by Katie Arnold
* * *
—
In the morning, I wake to the strangest, most magnificent sunrise. I’d fallen into bed after midnight, too exhausted to close the curtains, and now, through the tall windows, the sun is painting the hills pumpkin, peeling back the whiskery frost layers on the fields. The trees are awash in a deep persimmon, the light glittery and bright. Then, just as suddenly, the day goes dim again, as though time is crawling backwards. If only it would.
It’s snowing: Fine flakes drift from the sky, then fatter flakes, accumulating on the driveway, the lawn, the windshield of Dad’s pickup.
Downstairs at breakfast, Lesley and Meg and I pick at scrambled eggs and toast. Lesley says, “I think we should make a rule that we are allowed to cry at any time.” And she puts her head in her hands and begins to cry.
Later we drive to the funeral parlor, in Front Royal. Chris greets us at the door and ushers us into the beige sitting room, where he presents Lesley with a shallow bowl containing Dad’s personal effects: his scuffed gold wedding band, which I’d never seen him take off, and his black Timex watch.
Lesley holds up the watch. “Would either of you like to have this?” she asks us.
It is too soon to think about wanting anything—except for Dad, still alive, all the horrid cancer scrubbed from his body, the last three months a do-over—but as soon as I see the watch’s familiar glass face, I know that I do. I look at Meg and she’s nodding. “You have it,” she says. I put it on right away. The black leather band is soft and water-cracked in places, permanently molded in a semicircle and, even on the smallest hole, much too big for me. But through the curve of the strap, I can almost feel Dad’s wrist, the size and heft of it, the heat even.
Just moments ago, the Timex was strapped to his wrist. Just yesterday, his wrist was alive, veins and pulse chugging weakly, their last hours on the job. But now it’s December 10, and Dad is in the refrigerated room next door. We enter one at a time to say our final goodbyes. His face is more sunken, his skin colorless and ice-chest cold and pulled tight against his head. Yesterday’s farewell felt like running a race as hard as I could and leaving everything on the course. I said it all, as much as I had. Now I simply stroke his face, kiss his cheek. It is so much easier than I’d imagined, to touch him. He is still familiar, intimate, my father.
Afterwards, Meg and Lesley and I drive to the grocery store. Philip and Merrill are bringing us dinner, and we’ve agreed to provide dessert. As soon as we’re inside, I know that we’ve made a terrible mistake. We stumble around the fluorescent aisles, tarnishing the sanctity of our final moments with Dad, shopping for cheap, store-bought baked goods. We’re plagued by indecision: devil’s food cake or coconut cake with garish frosting? Some kind of weird jiggly flan in a plastic container or ice cream? Do we want to bake brownies from a mix? In a silent, mutual rage, we settle on a fruit tart. The raspberries on top glisten in a vulgar, unnatural way, and I know we will never take a bite.
I push Maisy’s stroller out through the automatic doors and into the pewter glare of the sun, which is trying to press through clouds, insistent but futile. I can still feel Dad on the pads of my fingertips where I last touched him.
This is the thing no one tells you about death. It’s morbid and heartbreaking, but it can also be wondrous. Because we want to know where they’re going, but we never will. Because it’s so terribly final. Because it wakes us up to the world, at last.
* * *
—
On Saturday morning, after breakfast, I go down to the basement, looking for Dad. If he’s still any place in this house, it’s his office. Six weeks or more have passed since he last was here, and it is stuffy and dim, warren-like. One window lets in weak, indirect sunlight above his desk, which is eye level with the lawn. He really could watch the grass grow. The room smells exactly as it always has: of felt-tip markers and tired rubber bands, manila folders where he stored his contact sheets, dusty Updike novels and cycling guides; of him.
For a long while, I sit in his swivel chair, spinning slowly, scanning the room. Papers and pictures are strewn about on his desk and stacked in orderly piles on the floor and shelves. Almost everything is labeled, though for whose benefit—his or ours—it’s impossible to tell. It’s systematic chaos, the domain of someone who devised a meticulous organizational system but ran out of time before he could finish. Dust motes slant through the shaft of light, and the air feels oppressive, heavy under the weight of memories and faded ambition, and also devotion.
I kneel on the floor, opening file cabinets, looking for nothing in particular, and for everything. His drawers are full of old family photographs, writings, letters, research. In one is a small wooden box labeled HAIKU! in his uppercase handwriting, the beginnings of an old book project from the 1960s that he never finished. He was going to pair his black-and-white photographs with haiku by the great Japanese masters. The box is filled with index cards, each with a thumbnail picture and a handwritten verse. One stops me cold:
If they ask for me
say: He had some business
in another world
—SOKAN
On the carpet next to the cabinet sits a tidy stack of small black hardbound notebooks. They are identical, each about the size of a paperback. On the cover of the first one is a title typed in bumpy red embossing tape: LISTENING TO MYSELF. I pick it up and flip open the pages to the middle. The thick black ink looks fresh, but the date on the top of the page says otherwise: 1975.
His diaries.
I skim quickly. He has left Legation Street and is dating a woman whose apartment he frequents on Idaho Avenue. He hardly ever mentions Meg and me by name. We are “the kids,” and his girlfriend is identified by her first initial, “A.”
