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ACOUSTIC GUITAR CLOSE TO HIS BELLY , leaned back on his bed, and strummed. He wasn’t practicing anything in particular, just running through some songs. It was his way of checking out. He closed the bedroom door, disappeared into himself, and tried not to think. The guitar was his shield, the hard outer shell he needed, like the exoskeleton of some soft-bellied bug.
    Whenever Eric thought about his father, when he remembered things, it left him confused. He didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to feel this way, but thememories flooded in like a rising river, ruining everything. There they were. He could picture it.
    Rudy just a baby, probably asleep. It was dark out, his parents at the kitchen table, Eric spooning a bowl of vanilla ice cream, and his father’s voice, loud and accusing.
    â€œClear the table?” his father screamed. “I’ll clear the table, just watch me. I can be really helpful around the house.” He picked up plates and glasses and tossed them one by one in underhanded arcs toward the sink. There they crashed and shattered—his mother crying, pleading for Eric’s father to stop, please stop, please—but the clatter continued until, finally, the dishes cleared and a life splintered, his father walked out the door.
    Oh, the way his mother sagged to the floor. Eric could see it in his mind, as if a motion picture were projected against the inner walls of his skull. She leaned against the wall and her legs slid forward. She dropped down, slumped over, face splotchy with tears. Eric didn’t dare to move. He sat watching her while a thousand small fish swam through his bloodstream. Then he finally climbed down to the floor and crawledto her and whispered, “It’s okay, Mom, it’s okay, stop crying. I’ll clean everything up.”
    â€œHe’s sick,” she murmured in answer, staring at nothing. “He’s so sick.”
    And rather than clean anything up, Eric bent his head to her warm soft lap and crashed. Just fell asleep right then and there, instantly.
    No, Eric hadn’t told Griffin that story. Some stories you don’t tell. You just keep them to yourself, locked away, and you run the guitar pick up and down across six strings and you strum.
    Eric couldn’t tell Griffin the whole truth about his father. So it was a day of white lies—first to his mother, then to Griffin Connelly. It wasn’t like Eric
wanted
to lie, exactly. It was just that the truth was so . . . inconvenient. To Eric’s way of thinking, a good fiction was better than a hard fact. Everybody breathed easier; nobody got hurt; and you moved on to the next thing.
    Even if he wanted to, how could Eric tell Griffin about what really happened back in Ohio? The truth was a slippery bar of soap, something ungraspable, athing Eric himself could never understand, much less
tell
.
    How do you say that your father has a “mental illness”? How do you say “schizophrenia” and not open a can of fresh wounds and questions? Schizophrenia was like a word from a bad horror movie, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Dad. But it didn’t work like that. His father didn’t act like two people, a good guy and a bad guy. It was trickier than that. His father was once the greatest guy in the world, but then, slowly, over time, he wasn’t anymore. He changed, got angry and confused. His own thoughts haunting him, hunting him down. His father fell into dark moods, made unfounded accusations, said crazy things. And worse: He dropped into long brooding silences, not speaking for days, a ghost walking around in Daddy’s shoes. It was like he slowly vanished in front of Eric’s eyes, from the inside out. A hollow man. A sunken-eyed scarecrow. In that way, his father
was
like two men, the good guy and the sick one. For Eric to ever live a full life, he knew that he would have to love both men. The well and the ill. He couldn’t pick one or the