I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (7 page)

When I was a baby, I woke up every couple of hours during the night, crying for my mom. My mother's friends told her that at some point, you have to let babies cry until they learn to comfort themselves. At nine months, I caught whooping cough. She lost thirty pounds while caring for me, terrified that I would die. After that, my mother couldn't bear to hear me cry. Despite my father's protestations, my mother always came for me.

I was scared of the dark. On the nights that my mother didn't sit with me until I fell asleep, I hid under the covers, breathing through only the tiniest gap in my blankets, drenched in fearful sweat until I finally succumbed to sleep.

When I awoke in the night, I automatically ran to my parents' bed. I remember my father's wide, hairy, freckled back in the night. He was so much bigger than me, too big to be human, like an elephant, part wild animal and part geologic formation. I was twelve before I made it through one night in my bed.

Having an oversized boy come into your marital bed in the middle of the night, each and every night . . . that must have been
a huge barrier to intimacy. When I got news of the divorce, this much was clear: I had destroyed their marriage. My father was abandoning my mother because I was weak.

The next year unfolded like a slow-motion film of a train derailment: the moment of hesitation from some minute anomaly, then the hurtling mass of metal slipping horribly sideways, the wrinkling of great sheets of steel, the folding of box cars, huge torn hunks of metal arcing dreamily through the air. Mentioning to reporters that I knew it was Wayne when I heard shots was enough to get me served with a subpoena as soon as I returned to campus. I was sequestered as a witness for the prosecution, which meant I could not talk to my friends or anyone else about what had happened. I found myself both mired in and deeply alienated from the most traumatic experience of my life.

My personal tragedy of the dissolution of my family—the worst thing I had ever encountered—was eclipsed, even in its inception, not just by the shooting but also by the experiences of my classmates. A friend's mother had dropped dead one Christmas, and her father had placed her with a foster family and signed over his guardianship of her. Another friend's father was a career drunk who occasionally worked as a carpenter and dipped in and out of homelessness without complaint or even comment. Another friend's father had been a government agent poisoned in prison by the CIA. Another friend's stepfather had caught him looking at his
Penthouse
magazines the day before Thanksgiving and with a “You
really
want to know what a woman is like?” had dragged him to the kitchen and plunged his hand deep into the semifrozen cavity of the Thanksgiving turkey defrosting in the sink. My story was so banal it hardly merited mentioning.

Zack took a little pity on me, and though he wouldn't allow me to compromise my sequestration, he shared with me one tidbit of happy news: Wayne Lo had been getting the shit kicked out of him
with such regularity while he awaited trial that they had put him in solitary confinement for his own safety.

My roommate, James, was clever and insightful but not particularly touchy-feely. His parents were happily married and, like most parents of Simon's Rockers, very well-off. He couldn't understand what I was going through as money got tighter and tighter. He extended bland sympathies when I told him, but that was about it.

Still, he was a comfort to me. At night, we'd climb into our beds at the same time, put the slow version of the Pixies “Wave of Mutilation” quietly on repeat, watch the star field screensaver, and talk—about girls, about music, about Galen—till we fell asleep.

One night while I was on the phone with my father, trying to figure out where I would go for the summer, he ventured that I would be welcome to come and live with him.

“Yeah? That might be cool,” I said.

His job in Vancouver had soured, as all his jobs seemed to sour, and now he was in California. I was still unsure about our relationship, but California sounded appealing, especially during the nadir of a Massachusetts winter. Just the two guys . . . it might be really cool.

“It's an option. There's room here for you. Of course, you would have to pay rent.”

“Rent? Dad . . . I just turned sixteen.”

“You're out on your own now, which is what you wanted. I think it's appropriate for you to contribute. We'll work out something fair.”

“Dad . . . I'm your kid. Aren't you legally obligated to, like, feed me and stuff until I'm eighteen?”

“Mishka, you have always made the argument that you're a special case and that ordinary rules shouldn't apply to you. You're out of the house, you come and go as you please, you drink alcohol, you smoke cigarettes. I pay rent—why shouldn't you?”

I got off the phone as quickly as I could and fell back on my bed. I had been using the word “unfair” to describe my relationship
with my parents for so long that, though entirely accurate here, it seemed completely inadequate to describe the situation. It was insane. He was insane. And to invite me in just to push me out like that . . . it was making
me
insane.

I made the mistake of voicing my displeasure to my friends. Zack told me, once and for all, to shut up. Zack had grown up a clumsy, skinny weakling utterly dependent on his glasses and his comic books in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a town enamored with its history of backbreaking industrial and agricultural labor. His childhood experiences hadn't exactly bred sympathy or a high tolerance for whining. When Zack's father came out of the closet and split with Zack's mother while Zack was in high school, he had endured public humiliation beyond all imagining, he informed me, and I was to never bitch about my parents' divorce again. It hurt, but he was right, I told myself. My troubles, troubles that were ruining me, in the grand scheme of things, well, they were nothing. Life is hard. Harden the fuck up, soft boy.

