Public Apology

by Dave Bry

  I didn’t understand. We saw each other every day. And like I said, I was confident in the belief that we would be together for the rest of our lives. I figured you could just tell me what was in the letters if you wanted me to know.

  I was missing a larger point. You shook your head and let out a little laugh. A sad, disgusted cough of a laugh. But at yourself, not at me. You told me that you thought you knew me better than you apparently did. You told me, for the first time, that the thought had occurred to you that we should break up.

  “I deserve better,” you said. “I deserve someone who keeps the letters I write.”

  You were right. Letters are important. There’s a difference between saying something out loud and putting it down in writing. Writing is more effortful, more carefully thought out, and in that way, more intimate. Letters are less ephemeral (obviously) and so serve well as a time capsule. And as a looking glass into a person’s mind state. Beyond the words themselves even, you can tell a lot from the slant of someone’s handwriting or the flow of the script. So handwritten letters are especially special.

  I recently found an old letter of yours actually. (I made sure to keep every one you sent after that conversation.) You wrote me a to-do list: some errands I needed to take care of, some things I needed for “life improvement.” Last on the list, though, was a joke referencing an argument we had gotten into that stemmed from something that had happened one day when we were playing Spades. We had been partners in this game, you and I, and I had made a reckless play, endangering our team’s fortunes for the thrill of taking a risk.

  “Regret dismissing my bid,” you wrote, “and sacrificing the team’s score for personal enjoyment for a long, long, long time. Say, fifty years?”

  It’s funny. But I know there were some serious feelings behind the joke. It’s been twenty-two years so far. You were always a very good letter writer.

  Dear Drivers of Cars Driving onto the Gooseneck Bridge in Oceanport, New Jersey, That Day at the End of the Summer of 1990,

  Sorry my father and I almost killed you with a runaway boat.

  It had been a hard summer. My father’s cancer continued to progress. He’d had it for a year and four months already, which was great in some ways because that was a year and two months longer than the doctors had told him he had to live when he was diagnosed. But while he was up and about most of the time, the disease had taken a toll. He looked different, like a shrunken version of himself. And smelled different—these big pills he was taking, prescribed by some alternative healing guru, large, clear yellow capsules filled with a liquid that looked even yellower, they gave his skin a sickly, acrid odor. His voice was softer. Most disturbing, to him at least, was that the tumors in his brain were beginning to show effects.

  That day he had asked me to help him bring our boat, a twenty-six-foot cabin cruiser, from our driveway, where it had sat since we’d taken it out of the water a week or so before, to the boatyard in Neptune where it stayed covered in tarp for the winter. We went out through the carport and each took a side of the large triangular trailer. We lifted it a few inches off the gravel and swung it into position behind the car, lining up the front point, which rolled on a smaller wheel than the two in the back, with the doorknob-shaped hitch attached just below the license plate. He asked me if I could lock it in place. I didn’t know how, I said, though I had watched him do this twice a year since I was a kid.

  He shook his head and tsked.

  “Come on, Dave,” he said. “You’re eighteen years old. You drive a car. You don’t know how to put a trailer on a hitch? You’ve got to learn this stuff.”

  It was in this particular area that I was, and am, most different from my father. He was a tougher, outdoorsy, can-do type. He liked to go camping and skiing, and he kept a shed next to our house with a Peg-Board wall hung with tools. He would bring me out there when I was little and let me crank the vise tight while he worked on small carpentry projects or did some minor auto repair. But I never learned the difference between a wrench and a ratchet. I never learned how to pitch a tent or not lose my mind because of mosquitoes—and while I liked skiing, too, I always had to go in early because my toes got too cold.

  “I’ll do it,” he said unhappily. “You lift.”

  I hoisted the trailer onto the hitch and watched—halfway, still not getting it—as he knelt down and did whatever latching or bolting things he did to lock them together. (I would never learn how to do anything like this. I tried to change a lightbulb last week and ended up unscrewing part of the fixture. It’s sitting on a shelf as I type.)

