It’s been five years since I killed my daughter. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the scraping of the metal hood on the pavement. I can still smell burned rubber and leaking gasoline. I can still hear her screaming for me to help her. Screaming for daddy to save her. But daddy wasn’t there. That’s the truth. I was gone. I was out of it before we even got into the car that day. Three-quarters of a handle of Jack Daniels and who knows how many beers.

I’d always been a good driver while drunk. I never thought it would be a problem. Christ, we were only going two miles up the road for ice cream, that was all. She begged me for over an hour to go and get her a blue raspberry slush. I knew it wasn’t the best idea, but I never could have imagined that would be the last car ride my little girl would ever take. All it took was one second. In one second, I looked away from the road. In that one second, I missed the stop sign. One second was all it took to steal a lifetime from my baby.

When I think about that day, I don’t think so much about the wreck. I don’t think about the ice cream. I don’t even think about losing her, if I can help it. It just hurts too much. What I do think about is the list. Her birthday wish list. She’d scribbled it in a notebook that morning with a hot pink gel pen. When she’d shown it to me that day, I couldn’t have known they would represent her final wishes. The last wishes she would ever have. I couldn’t have known that she would never make it to that next birthday.

The list resides on the very sheet of crumpled paper I am holding right now. Every year on her birthday, I look at it. Every single year. Only this year is a little different. I’m sober. Finally. I know what you’re thinking. Alcohol is the reason my daughter is dead. ‘How could he possibly keep drinking after that?’ You’re wrong. Alcohol didn’t kill my daughter. I did. I chose to drink the alcohol. I chose to get behind the wheel. I made the decision that a substance was more important than my child’s well-being. And guess what? I continued to make that choice for three and a half years after losing Charlotte.

The difference was that it wasn’t about getting drunk anymore. It wasn’t about forgetting my shitty job or the unpaid bills or the kind of father I should have been and wasn’t. From that day on, it was about dying. Killing myself, one day at a time. A bullet would have been too easy. Too quick. Painless. But to slowly poison myself beyond repair, that would be slow and agonizing. Along with my method, I would be forced to remember what I had done every single day until the last one.

Funny enough, that was what led me to stop. The idea that I was blunting that pain with the liquor. It wasn’t fair. She deserved my full attention. My full anguish. My deepest pain, and I couldn’t experience that if I was drinking. So I stopped, cold. Just under a year and a half ago. Now here I was, holding her birthday wish list in my hands. I read them, one at a time, as if for the first time. As I sat, leaned forward, on the edge of the couch, looking down at the list, tiny wet imprints began to appear as the tears dripped from my face.

Number one, see the ocean. Something she’d never had the chance to do. Two, give Abby the friendship bracelet she made. Her best friend in school. I hadn’t seen her since the funeral. Third, go to Shepherd’s Park with Mommy. Not just any park, but Shepherd’s Park. Her favorite place in the world. Four, get a puppy. And lastly…forgive daddy. That last one always stung and every year it hurt worse. What she’d meant was she wanted to forgive me for the drinking. Even at nine, she knew about my problem. She knew some of my behavior wasn’t acceptable, but she loved me anyway, and her final wish was to forgive me for my biggest flaw. The flaw that would end up killing her.

I folded the list and tossed it onto the coffee table before leaning back and placing my hands on top of my head so that I could breathe. I closed my eyes as tightly as I could, but it did nothing to stop the tears from rolling. When I was finally able to open them again, an idea set in. Charlotte would never have the chance to complete the list, but that didn’t mean the list had to go unfinished. I picked it up and unfolded it again, rereading through them. I realized that I could complete the list for her.

Would it make up for anything? Would it bring me some sort of peace, even though I didn’t deserve it? Would it give her closure in some way? I didn’t know, but the moment the idea came to me, it grabbed me by the throat and refused to release me. I have to do this. I have to. I thought about it for the rest of the night in place of sleep, and by dawn, I was on the road headed for the Pacific. It was an eleven-hour drive, but that didn’t matter. From the instant the thought occurred to me, it became my most important mission in life. The best way I could think of to honor her.

