Work Text:
He was drunk.
Again.
Holly wasn’t surprised, but she’d been hoping that maybe today would be better.
At least he’s not in the bath tub this time. Small victories.
She goes further into the living room, dropping her school bag on the floor and stomping through to the kitchen. The door slams shut behind her, rattling its hinges the way she knows her Dad hates and her insides twist a little bit. Well, if he doesn’t want the door slammed then he shouldn’t be passed out on the sofa at 3 in the afternoon.
The slam doesn’t seem to have woken him, with him only letting out a small snort before going back to his stupid half snore half breathing thing he does. It’s one of the things that terrifies her most - that he can be so quiet sometimes, that there have been many times where Holly has come home like this or woken up from a nightmare and run into his room and had to stand and wait, holding her own breath until she can see his chest move, the proof that he’s still alive and still here.
She considers going back and slamming it again to see if it would wake him, but a quick glance down to the cans piled by the sofa and the half bottle of scotch still clasped gently in his hands. She knows she should probably rescue it before he ruins yet another suit, so that he won’t be walking around with a suit reeking of alcohol that he won’t even smell but that it will follow her even when he leaves. But she wonders if he did go out with it on, maybe some stranger would say something and Dad would get embarrassed enough to think about his drinking and his daughter and try and do something about it. Not that he gets embarrassed easily. Would have to be some kind of stranger, to do what Holly has been desperately trying to do for the last 2 years, but she can hope.
It feels like some days all she has is hope.
Hope that maybe today is the day her Dad will change.
Hope that today he realises how much drinking is taking away from him. How much drinking is taking him away from her.
Hope that he realises with every drink a little bit of her dies a little bit more.
Hope that he’ll change before she loses him as well.
She knows he’s struggling with it all, the guilt of it all weighing heavily on his shoulders, pushing him under a little further every day. The day it had happened, when they were told she can still remember the noise he had made. The pain, the agony in it – as if the part of his soul that belonged to her Mom was being ripped out of him as he collapsed to the ground. Holly’s pain was quieter but no less strong – it was though part of her just floated away, a piece of her that she would never get back. In the days and weeks after, he had kept their heads above water – finding them somewhere to live, making all the funeral arrangements and pushing Holly into the grief counselling they were offered. It had helped, having somewhere she could say all the things in her head that she couldn’t say anywhere else, somewhere she could be angry and shout and cry without having to worry about anyone else. She had tried to talk about it with her Dad a few times – he had tried to ask her how she was but whenever she shared with him even a drop of the ocean that was swirling inside her, the light would go out of his eyes, his hands would start shaking and he would reach for the nearest bottle. Even when she tried to ask about her, small stupid things that she thought she’d have forever to ask that now she never could, he would answer but a shadow would come over him and he would hide in the contents of another bottle. So it just got easier to not tell him, to not ask anything. She got better at looking after herself, and looking after him.
With time, that ocean in her had ebbed away but the horrible mix of feelings are always there simmering underneath the surface – the horrible mixture of sadness and grief and loss and anger and the overwhelming feeling that all she wants is her Mom back.
Holly has gotten pretty good at handling those feelings. S
Sometimes something unexpected will cause them to get loud, like when her Dad will say something that he would only ever say to her, or she’ll hear a song on the radio that will take her back to a night with the three of them dancing in the living room, or she’ll think about the future too far and the life she wants and the realisation will hit her like a truck that she’ll have to do all of it without her Mom by her side. There’s nothing she can do about it then, she just has to let it ocean rise again.
Her Dad seems to have decided to ignore the feelings entirely – deciding to numb them with whatever he can pick of from the liquor store, shutting them out until the dam breaks. He tries to hide it from her, but she hears the shouts through the walls at night and notices the way he freezes in the street sometimes when a certain shade of blonde walks by. He is just about keeping himself afloat but Holly isn’t sure how long it will be until the current pulls him under.
Holly pushes those thoughts from her mind. Instead, she focuses on searching through the cupboards to see what she can salvage for food tonight. She grabs a familiar blue can from the back of the cupboard and tips the contents into a pan and grabs two slices of bread and shoves them in the toaster. It’s the only one left. She’ll have to let her Dad know so he can pick some up from that special shop he has to go to get them.
‘Why the fuck do I have to travel halfway across the state to get the godforsaken things?’ he had asked once.
‘Perhaps it’s because you love your wife and want to make sure she has a home comfort available to her whilst she is far away from her family in a strange and unfamiliar land?’ her Mom would reply with a wink to Holly, engaging in their favourite activity of winding him up.
He had continued to grumble even as he kissed them both goodbye and grabbed his car keys, the two of them bursting into laughter as soon as the door closed behind him.
She can just about remember the sound of her mothers laugh but can struggle to remember the last time she saw her father like he was back then – the smile that he always struggled to contain, that was always seconds away from breaking out onto his face. There are glimpses of him on the better days - the Dad from before who will swing her from her chair and dance her round the living room, or will pick her up from school and take her to get ice cream and choose the most repulsive combination he can just to make her laugh. But it will never last for long, and no matter how hard she tries he will still end up reaching for a drink.
She is broken out her reverie by the pop of the toaster beside her. She blinks away the blurriness that has sprung to her eyes and swallows the tears making their way up her throat.
She tips the pan onto the toast, takes a seat at the table and risks a glance back towards the sofa. He has shifted, the bottle clutched tighter in his hands, the ring on his necklace glinting in the evening sun and shows no sign of waking any time soon.
She takes a bite and thinks – hopes – prays – maybe tomorrow will be better.