The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  My father has been gone for over a year, but I still find myself driving down to his condo now and then. I ended up selling it a few months after he died, but I find a weird comfort in just sitting in my car near his old garage. I will in fact do this for years to come.

  My half brother Mike had to fly out from Atlanta to help me clean out the condo. I realized one day that I was never going to be able to do it on my own. Together we finished it in a weekend, moving systematically through each room, Mike holding up object after object. “Toss, sell, or store?” he’d ask patiently.

  I was incredibly grateful for his help, but I felt guilty all the same. Of his four children, my father had left me, the youngest and least capable, in charge of everything. My half siblings, two brothers and a sister, are all at least thirty years older than me.

  Mike, the oldest, lives in Atlanta and works for Delta. He is gruff but kind, and over the next several years we will grow closer than we ever were when my father was alive. In fact years later it will be Mike who walks me down the aisle at my wedding, his face bursting with pride as though I were his own daughter.

  Candy is a lawyer and lives in DC with her husband and son, Brian. It was in the driveway of her house that I last saw my mother.

  Eric, the youngest, is actually the least capable of all of us, having lived a scattered and tragic life. He will die of a sudden heart attack two years from now, in Candy’s basement in DC, surrounded by his beloved blues record collection, and I’m not sure that I will ever figure out how to feel peaceful about his swift passing.

  Sitting there, outside the condo, I close my eyes and talk to my father silently in my head.

  Dad, I don’t know where to go from here.

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS later I find my answer.

  A few years ago Holly and Kevin went to hear Dave Eggers read from his first book—a memoir called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—and Holly later mailed the book to me in New York.

  I scanned the book before I finished reading Holly’s accompanying letter. I could tell from his picture that Eggers was just a couple of years older than me and that the book was about how he had lost both parents in his early twenties. I felt a hopeful twinge and went back to Holly’s letter:

  I thought you would enjoy this book. While he was signing it, I told him that my friend who he was inscribing this to had had a somewhat similar experience and was writing about it. He said that he thinks it’s a bad idea to read a book like the one you’re trying to write, but I don’t buy that. I think you’ll like it. I hope so.

  I read it in only a few sittings, fascinated by Eggers’s similar story. I’d never met anyone who had lost even one parent.

  I often wonder who I would be had my parents not died. I watch my friends, envying the security they feel in their lives. They don’t even realize they feel so safe, but I can see it in the way they try out different career paths and relationships. In the ways they move toward each mile marker with a seeming confidence that it will be there when they arrive.

  I imagined that Eggers has watched his friends in a similar way.

  A few months after Holly sent me his book, Eggers was reading at my college in New York. I went by myself, sitting in a center row in the large auditorium. I was surrounded by young women, all of them whispering about him. I felt a stomach-tightening sense of possession over the author and I bristled each time one of them wondered aloud if he was cute.

  When he finally appeared on stage, he was indeed a little cute, but mostly he was funny and irreverent and the packed auditorium responded at the end with a standing ovation. My heart raced throughout the reading, wanting so much to connect with this man who surely understood my plight.

  There’s something incredibly lonely about grieving. It’s like living in a country where no one speaks the same language as you. When you come across someone who does, you feel as though you could talk for hours.

  It’s been years since that reading at the New School, but when I see that Eggers will be reading at UCLA, I buy tickets and decide to take my friend Abby. I can’t help the tingling feeling I have at the thought of seeing him in person again.

  It’s a good reading. They Might Be Giants play first and then Dave does the usual unexpected stuff involving random guest participation. The crowd is made up of the typical twenty- to thirty-five-year-old hipsters who fanatically follow Eggers’s San Francisco–based magazine empire, McSweeney’s.

  At the end of the reading Dave leans into the microphone and announces that he is starting a Los Angeles branch of his literacy nonprofit 826 Valencia. He rattles off an e-mail address, and I memorize it so hard that I may as well have tattooed it on the inside of my wrist.

  Twenty minutes later I’m standing in line to get another book signed, so nervous that I feel woozy. I look around at all the other audience members who have lined up to have their books signed. Girls and boys alike, we all want to marry Dave Eggers.

  When it is finally my turn, I fumble with my book.

  I’m sorry, I say. I’m nervous.

  Don’t be nervous, he says kindly. Here, do you want a pen? Some water?

