He writes me prescriptions for an antibiotic and hydrocodone—for the pain. “You probably won’t need it,” he says with a shrug. “But just in case.”
On the walk to the pharmacy, my father calls me from the shelter. He tells me about the Christmas loot “the bankers” gifted him: two new shirts, socks, a pair of gloves, a scarf, a hat. He tells me he was lucky to be given a bed.
I ask him why around the wad of cotton wedged inside my mouth.
“The regulars were out, I guess. I’m not supposed to be here.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have an ID with a local address,” he says. “They’re trying to get rid of their homeless population. Maybe I’ll go down to South Carolina again; they got real good shelters down there. Showers and everything.”
I wait. He waits, I know, for me to offer him a place to stay.
“Do you think,” he begins slowly, “I could stay with you for a little while? I’m not drinking right now.”
I remain silent. I’ll do it, my mother had told me. You just send him to me, and I’ll take care of him. But my mother is no longer here to take care of my dad.
“I don’t know why I did what I did last week,” my father says, to fill my silence. “I knew if I went back to Grandma’s I was gonna get into trouble, but I did it anyway. Maybe I just needed to get out of there.”
I sigh. “Why did you even start drinking to begin with?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I went and saw your sister.”
As if that was all the explanation I needed.
“I’ll ask my roommates if it’s okay,” I say, hesitantly. No one ever taught me how to tell my father no.
“All right,” he says, his voice picking up. “I’ll go down to the train station and see how much a ticket is. Tuesdays—I think Tuesdays are the cheapest.”
I walk home with my bundle of pills. My cat, Little Foot, follows me upstairs to our room. I close the door and set the two bottles—one an antibiotic, the other a painkiller—on my desk. I rotate the bottle of hydrocodone; read the label; uncap it; swallow a pill. I peel out of my clothes and turn off the light and burrow into a nest of blankets, and then I wait for the world to turn fuzzy and warm.
* * *
—
WHEN MARIE FIRST came to Boston to look for an apartment, I offered to let her stay with me. We hadn’t talked much in the years since I left, but it felt good—comfortable—to talk with her again.
I told her about my ex, Marc, who briefly had moved into the apartment I shared with Nathan and a third roommate. I met Marc on a dating website, Geek 2 Geek, and in the beginning, our relationship was easy and sweet. I never talked about my family, or me.
We played videogames together. We watched Battlestar Galactica together from beginning to end. When he moved in, he bought a metal shelving unit and a grow lamp, and he started an indoor garden, planting tomatoes and peas. He tied twine above the rows of peas for their little hands to reach.
One summer, we visited Martha’s Vineyard, where he had grown up and where his dad still lived. Marc’s grandfather was visiting from California, and one night, the four of us went out in a metal dinghy to catch crabs under a full moon. We waded through waist-deep water and shone our flashlights across the bottom of the ocean floor. The crabs froze in the beams of light, and if the crabs were male—with blue-tipped claws instead of red—we slapped our aluminum nets over their heads and scooped them up with a turn of the wrist.
Back at the house, Marc and his father boiled the crabs while his grandfather and I sat next to each other and peeled the meat out of the shells. His grandfather was Chamorro, one of the indigenous peoples of Guam, and he told me stories from his island and from his time as an enlisted soldier in the U.S. Army that Marc had never heard before.
Another night, we visited one of his high school friends, a sanitation worker on the island. There were dozens of bottles of liquor—hundreds if not thousands of dollars’ worth of alcohol—arranged in a circle in the middle of the living room floor. His friend had salvaged the bottles from the basement of a summer home that had flooded with sewage—the bottles were sealed, the contents safe, but the owners had thrown everything out.
That night, we both drank hard. But when he was drunk, Marc’s eyes looked like my father’s eyes, glistening shards of broken glass. I didn’t want to talk to him—I didn’t want to touch him—with eyes like that.
“I feel like I’m in prison,” Marc complained one night after he had been drinking with his friends, who I refused to visit; they sat around a dark room, chain-smoked cigarettes, and discussed the conspiracy theories of Alex Jones. When he came home, I could still smell the beer and the smoke on his breath.
“I don’t want to talk to you when you’re drunk,” I said, retreating to our bed.
“I feel like I’m not allowed to go out,” he yelled, following me to our room.
I wouldn’t look at him. I wouldn’t talk to him. I shut down.
The next morning, he followed me from room to room and tried to start the conversation again, but each time, I stepped through a doorway and sheltered behind its walls. I could not be seen. I could not look into his face.
When he gave up on the conversation, I hid in our bedroom with my headphones on and a cat in my lap. He packed all his things—his computer and his clothes and his plants—and opened our bedroom only once, to tell me he was leaving and to collect his clothes. And then he left.
“It wasn’t his fault,” I told Marie. “Not really. I never told him what growing up with my father was like.”
She asked me how my father was doing. She asked me about my grandmother and my sister. Sometime during the conversation, my roommate—a guy I met working at the thrift store—plopped down on the couch and eavesdropped on my family’s drama.
“I’m sorry,” my roommate interrupted finally, “but this is fascinating. I’ve never heard these things before.”
