I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (40 page)

I've found some of that Heaven without having to die. Since I stopped drinking and started running in 2009, the things I had lost—the most meaningful things in my life—have flowed back to me almost effortlessly. My relationship with my mother has never been threatened, and Tashina and I have always stuck by each other in our loner, hardheaded way. But when Chuong and Helen drove out to California and I got to see him hug my mother, well, that was a singular happiness. My mother gave him back his Vietnamese-English dictionary, which she had held on to for him all these years. “I knew you'd be back,” she said with a smile when she produced it and put it in his hands. He never finished eighth grade, but his stepdaughter is in medical school, and his son is in dental school. “Never do drugs, never go to jail. I did good, Mom?” he said to her. Yes, Chuong, you did good. We're planning a trip to Vietnam together so I can finally meet his mother.

Tatyana and I didn't speak for seven years after she kicked me out of her house, coincidentally the same amount of time I didn't speak to my father. Even before that, it hadn't been unusual for Tatyana and me to go a year without speaking.

Tatyana and her husband Bill welcomed me back into their lives unconditionally. I wanted to be forgiven, and they wanted
to forgive me. But that wasn't enough. When their dream home came up for sale, they let me loan them money, money that was just lying around because, never having had it, I had no idea what to do with it. The “Redneck Ranch” is gorgeous. It's a sprawling five-bedroom house on over an acre, as was our old house in New Hampshire, but as perfect as that home was flawed. Tatyana and I get along better now than we ever have in our lives, even before the divorce. We talk or text almost every day and haven't argued once since our rapprochement. It's odd, in your mid-thirties, to find a best friend who knows you inside and out, a best friend you have known your entire life.

I spend as much time at the Redneck Ranch as I can. As unpopular as I was with my family, I am infinitely popular with Tatyana's four kids. Tatyana's dogs love me so well that, the last time I visited, they cried and tackled me the minute I got out of the truck. It was pitch-black, the middle of the night. But they knew my smell.

Karma, a chubby chocolate Lab, is happiest when she finds me sprawled out on my sister's couch, exhausted from a long run. Harley is content to lick every salty surface he can find. My legs, arms, shoulders, tummy. But Karma crawls on top of me—this is a sixty-pound dog—carefully spreads her entire body over me in order to immobilize me as completely as possible. Then she roughly polishes my face, in disgusting detail, with her tongue, trying to force it into my ear canals, up my sinuses, and through my clamped lips into my mouth. Yuck.

There's a curious blurring that goes on when I'm at my sister's house. Harley is a shaggy black mutt, adopted from the shelter. My old dog, Katie, was a black mutt from the shelter. Zeke, Tatyana's old dog, was a retriever; Karma is a retriever. Karma's eyes are amber, almost yellow, like our old dog Princess's eyes. Karma growls like a friendly Wookie when she's happy and wags her tail so hard her hind legs skitter across the floor. Zeke did the exact
same things. The black fur on Harley's belly is riddled with white hairs, like Katie's. Karma sheds horribly, like Katie did, great tufts of brown hair drifting off of her every time you scratch her back.

One afternoon when Bill was at work and the kids were at school and Tatyana was running errands, Karma sat in front of me, her tail thumping the floor, laughter bouncing around in her eyes. Then she rolled onto her side and stretched out, waiting for me to pat her. I went down on one knee and obliged. Then both knees. Then I got on all fours, and instead of petting her, I just put my head into her fur and inhaled. She smelled exactly like Katie, my dear old dog, now long dead. I kept my face in her fur and kept breathing in her smell, that good, musty smell of a friendly old dog. I closed my eyes. It was Katie under my hands, under my nose. God, Katie, I have missed you so much. I kept my eyes closed.

This blurring happens with people too. When I'm there, no one is capable of calling my nephew Mika and me by our correct names. I gave my mother shit for it until the day I called Mika by my name. At school, Mika insists that people call him by his birth name, Mikhail. At school, I insisted people call me by my nickname instead of my birth name, Mikhail. We are both named after Michael, my grandfather, a man neither of us knew. When Mika was a baby, he couldn't say my name, so he called me Minna. When his younger brother Kai was a baby, he couldn't say Mika's name, so he called him Minna. The mother of my father, Murray, was named Minnie. The beloved dog of Bill's childhood was named Murray. The confusion really stacks up sometimes.

