Stray

by Stephanie Danler

  Ducks! I yell.

  Ahead are a group of four Chinese men in lawn chairs, feet in the water, fishing. Why do we continue to love this fading world? It looks—for one moment before I dissuade myself—like a real river. An entire river changed course. I’m myopic sometimes.

  Los Angeles, California

  Three years after my first winter back in LA, in 2018, I woke up at 5:30 a.m. to my blanched gray bedroom in Echo Park and said, I don’t feel well.

  Matt said strangely, You dreamed you were pregnant. I couldn’t tell if he was asleep. Had I dreamed that? Had I said that out loud? He said again, You’re pregnant. The drugstore opened at 7:00 a.m. We stood outside at 6:55, waiting for them to unlock the doors.

  I peed on a stick, saw two blue lines, and I was pregnant. A formula with the unfriendly bluntness of a math equation. I dislike math, and anything you can’t get out of. I stared at the pregnancy test. Disbelief hedged in my mouth. How? Isn’t this what we wanted and planned for? Didn’t I do all the acupuncture, take the vitamins, do the hard bargaining and wishing? I had been told it wouldn’t happen like this for me—quickly, or easily.

  An hour later, the initial shock fading, I felt a loss. It came in the form of, I can’t kill myself. It wasn’t a longing for death in that moment, but a longing for a longing, which is equal parts nostalgia and grief. Those interminable drives, fogged with depression or mania, where my breathing matched the mantra, I can die, I can die. An assurance passed down to me from my mother, who believed in verbalizing her desire for death even when I was a child. Upon losing the ability to fantasize about dying, I saw for the first time that there had been something tender in my attachment to it—it was something that was ours. I understood that when she said it, she’d meant only kindness.

  It was gone. No exit on my own terms. None of my elaborate escapes. Behind me were a mess of plane tickets and sublets, affairs that ejected me from relationships, the severing of communication with people who hurt me, namely my parents. Ahead of me, a child. I would just have to take it all, whatever the gods saw fit to give me. I am thirty-four years old and, for the first time, bound to my life.

  * * *

  It was not obvious there would be a baby. I had been pregnant, accidentally and unfortunately, three times before: an ectopic pregnancy that landed me in the hospital for a week and took my fallopian tube with it, a miscarriage, and a termination. I had never wanted children—not when I was a teenager, nor when I was married. I wanted to write, travel, and have enough money that I could pull out cash from an ATM without checking my account balance, simple goals that a baby would complicate. And in my younger, flippant tone, I would say I had no interest in passing down the damage I inherited to the next innocent victim.

  I slept with my mother, in her bed, most nights until I was ten. One morning, I would have been five or six, I held her face and told her how much I loved her. I did, it was as natural as breathing. She looked at me and said, You won’t always. I didn’t believe her. She said that someday I would tell her that I hated her. That was how it always went between children and their parents. I could not comprehend it. I remember crying at the time, asking her to tell me it wasn’t true. I would have forgotten it if not for the day, nearly a decade later, I first told her I hated her. She smirked at me—and this feels unforgivable when I remember it—and said, I told you.

  When I said I didn’t want children, what I understood, far ahead of time, was that to love a child is to guarantee suffering. There was no way to protect yourself, or them.

  And yet all the excuses I gave my partners in defense of childlessness came to pass: I wrote a book. I traveled. I wasn’t working in restaurants. I learned to take care of myself: I stopped losing my jewelry, wallets, cell phones. I had health insurance (most of the time), paid my taxes on time (most of the time).

  With age came not self-knowledge but the ability to give myself things, to actualize ideas, to create. That is the power of adulthood I didn’t imagine, and it’s a hard-earned privilege. It wasn’t a biological clock as much as some measure of emotional maturity that let me know that I could—if I wanted—take care of a child. That he or she would never—if I could help it—feel unsafe the way I did.

  I realized that the reason I didn’t want to have kids wasn’t that I was selfish as I always assumed. It was the same reason my mother tried to distance herself from my obliterating love for her, the same reason she prophesied pain for us: fear. I was scared.

  The Love Interest became Matt: slowly, with some stumbling. We accumulated tiny building blocks of trust until the two of us together became the thing in my life I wanted to protect. Was the baby simply a matter of finding the right partner? Yes and no.

