When You Went Away

by Michael Baron

  “You’ve been living a fantasy. How long did you think that would last? How long do you think it’ll be before something comes along that you can’t handle and these friends of yours fail you?”

  She wiped at her eyes again. “Look Dad, if you wanna handcuff me and throw me in the back of your car, go ahead and try. But that’s the only way you’re getting me back to Port Jefferson.”

  Maybe I should have slung her over my shoulder at that point.Maybe I should have tried a more conciliatory approach, something that would make her want to come with me. Instead, I said, “I’m not leaving here without you.”

  “Then you’re gonna look awfully stupid standing in this parking lot all by yourself at two o’clock in the morning.”

  At that point, the curly-haired woman walked up again and said to Tanya, “Are you’re okay? Who is this guy?”

  Tanya turned to the woman and said. “Yeah, I’m okay, Marlene.” She sniffed and darted a glance in my direction. “This man is my father. He was just leaving.”

  “I’m really not going anywhere, Tanya.”

  “Then I am.” She stalked off toward the arena.

  I followed after her. “You can’t run away from this.”

  She stopped and turned so quickly that I nearly ran into her. Once again, the tears flowed down her face with unusual force. “Do you have any idea what happened here tonight? You shock the hell out of me by showing up and telling me that my mother is dead. Now you want me to go back to Long Island with you and pretend to have a normal life? You have got to be kidding.”

  “You don’t want to handle this on your own.”

  “I have to handle this on my own.”

  “Why? You have people at home who love you.”

  “Really? What exactly do I have at home? I have you, who gave up on me years ago, a baby brother who probably dominates the whole household, and I have a million memories of a mother who no longer exists. Does that sound like home to you?”

  “I never gave up on you,” I said weakly.

  She put both hands up to her face. When she brought them back down, I thought I saw – just for a second – that she believed me. But then her anger descended again. “Dad, let me make this as clear to you as I possibly can. If you ever want to see me again – whenever the hell that might be – then you’ll leave now. If you try to take me home, I’ll leave again. And no matter what, you’ll never find me.”

  In that moment, I knew that she meant what she said. And I knew I couldn’t do anything to persuade her. I had no idea why Tanya was rejecting me this way, but she was doing so absolutely.

  I closed my eyes and held up a hand in her direction. When I looked at her again, her posture was stiffer. “I’m staying at the Ramada. If you change your mind, I’ll be there until tomorrow morning.”

  She wiped at her eyes again and then turned and walked back toward the van. I turned that way as well, but otherwise didn’t move. I watched her collapse into Marlene’s arms. The woman patted her hair and tried to console her in a way that Tanya wouldn’t let me.

  I’mnot sure how long I stood there.When I couldn’t take it any longer, I went back to the hotel, the rhythms and the celebration following me, tormenting me.

  • • •

  I never believed that Tanya would show up before I left the next morning. I therefore shouldn’t have been disappointed that she didn’t. And yet I was.

  I had never given up on her. I might have been ineffective at showing her how much she impressed me. I might have built up immunity to the sting of the hundreds of times she slighted me over the years. I might have let Maureen deal with her exclusively too much since she became a teenager, making the preponderance of our interaction verbal sparring matches. But I never once gave up on her. I truly believed that our difficulties were finite and that something more fulfilling was waiting on the other side.

  But now, in an effort to bring her back into the fold, I brought her the piece of news most guaranteed to keep her away. A home without her mother was no home she wanted.

  As I checked out of the hotel, the woman at the registration desk told me there was an envelope for me. She handed me a note written on hotel stationery. The handwriting was unmistakably Tanya’s. All it said was:

  I’m as far away as yesterday

  Or the rays of the setting sun

  Was this her parting message to me? Why, after what she said the night before, did she feel the need to punctuate our last exchange with this? Did she think I somehow missed the point?

  The lines were from a song, but couldn’t remember which one. It wasn’t until I retrieved my car and began the long drive back home that I remembered they were the words to a River song that was on the live album, the first two lines of the refrain.

  Two other lines followed:

  But one thing I’ve learned along the way Is that gone is never really gone

  BOOK TWO

  While You Were

  Out in the

  World

  NINE

  Smoother and Sweeter

  In the month after I returned from Pittsburgh, I vacillated wildly in my feelings about what happened that night between Tanya and me. There were moments – plenty of them – when I simply believed that I’d lost her again, that I’d provided her with every reason to stay away. But in other moments, I thought about the note she left me and the message implied therein. Sometimes at night, I put on the River CD and tried to take comfort in the belief that “gone is never really gone,” that Tanya would be back someday and that this day wasn’t as distant as it often seemed.

  I also spent a lot of time thinking about Tanya’s recrimination that I gave up on her. Surely, this was inspired at least in some part by how stunned she was to learn about Maureen. (And, believe me, I imagined her thinking on hundreds of occasions, “Why couldn’t it have been you?”). But she wasn’t wrong that somewhere along the line the joy in our relationship dimmed and then was nearly eclipsed by tiffs and coexistence.