The secretary.
She sometimes spends the night at his apartment on Newark Street when we’re there. In the morning, Dad leaves a box of granola for us on the kitchen table, along with notes, one of which he’s saved. “Have some crunchy munchy!” reads the paper, in the neat, oversize penmanship meant for little girls who have only just learned to read. “There’s milk in the refrigerator, please don’t wake me up until after 8 o’clock. Daddy needs his sleep!”
Stuck between the pages, miraculously unfaded, is an old snapshot of Dad holding Meg and me on his knees at a playground, and a woman, presumably A., kneeling beside us. She wears round glasses and a kerchief around her neck. I have a bowl cut and baby thighs. We are all smiling, and A.’s face is abstractly familiar. She has lived in the recesses of my three-year-old’s memory all these years, a sense of wrongness and disloyalty shrouding her like an aura. “Idaho Ave.”—even Dad’s reference is casual, shorthand, anonymous, elongating the distance between us.
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Meg and me, Washington, D.C., 1974
I read on. It wasn’t a simple trade-off: us for A. It might be easier to bear if it had been. Caught between his old life and his new one, Dad was conflicted about both, desperate to make his relationship with A. a “decent and good one, so that the terrible damage I did when I walked out could at least have led to some good.” But already it was foundering. “A’s and my relationship seemed to be crumbling faster and faster under the irrevocable weight of my doubts and the bitter hard kernel in the midst of it all…that our adventure together began as novelty for me, not as love.” I can see exactly where this is going, even though I already know the ending. How impossible it would be to salvage something solid from the ruins.
His tone is too tormented to read it all at once, so I flip erratically through the pages, afraid of what I might find. Dad writes about loneliness and “storms,” his blackest moments—here the ink is darker and the grooves of the letters deeper, the actual outlines of despair—the choices he made that he feared would “ruin my life, Betsy’s life, the kids’,” the pressures that drove him away an
d the gutting isolation of being gone.
I turn pages, forward and back. One line jumps out at me: There among the blur of words is my name.
I admit there were many factors contributing to my withdrawal from the family even in the early stages (including my deep resentment of Kate)…
I have to read it twice to make sure I didn’t imagine it. My head is thudding and dizzy, and a hot, childish shame rises on my face, the shame of being caught doing something wrong but not knowing what. I was only three that year. What had I done, besides being born? Besides breaking Dad’s bass violin? Besides confining him further to his role as father?
I glance over a few more lines, hoping he’ll elaborate or take it back, but there’s no explanation, nothing more to go on. I close the notebook, put it back on the stack, and press my head into my hands, trying to catch my breath, trying not to faint.
I think about the guilt I carried for so long, assuming the divorce had been my fault. And then, when I was grown, the shame I felt for thinking this. Get over yourself! How could a three-year-old have been responsible?
Well. Here was my proof, straight from the source.
I’d been right all along.
* * *
—
I’d wanted to tell Dad that I forgave him. I didn’t understand his choices, but maybe I could forgive him. I’d been working up to this for weeks, years maybe. And when I got to Huntly and found him so flat and still, I showered him with sudden forgiveness. He was human; of course he was. Even now, after finding this terrible diary entry, I don’t take it back.
That evening after dinner, Meg and I sit at the dining room table, working on his obituary. We’re leaving in the morning, and we hurry to finish, reading lines aloud to each other. “He lived his own life and inspired others to do the same,” I say. Only now I know another part of the story that goes: He was a selfish bastard and he hurt a lot of people. He was a great father to us and a shitty husband to our mother and I love him still. This part will never change.
There’s another thing I wish I’d said: I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry I wasn’t around as much lately. I’m sorry if you thought I didn’t care. I’m sorry I never answered your letter.
* * *
—
Four days before Christmas, I fly back to Huntly with Maisy to help Lesley plan Dad’s memorial. On the night I arrive, there is a lunar eclipse, the moon a spooky ball of molten rust swallowed by the earth’s shadow. It’s the first total eclipse on the winter solstice in more than four hundred years.
Dad’s in a black metal box on one end of the kitchen counter. It looks like a cross between an oversize recipe box and one of those portable hard drives designed to survive nuclear explosions. The label eliminates any doubt: “This box contains the cremated remains of David L. Arnold, cremated on December 15, 2010,” followed by a long serial number. Lesley and I have to reach over him to get our coffee mugs from the cabinet.
The next morning, I borrow a pair of Lesley’s Wellies and tromp out to the barn to keep her company while she feeds the horses and cats.
“Where’s Peacock?” I ask.
“Oh,” she says, sounding confused. “Didn’t I tell you? He’s dead. I found him frozen on the floor of the barn three days after David died.”
I’d hoped this might be the end of the long season of anguish and, now that Dad is gone, something inside of me would lift and I might find some relief from the pain of grief.
But of course it is only the beginning.
PART TWO
Shadows
I am frightened all the time. Scared to death. But I’ve never let it stop me. Never!
