I have a sudden memory of when I was a little boy in a sixties summer of Nantucket, and the carnival came to town, all the equipment offloaded from the ferry in tractor-trailers and pieced together into rickety, momentary magic. I can feel a ten-dollar bill slipped into my hand by my father as we ride in a green jeep to the field behind the high school where he drops off my sister and me and says he will be back in two hours. The freedom is the most I have ever felt in my life to that point, the barkers barking their preprogrammed deliveries. We follow the same ritual the next night, only my father goes with us. He spends a good hour trying to knock down all the bowling pins to win a stuffed animal. Then we ride the Ferris wheel together until it gets stuck, and he clutches me around the shoulder as he so often did.
I remember riding my bike to the field the very next morning to find everything packed up and gone, already on the ferry to what seemed like some distant port, Hyannis maybe or New Bedford or Fall River. I remember the ache in my heart staring at that empty field, wondering to myself why it all had to disappear so quickly, not just the rides but also my father. Perhaps all sons feel that way about their fathers, and all fathers feel that way about their sons.
Gerry and Zach walk side by side and wait in line for the Sea Dragon. I stand near the mesh container of cheap basketballs and wave to them. Gerry whispers something into Zach’s ear, and they both laugh.
I watch as they take their places on the yellow plastic seats, and Gerry protectively pulls the safety bar over them. Gerry is wearing a red T-shirt and Zach a blue one. Gerry is unshaven with a small but knowing smile across his lips. Zach is shaven—it is always important to look good at amusement parks—and steely-eyed as he braces himself for liftoff. The Sea Dragon begins to rock back and forth, slowly at first, then faster and faster and higher and higher. I shade my eyes against the hazy sun. The Sea Dragon is at its peak now, then swinging down with speed and thrust. I hear screams and yells. I cannot find the boys, lost in the blur of the downward force. But then I see them. Zach’s arm is extended and clutching Gerry’s hand. His eyes are welded shut, but he is alive with laughter as the Sea Dragon plunges. Gerry is laughing even harder, his mouth a sweetened oval.
There are my twins, born so beaten and bloody on a sweltering Saturday afternoon a quarter century ago, now merged into one. Three minutes does define a life, but never in the way I had always imagined. So many times I never thought I would get there. But we are a family, all different, sometimes divided, sometimes in pain, but unconquerable.
Father’s Day.
19. Reality Bites
ZACH AND I DRIVE to LAX two days later on Monday morning. We land in Philadelphia about 8:00 P.M. He is staying at my house tonight so I can drive him to work in the morning. On the way, he calls his mom, who has already scheduled at least a dozen social activities for him over the next month. She starts listing them over the phone. She is loading up his life, making sure he is never idle. His mom and I could never have stayed married, but I sometimes wonder what life would be like if we had, and I could have been with the boys without the stop-and-start.
On Tuesday I take Zach to the law firm. He is in the passenger seat, just as he was for the last two weeks. But it isn’t the same without the minivan, the shaking of the steering wheel at anything over sixty miles an hour, the spilling of hot coffee from the cup holders in fitful spasms, the sweet-sour fragrance of rental car deodorizer. The freedom of being on the road is always an illusion, since even at the height of escape you eventually have to go back to where you started. But you still lose yourself in that exact moment of where you are. Until you come home.
The drive from my house to his office shows the best of Philadelphia—the wind of Kelly Drive along the Schuylkill River with a rower dipping his oar into water drizzled with morning light, the smooth dolomite limestone of the Art Museum, the marble and granite of City Hall that was once the world’s tallest habitable building and over time became the world’s most uninhabitable habitable building, a boon for cats in the basement catching rats.
Merely seeing it brings the discomfort of familiarity, back into the utilitarian rote of a thousand trips on this route and a thousand more. Zach is still and silent, preparing himself for work and going over his mental checklist—not too much chitchat with the partners, focus on the tasks at hand, no more requests to pat a bald head no matter how much it beckons. He seems miles away from me, immersed in the immutable definitions of his environment. I feel like we are attached by little more than a thin piece of string at the wrists, and it is about to break. I always feel this way when I drop him off—the divorced parent’s lament—but I feel it more acutely than ever now, as I face the finality of something that became sacred. At least to me.
—You know I love you, right?
How many times am I going to say that?
Forever I guess.
—Yeah.
—I just don’t like that I don’t see you as much when we get back here.
—Yeah.
—Your mom makes good plans for you. She wants your life to be busy and full. But you have to remember you have a father, right? I make good plans for you too when I see you each week.
—Yeah.
—Sometimes you forget that because you get so busy.
—Sometimes I forget but I know you’re my dad.
—I wish I had more time with you.
