Stray

by Stephanie Danler

  Washington

  Unsurprisingly, my paternal uncle’s funeral in Washington State didn’t go well. That’s not true, I believe the funeral went well. I wasn’t there, but the reports came back: the ceremony was thoughtful, and his girlfriend, his AA community, his friends all spoke lovingly. There was a motorcycle procession. Half of his ashes were put into the Okanogan River, and his girlfriend would take the other half to Glacier National Park, where they’d planned on taking a trip on his Harley in the fall. My cousin said that Gloria, my paternal grandmother, was particularly hard-hit. That as she cleaned out her son’s rented home, she put on, and wore, his clothes in silence.

  It was my father being there that didn’t go so well. It was clear to those who saw him that weekend that he was using again. After the services, his three sisters decided to stage another intervention. It was then he told them he would go into seizures in the next twenty-four hours unless they got him new prescriptions. For daily maintenance, he was taking a double prescription of methadone, plus an average of fifteen Ambien a day. My cousin Lysandra, God bless her, wrote my sister and me a detailed recap of driving to different detox centers and hospitals. My father’s lies fell apart about what and how much he’d been using (in addition to the methadone and the Ambien, there were opioids). Then he stole a bottle of pills off the counter of a pharmacy when it looked like they wouldn’t give it to him. He grabbed the bottle and walked away and had to be stopped by security. She and my aunts—and I could hear how exhausted she was—ended up securing him a bed in a hospital and applying on his behalf to Washington State Medicaid. He would go into detox, then a treatment facility.

  My cousin: I’m sorry if this catches you off guard but I wanted to be sure you were aware and wanted to be fully transparent about the situation. I can continue to give you updates or if you’d rather not hear anything more I will absolutely respect your wishes.

  When I call Lysandra, she is still in a bit of shock. I remember that shock. The whole thing had taken on a nightmarish quality as my father’s sisters drove across Washington in the night. It took hours. Welcome to rural living, she says. I apologize for my father’s behavior.

  But I don’t want updates. I mean it. I don’t want to know about his seizures and detox, and I don’t want to know what medications he ends up on, the methadone obviously an example of a cure that begets another dependency and another cure ad infinitum.

  I don’t want the pay phone calls from the rehabilitation center, where my father will tell me how much better he’s feeling, listing the minutes of his workout and meditation routines, all the therapy, then the complaints about his knee, how x, y, z has necessitated some X-rays, some intervention, some surgery (one of his codes for using), how whatever sober living situation he was in got toxic (another code for using) and he’s had to leave, how he’s a natural leader in his halfway house, or that they’ve put him in charge of the volunteers at the shelter where he lives because he’s definitely the only one here with management experience.

  I don’t want to know what phase of sobriety he’s in, or what far-fetched job he’s applying for, and I don’t want him to email me saying he’s gotten an eight-year chip for sobriety from alcohol! Yay me! Because that one makes me laugh out loud.

  Do not call me twelve times, one after another, on Christmas, until I answer and listen to you incoherently crying, voice distorted with whatever-the-fuck is in your system. To the rest of you, don’t call and ask me to fly to Colorado to put him on welfare, or to stay with him for a week to transition him from the halfway house into the real world, or loan him some money after he’s stolen or borrowed tens of thousands from everyone else. Don’t ask me to listen to the repetitious monologue of optimism that thinly disguises the most profound hopelessness I’ve ever encountered in another person besides my mother. Don’t ask me to hold his hand while he kills himself.

  But my cousin doesn’t need to hear this. Any of it. So I decline to be involved, and she understands. I’m still holding this line in the sand that feels like the only thing that separates me from becoming him. Who, I find myself thinking as we talk about my uncle’s funeral, will end up at my father’s? Will I come to him then?

  I hang up with her and pace my house, feeling him out there and the web of his pain stuck to me, and I can’t shake it off. I’m deeply aware that this isn’t over yet. When I walk into a night with air like jagged glass, I still miss him. I do.

  I love him, I told my cousin at the end. If you see him, you can tell him that.

  Portland, Oregon

  In the spring of 2016, when my first novel is out, I give a reading at Powell’s in Portland. The reading is full (a mercy), and the front row is filled with friends, my aunt and cousin, artists I’ve met at residencies. I’ve spent the afternoon in the café in Powell’s, pawing books, the place a mecca I’ve wanted to visit for years. My name is on the marquee outside, posters of my book cover throughout the store. Not a second of it is lost on me.

  Ten minutes into my reading my father walks in. He’s oblivious to his tardiness. He walks down the center aisle, searching loudly for a seat, climbing over people and settling down directly in front of me. He’s waving and smiling. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in almost seven years, and the first contact I’ve had since I published an essay about his drug addiction in a national magazine.

  I don’t even so much as take an extra inhale while reading. I’m struck numb and I don’t remember the rest of the reading, what was asked, what was answered. As the booksellers lead me to a table for signing, one of them waves at my father. I’m confused. The bookseller says, Your dad is here.

  You know my dad? I ask.

  He comes in all the time talking about your book. He’s so proud of you.

  The other bookseller says, You’re named after him, right?

