I grin at his kindness, and we ebb into silence, the trees settling in around us. I stare at him for a beat while he loses himself to something across the lake, and I can see it now, see it clear as this Virginia air—that those bluish hazel eyes, even with the ever-so-fine wrinkles that too much sun and two decades can bring, even with the flop of burnished blond hair that sweeps over his forehead to mask them—that those eyes are the same ones my father had drawn in his sketchbook. That they were watching over me, and that maybe my dad was sending me a message, even if that message was obscured through his murky encryption. It was his wayward code to let me know that someone was out there, that someone had my back, even when he couldn’t. My father couldn’t have known that the book wouldn’t make its way to me. My father couldn’t have known that when it finally did, I’d have lost the ability to remember what the message was about in the first place.
Or maybe not. I reconsider. Maybe none of this is as complicated as I’m making it. Maybe my dad just wanted me to have a piece of him once he was gone, his final act of infamy, and maybe I need to stop affixing everything, every aspiration, every goddamn breath on who he was to me, what he meant to me, and how I can ever capture both of those things again. Maybe, simply, it was his apology—for asking me to live up to expectations that I could never meet, for not cutting me from those expectations when he understood the toll that they were taking. For not freeing me to make the music that burned inside of me.
“Okay, so one question: Why send me the keys?” I say finally, and Wes subtly releases himself from whatever thought he was lost in.
“The two of us had a pact,” he says, brushing the hair from his eyes. “When your mom came and took you that summer, we promised each other right before you left—while she was downstairs waiting, and my own mother was going bat-shit crazy at your father for letting things spin this far out of control—but we made a pact.” A laugh forms somewhere deep in the back of his throat. “You’d just read
Flowers in the Attic,
and when things got really haywire in those last days, you were convinced that we had to stick together, so we did that typical angsty thing of pricking each other’s fingers and rubbing our blood together.”
“Rubbing blood together can never be a good sign.”
“I know—weren’t we the cliché.” He smiles. “But anyway, we rubbed our fingers together and promised to watch out for each other, to figure out a plan to be a family somehow.” He shrugs. “Then Dad eventually moved back in with you guys, and then he went off the reservation until a few years ago…”
“Until a few years ago?” I interrupt. “You’ve seen him?”
He pauses. “Before my mom died. She must have known how
to contact him or known someone who did. He just popped up on Wednesday afternoon shortly after her diagnosis. I wouldn’t have been here—I run a graphic design company in town—but Mom wasn’t feeling well from the chemo…”
“Cancer?” I say.
“Isn’t it always?” he answers, then picks the cuticle on his ring finger with his teeth. “Anyway, he rang the doorbell and then used his key to let himself in—I guess Mom never thought to change the locks or maybe she didn’t change them on purpose, knowing that he still had a key—and I swear to god, it was the most surreal moment of my life: Francis Slattery standing in my living room as if he hadn’t been AWOL for the past two decades.”
As Wes is telling this story, my lungs feel smaller and smaller, tighter and tighter, like someone is suffocating me just slowly enough that I can recognize that I’m asphyxiating but quickly enough that I’m helpless to do anything about it. I wave both hands in front of my face.
“Please, stop.” I gasp for the clean lake air.
He looks startled for a moment, until he realizes that I’m running out of oxygen.
“Shit!” He moves to rub my back. “I’m sorry! Is this too much? Should I not be telling you this?”
I focus on my breathing, too embarrassed to admit that the realization that he came back for
her
but not for
me
has knocked the literal wind out of me.
Screw you, Father! I can’t believe that I’ve chased you all this time, and you couldn’t be bothered to chase me back. Not even for a plane crash and amnesia and the entire godforsaken disaster area that my life has become! It was exactly what my mom had predicted, exactly what I refused to accept, even in the wake of mounting evidence. And here I was, still chasing him. Screw you, new me! Screw you, old me! Who else is left for there to be now?
“Just go back,” I bleat. “Go back to what you were telling me before, about us, about why we lost touch.”
“Okay,” he says and hesitates, giving me a long once-over, his hand still forming concentric circles between my shoulder blades. He glances toward the house, wondering if he should go for help.
“I’m fine,” I say a bit more forcefully. “Please, go on.”