  When we were done, I offered to drive and held my hand out for the keys. He said no. If he had to be in charge, he’d be in charge.

  So he drove and I rode shotgun and tried not to think about how he smelled, or how lately, a wincing gasp would interrupt a family dinner, a sharp cry might come from his room late at night. He’d recently told me that it sometimes felt like his brain was trying to crack out of his skull. A couple weeks before, we had watched a movie together, and when I’d brought it up the next day, he couldn’t remember anything about it. He reached up and held his head in both hands and said, “I can’t even fucking think anymore!”

  That day that we almost killed you, though, he seemed fine. We’d only been driving for a couple of minutes. The Gooseneck Bridge was near our house, connecting our town, Little Silver, to Oceanport across the Shrewsbury River. We had just passed the highest point on the bridge and were on the downhill slope when I heard a noise from the back of the car. I turned to look and saw the boat swinging away from us into the other lane. There are only two lanes on the Gooseneck Bridge.

  “Dad!” I said. “The boat!”

  He turned to look and saw what had happened, that the trailer had come unhitched. “Holy shit!”

  He leaned on the horn and swerved the car back and forth like he couldn’t decide whether or not he should try to get in the boat’s way. But in a second it was passing us in the oncoming traffic lane.

  I sat stunned as we saw you, two cars approaching the bridge on the Oceanport side. My father blared the horn some more and unrolled his window and started waving his arm. “Get off the road,” he shouted. But you couldn’t hear him.

  You saw, though, and slowed, thank god, and pulled over by the reeds as our boat hit the curb and careened back into our lane in front of us. It rolled downhill like that, gaining speed and passing you—your wide-open mouths and eyes—on its way to rumbling off the road and crashing into a chain-link fence at the base of the bridge.

  We pulled up behind it and stopped the car, and my father exhaled. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “We could have killed someone.”

  He tried to motion you a mea culpa, but you drove off up over the bridge. You would have a good story to tell.

  “I don’t know what happened,” my father said, looking at the steering wheel. “I could have sworn it was latched. I could have sworn I checked it.”

  We got out to survey the damage. The trailer was banged up, but only a little bit, the one small wheel at the front knocked out of alignment. A couple of the posts of the fence had come up out of the ground, but otherwise it was fine—the chain-link mesh had given like a net. The boat looked okay, too, still strapped in its place.

  None of this mattered to my father. He was shaking his head and had a self-questioning expression on his face I didn’t recognize. “I don’t know what happened,” he said again, aloud, but not really to me. “I always check it. I always double-check it.”

  The Oceanport Police Department was visible from where we were standing. A low, flat brick building on the corner of Monmouth Boulevard and the road the bridge turns into, Myrtle Avenue. Within a couple of minutes, we watched a police car pull out of the parking lot, flash its roof lights, and slowly drive over to us. It parked on the grass by our boat, its door opened, and an officer stepped out. He frowned at the boat and the trailer and the fence before turning to us.

  “Who was driving?
” he said.

  “I was,” my father said. “I don’t know what happened, Officer, I…”

  The police officer cut him off. “This was an extremely dangerous situation.”

  “I know,” my father said. “It could have killed somebody. I could have killed somebody. I’m lucky I didn’t kill somebody.”

  My father explained what had happened, how he usually checked the latch so carefully, how it was a point of pride for him. The police officer was gruff, and eyed him accusingly, and mentioned the possibility of arrest and charges of reckless endangerment. And when my father finally copped to the truth, when he admitted that he had cancer and in his brain and that it was affecting his thinking, that was the worst part of the whole day, the worst part of that whole summer, the sound of my dad’s voice when he said that. How clear it was that he didn’t want to be saying it.

  The cop took my dad’s identification and told him he’d have to pay to repair the fence. But then he let us go.

  He said that I should drive, though. So I did. Like I should have driven there to begin with. Like I should have been able to hitch the trailer to our car and make sure the latch was closed tight, safe, secure.

