Running Home

by Katie Arnold

  After Dad’s diagnosis, our phone conversations and emails become a volley of medical updates revolving around a single urgent question: What do we do?

  I remember what my doctor told me right after Pippa was born: “Whatever you do, don’t look anything up on the Internet. It will drive you crazy.” But going crazy seems preferable to sitting passively as Dad navigates the worst health crisis of his life, so at night, after the girls are asleep, I flip open my laptop and Google kidney cancer. I find pages of specialists, discussion boards about new drugs, and case studies. Maybe if I look hard enough, if I scour the digital universe for cancer treatments all night until my eyeballs fall out, if I go OCD on Dad’s cancer, I will save him.

  I deluge Dad with links. “MD Anderson is where everyone goes,” I declare confidently late one night, long after Steve has gone to sleep and begged me to do the same. I don’t care that it’s in Texas and Dad’s in Virginia and he’s told me he wants to be treated locally, at the county hospital. I’m going to find him the best of the best—someone tells me Columbia is first-rate!—and he will go there and be treated and he will live.

  “I’m tired,” Dad writes. “I like my oncologist.”

  I spend hours researching experimental treatments: hypnosis, macrobiotics, laughter therapy! I buy him an iPod and upload soothing hypnosis sessions set to droning New Age music. Meg and I split the cost of a monstrous juicer, so that Lesley can pulp vegetables into pea-green juice, supposedly a miracle cancer cure.

  Then, serendipity! I come across a study asserting that breast milk may combat cancer cells. I’m still nursing Maisy six times a day and pumping milk once or twice in case she gets hungry while I’m out working or running. Now I attach myself to my breast pump three times a day to increase my supply. The tiny motor, disguised in its black nylon working-lady tote, sounds like someone whispering Oh shit, Oh shit, over and over. By the end of three days, I’ve filled three big bottles with breast milk. I pack them in a small cooler with dry ice and drive to the FedEx store, feeling valiant. “The contents are perishable,” I tell the man behind the counter, a hint of pride creeping into my voice.

  I call Dad to tell him the milk is on its way. “Just blend it up with some bananas in a smoothie!” I say, hoping my enthusiasm will disguise the fact that this is the grossest idea in the history of the world.

  A couple of days later, I get an email from Meg. “There’s a fine line between having a fighting spirit and being in denial,” she writes. She’s been talking to Dad. I’m not in fucking denial! I want to yell back at her, but part of me knows she’s right.

  * * *

  —

  On our second day at Huntly, Meg and I move Dad’s computer and hard drive upstairs to his bedroom. It tires him out to go down two flights of stairs to his basement office, but he has work to do. He’s trying to finish archiving the many thousands of photographs he’s taken over the years, for National Geographic and for himself. He refers to this simply as the Project, and it’s all-consuming. He’s been working on it since he retired, in the mid-nineties—long days burrowed in his basement, digitizing, captioning, editing, backing up, and filing every image. Dad’s turned retirement into a test of endurance.

  Lesley has bought him a new desk at Office Depot, which, we’re disheartened to discover, comes packed flat, in dozens of pieces. Meg and I sit on the carpet with flimsy, unmarked parts scattered all around us, trying to decipher the half-baked illustrated instructions and fumbling to screw tiny screws into the particleboard. In any other circumstance, this would irritate me beyond words, but we seize on the project with grateful, almost manic enthusiasm. Dad’s tumor may be beyond our control, but not this damn desk. Here is something useful we can do.

  When it’s finally assembled, Meg goes downstairs to make lunch, and I turn on his computer. Dad’s stretched out on his bed, talking to me with his eyes closed.

  “I’ve got all the digital photos cross-referenced on the hard drive,” he says, “and there are duplicate copies in the white folders in the basement. A complete copy of everything is on a zip drive in my safety-deposit box at the bank, all my pictures.” For as long as I can remember, he’s always enunciated this word slowly and deliberately, as though he’s savoring it: pick-chures.