I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, and I didn’t rest. I stopped twice for gas before parking near a public beach and making my way to the water’s edge. I didn’t stop there either. I waded into the waves, my shoes, socks and clothing still on. I was well aware of the stares and glances, but it didn’t bother me. Not at all. What bothered me was that my little girl would never experience this. Would never have to put her hair in a ponytail because the breeze off the sea caused it to tornado around her head. She would never know the sensation of sand squishing between her toes as she splashed out into the water. She would never get to see the natural beauty that existed here.

I stopped once I got about waist deep and allowed my body to fall forward, plunging into the ocean. I wanted to die right then and there. Allow my life force to leave this carcass and just float into forever, but I couldn’t. I was not going to leave her list unfinished. I forced myself to stay under until the darkness began to creep in on the edges of my vision and when I emerged through the surface, I found that several pedestrians had already begun making their way over to make sure I was alright. I thanked them with a quick nod before trudging, soggily, back to my car where I dropped into the driver seat without so much as toweling off and headed back toward home.

Once I arrived, I ignored how sleep deprived I was. It had been almost a full forty-eight hours, but I stole an entire lifetime from Charlotte; I could bear to go a few days without the luxury of sleep. I immediately went to my safe and retrieved the friendship bracelet Charlotte had made for Abby. It was one of the things recovered from the crash, and I had been sure to keep it. I rolled it in my fingers as I tried to remember the day she made it, but it was useless. I was too gone that day and any memory I might have had was washed down with the booze.

I waited near her family’s house until the bus came rolling down her street. Once she appeared from the vehicle and it began to pull away, I stepped out of my car and walked toward her.

“Abby!” I shouted with the friendliest wave I could muster. “It’s Todd Foreman, Charlotte’s dad.”

She looked in my direction and then immediately looked away, her eyes instantly filling to the brim. She began to walk toward her house, clearly having no intention of speaking with me. I didn’t blame her. Not at all. The town was small, people talked. Everyone knew what had occurred before the news even broke at seven o’clock the night of the wreck.

“Abby, I know you don’t want to see me. I don’t blame you, not at all, but I have something for you.”

She continued walking away from me.

“Abby, please. Please! It’s something Charlotte made for you.”

She stopped and slowly turned to me. I had no words for her, so instead, I held out the bracelet. She reached out and accepted it, analyzing every centimeter. A moment later, her body began to convulse as the emotion tore out of her. One final gift from her best friend, the sister she never had. She looked up at me, wiping the wetness from her face. Pain wasn’t the only thing showing in her eyes. There was also hatred.

“How…h-how are you able to keep living? How h-have you not hung y-yourself? She didn’t deserve that. S-she deserved better. All you ever cared about was…all you ever cared about was drinking and she died because of it.”

I didn’t answer. Even if there was a good answer, I couldn’t find the words. Everything she’d said was true, but telling her that I’d considered ending it for myself hundreds of times wouldn’t make up for the fact that I was alive and Charlotte wasn’t. She nodded to herself as if silently saying she wasn’t surprised I didn’t have an answer. She held up the bracelet in front of my face.

“I loved her. She meant more to me than you will ever understand, so this…this means a lot. It means a lot that she did this for me. And I…I appreciate you bringing it to me. But that doesn’t make up for what you did. Nothing will ever make up for what you did. I don’t ever want to see your face again. Not ever. And I hope you burn in hell.”

She turned away without another word, walked inside, and slammed the door closed behind her.

“You and me both,” I said to myself.

I slowly returned to my car and forced myself to take some deep breaths before confirming what I already knew was next on the list. I hadn’t seen my ex-wife in four years. Hadn’t so much as heard from her in that time. We had a few mutual friends on social media, so I knew she had remarried, but had never had more kids. Charlotte was an only child, and my guess was that with all the pain that had come from her loss, Sarah would never go down that road again.

I intentionally drove under the speed limit, practicing what I would say when she opened the door. It was useless. There was nothing I could say to make things better. My only hope was that she would help me check number three off of Char’s birthday list. When I arrived, I sat in the car for a long time. I wasn’t sure I could face her. Wasn’t sure I would even be able to speak if I did find the courage to walk up to the house. Somehow, though, a few moments after having that realization, I found myself standing at the front door with my index finger on the doorbell.