  Dear Dad,

  Sorry I didn’t come right away when you called me.

  This happened on December 25, 1990, the day you died. Since you are dead now, and I don’t imagine that you can read this, or hear it, or know my thoughts or anything, I suppose this is more of an apology to myself. For screwing up in a way that has made me feel bad since. Not horribly, terribly bad—I don’t beat myself up over it too much. But it’s one of those things that I wish I could do over again. I would do it differently.

  We were on an airplane, returning from Rochester, New York, where we’d just celebrated the holiday with Mom’s family, home to New Jersey. You, Mom, Debby, and me. I don’t know why we chose to fly on Christmas Day. Do you get cheaper tickets on Christmas?

  You were sick, sicker than you’d been since the initial chemotherapy treatment a year and a half earlier. You’d outlived the doctors’ original prognosis by sixteen months, doing better at some times than at others, but had recently taken a deep downturn. We had just gotten you a wheelchair because your feet had swollen up to the point where it hurt to walk on them. I remember the expression on Uncle Tom’s face as he pushed you out the door when the cab had come. His effort to smile when we said good-bye.

  On the plane, soon after the pilot switched off the fasten your seat belts signs, you said you had to go to the bathroom. The wheelchair had been stowed in the luggage hold; we’d boarded the plane early, you walking tenderly, with help from Mom and me. So I got up with you, and stood behind you, and held you by your elbows, supporting your weight as we moved down the aisle. You were light, your bones felt thin. But with people sitting in the other seats now, it was a more difficult trip than I’d expected. The flight was surprisingly full for Christmas Day. I glanced down and saw the purple wool booties a friend of yours had knit to cover your socks. They were stretched out like each one had a Nerf football inside it, dragging as much as walking. I felt the other passengers looking at us and I felt embarrassed. I looked straight ahead, avoiding their eyes. Then I felt ashamed for feeling embarrassed. What, was I going to pick up a girl? I kicked one of your feet. You winced and told me to be careful.

  When we got to the bathroom, I helped you inside and you grabbed the handrail tight. We decided we’d leave the door unlocked, so I could get back in if you needed more help. “Stand right outside,” you said. “So you can hear if I call, okay?” Your voice was raspy.

  I said I would, and I closed the door and stepped into a space around a corner, in front of the first row of seats nearby, but out of the aisle so people could pass if they needed to. Crouching slightly, I looked up at the cabin ceiling. I didn’t want to look out over the other passengers. I didn’t want to see what I thought might be pity in their eyes.

  I heard two people having a conversation in a language I didn’t recognize. I tilted my head toward their voices, trying to figure out what country they might be from. (I’m always interested in that sort of thing.) They went on for a bit and I couldn’t get it. Were they speaking Greek? Turkish? Romanian? Is Romanian a language?

  I was still straining to hear them when I heard your voice, faint but urgent, calling my name. I realized right away that I had in fact heard you a couple times already—but not registered it immediately because I was concentrating on the foreign language. I rushed to the door, and you called again as I pushed it open and saw you on the floor next to the toilet. Your pants and underwear were down, and your pale, gaunt legs were folded awkwardly beneath you. You looked up at me. Your eyes were scared.

  “I was calling you!”

  I stood and blinked for a second, hot with chagrin. I felt like a little boy who had just broken something important.

  “I fell,” you said.

  I snapped to and leaned down and grabbed you under your arms. “Here,” I said. “Let me get you up.”

  I lifted you up and sat you on the toilet, holding you there with my hands. You were breathing heavily, and your face didn’t look like itself.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” you said.

  We waited for a moment, and then your mouth curled downward on one side. Your eyes clouded and closed. You made a sound like “eeaughh” and your head lolled forward.

  I pulled you closer and kept you upright, letting your head rest on my shoulder. I didn’t know what to do. You’d been having episodic loss of consciousness over the past few months, Mom had told me. Like mini-seizures, the doctors said they were. So I waited for you to wake up. After a few minutes, though, once I felt your drool soak through my shirt, I called out for help. No one heard at first, so I kicked the door and shouted louder. “Help!”

