Breaking Hammer Read online

  So instead, MacKenzie and I went to the Catholic church every week to light a candle and say a prayer for her. At least, we went most weekends.

  We didn't go last weekend, the weekend everything happened. When MacKenzie said she wanted to kill herself.

  Standing in front of the altar inside the church, I touched the match to the votive candle. All of the candles in a row, flames flickering in the dimly lit church, stood for someone. They represented people with lives, loved ones, histories. I think that’s what kept bringing me back. It was oddly comforting, knowing that. Other people had lost, and still survived.

  Or some profound shit like that.

  MacKenzie squeezed my hand and looked up at me. “Do you think mom’s in heaven?”

  “I know she is,” I said. After all the things I had done, I hoped there was a place for April in heaven. I hoped my karma hadn't rubbed off on her.

  MacKenzie squeezed tight against my leg. “Can we watch some movies of her again, before I leave?”

  I swallowed the lump forming in my throat. “Sure, baby.”

  MacKenzie was only four when April was murdered, her life snuffed out by Mad Dog’s lackeys. My fucking so-called brothers. She watched the videos of her mom, looked at photos, but I didn’t know how much of April she remembered.

  Me, on the other hand? I couldn’t forget my wife. Sometimes I smelled her when I entered a room, memories triggered by a scent that reminded me of the shampoo she used or the perfume she wore. I saw her when I closed my eyes, and when I woke in the middle of the night, I still reached for her automatically. I didn’t know when that would change.

  It had been over two and a half years, and only now was it beginning to feel like I wasn’t completely raw.

  “This is mom and me at the zoo,” MacKenzie said. She slipped her finger across the touch screen on the tablet, scrolling through the photos. We’d been through our pictures and videos so many times I had their order memorized.

  Even before all this shit that happened last weekend, the admission to the child psych hospital, I'd worried that it wasn't good for Mac, the way we kept April’s memory alive. I wondered if it was too close to keeping April herself alive, if it cast a shadow over MacKenzie, talking about her dead mother all the time. There was something morbid about it, a kid and her father so preoccupied with her mother's death.

  The other part of me was terrified that unless I kept reminding MacKenzie of April, that April’s memory would fade away. That she would forget about her.

  MacKenzie's shrink had said it was okay, had told me to talk about it with her as much as she wanted. Without the gruesome details, she stipulated. That was the shit I couldn't get out of my fucking head, the way April had been brutalized, so that was the shit I kept to myself, replaying the image of her in my mind over and over.

  I kept the feelings to myself too, the guilt that washed over me like a tidal wave at times, so intense that I couldn't stand it. Guilt that I wasn't there when she was murdered; guilt that my association with the Inferno MC had been the cause of her death; and now, guilt that MacKenzie was so depressed.

  The anger was almost worse than the guilt. Sometimes I felt it was eating away at me, at the core of who I was. I tried everything I could think to get rid of it. Shit, I fucking beat one of April's murderers to death with a sledgehammer after it happened. You'd think that would have done something to quell the tide of anger inside me.

  I think it only made it worse.

  I tried to hide it, to put on a happy front with MacKenzie, but I worried constantly that it was never enough, that she would sense the darkness in my soul, the shit that pumped through my veins. And, really, if I were honest with myself, I think she did. It had to be one of the reasons she wasn't doing well. She was spiraling downward since we'd moved to Las Vegas a year ago. We'd come back from Puerto Rico, where we were living with April's mother for a year after her murder. It took me that long to get my shit together, to face life again.

  To face MacKenzie again.

  I'd been there, physically present, but not really there, for her. I'd been just going through the motions of fatherhood, numb to everything. I was too wrapped up in my selfish shit, my grief over losing April, to really be there for MacKenzie. April's mother was a doting grandmother, and her family surrounded Mac with love, but fuck, if her own father was so wrapped up in his shit that he couldn't be there for her, what the hell chance did she have? No wonder she came back here and completely disintegrated once she was stuck with me.

  We tried everything- grief counselor, child psychologist, psychiatrist. But Mac kept getting worse. She kept getting more and more depressed. Acting out at school. I thought it was an adjustment to the move- we'd never lived in Vegas, and kids took a while to adjust, right? It was last weekend that things reached a breaking point.

  MacKenzie had told one of her teachers at school on Friday that she wanted to die so she could go to Heaven to be with her mother.

  When the school called me, said they were calling her psychiatrist for an evaluation and told me why, I felt like my heart was being ripped out of my chest.

  She spent the weekend in the hospital, in the child psych ward, under observation. That was when her doctors gently suggested we think about going back to Puerto Rico.

  Or rather, the shrink suggested that Mac go back to Puerto Rico for a while.

  Not that I join her.

  Sure, they didn't come right out and say it, but what the hell else was that other than confirmation that I'm a shit father? MacKenzie was better off without me, better off with people who could be stable for her, who could show her more love than some fucking ex-biker ex-con. I tried, I really did. Wore myself to the bone trying to make up for being so out of touch after April died, so much that it tore me apart inside.

  There was no way I was ever going to completely make it up to her.

  I was just lost as a father.

  I was no good, and I never would be.

  “And that’s you and mom at the park,” I said, pointing to a photo of April sitting in the grass, holding MacKenzie in her lap, her arms wrapped around her. “You were barely walking then. I think you were a little over a year old. You loved having all that grass to play in.”

  “And mom took me to the park a lot,” MacKenzie said, her voice questioning.

  “All the time.” It was true. April had been a better parent than I could ever hope to be, from the very beginning. When Mac was born, she just seemed to know what to do immediately, without a second thought. Me? I was terrified, holding that little girl. I didn't have a clue what to do with her, when it came to changing diapers or feeding her. Hell, I was convinced I was going to break her, just by cradling her in my arms.

  But she didn't break. She survived to be a tough little girl, full of sunshine and light.

  Until April died, and everything changed.

  I kept telling myself that Mac leaving for Puerto Rico wasn't a bad thing. It was a chance for her to be surrounded by people who loved her. It wasn't fair for Mac to have a father like me, one who was still paralyzed by grief, even now.

  I kept telling myself I was making the hard choice by letting her go back, at least for a little while. It was selfish to keep her here, with her murderer father, the one who couldn't make her feel better. I felt powerless, trying to snap her out of the depression. But this part, I had control over. I was making a sacrifice so she could thrive.

  I kept reminding myself of that. If I repeated it enough, maybe I would eventually believe it.

  I put my arm around MacKenzie’s shoulder, squeezed her tight against my side. “Your mother loved you so much. You were the light of her life.”

  “Do you think she watches us now, from Heaven?” MacKenzie pulled away from me, continued to swipe her finger across the screen, her attention on the photos.

  “Your mom is looking down on us every day,” I said. “And probably raising all kinds of hell up there.”

  “I wish she was here,” she s