  At ten weeks I lay on my back in a dark room and waited for my old Irish doctor to come in and tell me whether this was real. I had been quiet on the drive, tearing into my cuticles in the waiting room. Probably ectopic, I thought. Or no heartbeat. Or just nothing where there should be something. Let’s get this over with. These are the kinds of things in my wheelhouse. Deep disbelief that I could deserve something that was simply…good.

  There was a whitish whisper on the screen as the doctor moved the ultrasound wand over my lubed-up stomach. He held the wand still and I looked at Matt because I was scared to see that something was wrong. Matt’s face was wet-eyed, open-mouthed delight. I turned to the screen and then asked, Is it in the right spot?

  The doctor said, Yes, it’s viable. Then looking at my face, said more warmly, It’s in the perfect spot.

  I saw the baby move and I cried out. It was real, and I held it inside me. Its heartbeat ran concurrent with mine, they mingled, merged. I struggled not to embarrass myself in front of the doctor.

  So this is joy, I thought. I—truly—had no idea.

  When I looked back at Matt, there was a pang in me, sharp, which I can only call envy, that our child got him as a father. There are fathers who lie, disappear, and abandon. Our child will never know anything about that. I have made so many mistakes. But not this. This part I did right.

  We don’t receive the things we want because we deserve them. Most of the time we get them because we are blind and lucky. It’s in the act of having, the daily tending, that we have an opportunity to become deserving. It’s not a place to be reached. It is a constant betwixt and between. It’s in that hollow, liminal space that I think—hope?—humility can be achieved.

  Los Angeles, California

  Writing is as close as I’ll come to resurrecting my grandmother, my mother, my former selves. I can send myself back to the night of my thirty-second birthday, to the woman driving on Sunset Boulevard, back to that original list of things I thought I knew but did not know. It’s an anomalous place, Los Angeles, fragrant with exhaust, dust, faint chlorine. They almost changed the name of the city back in the 1880s because it sounded too Spanish. It’s a name that invokes the heavens, those who ascend and those who fall. Historically, this city doesn’t have a shred of self-protection when up against a short-term interest.

  Another time in my life I would have pressed into the curves on Sunset, sped up on the turns up in the Palisades, where Sunset is still wooded with eucalyptus and the occasional redwood. It’s there you can feel the history of this boulevard that started at Union Station downtown and traced the base of the Santa Monica Mountains all the way to the sea. I would have refused to slow down where the traffic got heavier in Brentwood. I would have switched lanes without signaling, weaving through the other cars piloted by people who drive by riding the brakes.

  I think I was once proud of this kind of driving. Proud that I could not imagine my life past thirty, that I still can’t imagine my life past forty. I have no example of how to preserve my skin, my wealth, my friendships, my lovers, or myself. And while this darkness chases me, spurs me to drive faster, tilts me toward anything that will hurt me, wants me to shut my eyes and say I give up
—I find I have made it back to the falling-down cottage that is my own empty house.

  It has been so long since I heard from my parents on birthdays. That’s fine, I’m not a kid anymore. But I think about my mother, asleep down in Long Beach, her forgetful breathing, and maybe she can barely detect that this day is an anniversary of something she once held so dear. And I think of my father, far from his beloved Colorado, at the foot of another set of mountains, walking during twilight, his legs restless, and maybe he too, feels this winter day is more tender than most. They don’t think of me, but maybe, unbidden, they think of each other. It is, after all, the day they became parents.

  Here I am, a thirty-two-year-old woman, ambulating between the fatalistic tenet that nothing I do matters, and that—perhaps, terrifyingly—everything I do does.

  What if I could be kind to myself? Turn this one corner? What else, I wonder, is possible for me?

  I regret telling my sister that we’re alone. That’s a lie and it keeps me from wanting too much from other people. On this night, I’m surprised by my desire to cut out my cynicism and pride. My coping mechanisms—the denial, compartmentalization, dissociation, the cringing hope—are tired. I’m flattened by the urge to call Christina and tell her something I’ve been ashamed to say for my entire life: It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.

  I would love to tell her something inspiring and prescriptive, but I lack the wisdom. I can tell this story: I have to believe it’s possible to be a victim and not live a victimized life.

  It’s not because I’m clever that I’ve avoided addiction, or shakily scaffolded a life that may hold me for a while. It’s because I love these people, whose texts roll in all night. The love is risky, it opens me at an unhealing wound. If Carly is right and our souls come back to this earth after we pass, and we choose how, when, and why, I would choose this—with my parents, lovers, and friends—again and again.