“Well, okay, so we made this vow to—god, this sounds so young and naive—but we made this vow to stay family.”
Naive?
I think.
It sounds kind of nice, nothing short of a miracle.
“And this was before e-mail, before Google,” he says. “Our parents weren’t speaking, much less letting us speak…I wrote you letters for a while.” He runs his hands over his face, and I readjust the scarf around my feet. Slowly, blood is starting to pool back in my toes. “Anyway, a year goes by, then another, and then, I just figured that life pulled you out into it, and it certainly had me by the balls—college was not my shining moment—I got suspended sophomore year, and then arrested my junior year for selling weed.”
“Weed? Speaking of clichés.”
“Tell me about it.” He grins.
“Jesus, are we screwed up.”
“Not anymore,” he says.
“Speak for yourself.”
“Fair enough, but yours are due to extenuating circumstances. It’s not every day that you survive a plane crash and lose your memory.” We laugh together at this—at the truth of it, at the sadness of it, at the inanity of it. “So anyway, after all of that, so I let it—let the idea of us as a family—go.”
“And yet you sent me the keys.”
He sighs, heavy and purging. “My mom died.” He shrugs. “That changes you. Like, literally triggers something in you. And then I found your painting in the attic. It seemed like a good time to reconnect, to try to build something.” His voice drops. “I didn’t have anyone else, you know? The keys were an open invitation to coming back.”
“I wish I could remember why I didn’t respond.”
He raises his shoulders and lets them drop. “We had a complicated situation. I’m sure that part of you blamed us for the fallout.”
“You’re very levelheaded, you know. I can’t really believe that we’re related, not when I’m surrounded by all of this insanity.”
“Ah yes, speaking of which, your mother is currently in our kitchen about to blow a gasket.” He chuckles. “The dressing is different—last I saw her she was decked out in her best late-eighties tracksuit—but Jesus, isn’t she exactly the same.”
“Funny,” I say. “She’d say that there’s not much about her that hasn’t changed.”
“That’s the thing about self-perception,” he says, before rising to leave me be. “It’s a bitch.”
“I thought that was karma.”
He squints and assesses. “Who’s to say it’s not both?”
30
“Ramble On”
—Led Zeppelin
O
nce I found the song—sought it out on the iPod, and forced myself to listen—once I heard the song and remembered it—it seems impossible that it didn’t come to me sooner. That the music was the key to finding the moment that set everything into motion.
A bud of anguish builds inside of me, not just for what happened that day, but that I sacrificed so many months of my childhood running both toward it and from it. An animalist cry spills out from the underpinnings of my belly.
How long had I let him define me? Even when, as an adult, I pretended that he hadn’t.
I grab a wayward twig and chuck it out to the water. It floats for a moment before inexplicably sinking.
Forever. It seems that I had let him define me for just about forever. Whichever version of myself I was embodying at whichever moment, really, weren’t they all in reaction to him?
The song is still playing on my iPod—Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” stuck on Repeat. I turn away from the water and see it: my dad’s studio. It’s off to the left of the dock, tucked beneath the line of trees, with a clear view of the lake, which he claimed provided him
serenity, but really, who the hell knows what ever provided him serenity? Booze? Sure, that. Cocaine? Occasionally that, too. But his deepest secret is that I think his pain, his anguish, the depression that he so sunk into,
embraced even,
is what provided him serenity. At thirteen, this was impossible to realize. But now, two decades later, it is impossible to miss.
I’d wandered into my dad’s studio that afternoon. Wes was at the dentist for a chipped tooth he’d gotten during Little League practice—an errant bat went flying—and Rory was inside napping off a sunburn. Without my mom around, no one tended to things like if we drank four Cokes a day or if we thought to apply sunblock, so just yesterday, she’d fried her shoulders like pork rinds. She cried all through dinner, and Heather broke some aloe from her garden and tended to it, but my dad excused himself to his studio and didn’t return. Rory’s wails gave us all headaches, but it was only my dad who couldn’t tolerate it. The rest of us forked at our pasta, and knew that those were the consequences of living rule-free. You got to drink four Cokes a day, but sometimes you burned the hell out of yourself.
So I was bored. On the dock, two decades later, I still can feel the listlessness running through me. I’d come down to spend the summer with him—
I’d chosen him!