  I laugh. In my book he writes:

  “Claire . . . and always they gave them light of their own creation. Dave Eggers”

  I wait until I’m in the car to cry. Something about seeing someone who absolutely must know how I feel tugs at me relentlessly. I can’t shake the feeling that he has answers to my questions. That he has salves for my wounds.

  As soon as I get home I send an e-mail to the address, and a few weeks later I find myself walking down Venice Boulevard, carefully balancing a tray of homemade raspberry muffins. I’m on my way to a breakfast meeting for 826LA, and I’m determined to stand out in the sea of obsessive Eggers fans. The muffins will, in fact, earn me a mention the next day in a Los Angeles Times article about the impressive turnout.

  It’s funny to be in a regular house with a person I don’t know but have spent so much time focusing on. Dave’s wife, the writer Vendela Vida, is also in attendance though, and her presence is an adequate enough reality check. I take a seat on the floor with the other thirty or so people who have shown up.

  Dave stands before us and speaks enthusiastically about his plans for 826LA. This is to be the third location, with centers already up and running in both San Francisco and New York. The main part of 826LA will function as a free tutoring center where local kids can drop in for homework help, but there will also be workshops and classes, partnerships with local schools, author readings, and bookmaking projects.

  Each of the branches comes with a storefront—the San Francisco location hosts a pirate shop, Boston a bigfoot store, and LA’s will feature time travel. It’s a unique way to draw people in, Dave explains, in the hopes that they stick around long enough to see what’s going on behind the scenes.

  I’ve never heard of anything like it, but I’m in.

  In a weird twist of fate, the location for 826LA is just blocks from my Venice apartment. Since I’m still unemployed I begin showing up every day. A handful of other volunteers do the same, and we spend the mornings painting the second floor walls of an old public building, working to make this the future home of a tutoring center.

  I chat with the other volunteers and get busy acquainting myself with a paint roller.

  Eggers is there that first weekend, and I keep tabs on him out of the corner of my eye. He is friendly with everyone and works hard building bookshelves and making runs to the hardware store. On the second day we end up painting a small office together. The color is a pale, creamy yellow and it’s satisfying to lay it on the wall. The more we paint, the brighter the room becomes, until we are bathed in a warm, golden light.

  I can’t know that a few weeks from now, when I am asked to come on board as volunteer coordinator, this very room will be my office, but nonetheless I love the room for its light, for it being the place where I finally got to say my piece to Dave Eggers.

  As we paint we banter,
mostly about the space, about plans for the organization. I ask him questions about 826 Valencia, and he answers readily, obviously proud of the work they’ve done. As I listen to him talk I ponder the actions he’s taken. We both lost our parents. We have both experienced incredible loss and sadness in our lives.

  But Dave doesn’t seem sad. In fact he seems the opposite: energized and passionate. It doesn’t sound like he has ever spent all day on a couch feeling sorry for himself.

  How did he get past all of it? I wonder to myself.

  My parents died too, I say suddenly. We are working on separate walls, and in the brief silence that follows my sentence, I listen to the sticky sound of his paint roller.

  That must have been hard for you, he says finally.

  I swallow. It was.

  I have this dreadful feeling, suddenly, that a million people have told him about their losses. My confession, my big connection, is nothing new. In fact I realize, with a pang of insecurity, that he’s probably cringing right now.

  I want to fix the moment somehow, take it back maybe, but I can’t think of anything else to say.

  I want to ask him how he got where he is now, but I’m too intimidated.

  Before either of us can say anything else, someone comes into the room and asks Dave to inspect some tables they’re putting together.

  Excuse me, he says.

  And just like that it’s over.

  DAVE HAS GONE BACK to San Francisco, but I continue to walk down to the 826LA space every day. There’s constantly something to help out with, curtains to hang, bookshelves to hammer together. The walls are all painted. A globe hangs in one corner and there are neat cups of freshly sharpened pencils all over the room.

  As the launch date approaches, I spend hours there, and am often the last to leave. Walking home each night, staring down at the yellow paint on my sneakers, I have this new feeling fluttering around inside me.

  Something like satisfaction.

  Maybe something like happiness.

  Shortly before the official opening the executive director asks me to come on board as the volunteer coordinator, and I accept in a heartbeat. Even though we’ve hardly begun, I want nothing more than to be officially part of this organization.

  That first Monday a few of us stand nervously at the windows, watching kids pile out of a school bus. We’ve been working hard to get the word out to parents and schools, and a local teacher has arranged for her high school essay class to drop by for the afternoon. The students glance suspiciously around the room, not sure what to expect, but one of the volunteers jumps in before they can backpedal.