—GEORGIA O’KEEFFE
12
This Is the Way the Mind Works
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Blizzard at Huntly Stage, 1984
In January, Steve and the girls and I fly back to Virginia for Dad’s memorial. We fill the house with photographs by him, of which there is an impossible number to choose from, and pictures of him, which are scarcer: the elusive photographer caught on film. He is riding a tractor, paddling his kayak. He is a three-month-old with grave eyes and a grandfather holding his newborn granddaughter. A computer on a side table plays a loop of videos Dad made over the years: Huntly Stage in springtime, Meg and me running the Fodderstack, his life, and ours, flashing by on the screen.
His Rappahannock friends come over and his former colleagues from the Geographic, some of whom I remember from when we were girls. We drink wine and tell stories; then we cue up the Biggs on organ and crank the volume so high the floor starts to shake and it’s impossible to separate myself from the music, to feel where I stop and it begins, and where Dad stops and I begin. He still seems three-dimensional, with height and girth and green-flecked eyes. It’s easy to pretend I haven’t lost him for my whole life, just for a little while, and that once the novelty of his dying has worn off, he’ll walk out of my memory and back into this world, camera bag slung over one shoulder and that same old grin, always.
We’re so busy, there’s no time to go down to the basement. It’s just as well. I can’t stop thinking about Dad’s notebooks, but I can’t bear the idea of reading them. Instead I sort through his clothes. His half of the closet is still full. There’s his red down vest, a lopsided stack of sweatshirts; khaki work pants and dress pants; a faded Outside T-shirt; and an itchy snarl of ragg wool socks, too many to count. On the top shelf, next to a step-on scale, is a small spiral notebook. Only the first few pages are filled—a list of dates and numbers, in Dad’s handwriting. It’s his weight, recorded every day for three weeks, beginning in late August: 180 pounds. The trend was down. By his last entry, the day before his diagnosis on September 16, he’d dropped eight pounds. The rest of the book is blank. There’s no need for words. The numbers say it all.
Is this what it feels like to finally grow up?
Moving to New Mexico hadn’t made me a proper adult. Neither had marriage or even motherhood. I still called Dad when I needed advice. Mom flew out when I got my wisdom teeth pulled and birthed my babies. But losing a parent feels like naked, permanent vulnerability, full exposure to the elements.
* * *
—
Back in Santa Fe, the muddle of motherhood reels me back in. There are many days when I don’t have the energy to make the bed, when yolky breakfast bowls languish all day in the sink, when time passes in a swirl of teething, nursing, napping.
When they hear the news of Dad’s death, friends and acquaintances murmur their condolences. Some tell me it takes a year to grieve the death of someone you love: four seasons, all the anniversaries. This is meant to be a comfort, as though there’s a beginning and an end, and once twelve months are up I’ll magically be done. I’ve said the same thing to friends. But it’s not comforting; it’s panic-inducing. Who gets a whole year just to grieve? What a luxury it would be to mourn without interruption, like a nun cloistered in a whitewashed room in Italy, with stone floors and a view of a blue lake far below. If this were possible, maybe the sorrow really would pass in twelve months. But grief isn’t glamorous. It’s not a fantasy. It’s ordinary and mundane, all tangled up with real life. It is real life.
Before Maisy was born, when my stepsister, Amy, asked me what I thought would be harder, going from no babies to one or from one to two, I replied confidently, “Zero to one.” I’d already made peace with round-the-clock breastfeeding and seriously curtailed freedom. If I wasn’t so tired, if I didn’t feel like I had needles poking into my eyeballs, I would think my naïveté was funny. I did not imagine Pippa, my darling, irrepressible wolverine, scratching my face to get my attention. I didn’t imagine how many times in a day this girl would shriek No! I didn’t realize it was possible to be so exhausted—bleary, hungover, comatose, wrecked—and still wake at first light, buzzing with nervous energy.
Motherh
ood is a kind of schizophrenia. No one will tell you this beforehand, just like no one warns you that breastfeeding is hard to figure out and hurts at first, or about later, when the feral animal baby bites you with her razor teeth. But it’s true. Both are an agonizing ecstasy. The terrible feeling of separation, the longing embedded in your body when you leave your baby—even when you were frantic to get away, to go for a run or even to the grocery store (such outrageous liberation!), even when getting away was the only thing you could think of, the very second you’re gone, you want nothing more than to be home. You are two bodies wrenched apart. Love is almost unbearably physical. In this way, it is not so very different from grief.
I’m so relieved to have left the stupor of cancer behind in Virginia, the papery stinkbugs slinking everywhere, the pain calcifying in my body, that at first I rarely cry. I actually think: I’m handling this!
But grief is cunning and persistent, determined to find an outlet, like water. It channels through my whole body, filling every crevice and joint, following the path of least resistance, like an incoming tide on the mudflats that long-ago summer in Maine, rushing the sand until it’s deep enough to drag me under.
One morning in January, I’m awoken by a dull throb at the base of my neck. It’s been sore on and off since the summer, when I was breastfeeding Maisy seven times a day. I’d written it off as normal overuse, but now, in my half-conscious state, Dad’s words come back to me, a voice from beyond. Pay attention to your body. You will know when Something’s Not Right.