by Val Emmich
I wonder for a moment if I’ve misheard him. I’m so used to people saying the exact opposite—that they can’t imagine—and it’s always bothered me that no one seems willing to try. Mac’s willing to go there—wherever I am.
“I guess, with my own dad, I’ve been kidding myself,” Mac says.
The breath he takes is long and weary.
“I tried to stay out of it, what he did tonight. I really tried. But I don’t know how. That’s why I came to the museum and called 911—or made you do it. It’s why I called the house and kept texting him. It’s why I made us stop there on our way back.”
I peek over. His eyes are lost in the cracks in the floor.
“No matter how hard I try, I can’t not care,” Mac says.
I think of what to say, the exact right statement that can move us past this standstill without diminishing what each of us rightfully feels. He beats me to the talking, using an outer voice that sounds more like an inner one.
“All the things that happened when I was a kid, I thought they were normal. The yelling. The crying. A birthday party getting canceled. A family trip. The police showing up at our door. My dad disappearing for days on end or becoming super chatty out of nowhere. For the longest time, I thought he just really liked orange juice. I had no idea he was spiking it. I’d have a friend over, and they’d ask why there was a hole in the wall or a tear in the lampshade. I wouldn’t know what they were talking about. I didn’t even notice that stuff. I was blind to all of it. Until I started seeing other families, the way they were. I’m not like everyone else. Actually, I’m pretty fucked up.”
That nasty metamorphosis from normal to freak: I know all about it. How you almost wish you could go back to seeing yourself the way you did when you were younger even though you know full well it’s a lie.
“He’ll be clean for a long stretch and we’ll get used to that version of him. We think the worst is over. But you can’t get comfortable. Never. Because it’ll happen again. You have to be ready. Unless you’re James. He couldn’t stand how we’d act like this was all normal. One time he found my dad’s stash and broke the bottles on the driveway. It didn’t matter. My dad just went out and got more. Now James is gone. What am I supposed to do? My dad’s a grown man. If he’s not going to deal with all the shit underneath, whatever that is, there’s nothing any of us can do.”
He inhales forever and exhales even longer.
“Anyway, none of that is an excuse. I just wanted you to know.”
I feel horrible for forcing him to justify himself to me. I’ve already made him feel bad enough about his life by posting that video, and now I’m doing it again. Besides, it’s wrong to compare my situation to his. Our fathers couldn’t be more different.
But there is one thing Mac and I share: how consumed we are by these men, whether we want to be or not. Mac isn’t the only one whose preoccupation borders on obsession.
“Can I tell you something?”
He turns. In his eyes, I feel a vague bond reformed.
“I still send emails to my dad,” I say.
He’s the first person I’ve ever told. Saying it to him now feels like a way to take back the secret my mom stole from me.
“We used to email each other a lot. I remember when I got my first account, at nine or ten, I thought it was the coolest thing. My dad would send little notes to my inbox. We kept going like that, back and forth. Whatever we were talking about over breakfast, even if it was something stupid, it would continue over email until he got home at night. The day he died, I had sent him this list I found—the twenty-five best fast-food items. He loved lists, any kind of list, it didn’t matter what. He took them really seriously. The list I found had McDonald’s fries at the top, and I thought that would bother him, having a side dish be number one. That’s the type of thing he’d pick apart. I was curious what he’d say. I kept waiting to hear.”
Mac waits now for what I’m going to say. I want to say it all—and for him to hear it.
“I kept emailing him after that. I didn’t know how to stop. I didn’t want to. I used to dream I’d get a response. One day, I decided to make it happen. I broke into his account. It wasn’t hard to guess his password. He used the same one for everything. My initials and my birthday. I read his whole inbox. He was still getting mail from people who didn’t know he had died and from companies who didn’t care. I also looked through his sent mail and read the things he wrote to his friends and colleagues. It was like hearing him talk again. I wanted him to talk again. So I found the messages I sent him, and I replied to them. I made him write back to me.”
Whenever I’d see his name in my inbox, for a split second I’d think he was alive again. It feels like that still, even though I know it’s just me writing to myself.
Dad,
Were you scared? When it happened, did you know it was happening? It hurts to imagine what you felt. How alone you were. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.
Love,
Tegan
Tegan,
It’s okay, honey. It was quick. I promise I didn’t feel a thing.
Love,
Dad
Dad,
I look at other people, how they talk. They have no idea how lucky they are. Neel says not to compare. They teach us that in New Beginnings. Don’t compare pain. But I can’t help it. I keep asking why. Why you? Why did this have to happen to my dad?
Love,
Tegan
Tegan,
There’s no answer to why. It’s maddening, I know.
Neel seems like a great friend. I’m glad you found him.
Love,
Dad
Dad,
Did you ever wish you had a normal daughter? Did you ever look at me when I was a baby and wish I was like every other baby? Because I look at myself sometimes and I wish that. I would understand if you felt the same way.
Love,
Tegan
Tegan,
You’re the only daughter I ever wanted.
Remember when I threatened to kill that old man at Turtle Back Zoo if he didn’t stop staring at you? An old man! That wasn’t me, you know that. I never had a temper. But for you, forget about it.