  Trying to remember the last truly great time we had alone together, I needed to go back before her fourteenth birthday. As was usually the case, it had something to do with food. The kitchen was the one place Tanya and I shared openly and unreservedly together. She took an interest in cooking when she was in preschool, and over the years, I taught her numerous recipes and techniques. To mark the end of the school year, I told Tanya that we were going to put everything she learned into practice in the form of an elegant dinner party for a half dozen of her friends. We spent weeks devising and testing original dishes, drove all the way into Manhattan in search of the best ingredients, and took an entire Saturday to prepare the meal. The result was a level of teamwork that surpassed any we shared before, and Tanya was extremely pleased with the results. She impressed her friends and made me terribly proud of her.

  “I think she might be a cooking prodigy,” I said to Maureen in bed that night.

  “Maybe she’ll make huge amounts of money as a celebrity chef and buy us a retirement home on the Costa del Sol,” Maureen said, teasing me.

  “I mean it. She has much more skill than I had at her age. I wonder if there’s a weekend program for her at the Culinary Institute. I’m gonna check.”

  Maureen laughed. “It was a great meal, Gerry.”

  “It was a great meal. And she did most of it. I’m telling you, she’s a prodigy.We have to foster this.” Maureen simply laughed again.

  The next couple of weeks felt different between Tanya and me. We talked more about things like music and pop culture – things that both of us cared about, but which we didn’t really share – and she even took more of an interest in my job. It was a heady time. She was always so much closer to Maureen than she was to me and I never begrudged this (not really, anyway). Though I enjoyed having a taste of it.

  But I was a victim of lousy timing. Soon after this, Tanya went away to summer camp for six week,s and when she returned, she wasn’t quite the same and we were definitely not the same. I trie
d to get her to talk about the new Radiohead album and she sniffed at me, suggesting with her mannerisms that I couldn’t possibly have an opinion that mattered. I tried to get her to watch the DVD of High Fidelity with me and she blew me off. I told her that I thought it was time for us to put together another dinner party and she seemed bored by the suggestion. I never did find out what happened that summer, but something had caused our relationship to take two giant steps backward. Maureen bore the brunt of some of this also, but the two of them had so much emotional equity with one another that they could navigate this sea change without capsizing.

  I, on the other hand, felt cheated. And when Tanya kicked into full teenager mode, I had no patience for it.

  This might look a lot like giving up, though I never saw it that way. It was resignation. I knew I couldn’t have the relationship with my daughter that I really wanted and so I made myself accept that it was something less. But I never stopped wanting the relationship.

  And even now, I still wanted it. I had received no communication from her since Pittsburgh (Codie got one e-mail message that started out stiff and ended somewhat teary), though I faithfully booted up the computer every night. I wanted so much to reach out to her, to have some line of contact. I even considered driving to another River concert to see her again, even though I wasn’t sure she was still with the Riverriders. But I understood that I would never be able to retrieve her that way.

  I sat in my library staring at the computer screen, willing a message from her to appear. Realizing the futility of it, I pushed away from the desk. I needed an outlet for what I felt. I needed some way of expressing myself to her.

  It was then that I remembered the leather-bound blank book that sat in my desk drawer. Maureen gave it to me for Christmas the year before last. At the time, I wasn’t sure why she did it – I had never shown any interest in keeping a journal – and when I thanked her, my confusion must have been obvious.

  “I don’t know why I got this for you,” she said. “I just thought you might want to write something down some day.”

  I opened the book and let it stay blank in front of me for several minutes. Then in the middle of the first page, I wrote the words:

  While You Were

  Out in the World

  I would create this document for my daughter. Here, I would speak to her without restraint and without concern about her response. I could share my feelings, let my guard down, and not worry if she were listening or if she judged what I said. I had no idea whether she would ever see these pages, but I knew I had to write them honestly and without inhibitions. I began at the beginning.

  I remember how the responsibility of being a parent struck me all at once. Your mother and I drove to the hospital while she was in labor and it finally got through to me. Before that, I intellectualized what being a father meant, but it hadn’t really registered.

  And I have to admit that I panicked. The very idea that we were your sole means of support, that we were absolutely responsible for your life, was insanely scary to me. I was 22 years old, out of school a little more than a year, just getting into a groove at work, still caught up in the pure buzz of coming home to your mother every night – and doing something this big, this “no backsies,” was daunting. I drove that last mile to the hospital wishing for a traffic jam, as though a delay in getting to the delivery room would actually forestall my future.

  And of course your birth did change everything. If you’ve never heard the name Benny Scarmenti before, it’s because my best friend from college came over exactly once after you were born, realized that I wasn’t willing to drink myself into a stupor with a 3:00 feeding in the offing, and moved on to another party. The same was true with other friends, who we slowly replaced with parents who had young kids. The focus of conversation between your mother and me shifted from the future to the present – to be accurate, it shifted almost entirely to you for the first couple of years. And I remember realizing with a chill one day after my boss ticked me off that I couldn’t just up and quit my job anymore.

