“He’s dying,” she would say. “Let him have whatever he wants.” It was as if being needed by him in this way had transformed her, lit her from within.
AT THE VERY END, during his last days, when Allan could no longer eat or drink or speak, he clutched an empty orange water bottle around the clock, even in his sleep. It would fall to the floor whenever he had a seizure and when he came to, he would gesture aggressively for me to give it back to him. If he could tell me, I’d have asked what it meant to him. Since he couldn’t, I can only imagine that the feeling of a bottle in his hand was his lifelong association with comfort, and that on some level, any bottle was better than no bottle.
He had so many seizures at the end. He couldn’t make anyone understand what he wanted. His legs began to turn black. On his last day, he went into a series of convulsions, and a hospice worker asked me to leave the room while they tended to him. I went out to get a cup of coffee, and when I came back, a sheet was over his face.
WHAT CAN I say about my brother’s life? It was dark and hard and sad. It was soaked in alcohol and sorrow. Filled with suffering from start to finish.
It was also stoic and brave and redemptive. He was a godsend of a brother, a good worker, and a loving father. He was a broken soul and yet a gentle one. He was a far better parent than the one he had.
He internalized his grief. He tamped down his rage. He self-medicated with beer and nicotine.
He did no harm.
Because of Lynn, his most important affairs were in order before he departed. He got to make up for lost time with his daughter. They all wanted to be together, and they were. It was the best and closest-knit version of family he’d ever known. He told me before he died that Lynn and Jesus had healed his heart.
I’ll always be grateful to her in a way I can’t put into words. She offered him shelter at the end of his road, inside a trailer instead of a bus, but the same elements made it a true home: light and warmth, order and comfort. Devotion, provision.
Love.
Chapter 25
THE DEATH OF my brother Allan was one of the two hardest losses I’ve suffered in my life.
The other was that of my stepfather, Rick. I can only imagine how unlikely it sounds. It sounds unlikely even to me as I write it.
For most of our acquaintance, Rick was a drunk and a junkie. He was in and out of our lives, in and out of prison. He cheated on my mother and beat her often. He wrecked two vehicles while I was inside them, driving one of them straight into an oncoming car and rolling the other.
On both occasions, I walked away without so much as a scratch. In a way it was a metaphor for my love of him. Throughout my formative years Rick was a terrible man, and yet somehow my love for him survived it all, untouched and intact.
LIKE MY MEMORIES of my sister’s assault, I can only recall Rick in a series of mental snapshots. He was in and out of our lives so randomly and haphazardly, it’s hard to order or make sense of his appearances.
In my earliest memory of Rick, he and I are hitchhiking in the rain. We get into and out of many different cars. He keeps me close to him in these cars. At some point, we stop off at a bar, an old vintage-looking bar with a piano by the front window.
A catchy song is playing on the jukebox. The song is “Yellow Submarine” by the Beatles. While Rick is getting his whiskey, I go and sit at the piano. I touch its cracked and yellowing keys and within a few minutes, by sheer instinct, I’m playing along with the song. There’s nothing to it. I know exactly how to reproduce the tune. I do it over and over.
I’m only three or four years old, and this feat draws a small crowd of startled onlookers. No one is more surprised than Rick.
“Holy mackerel!” he whistles. “How did you do that?”
I remember the delight of being celebrated, if only for a few moments.
I don’t know why Rick and I were hitchhiking alone. This was during the time we lived on the beach, but I don’t know where we were going. We ended up in someone’s hippie house in the forest. I’m guessing now that it was drug-related. Maybe a dealer lived there. Maybe it was easier for Rick to hitch rides with a little girl in tow—maybe it made people less afraid to pick him up.
I don’t know how I was able to play the piano when I’d never seen or touched one before. I don’t know why I’ve never touched a piano since. You would think that once I could afford to try anything I wanted, I would revisit the piano and cultivate it as I did tennis. But no.
I do remember feeling—in a way I could not articulate then and can barely put into words even now—that I didn’t belong in the life I was living, that I had been abducted somehow, kidnapped into it, and this strange talent was evidence that I belonged to another time and place, other circumstances. I had a rightful long-lost life, one that included a piano teacher, perhaps, and this inexplicable skill was from that other, better place, like something I’d stashed in a sock and smuggled out along with me.
MY MOST REVELATORY encounter with Rick—the time I glimpsed the man divested of his shadow, if only for the briefest interlude—came when I was thirteen. He broke character on that day in a way that foreshadowed what would come later. It was the day my memories of the house on Creekside Drive came back to me.
After I left the home of Ted and Lorraine, I pushed all that had happened there out of mind, dropped it like a stone into black water, and let it sink beneath the depths. I didn’t think of it for years. I spoke of it to no one. It was as if none of it had happened.
I’ll never know what triggered the memory: the creak of a door or a floorboard, a man’s tread in the hallway outside my room, or possibly nothing at all. I only remember sitting straight up in bed as if shocked by a bolt of electric current. It was a little after four in the morning. Just that suddenly, for no reason I could fathom, I remembered it all: Ted’s hot hands, his rank breath, the seamy odor of his bedsheets, and the dreadful things he’d made me do.