Marie, surprised, looked between us, and I smiled a small smile. He wandered upstairs when the conversation drifted to Marie’s family, to her mother and brothers and our old friends. But after he was gone, Marie stopped talking and slid her glasses over the crown of her head to pin her bangs out of her face. “I get it now,” she said, pressing her fingertips over the tears in her eyes. “You came here to be alone.”
Unexpectedly, I began to cry. I hadn’t understood my own motivations until Marie gave voice to them.
If you isolate yourself long enough, you begin to believe no one can touch you. No one can take you back to the scared little girl you used to be. But one text, one letter, one phone call, that’s all it really takes to prove you wrong.
* * *
—
MY FATHER BUYS a ticket and plans to arrive a few days after Christmas. My roommates—Marie and two of our other friends from college—are already familiar with the stories about my father, my family. Even knowing, when I ask if he can stay with us for a few days,they agree to let him sleep on the couch in a spare room downstairs.
Before either my grandmother or my father called, I’d scheduled a date with another guy from OkCupid for the night before Christmas Eve. I consider canceling, but I already canceled once, the night my tooth was pulled. Fuck it, I decide, and meet him at a restaurant near my apartment.
Sometime between the appetizer and the entrée, after he asks me about my ancestry, I start talking about my mother. When I realize where the conversation is going, I apologize and try to back out.
“It’s okay,” he insists. “I’m a really good listener.”
After dinner, we go back to my apartment and watch the Lady Gaga and the Muppets Holiday Spectacular. “It’s so good,” he insists.
Most of the songs are from her new album, which I didn’t enjoy, and the show lacks a narrative arc. It is just Lady Gaga in different costumes with a dash
of the Muppets thrown in for flavor. When he asks me what I think, I admit the Muppets and the texture of their felted faces fill me with anxiety, a feeling like ants marching up and down my spine.
After the show ends, he pries again into my mother’s death; he asks me how she died, how I felt.
“I thought I was finally getting through it,” I say. “And then my father’s life falls apart.”
He strokes my back, but I can’t find comfort in it. I roll my shoulders uncomfortably, and he draws his hand away. “I’m getting tired,” I say in apology.
“Oh, sure,” he says, standing, as if to go. “I had a really great time tonight—you know, all things considered.”
I thank him, but walk him to the door. “I just have a lot going on right now. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry,” he insists, smiling. “I’d love to see you again.”
I tell him I’ll call.
I close the door and walk back upstairs. In bed, Little Foot wedges herself inside the crook of my arm. “I just want to die,” I tell her, and when I say the words aloud, I begin to sob. I bury my face in the scruff of her neck, and she waits patiently for me to stop crying. “But if I die,” I say finally, rubbing the bridge of her nose, “who would take care of you?”
* * *
—
CHRISTMAS MORNING, I take a bus to Nathan’s to feed his cat while he is home for the holidays. On the kitchen table, I find a six-pack of Pepsi and one of the discs from Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I had left in his DVD player when I moved out. Rupert Giles’s coquettish face gazes up at me, and a Post-it note tacked to the DVD reads, “Thanks Danielle! -Goob.”
I feel the prickling kitten claws of Nathan’s long-haired calico cat crawl up my leg, and I bend down to lift her onto my shoulder. I nuzzle my cheek into her soft rabbit fur and croon, “Hello, little Goob.”
I carry her through the empty apartment, which has been repainted with mute shades of tan and white. When we first moved in, the kitchen had been a light shade of green, which reminded me of my mother’s house in Florida, and the bathroom had been a rich goldenrod. I carry her into the living room, where two modern, plush sofas and an oversized loveseat dominate the floor space. Nathan’s mother had given us a set of heavy wood-frame sofas that reminded me of the ones my family had in Florida in our brown-and-tan trailer, but his girlfriend hated them. His new couches came from Bob’s Discount Furniture.
I sink down into one of the couches and let Goob pool into my lap. I scratch beneath her chin and smile at the soft vibration of her purrs. When I moved out, Nathan and I had been bickering. I left unwashed dishes in the sink and too many things in the living room. I didn’t help enough around the house. He would leave for months every summer, on grant-funded trips to Canada and Texas to study bats, and expected me to take care of Goob. Whenever he was gone, she paced around the house and cried; lost weight; groomed obsessively, which created a bald patch near the base of her tail. My presence wasn’t enough to calm her anxiety.
“She’s a cat,” he said, when I complained about his frequent, long absences. “They’re self-reliant. They don’t need people.”
Nothing I said would have made him change his mind.
I toss Goob’s fish around the living room and tell her I will be back.
It is already dark when I arrive home. I find a package on my porch—a gift from Nathan’s mother, who, even after we broke up in college, has mailed me presents for every major and minor holiday. I pick up the package and the stack of mail off the floor and, under the porch light, flip through the envelopes addressed to past residents.
My downstairs neighbor’s door cracks open an inch.
Startled, I glance up and smile. “Hi!” In the five months I’ve lived at the new apartment, we have never met before now.
He says nothing and closes the door.