  I laugh. My father knows I would never make a scene. He knows I’m a ruthless performer of likability, chanting Everything is fine, everything is fine under my breath. The child in me is touched that my dad knows I wrote a book. I wonder if he read the essay, or my book, if he thinks I’m smart, how many days sobriety he’s telling people he has, and I wonder about the true number of days, where he lives, how he pays for things. I think how satisfying this must be for his ego, how he walks around Powell’s with a confidence I can’t even impersonate. Then I look up at the line of people holding my book and think, Wait, this isn’t about him.

  I’d had another surprise guest at my book launch a month earlier. It was in New York City. Carly and Al had flown out and brought Luca, who ran into the Strand the day my book was released and jumped up and down when he found it. He took the book up to strangers and asked if they knew about it. When I arrived at the Strand a few minutes later, the booksellers were calling Luca my “hype man.” He ran to me, hugged me, and said, Do you see? Do you see your book? I think this is what it actually means to be proud of someone. But Luca wasn’t the surprise.

  That night, with my hair blown out, lipstick applied, reading for far too long because it was my first time, voice quaking while answering questions, I looked out: there was Alex, only three weeks after her mother passed. She held hands with Carly, who sat next to my sister, who rested her head on Eli’s shoulder. I’m not making this up: I am humbled by this kind of love. Then I saw the Monster in the crowd, grinning. He winked at me, then disappeared. There you are, I thought, as if I had seen him yesterday. There was more contradictory feeling in that second than in entire months. I was ashamed: I felt a tense fist in my chest and it still felt like home.

  Never mind that seeing the Monster or my father might have upset me. Never mind that these celebratory professional milestones were achieved, not with their support but in spite of them. I’ve loved some very sad people in my life and hurt myself trying to get them to change. They didn’t, and I have no business being surprised by it. People will tell you who they are. It takes an emergency
for some of us to listen.

  Long Beach, California

  Another afternoon I’m sitting with my mother, watching the clock until my hour is up, guessing at traffic patterns, estimating that, with each passing second, I’ll sit on a freeway for two hours instead of the forty minutes it took me on the way down.

  I haven’t minded the traffic, I say out loud to her, for no reason. After so many years on the subway I’m elated to see the sky. To sing out loud to music, make phone calls. It’s all stalling to me, these months, this life, sitting on the freeway afraid to move forward or backward, hoping someone will save me, but knowing that no one is coming. You have to make a change, I used to say to the Monster. Now I say it to myself. Sometimes I’m commanding myself, other times I’m begging.

  My mother looks at me, the same empty look, the same eyes underneath that I think are the most beautiful eyes in the world.

  I don’t drive, she whispers. She shakes her head, scared of the thought of it.

  Nope, you don’t drive anymore.

  I ask her if we can take down a hatbox on top of the bookshelf, filled with photographs. When I pull it down, a skein of dust comes with it. Inside this hatbox are all the memories that remain of my childhood. I sit next to her on the couch and pass her photographs, silently at first, until she says, pulling the picture close, Cortina.

  It’s a photo of her and my father on skis in front of a mountain. They are small and blurry, but there’s my lanky father, and the tiny bird of my mother. The photo is from 1979, five years before I was born. She would have been nineteen and they would have just met.

  You skied the Alps? I ask.

  She nods, not thinking too hard about it. Your father was a great skier.

  You were a great skier too. She taught my sister and me up at Mammoth Mountain, a resort that crowns the Owens Valley. She took turns with each of us on the bunny slope, guiding us with her skis around ours. When I remember it now—what possessed a single mother to travel alone on a ski trip, with all the gear and baggage, the boots unclipped, re-clipped, and our endless complaints about the cold?—I see how her children gratified her. We climbed all over her, bringing back our discoveries and questions, and I can still hear the enthusiasm—before the coma changed her voice—Oh my goodness what did you find? When I remember it now, she levitated while she skied. A nonchalant fearlessness that she never demonstrated anywhere else in her life.

  Who taught you to ski? I ask, but she doesn’t remember. She points again to the photograph and says, Your father called Christina “Cortina.” We were very happy on that trip.

  My father did call my sister Cortina. He continues to. I never once connected it to Cortina, Italy, or thought he could be making a reference to a happiness that only he and Nancy would understand. I’m moved.

  We keep going through the photographs, but I don’t get anything else insightful or new. She points out her clothes: I made that by hand. Or My first Chanel purse. Each photo I pass to her I wonder if she can see, really see or connect to the sense of possibility she once had. I tell my sister I don’t know why I’m visiting her—I’m sure guilt is a massive part of it. The longer I’m here in California, the more I’m forced to be honest about how much I want from her. And how impossible it is. Today I realize why I keep returning to this distressing house: I want an answer.

  As she holds a baby photo of me, I ask, Mama, how am I like you?

  She looks alarmed, as if I’m slow. You look just like me.

  Anything else?

  She concentrates. She thinks I’m quizzing her, but I’m serious. Tell me what’s going to happen to me, I think.

  Her eyes land on her books. You love to read. Just like me.

  I nod. It’s enough.