I lay there for hours, shaking and sick as the sky went from black to dark blue to pink streaked with orange. I lay there as everyone else in the house got up and went out about their Saturday morning. I heard the sound of cartoons from the living room television. I heard a neighbor mowing his lawn.
I could not imagine rising from the bed and resuming my life. The memory of Ted, of his hands and his mouth and his privates, felt like a stain I would never be able to wash away. I felt frantic to blot him out, to erase him again as he had somehow been erased before. I needed a doctor, a drug, a cudgel—something.
At long last I made my way downstairs to where my mother was drinking coffee in the kitchen. She was alone at the table.
“Mom,” I said unsteadily.
She looked up at me without speaking.
“Mom, I have to talk to you.”
“What is it?”
“I remembered something bad that happened to me.”
I have a vivid recollection of the look on her face just then. She regarded me not with alarm or concern but irritation. “What are you talking about?”
I started to cry. “It was in that foster home I lived in after you were committed. The one in Santa Rosa. The man in that house—he did bad things to me, Mom.”
“Stephanie. What are you saying? What kind of things?”
“He made me touch his private parts,” I told her, almost choking, barely able to get the words out. “He even made me put them in my mouth.”
My mother leapt from the table so fast that coffee sloshed over the rim of her cup. She actually put her hands over her ears, like a child. “Stop it, Stephanie!” she shouted.
“Mom,” I said, frightened.
“I cannot handle this,” she yelled. “I can’t! Don’t say another word! Don’t ever speak to me of this again.” She slammed out of the house.
I stood there as if rooted into the linoleum, feeling like I might die of shame. At some point, Rick appeared on the threshold between the garage and the house.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
I stood looking at him, tears running down my face, unable to answer.
He tried again. “What’s wrong with Florence?”
“She got mad about something I told her,” I managed.
He motioned me over, and I went to him.
“What did you tell her?” he asked.
Rick sounded different than usual, and it took me a moment to figure out why. He wasn’t drunk, and he wasn’t high. He was all there. His eyes were focused, and his voice was steady.
When I failed to respond, he repeated his question. “What did you tell her?”
“She said never to talk about it again.”
“Never talk about it to her again, maybe,” he said. “But you can tell me. What is it, honey?”
And so I found myself telling Rick exactly what I had just told my mother. And when I’d finished, he did not cover his ears. He did not get angry.
He stared at me with an expression I had never seen on his face. In his eyes were terrible awareness, understanding, and agony. Then to my astonishment, he began to cry too. He pulled me to him and held my head hard against his chest.
“Baby,” he wept. “Oh, my poor little girl.”
I was as surprised as I’d ever been. Could this really be happening? Was this my stepfather?
“Rick?” I asked, my voice muffled against him.
“I’m sorry,” he keened. “Jesus Christ, I’m so sorry. It was my fault. All of it was my fault.”
How can I convey how it felt to finally be heard and seen? To have an adult take ownership of the things that had happened to me? To hear a grown man’s voice breaking with regret for it? To be wept over?
I can’t. The relief of that moment, the validation, and the marrow-deep gratification—it defies explanation. In a movie, Rick would decide to get sober at that moment. In real life, it was just a glimmer of what was possible for him, a glimmer that wouldn’t resurface for another decade.
I WAS IN my twenties and newly married when Rick’s truck pulled to the curb outside our house in Hillsboro. I was surprised by his knock because I wasn’t expecting anyone. When I came to the door, my former stepfather was standing there, unshaven and unsmiling, his hat in his hand. He did not say hello.
“I want to get clean,” he said. “Will you help me?”
I called AA and found a meeting within the hour. I told him I would go with him that day and every day for as long as he wanted.
The first meeting was in the basement of the Lents Baptist Church in Southeast Portland. There was coffee, cookies, and folding chairs arranged in a circle.
When we went around the circle, introducing ourselves, I said, “I’m Stephanie, and I’m here to support my stepfather, who’s not ready to speak yet.” This happened at each meeting for three straight days. But when we were walking in on the fourth evening, he touched my shoulder. In a low voice, he let me know he was ready. When it was his turn to speak, he finally said the words that would begin his recovery.
“My name is Rick,” he said, “and I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict.”
I can’t think of that evening without tears coming into my eyes. There is something inexpressibly profound about the moment an addict owns his sickness.
And they enfolded him into their ranks then, replying back with the same words, spoken in many voices: Hi, Rick. It was this jumbled chorus that would hold and steady Rick through the hard months to come. A circle of strangers who spoke as one, offering him their simple acceptance.
Rick did everything by the book, down to the last detail. He attended ninety meetings in ninety days. He accepted a sponsor—a slightly older man who’d been clean for many years—and was fastidiously accountable to him at every step of his recovery. He undertook each of the twelve steps as if they were sacraments. He embraced the eighth and ninth steps with the faith of a fanatic.
