by Julie Clark
“Tell me the worst thing you ever did as a kid,” I say one morning.
He laughs. “What kind of a question is that?” he asks.
“Just tell me a great story,” I say. “I want to know what kind of a kid you were.”
My dad stirs his tea, thinking. “I once stole my dad’s car and took it all the way to Mexico with John Spencer.” He sets his spoon down and takes a drink. “When we got back, our fathers were waiting on the front porch.”
“What’d they do?”
“Took us into the garage and beat us with a belt.”
I wince. “Gina Ferrar and I did the same thing when Mom and Rose went to Florida for a cheerleading competition.”
“You’re kidding me,” he says, a grin spreading across his face.
“Nope. But Mom never found out.”
“Clever girl,” he says.
Clever girl. His words shoot straight to my center, glowing like warm embers.
Another time, we talk about his older brother, my uncle Paul, who died when my dad was six.
“My father was never the same after that. Nothing pleased him. I could never work hard enough or get good enough grades. Everything I did was a reminder of something Paul never got to do. After a while, I just stopped trying.” He looks at his hands, decades older than Paul’s would ever grow. “The thing is, no one ever thought it might have been hard on me. That I lost something important too.”
Another morning, we talk about Miles. “He’s an extraordinary child,” my father tells me. “You’re a terrific mother. Miles is kind and funny and smarter than any kid I’ve ever met. You’re doing an incredible job with him.”
Tears spring to my eyes, and I blink them away. What my father thinks of my parenting shouldn’t matter. But it does. I’m raising this amazing child all by myself, and it’s rare for anyone to stop and acknowledge it. Sure, my mother comments on how hard it is every now and then, or Rose will say she doesn’t know how I do it, but no one has ever spelled it out for me in quite this way. Leave it to my father to be the one who finally gives that to me.
“Thanks, Dad.”
The best conversations are when my father talks about things I have no memory of. “Do you remember when I took you and your sister to the circus?” he asks one day.
“You never took us anywhere,” I tell him.
“Not true.”
“You took us to a bar once,” I say, and he flinches, chuckling.
“Well, one time I took you girls to the circus. You wanted to see the elephants. The problem was, the clowns came out first, and you got so scared you hid beneath the bleachers and missed the entire thing.”
This makes me wonder what else happened, what other things my father did right that have been shoved aside and lost forever.
Sometimes I think of how he might describe what we’re doing right now, in the coffee shop. Remember how we’d meet every morning in the coffee shop to talk? It was our secret, he would say. Just the two of us I remember, I was dying of cancer at the time.
The more time I spend with my father, the more I can see how sick he is. We don’t talk about it though. We only tell stories about ourselves, laying them like stones on a pathway so we can find our way back to each other again. And I feel lighter. When you spend your life carrying anger around like a backpack, an extraordinary thing happens when you finally set it down. The world becomes brighter and easier. It was scary to take the risk, but in doing so I’ve reclaimed some of that bravery Rose swears I used to have. And maybe, with enough time, I’ll learn how to use it again.
—
But one morning, about three weeks after our first conversation, he doesn’t show up. I wait, drinking tea and flipping through my files, which are nothing more than props at this point. I check my phone and realize with a lurch I’ve turned it off. “Shit,” I whisper, hoping I haven’t missed a call from Bruno or Miles’s school.
When it turns on, I see I’ve missed a string of texts and several calls from Rose. But there’s only one voice mail from an hour ago.
It’s Dad. You need to come.
—
The drive to my mom’s is a blur, and I somehow manage not to get pulled over. Despite his absence throughout my life, my father has been a constant shadow, a visible lack of light. And it wasn’t until recently, when I finally gave him space in my life, that I realized how much I still need from him. I want more of his steady, calm demeanor, an antidote to my own manic anxiety and overthinking. You keep coming back. That sentence has somehow come to define him. To define us. I fight the thought that it might be too late, that I might have unknowingly already said my last goodbye.
