for the first time, Tanner had recognized fear in his father’s eyes. Fear and guilt and something else. Something deeper. Something meaner.
(It would be years before he can identify it. Self-loathing. How his father had hated himself then! For condemning him to a life of struggles. Of always having to look for the next hit, always having to try to control their brain into a semblance of normalcy. And Tanner had promised himself that day, years down the line, that he would make the best of it! That he would show his Dada he had not failed them. That their divergence was something to be proud of!)
Two years later, he had done the same for Penny.
Through his illness, through his and Momma’s divorce and Penny’s heartbroken wails and Tanner’s angry outbursts, he always makes sure they know how much he loves them.
His own personal sunshines.
His little miracles.
And Tanner knows he loves them with absolute certainty, because in that small room, all these years ago, the only colors Dada had fought to keep were his.
My hair is brown, she’s scared to touch
And she just wants to feel something
He doesn’t like Robby.
Never has. And a tiny, petty, illogical part of him wants to say Never will.
He doesn’t know why, really. Can’t remember when his aversion to the man started. He knows he had been around when he was little. Little enough that he doesn’t remember him much. But then he had disappeared from their lives so thoroughly that Penny had no idea who the man was when Dada first introduces him to her.
(Tanner pretends he needs to be re-introduced too. Pretends he has never met him. Or at least has no memories of ever interacting with him. It alleviates some of the pain in his Dada’s eyes, and that’s a good enough reason for him to feel spitefully justified.)
He doesn’t like Robby, and he makes it very well known.
Doesn’t like the time he takes his Dada away from them, his presence in their apartment, his attempts at playing buddy buddy with him!
Where was he when Dada was sick?! When he would lay on the floor of Tanner’s bedroom for hours on end and looking like he would never get up again?! When he had to wait at work, long past his hours, for the tests he had to take, the one Momma had never wanted to talk about?
Where was he for the dark days?! The one where Dada would cry himself to sleep on his or Penny's bedroom floor.
Where was Robby when Dada needed help?
If Robby was only here for the good times, Tanner didn’t want him to have anything to do with them.
And I don’t think that’s asking for too much
And when I go to sleep is when she begins to weep
All Dada had wanted was to be able to love them. Love them as thoroughly and fiercely as he could! As thoroughly and fiercely as he sometimes believed he did not. Tanner had never found the way to convince him he did love them! Never truly managed to convey how cherished they had always felt.
Penny once told him he was stupid. That you do not show this with words, but with actions. But that was Penny. She always thought she knew best!
She’s appalled by not loving me at all
So he doesn't like Robby.
Robby who can’t look at Dada’s problems and not make it about himself. Robby who once threw Dada out of his life for failing to meet his standards. Robby who goes around telling the entire world how great people are and how proud he is of his students and how happy he is that Dada got the help he needed… Robby who never once looked at his people beyond their ability to do their jobs and who can’t seem to stop making comments about the next time Dada will be sick.
So the first time Robby walk in on Dada and Tanner laying on the floor, entangled with each other, he doesn’t even have the time to start asking his question.
“Get out!” Tanner screams, furious and uncontrolled, surprising his father. Surprising himself. “Get out! You don’t get to see that! You don’t get to have that!”
She wears a frown and dressing gown
When she lays down
Then Momma finds a new boyfriend, and if Tanner thought he did not like Robby, Travis is another thing entirely!
Tanner hates Travis. With his self-sufficient smile and his belief that he can come in here, a new addition to their dynamic, and request that Tanner calls him Dad! Tanner laughs at him, meanly and scornfully. 'I already have a Dad', he tells him, sarcasm dripping from his lips. If he thinks he can just replace him, he’s got another thing coming!
Mom revokes his video games privileges for three weeks for that. But Penny hides his Switch in her room, telling them Tanner forgot it at Dada’s, and smuggles it to him when they are not looking.
Tanner hates Travis, who never talks about Dada except to throw little insults and derogatory comments about him. He never calls him Momma’s ex-husband, or Tanner’s and Penny’s Dad, or just Frank. He calls him the addict, or you know, the weird one or the doctor with that tone in his voice that says a lot about what he thinks of Tanner’s Dada.
As if Tanner’s Dada is not one of the best doctors out there. As if every hospital in Pittsburgh had not fought over him when he’d finished his residency despite the benzos and the PHP.
Tanner is fifteen at the time, full of anger at the world and everyone in it.
