by Leah Carroll
“Not really,” I say, embarrassed. I hadn’t expected to have to discuss the paper, much less be found out.
“You tell your dad that Bob says hi. And that his daughter is just as talented and smart as he is.” Bob gathers his tattered sheaf of papers and leaves. I stay behind in the classroom, reading and rereading my essay.
FOR CHRISTMAS THAT year, I buy Derek a pair of Patriots sweatpants, and Taylor, who is four years old, a Teletubby doll. I buy a paperback edition of A Long Day’s Journey into Night for Dad. I’d wanted to get him The Iceman Cometh because it’s his favorite play, but they don’t stock it in the Warwick Mall Waldenbooks. He’d taken me the year before to a small production of Hamlet, and I was mesmerized by the way the words came alive in a way they never had during high school English class.
The day after Christmas, Dad calls me at my aunt’s.
“You sound so shocked,” he says. “I am your dad.”
We meet for lunch at Murphy’s. Dad orders French onion soup and the cheese hangs from strings in his mustache as he eats. I hand him a napkin. We eat our sandwiches and pickles and I tell him about Bob. He laughs.
I start to talk about Taylor, to tell him about everything she has gotten for Christmas and that I really miss not living with her. Dad stops me.
“I really can’t talk about Taylor right now,” he says.
The waitress comes by to see if we want more coffee. I think about it for a second, looking at my watch.
“Have another cup,” says Dad. We drink another cup of coffee and talk about Schindler’s List, which I’ve just seen. Dad talks about the Liam Neeson character, how amazingly he has been rendered. He catches my eye for a moment and we both look away.
“I should get going,” I say.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” he says.
We walk down Fountain Street, near the Journal offices, to the lot where I’ve parked the Escort.
“I had a really fun time in Washington, DC,” I say. It comes out of nowhere, but it seems important to say.
“I did too,” Dad says. He crumples his chin the way he does when he’s thinking hard about something. “I had a really good time.”
I stand by the door of the Escort. I feel like I should hug Dad good-bye. I can’t get in touch with him and I don’t know when I will see him again. But I can’t make myself put my arms around him. It’s like there’s an invisible barrier, years of so much unsaid, blocking the way between us.
“Okay,” I say, getting into the car. He waves good-bye as I reverse the car out of its spot.
Two days later he’s dead.
TWELVE
When I walk into the door of my Aunt Sandy’s house she’s sitting on the corner of the couch, shaking her leg frantically. I can see the panic in her eyes and know right away what she’s going to say.
“Hold on one second,” I say. I walk back out the door and rummage through my purse, my heart pounding. I think maybe I can just not go back in. If I don’t go back in none of this will happen. My aunt comes out and meets me out on the step.
“It’s your dad, Leah,” she says. “He died.”
“Okay,” I say, nodding in confirmation. I walk to the kitchen table, hang my coat over one of the chairs, and put my bag down. “Okay, okay, okay.” I’m nodding and nodding, my head bobbing up and down. My aunt stands next to me, holding my arm.
“Leah?”
My knees wobble, and suddenly I’m on the ground, howling. I keep thinking about the hug. I keep thinking about how he’d asked me to stay for one more cup of coffee. I’ve thought all those years it had been wrong of him to never tell me directly about my mom’s death and how he’d abandoned me as much as I abandoned him. But I realize at that moment that what he’d been trying to do was spare me just this exact feeling. This knowledge that no matter what, he’s never ever coming back. The knowledge that I’ll never get to atone for abandoning him.
AUNT RITA’S SON convinces the obituary section writer of the Journal to list his place of death as Aunt Rita’s house and not the Sportsman’s Inn, the flophouse with a strip club on the first floor where he’d been staying off and on for the last couple of months. He’d burned through his severance and 401(k). I had worried what he’d do when he spent all that money, where he’d live. Now I know.
The details about his death are sketchy. There are whispers that when the manager at the Sportsman’s found his body the call that went out to police dispatch was that there had been a suicide. But nobody can confirm that. His body is autopsied and then taken to the funeral parlor.
“I think you should go and see him one last time,” Aunty Rita says to me. It has been years and years since we’ve spoken, but now suddenly she’s back in my life. At the last moment I decide to go into the room and see his body. The funeral director tells me what to expect.
“He doesn’t have any makeup or anything on. And we did a good job of cleaning it up, but you’ll see there’s a cut on the side of his head.” He hands me a plastic bag.
“Everything he had with him should be in there. I have his clothes too, when you’re done,” he says. “Everything except his pants.” The man looks flustered all of the sudden. “His pants were, they were… soiled.”
He leads me into the room where Dad’s body is on a kind of pedestal, a white sheet pulled up to his neck. He’s going to be cremated, a desire he’d expressed to me and Ann-Marie over and over again, so there’s no coffin. I walk up to him, looking down at his face. It has gone a bit sunken already, but there’s his silver hair, his mustache. It’s him. I lean forward and kiss him on the forehead, touching him for the first time in years. His skin is very, very cold and I feel aware of the way it stretches over his bones, holding his insides together like a package. There’s nobody in there, I think.