When I get there, Henry opens the door, and I fall into his hug. “They’re in your mom’s room,” he says, gently nudging me down the hall. I find her and Rose huddled together on a chair, my father asleep in her bed, and an enormous, tattooed man in scrubs taking his blood pressure. My mother looks exhausted, and guilt scorches through me for not supporting her as I should have. Rose holds her hand and leans her head on my mother’s shoulder. I hesitate in the doorway, unsure whether I belong here. As far as they know, I’ve had nothing to do with my father since his return. We both protected our time together, like an artifact, afraid too much attention might shatter it.
But when my mother sees me, she cries out, holding her arms open, forgiving as always of my hard heart. I sink into them, letting her comfort me. I begin to cry, softly at first, but harder as she holds me, murmuring that she loves me.
I pull myself together and ask, “How is he?”
My mother takes a tissue from her sleeve and wipes her eyes. “He’s in and out of consciousness. Oscar thinks he has hours, at most.”
At the mention of his name, the man turns toward me and offers a kind smile. “It’s good you’re here,” he says. “Even though he’s asleep, he can still hear your voice. It’s important to say goodbye to him. It will help him transition better.”
“What happened?” I want to say he seemed fine yesterday, that he was still able to get around, still able to talk. I thought he had at least another month. But I don’t say anything. I want to hoard for myself all the small things we discussed, his stories, his expressions. They belong to me.
“When he woke up this morning, he was incoherent,” Rose says. “He was growing bloated and jaundiced, and we knew his liver wasn’t working anymore. But the confusion, the inability to stand and talk . . .” She reaches out and takes my mom’s hand.
Hepatic encephalopathy. It’s irreversible. I’ve wasted so much time and given him so little, even after I let him in. But then anger surges through me. However much time I wasted, he wasted more. Decades. His advice now seems self-serving.
You keep coming back. I want to add, When it suits you.
“Can I have a minute alone with him?” I ask.
This request sends my mother into a fresh round of tears. “Of course, honey,” she says, her voice strained and thick. “We’ll be right outside.” Rose squeezes my hand as they walk out.
I stand over my father, unsure of what to do. I look over at Oscar, who’s wrapping the cord around the blood pressure machine. He looks at me with gentle eyes that have probably watched this scene play out a hundred times. “Just talk to him,” he says. “He’ll hear you. I promise.”
I nod, and Oscar leaves, closing the door softly behind him.
My father sleeps, emaciated and small, though his stomach looks as if he’s six months pregnant. Whatever anger I felt toward him a moment ago fled as quickly as it came. There’s still so much I need him to tell me. He figured out a way to come back. I need him to tell me how to do that with Jackie and Liam.
I whisper, “Dad?”
He doesn’t respond. I can barely detect the rise and fall of his chest.
I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around the fact that this will be my last conversation with him, that I will no longer be waiting for the next time he rolls into town. He will leave, and this time he
won’t come back.
“Dad?” I say again. When I don’t get a response, I sit on the edge of the bed and take his hand. My tears come fast and hot, and I lean down, pressing my ear against his chest. His heart beats a steady rhythm, and it comforts me. He’s not gone yet. If his heart still beats, he can still hear me.
“I’m glad you came back,” I say.
His hand tightens against mine, and I sit up again, squeezing back. Rose’s words float back to me. This isn’t about forgiving Dad . . . It’s about not hating him when he dies.
And I realize I do forgive him. He’s a different person. I saw it with Miles. I experienced it myself. It’s just too bad that it happened so late, that we lost so much time. I think back to the man he was just three short months ago, walking into Rose’s kitchen and saying Hello, Peanut. My naivety is like a kick in the gut.
“I forgive you,” I whisper.
His eyes open to slits. I consider calling my mom and Rose back into the room. But I don’t know how long this moment of clarity will last, and I don’t want to miss it.
He struggles to find words, and when he does, they come out slurred, as if he’s drunk. “I need you to understand something,” he says.