Angry at Robby. Angry at Travis. Angry at Mom! Who lets her boyfriend talk about his father like that! He calls her a bitch that day. Asking why she ever bothered having children when all she seemed to be interested in is a new boyfriend? Did she ever love his father? Was it what she thought of them too? He and Penny, when they can’t stop talking about their obsession of the week?! Is that what they are to her? How she describes them to her friends? Her weird kids who can’t sit still for the life of them and can’t bring her consistent grades?! Her weirdass kids with their ADHD and their higher risk of addiction!
Or does she never talk about them? Out of sight, out of mind.
He leaves the house with only the clothes on his back, running into the night without a thought as to what he is going to do.
“TANNER!!”
It’s Dada who finds him, shivering and huddling on a park bench in the middle of the night. Of course it’s Dada!
Because it’s Dada who could spend hours with him here, looking at the fireflies. It’s Dada who had lost entire mornings going through all the bushes because Tanner wanted to see the bugs and got distracted by the leaves and before they knew it they were on Flora Incognita looking up all the plants in the park, midday had gone by and someone was calling Dada’s phone because he’d forgotten an appointment.
There’s Dada, and aunt Yoyo, and Dada’s Shark friend and Robby, running towards him in various stages of fright and before he can compute Tanner is engulfed in the biggest of hugs, his father holding onto him too tightly, too strongly. Then he is being scolded for frightening them all and running away in the first place!
“Don’t you ever do this to us again! You hear me Tanner?!”
His ear is smarting where Dada pulled it, but not as much as his heart is still hurting and he erupts into abrupt sobs, wailing and leaving snot all over his father’s sleeves as he clutches his hoodie with a desperate grip.
Penny is home waiting for him when they get back, even though it’s not Dada’s week. Robby ushers them into the living room and onto the sofa, where Tanner and his sister are gathered into a tight hug. Aunt Yoyo stays with them, and even though Penny begs Park to stay, the man is on call for the night and has to go back to PTMC. He is already lucky they did not need him right now.
Robby comes back with hot chocolate for them all and Tanner begrudgingly accepts his. Anyone is better than Travis anyway.
We’ve got a plane, oh to see my dad again
The next day he screams at Dada and Penny. Because Dada just punished him for running away like that and Penny isn’t sneaking him his Switch anymore.
He and Penny fight all over the apartment to the point Dada has to physically separate them and put them in time out like they were nine again!
Tanner is seething, white hot waves of rage crashing in his body, suffocating him! The fury burns his throat and turns everything he says into hateful speech and he ends up banished to his room without his phone or any access to a game or the internet, not allowed to come out until he is ready to apologise for his words and behavior.
It is only late in the evening, after they’ve all eaten in a stony silence and he has been sent back to his room, that he hears it.Small sniffles and a low, deep voice humming soothing words. He takes a peek by the embrasure of his door to see that Park has come back. His arms are around Tanner’s father and he is rocking him s lowly, kissing his hair.
Shame curdles like bad milk in his belly.
That night he lays on the floor, remembering another time, another night when he had imagined his father’s presence in his room, in front of him. When he had been so sure that somehow, somewhere, his Dada was laying on the ground, facing him.
The next morning he wakes up in his bed, the smell of his father’s aftershave still clinging to him.
When he gets up for breakfast he has to face Park, as Dada has already left for work. The man gripes and grouses and Tanner wilts under his severe gaze as he tells him he better not make him sleep on the floor when he is having a tantrum.
Tanner says nothing.
She’d prayed that we fall from the sky
Simply to alleviate the pain
He has been watching over Dada’s. Scrutinizing the way he moves, cataloguing his winces and his bad days. The bad mental ones and the bad physical ones. The ones where all his father can do is lay in bed and pray for the pain to go away. The ones where he looks like all he wants to do is get horizontal on Tanner’s bedroom floor once more but he knows if he does that, he won’t get up again.
The one where his eyes are empty and he get the family albums out, riffling through Penny’s and Tanner’s baby photos as if it might re-ignites something within him.
The ones where all he can think of is how much he’d like a benzo.
Tanner never, ever tells him he can predicts when the urges will come. That there is a manic energy to him before the storm hits and the cravings come back to haunt him.
Just like he never tells him about that time he tried pills at school. How amazing it had been! How normal he had felt, for the space of an hour or so. Better than anything Aderall or any other treatments the doctors had tried on him had ever made him feel.
It would only add another burden on Dada’s shoulders. So he says nothing. Not even when the school calls Brendon (because Dada had been unavailable and Mom was on a work trip and there was no way in hell he was ever going to agree to leave with fucking Travis!) when the counselor finds him throwing his guts up in the toilets after a bad combination. The surgeon comes to get him from the nurse’s office but instead of immediately bringing him home, he makes a detour by the park, not asking Tanner if he wants to or not. Simply throwing him one look that has the teenager following him without a word.