  I open the hard drive. Dad worked at National Geographic for nearly thirty years. There are hundreds of folders, labeled by year or subject matter or story, each folder containing hundreds of images.

  “The Geographic pictures are marked with file names and dates,” Dad goes on. I know I should be paying attention, but I’m so transfixed by the mountain of digital memories that I’m only half listening.

  I scroll down to a folder marked KIDS. A long column of tiny thumbnail photographs pops up on the screen, in which are contained even tinier bodies, Meg and me in miniature. Dad documented nearly everything we ever did together. I start clicking on pictures at random. Some I’ve seen before, in my grandparents’ photo albums or in frames on Dad’s desk at work, but there are so many others I’ve forgotten, so many days we spent with him, yet also so few.

  I look up from the screen and glance over my shoulder at Dad. He has dozed off and is snoring lightly. Beside me on the floor, Maisy rustles in her car seat, batting absently at a quilted giraffe dangling from a plastic hook. She catches my eye and smiles, a soft, sleepy grin that makes her bright eyes crinkle. She’s always been this way: agreeable and undemanding. She slid into the world, becalmed, without a sound. Her hair was strawberry, her skin as wrinkled as a walnut. At home she slept off childbirth like a bad hangover, napping in her car seat on the kitchen counter or propped up on our knees on the couch. She can sleep anywhere, in the midst of any commotion, for hours.

  I rock her car seat gently with my bare foot and open the folder labeled CAMPING. Here are dozens of variations on the same picture: Meg and me huddled in Dad’s mustard-yellow Sears tent, standing in front of the tent, sitting in the open tent flap, roasting marshmallows over a charcoal fire. The canvas tent was of ancient vintage, tall enough for Dad to stand up in without stooping, with high peaks and billowy valleys, where water pooled when it rained. The long awning above the door was a hopeful thing, as though made for a grand party, though poorly executed. It sagged in the middle, collecting dew. In the morning you had to be careful not to knock into the poles that held it up or water would drip down your neck. In my memory the tent was ornate, even festive, like a circus big top, but inside it smelled like musty basements, and our plaid flannel bedrolls were placed directly on the ground, a fact that eventually gave rise to Meg’s intractable loathing of camping. Seeing it now, I’m struck by how run-down it was, even then, as though wilted by poor weather and unfulfilled expectations.

  These were the foggy first years after my parents split up but before we moved with Mom to New Jersey, when Dad took us on weekend camping trips to state parks in Maryland and West Virginia. We cooked watery scrambled eggs or baked beans in a blackened frying pan and wore leather sandals with knee socks and wool cardigans, outfits my mother had packed for us. In a disproportionate number of these pictures, Meg and I are shoving hot dogs into our mouths, nearly whole, and staring with dazed wonder at the sodas in our hands. Mom would never have fed us hot dogs for dinner at home; she would never let us guzzle Cokes straight from the can as if they were water. Meg’s expressions throughout range from uncertain to sullen. Even when I’m smiling, I look slightly bewildered.

  Meg and I were tomboys. She was mildly cross-eyed and needed braces, and I knocked out both my front teeth before I was three, falling off the plastic trapeze we called Hanging Bar, hung by a fraying rope over the basement’s black-and-brown-checked linoleum floor. I was always getting hurt, like the time I ran headlong into a tree at a park. I was so busy looking over my shoulder and grinning at my mother that I hit the trunk and bounced off, got up, laughing, and kept running. Mom clipped our brown hair in short bowl cuts and
trimmed our raggedy bangs with the kitchen shears. Little girls don’t wear their hair long, she told us.

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Meg (left) and me, Lincolnville, Maine, 1976

  Below that are folders marked MAINE. In the summer of 1975, we stayed with Dad in a yellow one-room cabin on Penobscot Bay. My parents had separated, and it was our first long trip away from home with just him, the first of many we would take to Maine. We drove north in his green VW microbus, Meg and me flinging around the two white vinyl bench seats in back, pretending the bus was a plane. Dad was the captain, and whoever rode in front was the copilot, responsible for pushing the AM radio’s fat, useless buttons (the radio never worked) while our father steered the craft north on I-95, the day growing cooler, the air smelling like the sea and damp old forests.