Aunty Rita decides on a Catholic Mass for Dad, though he’d converted to Judaism to marry my mother and had discussed his disgust for all religions on more occasions than I can possibly count. I think maybe he might see the humor in these priests waving around their incense and holy water over a heathen. And a Jewish one at that.
At the Mass, my cousin Shawn, Rita’s son who’s in his late twenties, talks about how his uncle was the coolest guy he knew, how because of him Shawn had the coolest sneakers when he was a teenager. He cries the whole time and struggles to get through a reading of Dylan Thomas:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
In the receiving line, I shake endless hands. There are a lot of men my dad’s age who are crying. The incongruity of it reminds me of being at the Vietnam Memorial. After the Mass I’m invited to Blake’s for the Irish wake they’re holding in his honor. There are more crying men there, telling me how much my dad meant to them. I drink Heineken and shots of Jameson in his honor. I feel special and I feel guilty for feeling special.
“To Kevin,” someone will yell, and then everyone echoes “To Kevin!” and then we all swallow our whiskey. I vomit in the bar bathroom but I haven’t eaten all day or the day before and there’s nothing in my stomach except for some sour bile that dribbles reluctantly out of my body. One of the young waitresses rubs my back and tells me how she’d thought of Dad as a kind of father, too, how warm and nurturing he was, and how he respected all the girls, and she just felt safe with him. I heave over the toilet bowl, feeling like something in my digestive system will rip open if it doesn’t stop soon—because that’s not how I feel about him at all.
I drive home on 95 with my little boom box off, still half drunk and trying hard to focus on the lines in the road. Suddenly there’s a high screeching noise all around me. I think something is caught in my tires and pull off to the shoulder, coming to a stop. But the sound doesn’t go away. Then I realize it’s me. I’m shrieking. Even after I realize, I can’t stop. It feels like I might sit there all night screaming and digging my nails deep into my skin.
&nb
sp; DAD’S BODY IS cremated and the death certificate we need to give to a seemingly endless number of people—my school, his bank (where his remaining two hundred dollars is in a checking account), the tow lot where his Jetta was stashed, the storage facility where all his stuff had been taken when he’d been evicted, months before—lists his cause of death as
natural, the result of an exploded heart and used-up liver. When we get the official report with his cause of death, the police officer who owns Blake’s hands me a small square of paper. He tells me he wasn’t able to give it to me until after the autopsy results. It’s a suicide note. I don’t know what else to call it. Apparently he’d gone to a friend’s house, typed it on her computer, and asked the bartender at Blake’s to hold it for me. Initially, the bartender refused—he was not going to let Kevin go out like that—but he put it aside for safekeeping when my dad left the note behind on the bar.
Unfolding the paper and reading his words, almost a month after seeing his dead body and burying his ashes in the Carroll family plot next to his beloved mother and despised father, is like hearing him speak again. He wrote:
Leah, try to understand this is not your fault. I’m not mad at anyone or trying to punish anyone. I just can’t live inside my own head anymore. Depression and alcoholism have ruined my life.
The proudest moment of my life was when you were six and read the Night Before Christmas at Ann-Marie’s mother’s house on the Eve. I’m proud of you now by going to school and doing something interesting with your life.
I always loved you more than life even if I couldn’t show it to you most of the time.
Try to see Beethoven’s Ninth with the chorale in person sometime. It’s magical.
Read the Mark Twain short story the Five Boons of Life to try to understand how I feel.
Take lots of pictures.
Use my car, the exhaust is new, it should last a long time
I love you take care of Taylor let her know I wasn’t that bad a guy
Use your mind
AFTER DAD DIES, I’m worried I will wind up like my parents and also terrified that I might not. By the time I finally make it to a four-year college in 2001, I’ve reinvented myself as wholesome, and capable, a possessor of material things that prove my worth: hundreds of books, monogrammed handbags, cashmere twin sets, and pearl earrings. I’m meticulous about my appearance. Each night I flat iron my thick, frizzy hair into a gleaming mane and in the mornings I wrap my ponytail in a pastel ribbon.
My friends and I hang out in a decrepit bar on Boylston street near our campus in Boston. We’re writing students pretending to be writers. We drink our afternoons away discussing David Foster Wallace and one upping each other with obscure pop-culture trivia. With enough foamy beer in me I feel warm and confident. Surrounded mostly by boys, I assert myself loudly and bombastically. I can swear, quote Joyce, rap every lyric to “Juicy,” and frost a layer cake. My headbands and my penny loafers are my armor. I want to be the girl who gets drunk with the boys at two p.m. on a Tuesday and also the girl who young mothers ask to hold their toddler’s hand outside of a public restroom.
I go into my college computer lab, access the Providence Journal archives, and type in my mother’s name. The articles are behind a paywall, and I have to pay to access them. I punch in my debit card number and read everything Dean Starkman had written. It seems so strange that I can read those words, “Give us the death rattle,” and all around me people work on papers and check Friendster and have no idea what is happening. I have the Yeats line in my head: the lonely impulse of delight. I log off the computer, grab my bag, and walk to the bar where my friends are drinking and laughing in the gloom.