  Hey, guys, how about you grab a seat right here?

  Slowly the kids fill the room, scattering the contents of their backpacks across the brand-new tables, grabbing pencils from the little cups we’ve so carefully stocked.

  I end up at a table with three boys: two eleventh graders, Freddy and Ismael, and a shy, sweet ninth grader named Robert. Their essays are supposed to focus on teamwork, and I begin by asking them each to go around and read what they have out loud. They are here today to get help on their final drafts.

  Before they start I fight back a breath of nervousness. I’m worried about what they’re going to read and how I’ll respond. I wonder if they’re annoyed with me for asking them to read out loud and if any of them are going to volunteer or if I’ll have to pick on one of them.

  Suddenly Freddy shrugs his shoulders, leans forward, and begins reading aloud from a crumpled piece of paper. I am immediately captivated by his vivid description of the feeling of handcuffs encircling his wrists when he was fourteen and being arrested for beaming lasers at passing helicopters. When he finishes reading what he has so far, he explains that he plans to incorporate teamwork into the essay by recounting how he and his friends, by not working as a team, had failed to escape the LAPD.

  We move on to Ismael after that. He’s written about his grandfather in Mexico, known to have had “less than fourteen but more than eight” children. Ismael isn’t quite sure how to bring teamwork into the essay, but after a thorough discussion between the four of us he comes to the realization that his grandfather had been the leader of the team that is his family. Robert, only fourteen but already a gifted writer, has finished his entire piece already, a story about getting trapped on a boat with his family on Lake Mead one summer, as a dangerous storm threatened to capsize their vessel.

  We are all impressed with Robert’s essay, especially by the way he so easily describes the teamwork required to keep all the family members afloat. After an hour the boys are grinning at one another, energized by all the new ideas they have come up with for their essays. We make plans to meet up often in the next few weeks to continue working together.

  When I walk out of the center an hour later, I’m buzzing with happiness. I realize that for the first time since my father died, an entire afternoon went by in which I didn’t feel sorry for myself.

  In fact I didn’t even think about myself.

  Months and months later I’m sitting in my office at 826LA. The sounds of the afternoon tutoring session echo in the hallway and I pause, looking up from my computer. I glance at the walls around me, at the walls I painted all that time ago with Dave Eggers, and I realize that he did have an answer for me after all.

  Part Five

  Acceptance

  In a strange way, as we move through grief, healing brings us closer to the person we loved. A new relationship begins. We learn to live with the loved one we lost.

  —Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

  Chapter Thirteen

  2007, I’M TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD.

  I’M ON MY WAY to my 7:00 p.m. psychopharmacology class when the accident happens. I’ve been cruising down Sepulveda, my body still warm and relaxed from the yoga class I just left. I’m listening to Peter Bjorn and John, thinking about how I’m going to see them at the Roxy tomorrow night.

  I glance down for just a moment, at my phone or at the little illuminated buttons on the stereo, maybe both, but when I look back up the car in front of me isn’t moving anymore.

  I’m going too fast to stop. Even as I slam on the brakes, my car makes impact.

  My books and bags fly off the passenger seat. Thwack, thwack, thwack. The hood of my car crumples. My head snaps forward and then back.

  Everything comes to a halt. I quickly turn off the stereo.

  I give myself a once-over to make sure that I still have all my limbs, and then I ease my foot tentatively onto the accelerator, following the other car into the parking lot of a nearby gas station.

  The other driver is a woman, and we get out of our cars at the same time. Her car looks relatively fine. It’s mine that illustrates the intensity of the impact. The hood has crunched up toward the windshield and a tiny tendril of smoke sifts upward into the night sky. I try to smile as the woman approaches, but my breath is already quick and shallow. There is a lump at the back of my throat and I feel the prick of tears welling up.

  Breathe, Claire. You can do this. Don’t cry yet. Please don’t cry yet. You can do this.

  We begin to exchange information, and she takes a long time filling hers out, searching for her insurance card, huddling over in the car seat, scribbling down various numbers and information.

  Leave, leave, please just leave so I can sob in peace. I chant this in my head over and over while she writes.

  She finally hands me a piece of paper, and I give her one in return.

  Will you be okay? Do you want me to stay? She looks concerned for me.

  No, no, I’m fine, really. Thank you.