  That is one reason I will not end up like my parents. And yet I live the way every recovering addict in the world does: one day at a time.

  You have to make a change, I say out loud to the canyon, the crickets, the traffic, the smog, the coyotes, and that stray cat I haven’t seen in a week. Thank you, I say to the car.

  I think I’m learning how to be careful with things. By careful I don’t mean caution. I mean it literally, taken as its suffix and root. I am learning how to be full of care.

  Afterword

  Once a month, when we’re living in Los Angeles, I take Matt and my son, Julian, down to Long Beach, and we visit my mother. Until I call to remind her we’re coming, she doesn’t seem to remember she has a grandchild. She does not call me or ask for photos of him. She doesn’t even ask for these visits. She watches the baby with fear and curiosity. She’s never sure how old he is and is not able to hold him, but when he’s there, she doesn’t take her eyes off him. These visits are heavy for me. Her condition since 2015 has not improved. She continues to drink. She has not left her house. But we go because it’s obvious that seeing Julian brings her joy. She wants him to call her Nonna, and we will make sure that he does.

  My father came to meet his grandson right after Julian was born. It was the first deliberate visit between us in a decade. What either of us is capable of remains a work in progress.

  I do this because I don’t believe my son has to inherit my feelings about his grandparents. This story will keep changing as life has its way with all of us. We are still taking each day as it comes. And gently.

  Los Angeles, California, 2019

  Acknowledgments

  When I first published writing about my father’s addiction, the response from readers was powerful and at times overwhelming. Thank you for sharing your stories. This helped me believe I could write a book, even without having answers.

  I’m deeply indebted to the people who make, read, and love books. Thank you to the booksellers and independent bookstores.

  This book took massive reserves of guidance and trust. I am blessed with brilliant, generous readers, and the wisest counsel. Thank you:

  To Mel Flashman.

  To Peter Gethers.

  To Claudia Herr.

  To Robin Desser and Sonny Mehta.

  To Paul Bogaards, Emily Reardon, Janet Hansen, and the team at Knopf.

  To Angelina Venezia and the team at Vintage.

  To Jordan Rodman.

  To the team at Janklow & Nesbit.

  To Adam Ross.

  To the editorial staff of The Sewanee Review.

  To Lauren Mechling.

  For the gift of time and space, thank you:

  To Antoine Flochel, Alexander Maksik, and the Can Cab Residency.

  To Heather Lazare, Chelsea Lindman, and the NorCal Writer’s Retreat.

  To the readers, artists, and friends who were instrumental to this book, who have made me a better thinker and human, thank you:

  In particular to Stuart Zicherman.

  To Sarah Esberg.

  To Ester Bailey, Ari Basile, Lucia Baskaran, Michelle Campbell, Denise Campono, Joshua Close, Francine Conely, Megan Conway, Mani Dawes, Cindy de Castro, Patricia Escalona, Melissa Febos, Linda Grey Heitz, Elise Hennigan, Dave Peterson, Ella Purnell, Lilli Sherman, and Matthew Strauss.

  To my Sweetbitter writers’ room family, superb teachers each and every one, thank you.

  To my Wild family, for giving me safe harbor, thank you:

  To Leslie, Mel, Crystal, Kevin Milne, Nali Milne, Indie Milne, Debbie and Sandy Schner.

  For the wisdom and unconditional love that permeates this book, thank you:

  To my Mannatt aunts and cousins: Marie Mannatt, Kathleen Sapp, Wendy Goldmark, Methea Sapp, Lysandra Donigian, Soren Jensen, James Jensen, August Jensen, Sophia Jensen, all their partners, and the next generation of cousins.

  To my aunt and my uncle.

  To Eli Bailey.

  To Carly de Castro.

  To Alejandro de Castro.

  To Luca, Francesca, and Emilia de Castro.

  To Alex McKenna LeClair Grey Heitz Close.

  To my grandfather, James Vercelli Ferrero, Jr., and my grandmother, Margaret Barton Ferrero.

  And finally, thank you:

  To my father, for the mountains.

  To my mother, for Disneyland.

  To my sister, Christina Mannatt Strauss. I would do it all again, as long as I’m with you.

  To Matthew Wild, the best thing to ever happen to me.

  To Julian Wild, thank you for choosing me.

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