Once, when I was visiting for Mika's eleventh birthday party, it got to be too much. We were sitting at the dinner table, a simple pine table my dad built before we left Canada, the same table we had gathered around each night for dinner before my family flew apart. I sat in my spot, and the other kids sat in their spots. We were sitting in the same chairs we had always sat in, chairs that were always in need of new felt on the feet, chairs that had always been creaky from the kids leaning back. There was a black dog,
Harley, and a brown dog, Karma, just like there used to be a black dog, Katie, and a brown dog, Zeke. There was a mom there across from me, where my mom used to sit. There was a dad at the head of the table, sitting in the special chair, the only one that had arms, where my dad used to sit. We were eating, talking, horsing around, and laughing. The mom loved the dad, and the dad loved the mom, and the only thing the parents loved more than each other were the children. I felt so good, sitting there at the table with my family. I was supposed to drive to LA after dinner to catch a flight home. The thought of leaving made me so sad that I had to run upstairs and cry. Not a dignified cry either, like you're supposed to have when you're an adult and a tear just drips out of the outside corner of your eye, and that's it. An ugly cry where your face looks shitty, and the tears mix with snot, and you can't get any air into your lungs, and you feel again like a helpless infant. I wasn't ready to go. I never am.

In 2012 Simon's Rock invited me to speak at the twentieth anniversary of the shooting, a perfect 180 from trying to kick me out five days before graduation. For the first time, I finally reached out to Galen's father, Greg Gibson. I sent him the piece I intended to read at the memorial and expressed my hope that the anniversary would not bring him any new sadnesses. His response took my breath away:

After Galen's murder, I thought we would always suffer the damage of this catastrophe, and that the kids, being young and strong, would grow past it. More and more now, I see I was wrong. We were old and tempered and already formed. We suffered, grieved, and got on with our lives. It was the kids, unformed, who were most profoundly affected by this terrible demonstration of the fact that we cannot control what happens in this world. So, in fact, this anniversary doesn't bring any new sadnesses to us. We've just got the old, familiar, almost comfortable
ones. But I sense it is you, the young ones, for whom the new sadnesses must continually come.

The father of a murdered son, a man I had felt so sorry for that just thinking about his plight racked me with poisonous guilt and shame and anger and grief . . . well, he had been feeling sorry for
us
. How many miles will I have to run before I can equal him, in his integrity and strength and grace?

When I was sixteen, I swore to rescue my mother, get revenge on my father, and make some mark on the world. Wonder of wonders, I was able to make good on my arrogant, adolescent vows . . . just not in the manner I'd envisioned.

In June 2013, exactly twenty years after I swore through angry tears, at our final, sodden, tragic yard sale in the driveway of our house in New Hampshire, that I would restore my mother, I bought her a little house in California. I chose it because it was only eight miles away from Tatyana's house in Fallbrook, so my mom would be able to spoil the rotten kids rottener. It's technically located just over the line in the neighboring town of Rainbow—somewhere over the rainbow, if you will, fitting for the house I'd dreamed of for so long. It's a tiny, brick three-bedroom on half an acre, perched so high on a hillside that you often wake up in a cloud. Every penny of the money I put down on it came from writing. I resist naming cars and guitars because I understand now that things are just things, but I had to name the house: Sweet Revenge.

My dad drove the eight hours down from Sutter Creek with a load of tools in his Volvo to help with the renovations. We worked together in the blazing hot sun, ten days in a row, fourteen-hour days, like we had when he helped me build out the Brooklyn loft ten years earlier. We worked side by side for a while, then branched off to do separate jobs after a couple of days. He took the opportunity to listen to his iPod and was rocking out to Guns N' Roses
while he hung sheetrock with his shirt off, occasionally stopping to wipe the sweat from his face and fist-pump or howl tunelessly along with the lyrics, the gray hair of a grandfather and the heart of a teenager.

Working in the kitchen, I found a newspaper clipping in a drawer: some 1950s housewife perched atop a column of brickwork. So what? I'd been working for twelve hours, still had hours to go, and there was no end in sight. I skimmed the article. The woman had spent three years building a house and was still only halfway done. Looking again, I realized it was the house I was standing in.

I read the whole article now, my heart thumping. The house I had bought for my mother was built by Carol Coast, a mother of three, just like my mother. Carol Coast was a sculptor who had been experimenting with the local clay. When she realized the soil was the right consistency for brick, she designed a house, then built it herself—pouring each of the bricks
by hand
, then laying them herself.

I walked through the gently curving hallway at the center of the house, running my hand over the bricks, Carol's bricks. How much work had she put into it? Hundreds of hours, at the very least. Thousands of hours?

The fireplace was her crowning achievement, with bricks of many sizes that she had tinted different colors, according to the article. I'm more careful about swearing oaths now than I was when I was sixteen (as they can be a real pain in the ass to fulfill), but I swore that one day I would peel the decades' worth of paint off of Carol's fireplace and restore it to its original beauty.

It was perfect: the house had been designed and built for my mother by another mother, an artist, a nurturer, and one hell of a hard worker, a woman who had toiled patiently, year after year, building her life one brick at a time. Just like my mom.

My mom came by one afternoon after most of the renovations were done, and I gave her the tour. She had been in China teaching
English to preschoolers while I was in the process of buying it, so she had never seen it. We had never even really talked about it. She seemed happy, but then she always does.