The door was solid wood, so she wasn’t able to check who it was before opening it, but I could tell from the look on her face she wished she hadn’t. Her eyes rolled, her face flushed red, and she immediately went to close it before I slid my foot between it and the frame. She looked down at my shoe, then back up at me in utter disbelief.

“Move your foot, Todd.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“I couldn’t care less what you need. Move your foot now, or I am calling the police.”

“I need your help, Sarah,” I said, holding up the unfolded list.

She didn’t even look at it at first.

“I don’t know what this is, but you had one too many this time. Get off my—”

“Look at it!”

My outburst clearly startled her, but instead of going back inside as I expected, she did as I had demanded and looked at the paper. Her eyebrows squeezed together as she squinted to ensure she was seeing it correctly. Even so, she still had to verify.

“Is this—”

“It’s her birthday list. She made it a week before…before it happened.”

“You’ve had this all that time? And you never said a word?”

“What was I supposed to say, Sarah? Hmm? ‘Hey, how you holding up? Just so you know, I have a list of our daughter’s last wishes before she died’?”

She wiped a tear from her left eye before closing them both.

“What do you want, Todd? Why are you bringing this to me now?”

“I am checking them off.”

“What?”

“I am checking off the things on her list. I drove to the ocean yesterday, earlier today I dropped off the friendship bracelet she made to Abby Jones. I can’t do number three without you.”

She looked at the list again and then back to me, her expression almost one of amusement.

“You’re not serious.”

“I’ve never been more serious.”

“We haven’t seen each other in years, and after all this time…after what you did…you expect me to agree to go anywhere with you?”

“It’s not for me. You wish I had died instead of her, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out, and guess what? I wish that to. Every single day of my life I wish I had died that day and she’d survived. I can never fix this. I can never make it right. I know that and the only reason I am still breathing is because I refused to allow myself that escape. I am forcing myself to stay here and live with this until my natural dying breath. This list is her list. Her wishes. Please…please help me. Help me do what she’ll never be able to.”

She wanted to tell me to fuck off. She wanted to slam that door in my face and leave me and all the pain in the past. But she didn’t. Instead, she disappeared inside and reappeared with her purse slung over her shoulder.

“Let’s go.”

We drove in silence and we remained in silence once we got to the park. It was full of children, all of them happy, carefree, and loving life. It was all just a reminder of what Charlotte should have had. We stayed for about an hour. It was the longest hour of our lives and neither of us spoke a word during it. It was only once we returned to her new home that she talked.

“What is this, Todd? What are you doing? Is this some sort of redemption tour that you’re on? Part of your twelve steps?”

“No. No, I finished those a while back. I don’t know why, it just felt like something I had to do. Like my way of honoring her memory, even if it means I can’t ever make things right.”

“You can’t. You’ll never make this right. It can’t be fixed, she’s gone. She’s dead!”

I would have preferred if she had just stuck a butcher knife through the center of my chest. The words hurt far worse. She looked up quickly, as if just then realizing what she’d said, but there was no apology. She’d just said what she felt inside, and she was right in each word.

“I know that. I know she is. Thank you for helping me…I won’t bother you again.”

The fourth one was easy compared to the first three. I stopped at the humane society and asked to see their available puppies. There were seven of them, all different breeds and from different liters. Six of the seven stormed the gate, wanting to lick and jump on me. One stayed off by itself over in the corner. A female chocolate lab.

“Her,” I told the attendant.

Without a word, he scooped her up, carried her to the front and after a few minutes of paperwork, she was sitting on my lap with her nose out the open window as we drove home. Once I got her settled in, I was left with only one thing to do. Accept that the list would never be completed. I would never be able to check off the fifth item.

Forgive dad.

She would never be able to forgive me, even though she wanted to even back then. She couldn’t forgive me for the drinking, but what hurt more was that the drinking itself wasn’t the worst thing he would ultimately do. She would never forgive him for the drinking, and he would never forgive himself for taking her life. He stared at the list and then at the dog. Another life that was in his care. He got on the floor and rubbed her behind the ears.

“I’ll never let you down, Charlotte. Not ever.”

He laid down on the floor, curled up around her and the two of them drifted to sleep, her dreaming of him and him dreaming of a time before his daughter was lost. The same dream he had every night. And there, lying on the floor beside them, was the list. Her Final Wishes.