  I am three and a half. The trip wobbles in the mind. We kick a red rubber ball in a meadow of Queen Anne’s lace and skip down dirt lanes bordered by blackberry bushes, arms streaked purple from reaching through the prickers for handfuls of berries. We glop barefoot across the mudflats at low tide, foraging for mussels, hazy ocean waves curling in the distance. On the summit of Mount Battie, Meg bites into a pear and leaves her front tooth behind. It lies bloodied like a shark’s tooth in the white flesh, prompting great hilarity and immortalized forever, like so much of our childhood, on film.

  Dad’s in all of these pictures, even when he’s not. He’s the unseen presence in every frame, the photographer behind the lens. Look into our eyes and it’s his eyes we are trying to catch, his smile we seek, his face we most want to see. Our expressions tell only half the story; the photos tell it all. We’re not looking at the camera but at him.

  * * *

  —

  There’s one photo I want to find but can’t, from a day that stands out in my memory more than almost any other. Ironically, it’s one of only a few days together that Dad didn’t document.

  It must have been November 1979, the fall after the Fodderstack, the second winter he and Lesley lived on the farm. It was a crackly, bitter afternoon after Thanksgiving, and we went traipsing through the woods, Dad and Meg and I. The pale sunlight slanted through spindly trees in its dizzying, fatiguing way. This was the hated season of shortening days, night shouldering in too soon, and mornings with a glaze of frost on the grass. I wore a belted navy-blue down parka and red rubber boots with thin cotton socks. My knees were chilled through my corduroy pants. I was cold and wanted to go home, but I would never admit it.

  In this part of Virginia, there is water everywhere, splicing through pastures, along the rock walls Dad laboriously restacked by hand, over the far hills and between this field and that. On sticky August days, we braved the itchy pasture and cut across two fields, hopped the stone stile Dad built, and crossed over into the neighbors’ property. We skirted their house and followed a faint path that switchbacked down to a swimming hole on the Rappahannock River.

  That day in November, though, there was a papery skin of ice at the river’s edge, dead leaves swirling in an eddy created by a small boulder. It was likely not as frigid as I remember, because if it was, Dad probably wouldn’t have done what he did next. “I’ll give you five bucks if you go in,” he said, with a sly grin. The river was low, little more than a trickling creek, and the swimming hole looked deep enough for me to dunk up to my waist, but barely.

  Dad always liked to make bets. “Let’s bet who will get home first,” he’d say. “Us or Lesley?” Money, rarely offered and almost never rewarded, was never the point. Trying to guess and be gutsy, to outsmart the other, was. He was a walking Trivial Pursuit game, quizzing us constantly about geology, engineering, nature: Where do we get iron? What makes gunpowder? How do glacial moraines form? Beneath his tests and gags—some fun and others, frankly, annoying—lay his long-held conviction that if we pushed ourselves, we were capable of big things.

  The river glimmered uninvitingly, but it didn’t scare me. I’d learned to swim when I was three, flinging myself off of docks into chilly lakes. I loved the shivery rush of soaring through the air, the moment of anticipation just before you hit the water.

  I thought about the five dollars. The cash meant nothing to me. I knew that if I did it, it wouldn’t be for the money. I’d do it to prove I could.

  “Okay,” I said, with a conviction that surprised me. “Watch me.”

  I stripped off my coat and turtleneck and tugged down my corduroy pants and knee socks. I stood there, shivering for a moment in my white cotton underwear and undershirt, watching the wind rustle the branches, trying to anticipate the cold, for which I had no precedent. I took a deep breath and plunged in up to my waist. Over the rush of blood in my ears, I could hear Dad gasp; his bushy eyebrows shot up and down frantically. Meg looked disdainful but also sort of impressed.