I hated my father that winter, but by then I had hated him for years. I hated him because I loved him and he ignored me. When my father wasn't away on business trips for Atomic Energy of Canada and then the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he had only been a token presence, returning from long hours at work just to disappear after dinner into his basement wood shop and a six-pack of Budweiser tall boys. I missed him, and I expressed it by constantly pestering him when he was around.

I couldn't have been more than six, shadowing him around his basement workshop, when he finally tried to engage me. He plopped me in an office chair in front of a computer. I still remember the green flashing cursor on screen and the built-in keyboard, a cutting-edge machine at the time. My father explained to me that a computer was so smart that it could solve any problem.

Okay, fine, I had a problem for it. I laboriously typed into the computer “How do you work?”

My father saw it coming and began hemming and hawing before I'd written my third word. Then, when I'd finally finished, he began trying to explain himself out of the corner I'd painted him into, telling me I hadn't asked the computer the question in a language it could understand.

I burst into tears. I had beaten his challenge and found a question the computer couldn't answer. My father couldn't stand that I had outwitted him, so he'd changed the rules. He had cheated.

When I was in second grade, I asked my father to help me design a trap to kill Jason Frederick, the class bully. On my instructions, he drew a deep pit full of jagged blades concealed by a thin camouflage covering. Then he drew Jason Frederick approaching, holding an ice cream cone. Then he drew a little holder on the side of the pit to catch Jason's ice cream cone when he fell in. I decided then and there that my dad was an asshole. This was a serious situation, Jason had to be dealt with, and my father was mocking me, his only son! On that day, I wrote him off, and I held fast to my disappointment in him.

As the winter wore on, it became clear that my father intended not just to shuck off his wife of nineteen years like an ill-fitting coat but to ditch the children too. Had he ever liked me? My father clearly preferred Tatyana over me—she was quieter, tidier, more orderly, less wild. Tashina had only come to live with us at the age of four, when it had become clear that her father, my mother's brother, couldn't afford to take good care of her. Though my father didn't have the disdain for Tashina that he had for me, they had never really bonded. It occurred to me that when Chuong moved out to New Hampshire with us, my father stopped trying to connect with his wife's extended brood and resigned himself to being
a stranger in his own home. Had he felt anything other than relief when Chuong had run away?

My father's exit had been so convenient, so seamless for him that it seemed impossible he hadn't planned it. He'd walked into a new life in which his family didn't exist, had never existed. He didn't even need to flee us. We had been unwritten.

Months out of a marriage of nearly twenty years, he already had a new woman. Who, we didn't know, and of course he played dumb. But we had proof of his betrayal. My mother showed me a letter she found in the back of a book he had been reading. It wasn't addressed to anyone, and it wasn't signed, but it was written in his hand, so loving, so tender that he could not have been writing to my mother. I was dying to confront him about it, but Mom swore me to secrecy—he could not know that I knew.

My parents struggled to keep the bills paid with two kids in college as they sorted out the divorce. My mother had been out of the workforce for eighteen years, raising us kids: she had no resume, no professional references, no marketable skills. Still, nothing was going to stand in the way of taking care of her children. “You do what must be done,” she had told us as children, and we'd seen her live those words, time and again.

“Well, if there's one thing I know how to do after raising you kids, it's baking. Cookies, muffins, bread . . . just point me to the eggs, flour, butter, and sugar and stand back!” She got a job working in the bakery department at Albertsons for minimum wage, sneaking the stale cookies home in her purse for her and Tashina to eat. She never let it get her down. My parents had both been poor farm kids so we weren't indoctrinated in social stratification. A job was a job, and any job had dignity. Still, I burned inside to think of her in her Albertsons uniform and hairnet, bagging bagels in clear plastic gloves, a servant to the sneering locals.

That spring, at my father's insistence, my mother tried to refinance our house. The bank told her that, as a matter of course, there was no reason to refinance their mortgage because my parents
hadn't missed a single payment. Though they had the money in their account, she didn't make the house payment one month. The bank immediately initiated foreclosure proceedings. It wasn't enough that my father had abandoned us; the bank had played us for fools, and we were now to be driven from our home.

We unceremoniously disposed of our pets. Tasha, our gorgeous, airhead Afghan hound—she had knocked herself out by running into not just a sliding glass door but also a tree—was given to a snooty but kindhearted old lady. Zeke, Tatyana's gregarious golden retriever, who spoke to us and wagged his tail so hard his rear legs skittered back and forth across the hardwood floor, went to a group that brought animals to visit old folks' homes and the terminally ill. Our three cats, too, were handed off like old clothes.