“Let’s get shots!” I say. When I get my wallet out to pay, I discover it’s gone. I run back to the computer lab where I find my wallet next to the computer I’d been using. Somebody has taken all the cash but left everything else behind.
YEARS LATER, I sit at another funeral, this time surrounded by the Rhode Island Chapter of the Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association, and think of the last time I had seen the man in the coffin, Billy Temple: my dad’s best friend in his final years. The vets stand at attention around the edges of the room. They’re stone-faced and turned out in leather vests and American flags. Their tattoos mark their time in various wars, mostly Vietnam, but I notice one or two younger men, younger than me surely, with patches affixed to their leather jackets denoting their service in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I thought that surely I would see Billy Temple again, that I would get to ask him more questions about who my father was and what he was doing in the days before he died. I thought in some way that my dad’s tragedy was singular to me and that it couldn’t be duplicated or improved upon. But ten years after my father’s death, Billy Temple, a former police officer who carried a concealed weapon, was involved in a minor car accident on Nooseneck Road in Coventry. When the police arrived, he turned the gun on one of the officers. I think that must have been the moment when, as a former police officer himself, he knew it was all over. Billy sat for a bit in the car, weapon pointed at his chin, then stepped out of the vehicle, moved the gun to the side of his head, and fired a single shot. By the time he was transported to Kent Hospital, the hospital where I had been born, he was dead.
The last time I saw Billy Temple alive, I’d been twenty-five and was collecting more information about my parents. I met him at Twin Oaks, an Italian restaurant in Cranston.
When I walked in, Billy turned on his bar stool, rose to meet me, and asked, “Can I get you a drink?” It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and the winter sun reflected off the Pawtuxet River, pouring into the oak-and-maroon interior of the lounge area where we sat.
“I’ll have a glass of Pinot Grigio,” I told him. The bartender, in his white shirt and black vest, looked at me. He reached for a wineglass and winked at Billy.
“This is Kevin Carroll’s daughter,” said Billy, and the bartender’s whole face changed. I pretended not to notice, joking instead with Billy about my baby face and getting carded. Billy drank from a snifter of Grand Marnier, and I tried to keep it together next to this man who looked and acted so much like my dad. I took a big swallow of wine.
Earlier that day, before meeting Billy, I’d picked up my dad’s autopsy report from the Rhode Island medical examiner’s office. In the car I tore open the manila envelope stamped CONFIDENTIAL and read the disclaimer on the first sheet of paper.
This report provides an explicit description of the deceased’s Injury(s), disease(s), or characteristic(s). When present, postmortem Changes brought about by natural decomposition after death and additional Postmortem artifacts are also described in the report(s).
Please consider that the report may have an adverse impact on the Reader. The reader may want the support of family, friends, clergy, or personal Physician during their review of the enclosed report. Regretfully, the emotional Effects of these reports cannot be predicted or prevented without sacrificing the legal and scientific value of the report itself.
I felt a sad and perverse little thrill go through me as I shuffled through the pages. It came from this proof of things, from the physicality of the fourteen-page autopsy report. In deciding to retrace my dad’s last day alive, the office of the medical examiner was my first step.
The place was something straight out of central casting: basement level, concrete floors, and permed receptionists with thick Rhode Island accents. I introduced myself as the next of kin and they chewed gum and unlocked a filing cabinet. I wondered what it must be like to work in that basement office all day. I wondered if the women packed Tupperware containers of leftover pasta or if they went out on their lunch break for sandwiches. All of it gave me a strange sense of satisfaction. This was how things should be.
The first page of the report read:
The body is that of a normally developed, adequately nourished, adult white male who appears approximately the stated age 48 years. The measured height is 72 inc
hes, and the scale weight is 225 pounds. Rigor mortis is present and equally developed in the extremities. Livor Mortis is light purple, posterior, dependent and fixed. The body is cold to touch. The scalp hair is gray, measuring up to 1 1/2 inches in length. A laceration to the right side of the head and superior portion of the right ear will be described under evidence of Injury. There are no palpable fractures. The external auditory canals are dry. The irises are hazel/blue. The pupils are round, symmetric and measure 0.5 cm in diameter. The cornea are clear. The conjunctivae and sclerae are unremarkable. The nose is palpably intact in the midline, and the left nostril contains a slight amount of grumous, dried, dark brown fluid, extending over the upper lip. The teeth are natural and in good repair. There is no evidence of injury to the lips, tongue or oral mucous membranes. The anterior structures of the neck are palpably intact in the midline. The neck veins are slightly distended, and there is upper chest, neck, and facial plethora. The chest cage is symmetric and intact with mildly increased anterior to posterior diameter. There is mild bilateral gynecomastia. The abdomen is firm and atraumatic. The lower extremities are symmetric and intact. The feet are clean and atraumatic. The upper extremities are symmetric and intact. The hands are clean and atraumatic and the fingernails are fairly well groomed. The thoracic, lumbar, and sacral spines are palpably intact. The anus is clean and atraumatic. There is no unusual or distinctive odor about the body.
When received the body is clothed in blue denim pants, a black leather belt, a black long sleeve sweater, a gray sock, and a “Timberland” brown boot the left boot and sock have been removed from the body for attachment of the toe tag.