  But what I didn’t realize on that drive to the hospital was how smooth the transition would be. Drinking with Benny had lost its appeal a long time before and if we weren’t drunk, he wasn’t nearly as much fun to be with. The friends we lost along the way weren’t meant to be long-term friends in the first place. I liked talking about your first smile, your first step, your first everything. A lot of the people we met through playgroups and preschool turned out to be great. And I never would have simply up and quit my job, no matter how much my boss angered me.

  One of the things I realized was that if you were meant to be a parent at all, the changes don’t come as a burden, but as an opportunity to evolve in ways that you wanted to evolve anyhow. This was the secret handshake, the thing that only parents had together. You don’t tolerate parenthood. You don’t survive it. You grow with it.

  I don’t know that I ever told you how much you changed me. I definitely know that I never thanked you for it. And as much as you did for me, I know you did so much more for your mother. She was fuller after you arrived. More amazed by life. Even sexier. She became more of what she was supposed to become. I guess I should thank you for that as well.

  Anyway, it turned out that there was no traffic jam on the way to the hospital. I even found a parking space right away. I suppose there was a message in this.

  It felt good writing this way. And I felt closer to Tanya by doing it. I was absolutely determined to stay in touch with my daughter. Even if it was an entirely one-way conversation.

  • • •

  Reese became much more of a person every day. We had exchanges now. They weren’t sustained exchanges to be sure, but I did things that generated a reaction from him and vice versa. I got the impression that he would have a great sense of humor when he got older. He liked to laugh, which I suppose every infant did. But he also seemed to love making me laugh. If he did something that got that response, he did it repeatedly. And a few days later, he tried it another time, just to see if it still entertained me. I found it fascinating that he was learning in this way and always rewarded him for his efforts.

  Reese was the one unequivocal joy in my life. I knew I could glean messages from the losses I suffered, messages that applied to the relationship I had with my son. And certainly at least some of what I felt about him had to do with the fact that he was here. He hadn’t run off. Fate hadn’t taken him away. But there was much more to it than that. Of course, I loved him. After Tanya was born, I came to accept that parental love was included in the starter kit. But I also really liked having Reese around. He was good company.

  This really came clear to me on Opening Day. For the last several years – since I had enough security at my job to do something like this without repercussions from my supervisors – I took the afternoon of Opening Day off to watch the Yankees on television. I thought about skipping it this time around because this year was not like any other, and then I decided that would be a mistake. And so with a couple of hot dogs on the griddle, sauerkraut warming in a pot, and pureed butternut squash in Reese’s bowl, I turned on the television for the pregame show. Reese was in his baby seat (which he’d pretty much out-grown) on the kitchen counter, and he cooed and waved his hands wildly while I finished preparing lunch. In the last week, he’d become more animated, gesturing and making sounds almost nonstop. I assume it was a warning of sorts that he was going to be crawling soon enough and that he would channel all of this gesticulating into skittering across the floor; that in the very near future, I would need to watch every single move he made.

  Though I knew that how the Yankees performed in the preseason offered little indication of how they would do once the regular season began, the news from Florida had not been encouraging. Very few of their pitchers got batters out regularly, and no one in the starting lineup hit the ball with authority. The only player who had an exceptional spring was Bobby Kitterer and the team sent him down to the AAA Scranton team
for more seasoning, the Yankees choosing to open the year with a journeyman left fielder they got a week ago from the San Diego Padres. It had been a long time since I felt this skittish about their chances.

  I moved Reese’s high chair in front of the television along with the hot dogs and the squash. Reese loved butternut squash nearly as much as he loved apricots. A pattern was emerging – he had a decided fondness for smoother and sweeter foods. I knew it was still too soon to introduce him to spices, but I wondered how his appreciation of tastes would change when he discovered ancho chilies, garlic, and salt.Would he still look upon peas indifferently when they were sautéed with onions and olive oil? Would he be nearly so disdainful of string beans once he tried them with Szechwan peppercorns, soy, and ginger? Or was this sweet tooth going to last him a lifetime?Was he going to be one of those marshmallows- on-sweet-potatoes people? And could I really continue to love him if he were?

  The introduction of the starting lineups on the field interrupted my thoughts about food. I offered Reese a key fact or two about each player, he absorbed this with little comment, and we finished eating and settled in for the game. I tried to sit Reese on my lap, but he squirmed out of it almost immediately.He did, however, seem perfectly happy to sit next to me on the couch. The night before, I bought him a foam rubber ball bearing the Yankee logo, and he gummed it now while the Yanks’ ace stood on the mound and tossed the first pitch of the year – a strike.

  “Here we go, Reese. It’s a new season.”

  Reese chewed the ball harder, though it was unlikely that it was in anticipation of another World Series title.

  It didn’t take long for the excitement of the day to dim. Immediately after that first strike, the Devil Rays’ leadoff hitter stroked the next pitch to the wall for a double. Four consecutive hits followed and all of those runners scored before there were two outs. Then, to cap off a dreadful first inning of the first game, the Rays’ number seven hitter – who batted .209 the previous season – hit a home run to straightaway centerfield. The Yankees had yet to bat and they were already five runs down.