—Yeah but I don’t have any friends my age who are in Philly the last time I remember I had friends here was when I was nine at Jenks like that guy Michael Lepore he came over a couple of times I remember I had friends in Milwaukee like the Carter boys I felt like in those days I had those friends.
It is true. He has no friends where I live.
I honk at another car. There is no reason to honk. I am beginning to fill with the fallback of anger when distressed. I fight it off. He has seen it too many times. He has work to do. Zach keeps looking nervously at his watch.
—You’ll be on time.
—I’m always on time I went in late that one day when Grandma Laine was here that Thursday June 21 of ’07 I had breakfast with her I had breakfast that morning I told them I was going to be a little late they were okay with it they were okay with it then because I wanted to say goodbye to Grandma Laine before she was going so they were okay.
The car stops on the sidewalk in front of his office building. Zach gathers his things. He says something to me he never said during our journey.
—I love you Dad we had a fun trip.
The words fill me up, what I so hoped for with Zach and was never quite sure we had achieved until now.
—Yes, we did.
—Bye Dad.
—Bye, sweetie. Give me a kiss.
He bends his neck into mine. I kiss him on the top of the head. Every time I do this I think back to when he was born and what he went through. How could anyone have such strength as he does?
I watch as he gets out of the car and walks in his Chaplinesque style with a green bag draped over his shoulder. He does not turn around and wave or come back to the car just to say one more time how great it all was. I didn’t think he would.
Now Zach is stooped low and running as if he is dodging tacklers. He hurries through a revolving door. I capture a final glimpse of him, mostly of the green shoulder bag, before he disappears. He is gone, vanished, swallowed up into the building that is his life for today. A feeling comes over me, one I thought I would never ever have: I need Zach more than he needs me. He has reached that point of self-assurance.
I saw it unfold during the trip, all the times he asserted himself by wanting to be with someone else besides me or venture further and further into the discovery of his own self. He was gentle about it. He is always gentle. But I should have seen it coming. Zach gave me fair warning. When he decided he wanted to spend the night with the Chavez family in Odessa, he gave a brilliant closing argument on what it was like to stay in hotels with only me for company:
It’s not much fun.
What I think about the most, ironically perhaps, is the disaster of Vegas, as we were waiting for dinner and I probed him with questions until he stopped me with a voice that was not strident but firm.
The reason I don’t like when you ask the questions is that sometimes I don’t know how to really answer them.
So much of his life had been spent in captivity—me, his mother, his teachers, other adults—to corral his behavior within acceptable bounds. To declare himself, to protect himself and stand up for himself in front of his father, took courage. It was also his way of signifying his separation from me.
We normally associate success with intellect and riches and status—an Ivy League education, a fat-assed salary, a house twice as big as we need, a membership in a golf club with a long waiting list, gold-embossed party invitations to ten-thousand-dollar-a-pop political fundraisers we attend in order to say we attended them. Up until this trip, that was my own definition.
We assume that people like Zach have no interior, that they’re embalmed in their concrete, working rudimentary jobs. They just exist in the tiny Gaza Strip that is given over to the different and the disabled, shunted away behind the psychic fence that we Normals have erected out of unease or disdain. Zach is truly loved by many. He is lucky to have an extended family of hundreds all over the planet. But he is forever different and difference causes fear whether conscious or unconscious.
Zach has an interior life. So do many—most—of the others we relegate to that Gaza Strip. He thinks, he feels, he intuits, he sees life through his own idiosyncratic design. It is not a design of abstraction or interpretation. He takes puzzle pieces that do not fit and works like hell to make them fit. In our minds, the way he has assembled the world looks like a piece from over here and a piece from over there jammed together in some impossible pattern. But in his mind they all fit, each word he hears connecting to a moment and a memory. Somebody mentions an amusement park. He has been there and off he goes, reciting all the rides he went on and then listing all the other amusement parks he has been to. It’s the same with the mention of a restaurant. Or asking someone if he knows anybody at the law firm where he works, only a matter of time before he will recognize a name and then another and then another one.
“Every day he wakes up with broken wings,” Lisa once said. “And every day he learns how to fly.” It is a beautiful statement. But after driving across the country with him, I am not sure it is entirely true. I no longer think his wings are broken. He may skim perilously close to the ground. He may bump up and bump down and bruise himself. The landing may require a mayday. But he can fly. And sometimes he soars, leaving all of us down below to watch as he seizes every skill within him to skim the clouds.
If I learned anything about Zach during the trip, perhaps it is simply this:
Never doubt his sense of direction. He knows where he wants to go, whether on the grid of a map or anywhere else in life. He knows what he needs to do to get there. He will figure most of it out.