Make a list of wrongs done to others and be willing to make amends for those wrongs.
Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Rick’s sobriety was a miracle in my life. It was proof that people can change.
He took responsibility for every bad thing that had happened in our lives: The sexual abuse I suffered in my foster homes was his fault; the terrible things that happened to Allan were his fault; Isabella’s assault was his fault. He owned it all.
He became a different person—gentle, reliable, accountable, and so desperate to make amends that he would never be done making them. He would do anything I asked. Whenever I wanted to paint my house, for instance, he would show up and do it alone and for free. He was no less invested in making amends to my siblings. My oldest brother had hated him for years, but he and Rick grew to love each other like a true father and son before Allan died. He was like a grandfather to both of Allan’s daughters.
He did his best to be a father to my other siblings as well. He offered his time and gave his money whenever any of us needed anything. He came to both of my sons’ games and cheered himself hoarse on the sidelines. He took my husband golfing and bought him a set of clubs.
He told me often that my coming to AA with him was the best thing anyone ever did for him. He asked how I could possibly love him after all he’d done. He told me I was beautiful, inside and out. He said this over and over.
There was a certain purity to his penance. He would do anything we asked, and he never said no. Another man so consumed by guilt and shame might have chosen to end it all, but Rick reasoned that he was worth more to us alive than dead. He took a vow to be of service to all of us for as long as he might still live.
Even after he’d been sober for years, he’d give money to homeless drunks so they could buy alcohol. I couldn’t understand this and said so.
“Of course you can’t understand,” he told me. “You’ve never had the shakes.”
RICK’S DEATH WAS very sudden. He had a heart attack in the shower, and forty-five minutes later he was gone. I got the call on a Saturday afternoon, just as I was about to climb into our hot tub. My younger brother, Walter, told me he’d been found dead on the bathroom floor.
I cried at least once a day for more than a year after he died. Sometimes I wonder at the depth of my own grief for him. I’ve come to think it has to do with the fact that my mother never once took stock of the damage she’d done, let alone owned it or sought forgiveness for it. So he became something of a stand-in for her—he performed the atonement that she never could or would. He was the one adult with whom I had lifelong continuity who showed emotional investment in me. Who’d borne witness to how it had been for me. The only one who could say firsthand: I know what you went through; I know how you’ve suffered and what you overcame.
On the morning of his funeral, a homeless woman came up to me in Starbucks, drawing closer than a stranger would. With no alarm at all, I let her reach out and touch my face.
“You’re beautiful,” she crooned. “I can see you’re beautiful inside and out.”
It was Rick’s mantra to me, and in that moment, I had no doubt that the message was from him. The gift of it knocked me out, rocked me from the roots of my hair to the soles of my feet. It was a moment as otherworldly as the one in that vintage bar, at the piano, when music flowed from beneath my hands with no explanation. That was my first memory with Rick, and this would be my last: both of them shimmering, glittering with mystery.
Chapter 26
WHENEVER I TOOK stock of what I’d learned about my roots, I was struck by all that had been revealed in just a matter of months. I’d found out more about my family history in this brief interlude than in the forty-eight years preceding. I’d learned what happened to my mother, discovered my connection with the Thorntons, and traced my lineage to the Grubbs. I’d even found my uncle.
But there was still an absence at the heart of it all, a space that remained hollow and melancholic. It was an ache that flared every third Sunday in June, or when I watched Jim with Andrea. I felt it whe
n brides were given away at weddings and when I was faced with family history forms in any medical office.
It was there whenever someone said: You have such an exotic look, are you Portuguese? Catalan? Turkish? Greek?
I’d laugh. “Oh, I’m a mongrel,” I’d say. “I’m a mix of things.” I could never bring myself to say: Maybe? To confess: I don’t know.
It was time to look for my father.
ALL MY LIFE, my mother had told me that the dumpster rapist was my father. When I was very young, I believed this, and the shame I felt was like a live thing writhing inside me, coiling like a cobra up from my gut and into my throat. By the time I was in my teens, it was clear to me that my mother had a very intermittent commitment to the truth.Whatever she said on any given day might be a mash-up of invention, distortion, half-lies, and a dash of what actually happened.
The story of her abduction and gang rape had turned out to be true, for instance. Her connection to the Washington family was true. Her lineage on both sides was as rarefied as she’d always claimed.
She also told countless outright lies. Like the tales she’d told all my life about my younger brother Dominic.
Dominic had disappeared just after Louie’s death. He was still just a baby, less than a year old. He was there one day and gone the next, and when my siblings and I pressed our mother about it, we would hear a different story each time.
“Dominic was very sick. I did everything in my power to help him get well. I sat by his bed around the clock and fed him soup and toast. I chanted over him the whole time, but he died anyway.”
Did I ever accept this story? I’m not sure. I could not imagine my mother sitting by a sick child’s bed for even five minutes, let alone feeding him, doting on him, and caring whether he lived or died.
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