I carry the package upstairs. Inside, I find Christmas-themed kitchen towels and potholders; a snowman-shaped marshmallow; two bars of soap made with goat’s milk; a sheet of bird stickers; two packages of cat treats; a pair of hand-knit turquoise gloves. I pull out my phone and send Nathan a text message: thx for sharing your mom.
My date from OkCupid texts me a photo of his sister’s cats batting balls of wrapping paper around the floor. Hope you had a great holiday! he says, adding that he would love to see me again.
I draft and delete a number of responses. I don’t think I’m up for hanging out, I finally reply. I’m pretty wrecked this week, sorry.
* * *
—
MY EX, MARC, sent me a Facebook message a few days after my mother died. I’m just gonna throw this out there, but if you need someone to vent to, I’m here, he had said, adding, I know you’re not big on all that.
At the time, I thanked him and declined his offer. But after my father buys his bus ticket, I text Marc and ask if he’s free to hang out.
Whatever works for you, he says.
* * *
—
I MEET MY father at South Station. I wait on the platform and watch him walk off the train—shoulders back, feet fast. He carries a single black bag. When he stops in front of me, he smiles, sad. “You look like your mom, standing there like that.”
I wonder what he means—what part of her he sees in me—but don’t ask. I hug him, ginger.
“Let me smoke a cigarette before we get on the train,” he says, “I’m dying.”
I follow him through the station and wait quietly as he smokes one of his rolled cigarettes. Then I show him the way home, where I pull a sheet over the couch cushions and offer him one of the blankets my grandmother crocheted.
We sit down next to each other, and he unpacks his bag, showing me the new socks and underwear the bankers gifted him for Christmas. He pulls out his netbook and says, “I thought I could work on my apps while I’m here.”
My father originally learned to write Android apps to create a program he claimed could predict the best lottery numbers to play. The app had decent reviews, but after my nephew was diagnosed with autism, my father began creating kids’ apps instead. He showed me one of the new apps he was working on, Kids Farm Animals, a simple farm game with three different scenes. In one, a frog hops from lily pad to lily pad; the shadow of a fish glides under the surface of the pond. If you touch the shadow, the fish flips into the air in surprise. In another, you can pick carrots out of a field, and my father’s voice—warped digitally, but still recognizable—counts one, two, three as you go. A groundhog sits beside the field, and if you don’t knock him out, he steals all the carrots, which resets the counter to zero. In the last, an owl pops its head out of a barn.
“I showed Sebastian an early version of this one,” my father says, “but the owl didn’t hoot yet. He’d push on the owl, and he knew something was supposed to happen, so he got all frustrated. He handed it back to me and kept saying, ‘Hoot! Hoot!’ ” My father laughs. “He knew it was supposed to hoot, but I couldn’t fix it that fast.”
I laugh, too. The last time I visited home, my nephew hadn’t been very interested in me, but he knew how to ask my father for a peanut butter cracker, or for his Kindle to be charged, or for the last fifteen seconds of a movie to be replayed, without a word. I took a picture of them together: My nephew lies upside down in my father’s lap, his legs propped up against my father’s chest, his toes curled around my father’s chin.
“All the money from these apps is going into a bank account for Sebastian,” my father says.
“You’re a good grandpa.”
“He’s really smart,” he continues, as if he hasn’t heard me. “His teachers think he’s a savant. He’s going to be smarter than all of us.”
The doorbell rings, and I jump off the couch. “One second,” I tell my father, then run downstairs to the front door.
Marc, wearing a pair of black dress pants and t
he same blue-and-gray jacket he owned when we were together two years before, stands on the porch. He holds a styrofoam Dunkin’ Donuts cup and rolls his shoulders in a nervous shrug. “Hey,” he says.
“Hi,” I say, pressing myself against the wall. “Come in.”
He follows me upstairs, and my father stands up to greet him.
“Do you remember Marc?” I ask. Marc drove me down to Pennsylvania one early summer, and he had met both my grandmother and my dad. I took him to the fruit farm where I worked as a kid, and we bought a pint of black raspberries to eat in the car.
“Yeah,” my father says, extending his hand. “How you doing?”
“Hi, Mike,” Marc says, shaking hands.
“I’m gonna smoke a cigarette and go to bed,” my father says. “I’m tired.” He picks up his bag of tobacco and walks past us, toward the door.
“It’s past your bedtime,” I try to joke.
He laughs a small laugh.
I show Marc upstairs to my room.
“Oh my god,” he laughs, “how is it so cold up here?”
I crawl under the blankets and pat the spot beside me. “The insulation is terrible, and we keep the heat turned down to save money.”
Marc slides in beside me; we lie on our backs, side by side. I shiver, a tremor that makes my teeth chatter quietly. I’m not sure if it’s from the cold or my nerves.
“How are you doing?” he asks, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.
“Things are so crazy right now,” I say. “It wasn’t just that my mom died. There was all this other—shit. And it all happened so fast.”
“That’s hard,” he says, quiet.
I tell him about the trip to Florida—about Dale, and the things I found. How alone I had been. How Eileen disappeared. How my father was homeless and my responsibility again. I walk backward in time, telling him things I never told him about my childhood, because my heartache feels rooted in more than the last three months of my life. I start crying and roll away from him to bury my face in my hands.
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