Brendon sits him down on a bench and points at a homeless man sleeping not so far away, his gaze hard and unyielding.
“You see that man. That’s what pills did to him.” Then he pulls his phone out and starts showing photos after photos to Tanner, commenting all along. “That’s what addiction does to you. That’s the truth of it. That’s what your Dad has to fight against. Every day. Every night. And it never stops. It never ends. This isn’t a war you can win kid. It’s just a war you try not to lose. Do you really think that’s what he would want for you?”
And Tanner is so, so tired!
So tired of being sad. So tired of seeing his Dada be sad. Be sick. Be fighting, on and on and on. So tired of being angry!
“Come here kid.”
Before he has the time to understand what’s happening, Brendon is gathering him in his arms. Hugging him. And it feels nearly as good as when Dada does it.
Tanner never tries a pill ever again. Promises himself he won’t touch alcohol either, because he’s seen what that does to some of his friends. He and Brendon never bring it up ever again, and never say a word of it to Dada.
Over water, hmm
Over terrain
The engines all go bust, we turned to dust
Then Tanner turns eighteen, leaving highschool a valedictorian and he spends the entire ride to the school ceremony wishing someone would crash the car so he can escape having to deliver his speech!
Unfortunately, Brendon is the one driving. Because let’s be real, if Dada had been behind the wheel he might just have ended up crashing the car with how stressed he has been himself. Nevermind the fact that he, Tanner and Penny are all emotional sponges and they’ve been feeding each other’s anxiety for days now!
So Tanner ends up having to talk in front of hundreds of people and he has to remind himself of what he promised himself, years ago.
To show his Dada their divergence was a strength. Not a burden.
He swallows his nerves, swallows his desire to throw himself under an incoming bus or a truck to escape his duty. He pushes the littles voices down and buries them far, far under all the mud and muck of harder days. Under Travis and Dada’s disappearance and the pills. And he delivers the most important speech he’s ever had to make.
The one where he reminds his father, reminds his sister, reminds himself that their difference does not make them lesser, does not make them a burden. It is what makes them who they are. And fuck anyone who think they have the right to tell them they are too much.
And I’ve no reason to complain, yeah
He gets into a prestigious drama school.
Because he can. Because he has the talent and the drive and he wants to be out there, center stage! Where he can talk to the entire world! Where he can be listened to when he talks about ADHD and mental health.
He has some sort of truce with Robby, accepting the man in his father’s life as long as he doesn’t fuck up and begrudgingly recognizing the good he has brought with him since he started therapy himself.
He still doesn’t like Travis, but at least the man has learnt to keep quiet on his opinions of his Dada. Though that might be more because of Penny’s guerilla warfare tactics than the idiot having finally grasped when to keep his thoughts to himself. That and Momma finally putting her anger aside for their sake and having a discussion with him.
And in the end she chose cocaine
But it couldn’t fix her brain
Tanner is twenty when he finally finds peace with his past. With his father’s struggles. The moments he missed, the moments he messed up. The moments Tanner had wanted to be different.
His Dada’s need to be perfect, to excel at every part of his life, to deal with his problems on his own and not show any cracks had driven him towards benzos. Toward a chemical crutch that made him believe he would hurt less. That he would be quicker, better, more alert.
A better doctor, a better father. Someone who would not be thrown to the side. Someone who would not be abandoned.
It had only left him with a lifelong battle. One more thing that took from him.
She’s appalled
Oh she doesn’t love at all
Tanner has never doubted his Dada loved them.
He had always made sure they knew, Penny and him, that they were the most beautiful, the most amazing, the most precious miracles he and Momma had made together.
His own personal sunshines.
His little miracles.
Even when he had laid on his bedroom floor, watching Tanner without ever blinking. Afraid of the emptiness in his breast. That dark, black hole that would suck every ounce of feelings out of him.
Even then, Tanner had known.
She wears a frown and dressing gown
When she lays down
And now it’s his turn. To lay with his Dada. To make sure he doesn’t have to get down on the floor anymore. It’s his turn to help Brendon make sure his father takes care of himself and doesn’t sacrifice his own comfort for the sake of others.
It’s his turn to mess up too. In life. And in love. And to understand how Momma and Dada could love each other so much and still end up tearing themselves apart.
It doesn’t make things easier.
But it does make them hurt a little less.
That was it