He drove me back to the town square and waited until he saw that my car started up. I knew he would. I have a knack for picking out nondangerous people. It’s like I couldn’t get into trouble if I tried. And I’m always a little let down by it.
7
“Hey, it’s Hope,” I said into my phone. It wasn’t my dad but his girlfriend, Beth. She perked right up. “Oh, hi!” she said cheerily. Beth was always cheery. It was annoying. She tried too hard to be friends and never noticed my obvious disinterest in her. I said I was coming to visit. Maybe for a while. I said I had trouble with my apartment so I was between places. I was already in DC. “Oh, that’s great!” she said. “Your dad is going to be so happy to see you. He got some bad news recently and this will cheer him up.” I asked what it was, but Beth said, “Oh, I’m sure he’ll tell you about it when he sees you.”
Beth asked me if I ate chicken. “You know your dad’s supposed to cut down on salt.” And then she prattled on about something, something that was bad for the environment, or someone who was unnecessarily rude to her at the store, or someone who just didn’t get it, whatever “it” was. With Beth, either everything was astonishment that people had opinions that differed from hers, or everything was “just great,” and “just great” included everything she didn’t quite understand, or didn’t understand enough to have an opinion about.
“Do you drink herbal tea?” Beth asked. She had made some from her garden. “I dry the plants myself and make different blends. I can make you your own blend if you want. You just have to tell me what you like in your tea. People tell me I should start a business with it, but I don’t know. I’d have to get a website. It seems like a lot of work. But you never know.” My dad’s previous girlfriend had been a ceramist who had her own business and showed her work in galleries. She wanted to move to New Mexico and my dad did not, so she broke up with him. Beth always felt inferior, which she made up for by being really nice. The first time we met I asked her what she did. She said, “Oh, I’m just a person with a job. I’m not very interesting.”
Beth went on about what she was going to plant this year and how she was going to start a lot of seedlings in the den because it got the most sun. “I think it will be really nice once spring gets here,” she said.
My dad was waiting for me when I walked out of the Metro station at the end of the line in the Virginia suburbs. He leaned out of his car and waved his baseball hat so I could find him.
“Downsizing?” he asked, looking at my lack of luggage. I didn’t answer. “How long are you staying?” he asked. “Not sure yet,” I said. “I see,” he said. He wore old jeans and new sneakers and an old sweatshirt that used to say something, but the design had flecked off. He shifted gears and his fingers rubbed the knob, itching for a cigarette he stubbed out two decades ago. I was making him nervous. This is every parent’s nightmare. Their adult child returns home for an unspecified amount of time. With only a backpack. And no voiced plans.
“Shit,” he said. He quickly turned his head, worried, and made an abrupt move into the turning lane. “Yeah, yeah.” He waved off another car honking at him. “Sorry, I need to pick something up.”
We pulled into a grocery store parking lot. “You want to stay here? I’ll just be a sec.” He didn’t wait for my answer and was halfway out of the car when I said, “Sure.” He hurried to the store. The automatic glass doors parted for him and exhaled as they sealed him inside.
I wondered if this was worth it. If instead I should’ve coughed up the money and looked online for a cheap hotel room. I knew my dad didn’t know where Eden was, but he might know something. He might remember someone’s name. My father never threw anything away. He still had The Camper. I didn’t have enough money to rent a car. And to find Eden, wherever she was, I needed a car.
When he emerged from the store, he was carrying a bottle of wine in a brown paper bag and a pint carton of cream. He stopped to talk to someone on the curb and gestured loftily with the carton. His friend said, “Take care” and walked on. My father stood there for a moment, squinting into the distance. He shifted the wine to his other hand, dug into his pocket for his cell phone, and dialed a number. He put on his sunglasses, the kind with a Velcro band around the back, the sporty version of a librarian’s spectacles on a chain hanging from her neck. He paced back and forth while he talked, cradling the wine and cream against his hip. Every now and then he would pause and look down at his feet, his whole body sagging into a curve.