Love,
Dad
1:02 AM
I remember hearing about it,” Mac says. “It was a few years ago, right?”
Three years in March. So yeah, I’m not a fan of March. Or June (Father’s Day). But March 9, specifically, is the worst.
“We were in eighth grade,” I say.
“Right,” Mac says.
“I was at Isla’s house. I used to be there a lot. It’s one of those houses you never want to leave. We were sitting at the kitchen table, pretending to do math homework, but actually cracking each other up by sending memes back and forth. Isla asked her mom to make us smoothies. Robin, that’s her mom’s name. She’s really cool. Normally she’ll drop whatever she’s doing if Isla asks her for something. But that day, she was like, ‘No, Tegan has to go home.’ I remember Isla and I started laughing. We were just in that mood, you know. But Robin was serious. She told me to grab my things. My mom had called her and asked her to drive me home. I texted my mom, just to check in, but she didn’t write me back. I thought maybe I was in trouble, but I couldn’t think of what for. In the car, Robin was trying to talk to me about school and stuff, but it was weird, she wouldn’t even look at me. When we got to my house, I saw my grandparents’ car out front. Then my mom answered the door and I saw she was crying.”
My mom signed me up for a bereavement group at school, New Beginnings, where I met Neel. He had lost his cousin Avi from a terrible asthma attack. Avi and Neel were like brothers. After it happened, Neel kept having nightmares where he couldn’t catch his breath. When I started having nightmares of my own about my dad, I asked Neel when his bad dreams finally stopped. I’ll let you know when they do, he told me.
Isla and Brooke, meanwhile, keep waiting for me to magically spring back to my for
mer self, a lighter kind of quiet, but I don’t think that’s how grief works. I can’t just flip a switch and be in a great mood and want to hang out all the time. I know they mean well, but only Neel seems to understand that no matter what anyone says or does, the heaviness never fully goes away, even when you’re cracking the biggest smile on the outside. Sometimes I don’t have the energy to pretend I’m not sad.
Mac asks, “What was your dad like?”
Where to begin? Random memories come to mind.
“He liked puzzles with a million pieces. He was a good doodler. I remember papers with two drawings of the same animal. Two dogs. Two zebras. Two giraffes. His giraffe was always better than my giraffe. I remember his voice sounded much deeper in the morning. I remember I would hold my arm up straight and I would ask him to tickle it and he would. Every time we saw a W.B. Mason truck on the road we’d both say ‘yellow truck.’ I still say it now. I remember him dancing on the back porch to ‘Hey Ya!’ He wore glasses, and when I was really little and he came to my room in the middle of the night, if I had a nightmare or something, his face without glasses would frighten me.”
I angle toward Mac. “We went tubing—once.”
Mac smiles.
“At the top of the hill, before you go down, they give you a choice. They can spin you or not spin you. My dad would get nauseous so easily. He never let my mom drive because he’d get carsick. I don’t know how he would have driven around with me with my learner’s permit, but anyway. I tell the guy I want to spin, and my dad just gives me the fakest smile ever. He was so not into it, but honestly, I didn’t even care.”
Mac shakes his head. “Ruthless.”
“Hey, I was a kid, and I was really excited.”
“Go on,” Mac says playfully.
“So we go down the hill, spinning like crazy, and when we get to the bottom, he can’t”—I start laughing—“he had to roll out of the tube.”
Mac’s dimple shows.
“He stayed there in the snow and people had to walk around him. My mom and I were cracking up. I felt bad, but I couldn’t help it. I guess I am pretty ruthless.”
“I was just teasing,” Mac says.
“Whenever I was in a bad mood or I gave my dad an attitude, instead of calling me Tegan, he’d call me this other name: Regan. I hated when he called me that, even though I didn’t get the joke until later. Regan is this really evil character in King Lear. One of the king’s daughters. Even my dad’s jokes were Shakespearean. He was kind of a dork.”
I think about him constantly, but he’s not usually part of my conversations, not overtly. People don’t want to touch the subject, even Isla and Brooke, who knew him well. Neel thinks they’re trying to protect me from sadness by not ever mentioning him, but the reality is I’m usually already thinking about him anyway. It feels good to talk about him—my dad. Now that I’ve started, I don’t want to stop.
I look around the museum and more memories arrive.
“He loved this place. Just a few years ago it was really run down and a bunch of people in the community got together to help restore it. He was part of that. At one point, he was here pretty much every weekend. He’d drag me along.”
My boss’s fondness for my dad is the only reason she granted me a summer internship normally reserved for college students. To make good on that, I tried to read everything I could about Thomas Edison. I figured I owed it to my dad.
“I wonder sometimes when I come here if it was Thomas Edison he was a fan of or just this place. What this place symbolizes. The ideas. He was really into ideas. He knew how powerful they can be.”
I think of my “dual touch” idea, the one Neel and I hope to submit to the inventors fair. My dad would have flipped for it. I try to picture his reaction, but his appearance is murky in my mind.
