The ball bounces down the stairs, following him. But our son, the one who always has to win, already lies in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the last stair. His arm is bent back behind him, his lips in a pout.

This wouldn't have happened if I had watched him for a little bit longer today before turning back to the magazine in front of me. I would still be able to cradle my son at night if I just would have watched him for another second, paying close attention to the way that the light made prisms out of the individual strands of his hair.

I should have been a great father, but I just sifted the responsibility through my fingers. I would be there at soccer games but I wouldn't be around when he needed help with homework. I would drop him off at school and forget to pick him up later on. I would promise to teach him how to play football, basketball, baseball, and then deny I had ever promised. I only wanted those shining moments of fatherhood - carrying him high on my shoulders, him running into my arms - and not the moments that made me well deserving of those moments.

I never wanted to be a father. One moment we were living it up, traveling to foreign cities and staying in dumps because we liked the lifestyle but didn't have the money for it, and the next, she comes to me with tears streaking down her face, a hand on her flat stomach. I kept telling her I couldn't be in the picture, but she knew that I had a good job, that I didn't have another place to go, and she stroked my back night after night just as she did her stomach. Night after night I fell asleep with dreams of fatherhood.

The first few months I slept in cold sweats. I would wake up parched. I'd wake up and just stare at the ceiling for hours. She would wake up next to me, ask what was wrong. I'd just tell her, "Nothing, go to sleep." But in those wakeful hours, I would think of what I would do. I'd teach him how to speak two languages. I'd teach him to swim. He would like to paint. Then I'd start worrying about tiny stuff, and I'd start sweating all over again. How am I going to afford a baby? Is he going to be easy to change, bottle feed? Will he cry all night? And I would lapse back into another dream, this one full of babies that would cry and cry and cry, and nothing I did would help.

He wasn't like that. You would think that would mean I was even better prepared, even more excited and ecstatic to be a father, but it actually meant the opposite. He didn't cry for me when I left a room, so I didn't stay as long. He didn't fuss when he was hungry, so I didn't even think that he might be. He was a quiet baby, a quiet child. The only thing loud about him was his competitiveness, but even that only held my attention for a few minutes.

Looking through his things, I found out that he liked to paint. He was trying to master trees. He liked science at school. He did spelling bees and he read the most books and he won titles in sports, but I never noticed it. All I saw was a thumbs up on the field. I never saw him gritting his teeth in his room, tracing and retracing the leaves of the tree. I never saw his tears as he pushed his books away. She said that he felt he couldn't live up to my standards - when really, I couldn't live up to his.

You were a bastard of a father, my fourth drink of gin tells me. You killed your son.

And I know I did. I know it when I look at his preserved room, because that's when I see pictures of him and his mother at the zoo, on the trolley, holding cones of ice cream. But where's daddy? Oh, honey, he's out playing poker. He's drunk and asleep on the couch. Why doesn't he ever play with me? Oh, honey, don't you know he never wanted you?

I went to talk to her. She opened the door, a tissue crumpled in her hand. I tried to say a few words, but all I could manage was a weak smile. She shut the door in my face and pulled the curtains closed. Not all parents deal with the loss of a child well. She did. I see her now, selling her drawings. Most are dark, like her teardrops fell onto the canvas and she just put a price on it. But some tell of promise, of hope, of love. And they are all trees, their leaves reaching to and past the canvas, reaching to you.

I didn't deal with it well. But that's because I was never good at any of it. I would dress him too roughly. I would yell at him when he couldn't understand his homework. She was a good parent. She was the center of everything.

It's been a year now. I still think of him. Invincible. Indestructible. Forever intact in my memory. My little golden boy at the top of the stairs, saying, "Watch me slide down the rail faster than this ball can bounce, Daddy", a indomitable smile on his face.