  It might as well have been Antarctica. The water sliced me open, karate-chopping my shins, my stomach. I counted to ten, forcing myself to stay in long enough to make it count.

  “Good grief, old girl!” Dad cried, waving me out. When I crawled onto the bank, the air seemed colder, prickling my splotchy red skin as I patted myself dry with my clothes. Dad clapped me on the back and reached into his wallet, stretching it wide open and pulling from it, with a flourish, a wrinkled five-dollar bill. I was wet as an oily muskrat and shaking uncontrollably, laughing through chattering teeth, half-deranged from the chill.

  Now, remembering the day, I stare out of the sliding glass door that opens onto the balcony, overlooking the fields and the cleft in the hills where the river flows. Wallowing in the water had been an awful idea, pure torture. But it was the stuff of family legend—even as I stood shivering in my underwear on the bank, I sensed it would be—a bold feat I could pocket for future use, as insurance against indecision and doubt, as proof of courage I didn’t always feel but wished I did, that would bond me to Dad forever. If he loved nature, so would I! And beneath this was my secret hope: If I could be brave and daring and fully committed in the tiny wedge of a world we shared—outside, in the fields, on the rivers and trails—maybe Dad would forgive me for leaving him. Maybe, somehow, I would get him back.

  On the floor beside me, Maisy has fallen asleep. She’s suckling her pacifier through wobbly lips—in and out, in and out—her plump cheeks expanding and contracting slightly with each breath. Her mouth makes a tiny sound, like a kitten lapping milk with its sandpaper tongue. Dad’s still asleep, too, flat in his bed, so still I have to look twice. They make a mournful pair: one just born, the other slowly dying.

  The heaviness in my chest is old and familiar. It’s not quite grief, not yet, though I can feel that coming, but a hitch in my heart, a tick of apprehension—something is missing, but I don’t know what. I feel as young as the girl in Dad’s pictures. I’m homesick. That discomfiting in-between feeling—not quite there, not quite here—that I’ve felt my whole life with my father. Our relationship has been a constant cycle of coming together and moving apart, hellos and goodbyes. The excitement of arriving and the guilt of going all twisted up like a tangled skein of wool. Happy! And sad. Now that we’re heading toward our last goodbye, the word has a terrible new meaning: home-sick.

  That first summer we went to Maine, Dad made up a game that he called Morsel. He would lie on his back on the ground, pretending to be some sort of big monster. Meg and I would run around him, squealing, daring each other to make ever tightening circles, while he stretched his arms out and tried to grab us with his lurching monster limbs. When he did, he would roar and pull us in, tickling us and holding us tight while we laughed and laughed, pretending to be devoured, tender little morsels of prey. After a while we would grow tired, all of us, and Meg and I would sag down on either side of him, his arms wrapped around us, giggling and tired, our stomachs and faces sore from laughing. We would lie that way for a while, until it seemed like maybe Dad had fallen asleep, and maybe we would, too.
I felt as though if we lay still, we could stay that way forever.

  I look down at Maisy and picture Pippa, at home in Santa Fe. They’re almost the same ages Meg and I were when my parents’ marriage began dissolving, not long before they separated. I think of the lengths I went to impress Dad and to bridge the distance between us—the stamina this required and the person I became because of it. And suddenly I wonder if I’m still trying to prove myself, to myself and to my father—if maybe my whole life up to this point hasn’t been one long dare.

  And who will I be when he’s gone?

  3

  Edge of Memory

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Meg and me, Washington, D.C., 1974

  No one tells you anything when you’re little. You have to gather clues. The story of your life is made from these clues, random shards stuck together at haphazard angles that don’t always make sense. They will not necessarily match the recollections of those around you; everyone collects their own evidence.

  It’s nearly impossible to untangle my earliest memories from Dad’s photographs. In his first picture of me, I am one second old. I have just cleared the birth canal. The masked doctor holds me, squalling, furry with mucus, splattered with blood, eyes squeezed shut, mouth in an uproar. The fingers of my right hand are flung open and blurry, in motion already.