He’s avoiding me, I thought.
He finally got back in the car and hastily deposited his purchases at my feet.
“Okay,” he said. “Sorry about that.”
“Who’d you have to call?”
“Nobody,” he said. “No one important.” He jammed the brakes to avoid hitting a slow-moving shopper pushing a cart. He was about to yell obscenities but controlled himself enough to wave her on. “We might actually make it out of here alive,” he said as we rolled to a short pause at the parking lot exit.
I never thought I made my father nervous, but he seemed unable to contain himself. He tapped on the steering wheel. He wiped his sunglasses at stoplights. He fiddled with the radio that never worked properly. He scrolled through his cell phone numbers while waiting for the light to change. And then he said, “Whenever you want to tell me what you’re doing here, let me know.”
“Really?” I said, too annoyed not to get sucked in. “I need a reason to visit you?”
“Oh, come on, Hope. You’re dropping in out of the blue. You were just here for Christmas, which is the only time you visit. No one’s sick. I’m not dying. Okay. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about your mother. But you knew for a long time it was terminal. I’m sorry if that seems unkind, or that I’m lacking in compassion for one of the mothers of my children, but you had some time to prepare. You knew the situation. Now, you tell Beth you’ve lost your apartment, and I assume your job, or whatever you were doing for money. I think I deserve a little explanation.”
“You’ve answered all your own questions. I really don’t have any more information to give you.”
He rested his elbow on the edge of the window, steering with one hand until it proved too awkward a position for him. “What do you intend to do? Are you moving in with us while you get back on your feet? Are you going to lie on the couch all day and watch TV again? Get a job in the local lesbian bar? I don’t even know if there is one. Am I supposed to give you money for doing chores around the house? Or maybe I’m supposed to pay you for copyediting my book.”
“What book?” My father hadn’t published anything since I was a kid.
“What do you mean, what book? I’m a writer. I’m working on a book. And they take a long time. And they require quiet and intense concentration and not a lot of disruptions to routine. I don’t know, Hope. I thought you had an idea of what you were doing with your life. You were involved in the arts community. You got some play with your theater things. You wrote a little here and there. I know some people don’t get any gigs, but you got some. You just never seemed able to do anything with it. Or you never met the right people. Everything is always just within your reach, Hope, but you bail out before anything can happen. You switch what you’re working on. You quit your job. You decide you don’t want to be a filmmaker or a journalist or a playwright or whatever it was. Just when you’re about to get there, you drop the ball. You know, I thought you had a niche. And it’s smart to have a niche. Then you can be the big fish in the small pond, even when you’re in an ocean like New York.” He lifted both hands off the steering wheel in defeat and let them fall back down. “I don’t know. I expected you would win an award or something by now.”
“I did win an award,” I said.
“I mean something else. Another award. Not just a first-timer, starting-out award.”
“That’s your marker for success? A display case of awards?”
“You have to mark it somehow. You have to determine whether you’ve failed or wh
ether you’re on the right track somehow. Okay, sure. It’s petty and it’s bourgeois, but yes, I think an award is a mark of success.”
“Exactly which award was I supposed to have won by now?”
“Hey, I don’t know, Hope. An award. A good review. A good paycheck. You fold that into a teaching job. Or editor. You get asked to do things. Fuck, I don’t even know what I’m talking about because I don’t know what you do or what you care about. If you cared so much about your plays or whatever, I think you would have sent them to us to read or invited us up to see them sometimes.”
“Like you would come.”
“I would. I would come.”
“Suddenly you’re going to be the supportive parent?”
“I’ve always supported you, Hope. I’ve always supported you. I’ve always encouraged you. I paid for college. I helped you—”
“Oh, I see, your mortgage on me is paid off.”