“Shh,” I tell him. “Don’t talk.”
He shakes his head. “No,” he rasps. I worry he’ll wear himself out and lean closer so he doesn’t have to speak louder than a whisper. I smooth what’s left of his hair across his forehead, and those familiar blue eyes linger on mine. “I went looking for you.”
I wonder if the painkillers are making him confused. “What?”
“In the coffee shop,” he whispers. “I knew you’d be there.” He coughs, and I wait. When he catches his breath, he says, “I knew you were never going to find your way back to me, so I had to find my way back to you.” He closes his eyes and smiles. “I wasn’t sure it was going to happen,” he tells me. “But you were worth the wait.”
He closes his eyes, and soon he’s asleep again. I sit there, tears streaming down my cheeks, and hold tight to his hand, savoring the warmth and willing the blood to keep pumping, the heart to keep beating. I’m not ready to let him go. But as always, I don’t get a say.
When it’s clear he’s gone deeper into sleep, I whisper, “Goodbye, Daddy. I love you.”
I leave him, seeking the comfort of my mother and sister, who wait for me in the living room. Forty-five minutes later, my father’s gone.
MEMORY
* * *
There are about seventeen genes that are crucial to laying down memories. When you learn something, a gene in your brain is activated, and your synapses create a memory.
Most people assume memories build up over the course of a lifetime and then disappear with death. I think of all the memories my father never got to share with me. What were his school years like? Who was his first love, his first heartbreak? New research is showing that some memories can pass through generations. Certain experiences can embed themselves in our genes, causing a methylation, a change in our genetic makeup, which then gets passed on to offspring. This accounts for why some people have phobias or stress disorders without a specific trigger.
When we learn something, it becomes a memory that we can access to inform future decisions and behaviors. Repeated enough, that learning becomes instinct—the accumulation of memories passed down through the generations. Instinct is the dog biting a child who tries to take its food. It’s the zip of adrenaline when someone follows us down a dark alley. It’s the monarch butterfly, traveling tens of thousands of miles with nothing to guide it but a whispered memory embedded in its genes.
* * *
Chapter Thirty-One
After Dad died, Mom didn’t want to be alone in her house, so we all reassembled at Henry and Rose’s, where we talked about Dad late into the night. I stayed quiet and listened to their stories about outings with the kids, funny things he said, or habits he had that I never knew about. I expected to feel a sharp pain at all I missed, but I just felt numb. I kept the last few weeks we spent together to myself, unwilling to share, ashamed of how few memories I had.
Now I sit in my pajamas, nursing a cup of coffee while the rest of the house sleeps, thinking of my father’s last words: You were worth the wait. In the end, he didn’t abandon me. He showed up, one last time, and rewrote the story.
And now it’s my turn to rewrite mine. Voices echo in my head—the voices of people who love me, trying to tell me what I refused to believe—that if I take a risk on them, they’ll be there for me. There’s Bruno, telling me if I continue to treat Liam as an acquaintance, that’s all he’ll be. And Rose, who tried to tell me that the resolution I fought so hard to give Miles was actually the one I needed for myself. My mother, who told me I was afraid to see my father had changed, because then I’d have to do something about it. Jackie showed me I was lovable, and my father showed me I was worth it. And then there was Liam, who tried to make me see how hard I worked to keep him out of my life, while he worked so hard to stay in it.
Fear. It’s exhausting.
With no clear plan of what I’ll say, I reach for my phone and dial Liam’s number. When he answers with his familiar Hey, my heart melts. Hey. What he used to say in the morning, after nights Miles slept at Rose’s. Liam, on the pillow next to me, hair messy, eyes half-closed, and smiling. Hey. What he used to say when I’d open the door and find him leaning against the frame, head tilted and that smile he reserved just for me. Hey.
I fall apart, deep sobs stealing my voice.
“Paige?” he asks, panicked. “What’s wrong? Are you okay? Is it Miles?”