—and he was never around, and when he was around, he was mostly snappish. That day, with Wes at the dentist and Rory asleep, I picked grass and threw it for a while, watching it flutter from my palm back to the ground, but then resolved to go see him, breaking one of the few rules that had been imposed.
Don’t interrupt him,
Heather had said early on.
Not when he’s working.
The three of us—Wes, Rory, and I—bobbed our heads in unison and understood the gravity of crossing this line, and then we ran outside in our pajamas to watch the fireflies.
But today felt different. I’d hardly seen him in days, with the exception of last night’s short-lived dinner, and I was thirteen and testing my limits, pushing up against what was expected of me, and goddammit if I didn’t want a little bit of his attention!
He was working with the stereo on: blaring Zeppelin so loudly that the guitar split my ears.
“Mine’s a tale that can’t be told, my freedom I hold dear. How years ago in days of old, when magic filled the air.”
He didn’t hear me when I came in, even though the door squeaked, and I kept shouting, “Dad, Dad?”
I snuck in closer and closer, and even then, he didn’t see me, or didn’t choose to see me. Finally, I reached out and tapped his elbow, which was frozen in midair, his forearms splattered with paint, his brush still aloft. I knew I was crossing some sort of boundary, I
knew
that I was popping the bubble of his private seclusion, but I just wanted him to turn around and see…me. That the color I’d gotten yesterday across my nose had already turned to freckles, that I’d braided my hair into long pigtails just like I used to as a kid, that I smelled like honeysuckle because Rory and I had spent the morning wading through the back bushes, embracing the freedoms that we didn’t have back in New York with our mom.
Instead, I tapped his elbow, and he spun around, dropping his brush, and there was blackness in his eyes. Even now, on the dock, I can remember that so acutely, that he was practically dead. Dead inside anyway. That his dark space had gone bleaker, which didn’t seem possible, knowing his spells, but that it was indeed possible. His pupils were dilated to saucers, the rims around the whites of his eyes pink like salmon, the circles under them black as soot.
He can’t see me,
I thought,
he can’t see anything
.
I realized my mistake, my brazen foolishness, almost immediately,
but by then it was too late. Like disturbing a rattlesnake. Once you step on it, it’s not like you can pretend that you haven’t.
“What is the rule we have?” he erupted. “What is the one
fucking rule
we have, Eleanor Margaret Slattery?” His breath burned my cheeks. It was laced with bourbon and beer and god knows what else. He grabbed my biceps and lifted me, and that’s when my regret of interrupting him turned to fear. That he was so unhinged, so out of his mind in his depressive trance that he might actually hurt me. He started shaking me, slowly at first, and then faster, faster still, until I was flopping around like one of Rory’s Raggedy Ann dolls, and I started crying, and then begging for him to put me down. I could feel his fingers worming into my skin, pressing against my muscles, bruising them almost instantly.
I was sobbing when he finally—and violently—threw me against the couch, like I was so disposable that I was a pair of socks.
We both froze for a second as reality sunk in, and I saw a flicker of humanity return to him, at the gravity of what had just transpired, that neither one of us could go back in time and erase it.
Oh Jesus, do I wish that I could go back in time and never come down to his studio, that Rory wouldn’t have gotten sunburned, that Wes wouldn’t have chipped his tooth. Then I wouldn’t have been so bored, wouldn’t have thought to break the one rule I knew that I shouldn’t have.
But then he turned his back, flicked the stereo on just a touch louder—“
Gonna ramble on! Sing my song
!”—and grabbed the brush, which had fallen to the floor, marring the Oriental rug.
I finally found my breath and ran, as fast as my thirteen-year-old legs could carry me, down the rest of the hill, feet flying out beneath me, pebbles casting themselves away underneath. I was peeling my shirt over my head, preparing to launch myself headfirst into the balm of the water, when my ankle snapped under. Nineteen years
later, I can still hear it: that pop, the searing tweak that radiated up the side of my calf, and then I was falling, spilling over myself mostly by accident, but also in my grief. The planks of the dock got close, then closer, and then the pain in my ankle gave way to an acute, anguished burning in the side of my temple, right where my head impacted the corner of a two-by-four on the dock. And then I felt the cool sensation—just for a fraction of a second—of my body plunging into the water. And then, I stopped feeling anything at all.