I get up from his desk and step across the hall to his bedroom. I do not turn on the light. I stand in the doorway and hold my breath until I think I’m ready to confront the scent of this room. When I dare to breathe in—this wonderful, horrible, familiar scent—it fills me and it stops me, and I back away because it’s like a presence, and within it, it is impossible for me to believe that he is gone. So I choose not to believe it. Just for a moment. I step forward, sucking the air deep into my lungs, and I close my eyes and stretch my hands out in front of me. I circle the room, fumbling against the furniture and guessing at objects I touch. Photograph frames, a stack of dusty paperbacks, a handkerchief, a deck of cards, a miniature ferryboat ornament on the dresser. I imagine that I can come across my dad in this rustling around, imagine that he’s sitting here waiting for me and will shout, “Got ya!” and the whole of what has happened will be nothing but a cruel joke.
Within minutes my nose assimilates what surprised it a moment ago. I sit down on the bed and I open my eyes. He is no longer here. And I’m not sure anymore who he was. What’s the trade for this? I can’t find one anywhere. The room is completely empty. I punch the pillow. My fist flies into the dented space where my dad’s head is meant to be resting. I’ve never in my life considered hitting him but here it is. And the fact that he isn’t here to receive the blow does not alter how good it feels to want to commit this violence against him. So I punch him again and again, smashing the surface of the cotton, changing the shape of his indent, fighting at this empty space until I have changed it, until I have transformed it into something I have made with my own two hands.
12
THE THING ABOUT HEELING IS THAT THERE’S a point when you go too far, when the only possible outcome is to capsize. When I was in middle school I wrote a report on capsize risks for fishing trawlers. My teacher was very impressed. It was both a vocabulary study and a math lesson. She gave me an A+. She called my dad to tell him how well I was doing. That she was sure I’d be fine, despite all the trouble, because I kept my head at school, did my work.
I was careful though. Because capsize risks are really hard to determine precisely. You’ve got to work out the stability curve, which is the angle the boat can heel and still right itself. You don’t want to push things too far, in other words. You want reserve buoyancy because that’s the way to get through the waves and the wind.
After, sailing up past the Columbia Bar all those times, my dad taught me about this. He showed me how we could let the wind roll us, let the waves rock us. Mostly because our boat was a good one, but also because we were a crew that knew what it was doing.
“The vertical center of gravity really can’t be low enough,” he said.
“And gas tanks must be baffled or filled,” I answered, because I knew he’d smile at me then.
“Keep heavy items low to deck,” he said.
“And no oversized rigging up high,” I said.
That’s how we sailed so smoothly. We only had to discuss the external conditions—wind speed and wave height, wave direction—and keep our boat righted.
“Don’t ever forget,” my dad said. “When a wave crest hits your topsides, it gives the energy that will start your boat heeling.”
“Don’t I know it, Captain,” I said. Once the wave has passed there is nothing you can do about it. You can’t look back. It’s gone anyway. Waves vanish like that. No two waves are the same. So hunker low. Look forward. Point your boat. Keep sailing.
13
“HERE,” NEIL SAYS, HIS ARM OUTSTRETCHED as he walks into my dad’s room a few hours later. I haven’t moved from the bed; my hand rests on the flattened pillow. I close my eyes then open them quickly, hoping he will hand me something extraordinary. I’m hoping for a stone—a thunder egg, a smoky quartz, an agate. Something from his usual hoard of treasures. Maybe one he gave my dad once that he’s just come across on a shelf.
Instead, he places the letter into my palm. An ordinary letter. I sit up.
“Just look at this, Ella.”
It has been so long but I recognize it right away. How dare she, I think, with a burst of energy. My feet come down with a thump on the hardwood floor. Show me how to unfurl the sails, Captain.
“Do you want to come and see? There are a whole bunch of them.”
But instead of answering, I push back the sliding door to my dad’s closet, take the deepest breath I have ever taken in my life and step inside. I take another step, right in between the hanging clothes. A metal hanger brushes my cheek, cool and sharp.
I raise a coat sleeve to my face. Let the fabric touch my cheek. I squeeze myself behind the rows of hanging suits and sports jackets. It’s dark in the closet and cramped but I have enough room behind the clothes to move around. I duck, slip my hand into the pocket of one of the coats and pull out a wadded Kleenex and a nickel. I put them in my own pocket and reach for another coat. Its pockets are empty so I try another. And another.
Neil stands at the closet door. “Ella?”
My voice is a whisper when it comes. “Second drawer down in the green filing cabinet? In a large manila envelope?”
Through the hanging clothes I see him open his mouth, then close it before speaking.
I test each of my dad’s pants’ pockets, messing up their neat arrangement on the hangers. I lean over to the floor and reach inside his shoes, pull back their tongues and shove their laces inside. I push past a few more sweaters and find my dad’s old winter coat.
Neil sighs, reaches a long arm out, pushes some of my dad’s clothing aside and joins me in the closet. A t-shirt falls to the floor.