  Before I go, I pocket the photo of her and my father in Cortina. I check her trash can and there are empty wine bottles, beer cans. She’s not even pretending. I check the fridge and there is a container of tuna salad.

  I always loved your tuna salad, I say.

  On Triscuits, she says. I’m glad she remembers.

  I am aching already, abnormal for me. Usually it’s days later, sometimes months, when I’m at dinner, or with friends, or listlessly walking the aisles at the grocery store that I find it unacceptable, inexcusable, all the life I’ve had the privilege of living that she never had. No solo travels in her thirties, no expendable income, no graduate school, no time for anything close to self-realization. She was so busy surviving, and then it was gone. Perhaps I am like what she could have been like. I take her hand and she allows it. She smiles at me.

  You’re so pretty. You ended up so pretty.

  I thank her and tell her it’s because she’s so pretty. I ask her if she wants to leave this house. Or leave Larry. Or change her life. She pulls her hand away from me. She shakes her head.

  I’m not going to leave this house again.

  I haven’t cried in front of her in sixteen years except when she was unconscious. And I can’t do it now, but hearing her say that breaks my heart. My hopelessness has passed beyond feeling to fact.

  That’s too bad, I say. I’m thinking, I have to let you go again. I can’t stay here with you. I’ll drown.

  She shrugs. Looks out the window and, I imagine, doesn’t miss the streets shrouded in a morning marine layer, or oil islands offshore, or the canals too much. It’s impossible to know if she’s thinking about what I said, but she might be because she has turned to me and says, sighing, This is just how things ended up for me.

  Los Angeles, California

  It turns out that quaint Seal Beach is one of the more polluted beaches on the Southern California coast. The beach catches runoff from the San Pedro Harbor, the Los Angeles River at its terminus, and freighter pollution from the port. Seal Beach is also where the San Gabriel River empties into the sea. Growing up, the kids all got staph infections if they swam after a rain. Couches, syringes, old appliances washed up like beached whales. Disgusting, I used to say to my new friends in Colorado, then Ohio, then New York City.

  But that wasn’t the truth, was it? Children who grow up close to the ocean know about freedom. When I started middle school, I was allowed to get to school on my own, which is when I got my Gravity longboard. I carried it around between classes or hid it in the bushes outside school. I skated up and down the numbered beach streets in a bikini, blessedly unaware of my body for the last time in my life. I climbed the sand berms the town built for winter storms and watched the sunset by myself, learned how to feel small and holy.

  When we were kids, we ignored the rivers. There’s nothing more sterile than a cement “flood control channel,” a thin stream of water trickling on, exhausted. But in the eighteenth century the Los Angeles River was an Edenic wonder, surrounded by floodplain forests and wetlands. It was called “the upside-down river” because it had no obvious head, appeared to be causa sui. The runoff from the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains ran down into the San Fernando Valley composed of porous rock. That rocky soil acted as a natural filter, sending water to an underground reservoir, which then reappeared as a spring in the valley. Spanish explorers noted the proliferation of wildflowers, grapes, roses on its banks. Most Native American villages in this area were built within a mile of the river.

  It used to rain here. Los Angeles was known for its deluges and subsequent floods, which wrecked subdivisions, revised the streets. A friend’s mother, now passed, grew up in Atwater Village during the 1930s and said in elementary school they went to view the engorged Los Angeles River (I believe this must have been during the flood of 1938, so ferocious it wiped out bridges) and there were dead bodies roaring past. This was shortly before the city decided to “build out” the river, so they could control the floods and continue housing development along its banks.

  During one such flood, in 1825, the river broke its banks, destroyed a pueblo, and cut a new channel di
rectly south. It used to empty in Playa Vista, now the end point of the Ballona Creek. Ever since that 1825 disaster, the Los Angeles River has flowed south, re-making the South Bay peninsula I come from.

  Today the river is a source of interest, investment, and debate in Los Angeles. The first time the Love Interest said he wanted to take me there, I thought, no thank you. But he’s been working on projects around the river since graduate school and has watched it change in thorny ways. With the virtuously intended creation of public space—channels of transportation like bike paths, remediating the soil at abandoned riverside industrial sites that could become parks—comes the wrecking ball of real estate interest. Condos will soon line the river. Already there are a few cafés for bikers. Urban planners are talking about the kind of growth for the LA riverfront that makes one fear for the existing communities. Yet they are also re-naturalizing the river. As we walk one afternoon, he nudges me down the cement incline and I hesitate.

  I don’t think we’re supposed to go down there.

  It’s just a river, he says.

  The rivers in LA aren’t rivers.

  In a stretch between Griffith Park and downtown Los Angeles, called the Glendale Narrows, there is already progress. The gradual recovery of a riparian habitat with arroyo willows and western sycamores, and of a freshwater marshland. There are proposals to change the water allocation, reconnect the river with the floodplains, so that water can be infiltrated back into the earth as opposed to running straight out to sea.

  People already kayak here, he says.

  Yeah fucking right, I say.

  We walk carefully through rocks and weeds, the river bottom soft beneath our feet. There are cottonwoods in front of me, water splitting instinctively around islands. It’s spring and the grasses are lime green. There are birds, not just pigeons, but herons, pelicans, ducks as well.