“There’s this one invention of Edison’s I think about a lot. This machine that lets you communicate with the dead. People called it a ghost machine or spirit box. Edison mentioned it a few times in interviews. He had been working on it a long time. But no one’s ever found evidence of one having been built. Plus, no patents were filed for it. I guess he never figured that one out.”
I look to the floor, avoiding Mac’s eyes. As much joy as it’s given me to bring my dad back to life, I feel overwhelmed by all the things I don’t remember. I don’t remember his smell. I don’t remember his laugh, how it sounded. I don’t remember his love, how it feels.
Watching videos doesn’t help fill in the blanks because he was always the one behind the camera. He was busy shooting my first steps, first haircut, first taste of mashed potatoes. He was busy shooting my worst tantrum and best cartwheel and most drawn-out story. He was busy shooting my birthdays and swim lessons and recitals. He was busy capturing me.
I wish I had captured him back.
1:19 AM
How about your dad?” I say, because now I’ve spilled the beans about mine, and I’m feeling exposed and self-conscious and also guilty that I don’t know anything about the poor man I callously threw under the bus. I know he loves music and records but what else? “What does he do for a living?”
“Not sure,” Mac says. “Something with computers.”
It’s both shocking and not that Mac has no clue what his dad does for a living. “Does he like it?”
This, too, gives him trouble. “No. I don’t think so.”
“My dad loved his job. He was an English professor. At Rutgers, actually.”
I had wanted to share this information earlier when Mac mentioned the possibility of going to Rutgers, but I held back. It seems unbelievable now, my hesitation, how fidgety and guarded I felt around him. He’s morphed from a unicorn into a human.
“What about your mom?” Mac says.
The casual mention of my mom ruins everything—again. “What about her?”
“I don’t know. We keep talking about our fathers. Equal rights, you know.”
In this case, screw feminism. “You answer first.”
By now he’s used to my deflections. He stretches his arms high, the way you do when waking from a deep sleep.
“My mom,” Mac says. “She’s frustrating.”
Now we’re talking.
“She complains a lot,” Mac says. “But she won’t do anything to fix it.”
“It?”
“The stuff with my dad. Like, with the mailbox. When she finds out, she’ll yell at him, say how we can’t have anything nice, all that, but how about actually doing something about it?”
“You mean, like what, getting help for him?”
“Yeah. Rehab, therapy, something. James looked into some kind of retreat. Or else my mom should leave him already if that’s what she wants. She should want that. They fight all the time. But to just sit there and be helpless…” He’s worked himself into a state, an overflow of frustration. “She gets to run off to my aunt’s. What about me?”
I guess tonight he decided, finally, that he could leave, too.
The feeling of injustice, I know it well. When my mom started dating Charlie, I was aghast. How dare she move on? Why was I the only one holding on to my dad? It was too big a job to fall solely on me.
“I do feel bad for her,” Mac says. “I know she puts up with a lot. She’s been out of work, too. She keeps changing careers. If she could find one thing to stick with, maybe she’d be happier.”
I can’t keep quiet now if I tried. “My mom teaches preschool. She’s a very sweet person. She always sees the bright side. Always. It’s super annoying.”
Mac laughs. “You really are brutal.”
“Trust me, it may sound good from afar, but I promise after a while it’ll drive you crazy. Especially when you look around and it’s obvious that everything is not fine. Things are literally falling apart.”
These words come with pictures—memories.
I’m up on my feet and heading into the front room. Before Mac can follow, I’m back and carrying a watering can to the bathroom. I fill the can i
n the sink and carry it to the front room. Mac trails behind. I turn on a small lamp, not the overheads, and climb on a stool. I stand high and water all the plants. Three of them, hanging in a row.
“No one remembers to water them.”
I remove a dry brown leaf from the bottom of a pot. I finish watering and sit down on the stool.
“Sorry,” I say. “We were talking about my mom.”
“Right. What were you saying?”
“No, I mean that’s what made me think of the plants.”
Mac takes a seat on the other stool. I place the watering can on the counter. A dangling drop falls from the spout and lands on the glass. I flatten the bubble with my thumb.
“When my dad died, no one was taking care of his plants. He had a lot of them.”
At the time it felt like everywhere I looked, things were falling apart. Another school shooting. A post about a tortured dog. A childhood haunt replaced by another cash-and-carry. A tiny rip in my favorite shirt. All I saw and heard—destruction, decay, departure. Things were not fine. I was thirteen.
“My dad used to always be on the phone with this service, this plant hotline. You talk to a real person, not a recording. One day I called the number. This woman—she had the kindest voice—she asked me how she could help. I didn’t know what to say to her. So I hung up. I didn’t know anything about plants. But I started learning.
“I looked up what kinds of plants my dad had in the house and I called the hotline again. The same woman picked up. Her name was Daphne. I’d describe the problem, whatever it was—the leaves were sagging and yellow, white spots everywhere, growths all over the stems—and Daphne would tell me what to do. More water. Less water. More sunlight. Try feeding it. She had all the answers.”
My dad could have looked up the info online, but he preferred to interact with real humans. After talking to Daphne and always having her there to solve my problems, I understand why he liked it so much.