Of course my mother’s letters are still in the house, are still exactly where my dad once kept them. That one drawer, unremarkable from the others in the tiny room off the garage that my dad has for storing paperwork and files. A place I used to tiptoe into as a teenager, to reach for that drawer, to pull my arm back again and retreat. Tiptoe away. This was one of the pacts I made with my mother. I promised not to think about her, to let her go because that is what she asked of me.
“We’ll have to give all of this away,” I say.
“You knew they were writing to each other?”
“No,” I say, more curtly then I mean to, pressing a hand down the thick wool of my dad’s old coat and scrambling for an answer. Not the real answer, but some kind of answer. “They never wrote to each other. That isn’t from her.”
“What do you mean?”
What do I mean? I mean that I was eleven when the letters first started to come. That I would see them before my dad, that I would slip them beneath the rest of the mail and hold everything tightly pressed and hidden until I was safely inside the house. “I mean that would have been too easy, wouldn’t it?” I say. “That would have changed everything.”
“Ella?”
“She left, Neil. She left when I was ten and she never came back. We never found out what happened to her. We were better off without her.”
He says nothing, and I reach into a box and find a stack of coiled belts. Obviously ones my dad hasn’t been able to wear for some time.
“You told me that before. But I didn’t know about letters.” He pulls some sweaters from the upper shelf. “I can do this for you. You don’t have to.”
I say nothing. I’m too busy resisting the urge to put my dad’s shirts on, one on top of the other. I’m holding the sleeves and wondering how to get out of this closet. Except that I never want to leave this closet.
Neil is refolding the sweaters, putting them back on the high shelf. I stop his hands, take two of the sweaters in my arms and hug them.
“Ella, love, what does it mean that she was writing to you? Or to your dad?”
“I’m saying these weren’t from her.” I take a deep breath, nearly a sigh, because I know what to do now. It is easy to explain how After worked. I’ve never been in any doubt about this. “You have to realize that our address and phone number were listed with the national missing person associa
tion—that means anyone could contact us, even people who were missing. It’s something that happens. It’s horrible for the families.”
“This is what your dad explained to you?”
I shake past the thought that my dad didn’t explain much. Talking about it was too hard. I was very young. “This is what I knew. What we knew. Sometimes we would get these letters, from people claiming to be my mother, or even not.”
He shakes his head. He doesn’t believe me. I push the dress shirts aside. One by one. Trying to make a space on the hanging rod.
“Are you looking for something specific?” he says quietly.
I don’t answer. I won’t find my dad in here. I know this, but I can’t seem to step away.
“Ella?”
I pick up a fallen hanger. Find a button on the floor.
“Why don’t we go downstairs?” The letter is still in his hand, crumpling now.
“You don’t have to help me.”
“Ella?”
“Have you even read it?”
“Just quickly.”
“Read it again. You’ll see what I mean.” This is a gamble, but it works.
He opens the folded page, scans it, passes it over to me. A feeling like triumph ignites as I read her loopy handwriting, see the messy ink splotches:
I don’t approve of alerts or milk cartons. I didn’t INVENT these concepts and anyone using “identity” as a means to safety must be a thief or A PRETENDER himself. We’re talking about the most at-risk. Identity system for “theft,” relay and safe house system for “theft,” social work care system for “theft.” No harm must be done.
The letter is signed “Margot”. But this is half-crossed out, followed by the letters M-A-R written carefully three times. “You see,” I lie. “This was just some random person who found our address.”
Neil puts a hand to the back of his head, then brings it forward and rubs his eyes. “It doesn’t make any sense. Don’t you know what happened to her? And what did your dad do about these letters?”
I shrug, I shake my head. “We lived without her. That’s what we had to do.”
“Did he follow them up? Go looking for her?”
I shake my head. “She left us. That’s all we ever needed to know.”
Neil drops his hands, lets out a deep sigh. His voice is very careful. “I’m so sorry, Ella. I’m sorry you’re having to think about this again. But I still don’t understand. Was she sick? What really happened?”
How quickly the world splits. How hard it is to put back together, to make it seamless again. Neil isn’t supposed to see any of this. I’m fine now and he shouldn’t have to worry. I just want us to ignore her. “It’s like this, Neil,” I begin, and I’m going to make it clear once and for all that there is nothing interesting in bringing this all up again. That it was all so long ago. “I appreciate how much you want to understand. But that’s the thing of it. There isn’t anything to understand. What happened was simple. She left. We were on our own. We made it.”
Two lines appear between Neil’s eyes. He tips his head. “I think …” But he stops, rubs his forehead with his fingers. “I think this is really hard for you.”
I say nothing. I turn my attention to my dad’s dress shirts and press the flat of my hand against their equally flat breast pockets. I touch the flannel shirts twice. Neil takes a deep breath. Then another.
I find my dad’s old jogging clothes—gym shorts and frayed sweatshirts. I start to pull these out and throw them into a pile in the middle of the room.
“Stop,” Neil says. But I don’t. So he reaches for a suit in a plastic sheath. “Is this his uniform?”
“Don’t touch that,” I say.
Neil keeps a hold of the zipper and speaks slowly. “Tell me what you want so I can help.”