Like everyone else, I will one day become too old and sick for my own good or anyone else’s. I think it’s a pretty good guess I will be a cranky son of a bitch. Lisa has told me several times that she is determined to die first to avoid the misery of taking care of me. Like my father before me, I will be terrified. Like my father before me, I will know that I am dying. Like my father before me, I will lie awake thinking about what I did in my life and think about the terrible mistakes I made. But unlike my father, I will also think about what will forever reside in my heart. It won’t be the sweet but ephemeral irrelevance of the Pulitzer and Friday Night Lights. It will be the times I broke through to a place I never knew existed. My beautiful Gerry and Caleb will be with me. So will my beautiful Zach. He will take my hand in his. His grip will be gentle. Neither of us will ever want to let go. We will both recall.
—Remember the time Dad you and me drove cross-country I remember that.
—Of course I remember it. I will never forget it.
—Did you have fun?
—I had the best fun ever, Zach. What about you?
—I had fun I liked it.
—What did you like the best?
—Because it was just the two of us that’s what I liked.
—I love you, Zach.
—I know.
—How do you know?
—You have to love me because you’re my dad.
—I love you because you’re my son.
—Yeah.
—So let’s do it again right now. We’ll just go.
—I’ll think about it.
—What do you mean think about it? Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here!
—Maybe.
—Come on, Zach. You know we’ll have a blast!
—Only if we fly.
Epilogue
MY TRIP ACROSS the country with Zach took place in the summer of 2007. Since this is a book I had thought about for two decades, I believed the words would flow easily, take at most a year to complete with publication in 2009 or 2010. But the process was difficult and painful. Writing about the personal is fraught with fear, a vastly different fear than I ever have experienced before as an author.
I felt the need to get every word right, to capture my son Zach and my relationship with him without understatement or overstatement. I also decided that this book must be completely candid no matter how difficult at times, to get at the truth of my heart. That meant confessing my own faults. It meant confessing my feelings about having a severely disabled son, so complex and contradictory, because love always has limits.
I also had to be completely honest about Zach, the amazing strengths I discovered during our journey as well as the considerable debilities that will never change. I also bore the million-pound weight of knowing that Zach, even if he read Father’s Day, would not understand it. That gave me incredible license, as well as incredible responsibility.
With all these emotions to juggle and worry about and agonize over, a one-year project became a four-year one. I needed that time; the book could not have been written without it. Had I rushed, Father’s Day at best would have been careless and exaggerated, nowhere close to the truth. Whatever exactly that is.
In the year 2011, Zach’s comprehension is still limited. Any abstract interaction is still difficult for him. When asked emotionally based questions about why he likes something, or what it feels like to do something, he almost always answers with a one-word “yes” or “no.” He still fires away with his tracer-bullet questions of where are you working and what are you wearing and when is your birthday. He continues to often speak in disparate rambles. But he is teaching himself to enter conversations gently instead of crash-landing into them. His vocabulary continues to expand because of his habit of silently soaking in every word and phrase he hears and later trying them on for size.
Two and a half years ago Lisa took an administrative job at New York University in Abu Dhabi. After much agonized discussion, we decided she could not turn down this opportunity, the stimulation of being surrounded by brilliant people, the once-in-a-lifetime chance to be on the inside of starting up an unprecedented institution.
She is now a consultant to the university assigned to special projects. She still spends long stretches in Abu Dhabi, but her role gives her much more time in Philadelphia. The house becom
es alive when she is here, filling up with her impromptu singing, her vivaciousness and humor.
When Lisa first left for Abu Dhabi, I was in shock. It seemed surreal given the bond between us and all the challenges we’d shared: the deaths of my parents, her struggle with breast cancer, the death of her father, and my mild but ever-present bipolarity. Without her, the house became ghostly, just myself and the dog.
Several days after she left, I picked up Zach at the nearby train station. We drove home without a word. I pulled the car into the garage. Zach looked at me and broke the somber silence.
—Well just a couple of empty-nesters.
He had heard the term from his mother. I don’t think he quite knew what it meant. It didn’t matter. It was said of Zach during the trip that he has a sixth sense for sincerity. But he also possesses a seventh sense of saying the right words at the right time even if he doesn’t know they are the right words.
I laughed for the first time since Lisa had left.
It is Christmas of 2011. I have given Zach a map of South Africa so he can see where his brother Caleb will be spending the spring semester as an exchange student at the University of Cape Town. It is also a way of including him, without actually including him, in the trip the rest of the family—Lisa and Gerry and myself—will take this April to visit Caleb. Given Zach’s continued propensity to fidget and gasp and talk aloud to himself when confined for hours with nothing to do, I don’t think he can possibly survive the twenty-hour trip to Cape Town. The family has taken other trips overseas, and I have always asked Zach to come. But it has been mere lip service because he’s never shown any interest in going. I make the same pro forma gesture toward South Africa.
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