“We’re okay,” I manage to say. “My dad died last night.”
He sighs. “I’m so sorry,” he says.
The silence stretches between us, thin and tenuous. I think about how my father sought me out, putting himself in my path so I couldn’t avoid or ignore him.
“Will there be a service?” Liam asks.
“He didn’t want one.” I fight the instinct to gloss over the pain and appear strong. “I miss you,” I blurt out.
There’s a long pause before Liam says, “I miss you too.”
I push forward, equal parts terrified and exhilarated, as if I were stepping onto a high wire, with nothing below me except sharp rocks. And maybe sharks. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, but do you think we could start spending time together again?”
He hesitates, and I cringe, realizing that yet again, I’m holding myself back and not asking for what I want. But I also know I can’t do this over the phone. I need to be able to see his face, to look in his eyes when I ask him to come back.
I hurry to clarify before he can say no. “I just . . . would love to see you. Not in passing, not as part of a larger gathering, but just the two of us.”
“I’d like that,” he finally says, and I release the breath I’d been holding. “Call me when things settle down.”
It’s a start.
—
“Paige, right? Miles’s mom?”
I turn away from the barista who just took my coffee order, to the woman in line behind me. She’s petite with short blond hair pulled into a tight ponytail. She looks vaguely familiar.
“Isabella,” she says. “Trevor’s mom from karate.”
I smile and step out of the crowd of people until my order is ready. “Right,” I say.
“Decaf, black,” she says to the barista and then she joins me. “Does you son go to school around here?”
“He’s at Elmwood. How about Trevor?”
She accepts her coffee from the barista with a smile. “He’s at Saint Anthony’s.”
I reach across the counter for my drink, and Isabella says, “Have time to sit? I’m trying to make more time for myself these days. It’s always go-go-go. But it won’t kill me to take a few minutes, sit down, and enjoy my coffee before I get back to it.” She pulls out a chair and gestures to the one across the table. “Please.”
Since Jackie left and my dad die
d, I’ve slipped into ten-hour days, as comfortable as an old shoe, trying not to think about how much I miss Jackie’s texts and calls, or the black cloud of my father’s absence that hovers over me. I haven’t had the nerve to call Liam again, afraid to seem too eager too soon. But if Jackie taught me one thing, it was to get out of my head. To be more of a human and less of a machine. “Sure,” I say. Maybe I can make a new friend. Find someone to fill the hole that Jackie’s left.
I sit across from her and take a sip of my coffee, suddenly feeling awkward. Was this what it was like at first with Jackie? Me fumbling around for something to talk about? I flash back to the school picnic, to how nervous I was, and think, Yes. That’s exactly what it was like.
Isabella smiles, and I smile back, fighting the urge to check my watch and make my exit. I need to do this.
“So Trevor just loves Miles,” she says.
I’m trying to think of a time when Miles has given Trevor anything more than a cursory glance, but I can’t. “Same,” I say, wishing I’d ordered a smaller coffee so I could finish it and be gone.
“Trev’s taking karate to help with his anxiety,” Isabella says, dumping a packet of sugar into her coffee and stirring it. “His therapist recommended it. Though his father thinks that’s all in my imagination, but you know how it is. Your baby! You want them to be happy. Is Miles your only one?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Then you know how it is! You only have one chance to get it right. Actually, I’ve got a meeting with Trev’s teacher, about some incident.” She looks incredulous. “They say he clogged a toilet yesterday when he was supposed to be in class. But I’m sorry, I feel like there has to be more to the story, you know? Like who was with him? Who gave him the idea? I can’t imagine Trevor woke up yesterday and thought, You know, I think today I’m going to vandalize the bathroom. It’s ridiculous.”
I nod and try to imagine Jackie at the table with me. The way she’d probably press her knee up against mine, the way she’d roll her eyes at Isabella’s obvious blind spot about Trevor, who is most certainly playing her for a fool. And all of a sudden, I feel the loss again, fresh and burning, and I need to get away.