“Hope, I didn’t say that. But I think I have a right, yes, as a parent, but also as coadults here in this situation, I think I have a right to ask you what is going on with your life rather than just sucking it up and pretending that everything’s okay. I know your mom just passed, and that was sad and she was too young and we’re all still mourning her. She was a wonderful, beautiful, brutally honest woman and she was very important to me. She was your mother and she was a big part of my life. But you know, I was much younger than you when both my parents died, and life goes on. You have to go on, Hope. You have to go on.” He paused for a moment and then jumped back in. “I mean, maybe I’m making too much of it all. Maybe I’m too involved or maybe I’m projecting too much onto you. Maybe you really don’t have a very interesting life. Maybe you’re just a zombie walking through the whole thing, in which case you probably need some therapy. You know, because you’re not like other adults your age, Hope.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
“And don’t go throwing that at me,” he said. “I know the most horrible thing imaginable happened to you and Eden, but guess what? A lot of people have been through a lot worse and come out the other side. And don’t think you’re the only one who has ever experienced something like that. And don’t think I don’t know why you’re really here. I know why you’re here. I know you got the same call I did from some lawyer for the county, wanting to open the whole thing up again. And you know what? You’re too late, because I already talked to him and told him to go fuck himself. You’re not the only one involved in this situation, Hope. You know, out of everyone involved, everyone in this hodgepodge family of ours, out of all of us, you got off easy, Hope.” He was gesturing wildly with his hands and almost missed turning into his own driveway. He swung hard and the car jostled over the gravel and up the incline. “You know, don’t think it wasn’t hard for me, don’t think I haven’t suffered every day of my life thinking that I’m a failure as a father, that I couldn’t protect you, that I fucked up. Because I did, Hope. I fucked up. I was supposed to be there to pick you up and I wasn’t. And I’m sorry. You know, I’m sorry.”
My father was crying now. He turned off the engine and opened the door to get out of the car as fast as possible, but he forgot the groceries at my feet. He climbed back inside and herded them into his arms, his sunglasses falling off his face and dangling there around his neck, caught by their Velcro strap. He slammed the car door and marched up to the house.
Beth was out on the deck. “Hey!” she called as I got out of the car and stood up. “Great to see you!”
My father shook his head as he passed her.
“I want to borrow the van,” I said before he got inside. He stopped in his tracks and sank a bit. He looked at me and said, “The Camper?” like I was asking to borrow his prized toy. I was the grade school bully. I would take it and never give it back and he didn’t have the power to say no. He didn’t know what to say. He stood hurt, his mouth agape, before turning to go inside.
Beth looked at me quizzically, but did her best to stay upbeat. She peeked in the window, trying to assess my dad’s state, if he wanted to be alone or not. I got my bag out of the back seat.
When I closed the car door my father came back outside, walking so fast his ankle got caught on the edge of the screen door, which hadn’t opened wide enough yet. He stumbled and immediately got back up, determined not to slow down. He extended his arm out in front of him, offering me the keys but not wanting to touch me. He wanted me to go away. He was worried I might bite. I took the keys from his fingers. He dropped his arm, then turned around and said, “I can’t promise that it’ll start. If it breaks down, I’m not responsible. I don’t want to be involved with whatever it is you’re doing.”
He marched into the house and Beth followed him. I wondered if he wanted me to get in The Camper and drive off right then and there. But it was late and I didn’t have a plan, so I went inside the house.
My father was behind the kitchen island counter pouring himself a shot of vodka. Beth was unsure how to approach him. She stayed on the other side of the counter. The drinking of hard liquor repulsed and scared her. He drank half the shot, coughed, and then drank the rest. He poured another and screwed the top back on the bottle.
“I need to find her,” I said.
“Let her go, Hope,” he said, not looking up from his glass. He stared at the clear liquid, unsure if he really wanted it. “She’s a ghost.” He took a sip and put the vodka bottle back in the freezer, still avoiding my eyes. “She lives on another planet. She never came out of the woods, so to speak, if I may use such a terrible metaphor. About my own child.” He took hold of his glass again. His body hunched over it, awkwardly swaying over the kitchen sink.