  A man came to the door and then Mom a moment later. She squeezed in next to me and helped me hold you. I told her what had happened, and she guessed it was another mini-seizure. I heard the pilot come over the address system and ask if there were any medical professionals on board. I had never been on a plane or in a restaurant or any other place when that call had gone out: “Is there a doctor in the house?” It seemed like something from TV. I had the strangely dissociative realization that he was talking about us, our family; we were the emergency. Like we were the people on TV.

  Mom and I sat there with you, crouched down in front of you, taking turns supporting your weight, waiting for you to wake up. For a long time; must have been ten minutes. While she was holding you, I stared at your lips and nostrils to see if I could see any tiny movement. I don’t know at what point exactly I had started to wonder if you were dead. But I was wondering. I wished I had a hand mirror. After a while, a quiet while, I could tell from her face that Mom was wondering the same thing.

  “Do you think…,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Mom said.

  “I can’t tell if he’s breathing.”

  “Neither can I,” she said.

  I put my fingers on your throat, on your Adam’s apple. I thought I felt a pulse, but I didn’t trust myself to distinguish between your pulse and the pulse in my fingertips. I didn’t know whether I was putting my fingers in the right place.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Eventually a pilot came with a man who was, I think, not a doctor but a pharmacist or dentist, and we pulled up your pants and they pulled you out of the bathroom and set you in a chair across the aisle. They put a blanket over you, and Mom sat next to you with her arm around you. An ambulance had been called to meet the plane when it landed, they said. I went back to go sit with Debby, who was only twelve, and a flight attendant in a billowy blouse who had been sitting with her. Debby was crying and asked me what was going on, and I told her I wasn’t sure. That you fell and lost consciousness and that there’d be a doctor meeting the plane when it landed. The flight attendant started crying, too, and told us that her father had died ju
st last year. I guess everyone was fairly certain what had happened, that you had died—I bet the pharmacist knew how to check for a pulse; I imagine him shaking his head to the pilot, quickly, secretly, so Mom couldn’t see—but no one being a doctor, no one was going to make the final call. I don’t blame them. You wouldn’t want to be wrong about something like that.

  I pretty much knew it. I was strangely calm, though. I felt cool and numb and far away from everything. Like I was somewhere way deep down inside myself, looking out at my hands and my clothes and Debby and the flight attendant, this stranger, crying next to me, as if it were all through a window, or a telescope, or the periscope of a submarine.

  An hour later, we were in a brick-walled, warehouse-like security station at the Newark airport. The ambulance had driven right up on the runway—I saw the flashing red lights as we landed—and EMT guys had boarded the plane and put you on a stretcher and carried you off. That part was fast and chaotic. Mom told them, with more volume and urgency than she usually spoke with, that you did not want to be resuscitated or kept alive on a respirator—that you’d signed a directive saying so. She and Debby and I had been taken to the station to wait. A man came in and called Mom into another room, and when she returned, she smiled at us with tears in her eyes and opened her arms and said, “Oh, kids!” and we all hugged. Deb started bawling and Mom said, “We’re going to be okay.”

  The strange farawayness I felt on the plane lasted for days. As relatives arrived, and old family friends, and more food and cards and flowers than we knew what to do with. As I told the rabbi that I did not want to speak at the funeral because I didn’t have anything to say—I didn’t, not in public, not then. As I sat in the front pew, while Ava, your sister, clutched the podium and swayed through her eulogy and David Landy told warm, funny stories about you. As we drove to the cemetery and stood in front of all those people and threw dirt on your casket and the clatter of pebbles and stones on the cold wood planks sounded appropriately real and physical and final to me. As the bright green Astroturf they laid over the top when we were done looked the opposite. As Thea and Pa, your parents from Germany, broke down when the rabbi started his prayer—“Gerht, we sing Kaddish for our Peter!” And sobs and sobs and white knuckles clutching winter coats. “I know! I know!”