“You’re wrinkling it!” I try to snatch it from him.
“I’m not.”
“You’re letting it crease on the floor!”
He hands it over. It’s an old uniform. I doubt he’s worn it in a few years. Still, I unzip the plastic sheath. Force myself to keep my eyes open in the face of all that stark white cloth. Then I place it back into its rightful place, smoothing my hands across the shoulders on the hanger. My dad was never this short. To hug him I had to practically jump into the air, reach up despite my own long legs. I slump against the back wall, pull my knees into my chest. And still I want to howl at the sheer genius of death. How perfectly fucking final and unarguable it is.
“You see,” I say.
“No,” Neil says, sliding down to sit beside me. He places a hand on my leg. “I mean, this is hard for you to see differently. It’s like you’ve decided how it all went.”
“There’s nothing to see differently. And it was a really long time ago now.”
“You’ve decided you know what happened. But that can’t be true anymore. I wish we could ask your dad, but we can’t. We’re going to have to look into it.”
A muscle tightens in my throat. Why would my dad not tell me if he knew where she was? It doesn’t make any sense. We both decided. I put a hand to massage my neck. I’m about to refute Neil’s statement but from the den comes the sound of the phone ringing and we have to shift ourselves from out behind my dad’s clothes and leave the closet. I am pulling on one of my dad’s old wool hats as I take the phone in my dad’s den. It’s the funeral home. A woman informs me that this afternoon would be perfect.
“Perfect,” I repeat.
She coughs and says, “What I mean is that we can accommodate your schedule of course, just let me know when you can come by.”
Which is immediately, because this is a chance to see my dad’s body. I don’t need to sit in the bottom of his closet or put on all of his shirts one by one and test his shoes. I will be able to sit with him, just for a moment, and maybe this will tell me about the kind of man he was and if his secret can fit in the same room with the two of us together.
We find his current uniform in the downstairs closet and we call George at work, figure out when he can leave, arrange who will drive, put the dogs out, and then before too long we’re all driving north together to Swann’s funeral home.
It takes us twenty minutes to get there, and we don’t speak. We turn off the road in front of a large, stone house. The building is gray, the window awnings striped gray and white. It’s an ugly structure. In the parking lot, George is visibly nervous and pulls out a cigarette before we get to the door. He asks me if I’m ready, he asks Neil if he knows what to expect. “I’ve been to viewings before, it isn’t easy,” he says.
Careful gruff George. Of course he’s worried about this. I say nothing, watch him smoke furiously. I think of how my job has somehow prepared me for this, how it was something I learned to get over.
Then, with a chill, I hug the sleeves of my winter coat and remember how in the early years of working at the clinic I’d had dreams of euthanized animals getting back up off the table and speaking to me in my mother’s voice.
“Come on,” I say, trying to be gentle but I sound too impatient and must swallow the words because George isn’t quite done smoking and Neil has stopped to wait for him.
“Catholics used to hold the viewing at home,” George says, finally walking up the steps of the gray house. “For several days.”
“I wouldn’t like that,” says Neil.
Then, finally, both men are shuffling forward, climbing the last of the steps and bracing their shoulders, readying themselves for what we are going to see.
But this isn’t what happens at all. We make it up the steps, cross the threshold of this somber building and enter a hall with silk flowers, careful urns and dully bright commemorative plates. We introduce ourselves to the young female funeral director. But then one moment I am preparing myself to be in the same room again with my dad, and the next the woman is explaining that there has been some mistake.
“This has never happened in all the years my parents and grandparents ran the business,” she exp
lains, her eyes jumping between the three of us. “So I have no idea how to handle this except to give you my sincerest apologies.” She takes a deep breath. “The hospital gave us the information that your father was not presentable. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, they should have done that. I didn’t realize you …” here she looks to George and Neil, back and forth.
My dad will not be presentable, I think, like someone has spilled soup on his clothing, or a glass of wine across his white captain’s uniform.
“I didn’t realize,” she continues, “until one of you called yesterday, that you hadn’t seen him.” Suddenly she stops wringing her hands and straightens. “I can confirm that a viewing would not have been appropriate based on Mr. Tomlinson’s injuries.”
“What kind of mistake?” Neil asks.
“What exactly are you telling us?” George says. “We don’t want a public viewing at the ceremony. Today is for us.”
But I understand right away that my dad has already been cremated. I sit down on one of the suede sofas and blink at the funeral director. She is wearing a charcoal gray pantsuit. Her hair is swept back. She is as tall as I am and I wonder if this helps her in this kind of work. I just keep staring at her. Of all things, my anger has nowhere to go. I wanted to see his face. I wanted to have him in my presence as if that would have somehow held him accountable.
“I’m so sorry,” the director repeats. “We arranged for you to pick up your dad’s ashes today.”
“Where is he, then?” I ask. It is not what I mean to say but she seems to understand me. She invites us into a second room. She closes the door behind us. Neil and George walk beside me. George’s face is red, his hands balled into fists inside his jacket. Neil is bowed, turned toward me.
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