“Maybe I just want to find her because I want to find her. She’s my sister.”
“She’s my daughter. Don’t you think I want to find her too?”
I know it’s incredibly immature, but I always felt that my dad loved Eden more than me. Sometimes it seemed like my mother was our common parent and Eden was the only one who belonged to our dad.
“What about the other case?” I asked. “They could connect him to another case if she provided some evidence. Then he wouldn’t get out of jail.”
“What makes you think she has evidence to give?” He took another sip and wiped his mouth with the back of his fingers. “Maybe nothing’s there. Maybe she said everything that happened to her and there’s nothing else to tell.”
“I guess that would be easier for you.”
“That would be easier for Eden. Do you wish she suffered more? Does that make you feel better in some twisted way? I’m sorry.” He put out his free hand like a stop sign. A retraction. He closed his eyes. He dropped his hand. His mouth started to torque into a grimace. “It would be easier for me. It was my fault, Hope,” he said, making a grand sweep with his vodka glass to cover his sloppy emotions. “It was my fault,” he said again. But he couldn’t keep up the act. He grasped his face with his free hand and started to sob in retching cries. “I got the weekends mixed up,” he said in a high-pitched voice that was out of his control. It sounded womanly and in pain. It seared out of his body, scorching wounds as it went. “I was at this stupid party. It was a reception for Woodward’s new book and a lot of people were going to be there and I thought it would be a good opportunity to approach his agent because mine had just retired and no one had picked me up. I was going to be left out in the cold. I needed to go to that party and get my name back out there. I completely forgot. It was just a mistake.” He was gasping now and losing his breath. “I should’ve been there.” He turned his shielded face away from me, toward Beth. She reached out to hug him, but he pushed past her, setting his glass on the counter and then accidentally knocking it to the floor as he left the kitchen. Beth reached down to pick it up and followed him out.
I stayed upstairs in my and Eden’s old room until I heard the car start up. Out the window I saw them drive to the main road. I crept down to the kitchen, where a note was left for me in Beth’s
handwriting saying they went out for dinner, but there was plenty of stuff in the fridge. She signed the note with a heart and a B.
I was back in my room when they came home. I expected my father to come up the stairs and softly knock. One of us would say, “I’m sorry,” and the other would say, “I’m sorry too,” and we wouldn’t talk much more about it. Noreen and I would always have long-drawn-out emotional discussions or fights or misunderstandings that wouldn’t resolve until one of us was crying, the other one teared up too, and then we had sex. And what the whole fight was about in the first place or how it was actually resolved, I couldn’t tell you.
My father didn’t stop in. He came upstairs with Beth, two sets of shoes thumping up the steps, past my room, and into their bedroom. I heard the faint sounds of a TV talk show and bathroom water running.
My dad had written a magazine article about what happened to me and Eden, but, according to him, “they edited the fuck out of it.” It came out about a year after it happened, around the time Eden took off in the car with Suriya. He tried to parlay the article into a book, but got no takers. An editor told him that the story needed more of him in it. “If you somehow saved the girls, or went after the kidnapper, or nursed them back to life from a subsequent drug habit, that would’ve been good.” The story needed something like that, the editor said.
I once temped for that same editor, purely by chance. On my first day, she stared at my name and then asked me if I was related to my dad. When I said I was his daughter, I watched her face as she remembered the story. She looked at me, half in awe that a person who had been through something like that was standing in her office in cheap career clothes from a thrift store trying to look “nice,” and half pitying me that obviously I had never gotten it together to be successful and was working a temp job because I had been so traumatized. She bought me lunch later that week and told me that if I ever wanted to write about “the event,” as she called it, she would be happy to read it, and that she thought it would make a great book. I never told my father that. I never told him I had worked for her.
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