He moves closer and wraps his arms around my waist and hugs me against him. “I’m sorry,” he says, leaning his head against mine. “I didn’t know there was so much.”
“I just want to die,” I breathe.
Marc holds me tighter. “Please don’t do that,” he whispers, urgently. “Please don’t do that.”
I shake my head against his. When my tears finally stop, I turn slowly to face him. “I think I told you more tonight than I did the entire time we were dating,” I laugh.
“It puts a lot of things into perspective.”
“What do you mean?”
He rolls onto his back again and drapes his arm over his eyes. “It makes me feel terrible about the way things ended.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” I say.
I hug one of my blankets tighter around my shoulders, pinning it against the bed to create a flimsy barrier between his body and mine. Our conversation feels like it’s heading in a dangerous direction. “I don’t know if I’m ready to date anyone,” I tell him, worried I will break his heart.
“I know,” he says. He slides his arm under the blanket and hugs me closer. “I’m just happy to be here right now. I’m not going to pressure you into anything.”
“Thank you, Marc,” I whisper, resting my head on his chest. I fall asleep listening to the soft, rapid beating of his heart.
Marc leaves for work early the next morning. By the time I come downstairs for breakfast, my father has been awake for hours. He watches me pour a bowl of cereal.
“Did he come over because of me?” he asks. His voice, small and quiet.
Something swells in my throat. “Of course not,” I say, trying not to cry. Is he worried I am scared of him? Of what he might do? “I asked him to come over before you even bought your ticket.”
“Oh,” he says.
* * *
—
I HAVE THE entire week off work after the holidays, through the new year. My father and I begin watching Battlestar Galactica, the remake. I decide to make a homemade dinner. I order a pork shoulder from the grocer, an eight-and-a-half pound slab of pig that lands heavily on my counter the next day. “What am I going to do with this?” I ask my dad, turning the package in a slow circle. “This is never going to fit in my crockpot.”
“We’ll just have to chop her up,” my father titters, digging through my kitchen drawers. He finds a knife and starts hacking, pulling chunks of meat away from the bone.
I collect the bits of meat in a bowl and rub them with salt and pepper and paprika, according to a recipe I find online.
“You could feed this to the dog across the street,” my father says, wielding the bone.
“Or we could make a stock,” I say, though I have never made a stock before.
“You really are a fancy chef now,” he says.
I laugh. “No. I just have the Internet.”
I find a recipe for pork stock, then another for homemade pork and beans. My father offers to walk down to the grocery store and returns with two bags of dried navy beans.
I message Marc and asks him if he wants to come over for dinner, and he says yes.
I bake a pan of fresh cornbread, and by some great miracle, everything is done cooking when Marc arrives. The three of us sit down in the living room to watch Battlestar Galactica, but my father and Marc keep talking over the show.
“This never used to happen,” Marc laughs. “She never used to cook.” The entire time we lived together, Marc cooked every meal I didn’t order from Foodler.
“I remember when she couldn’t even boil water,” my father says, then laughs. “Marc’s never going to leave if you keep feeding him like this.”
“Just watch the show,” I beg.
The next day, my father leaves early for work: He wants to pick up a few hours at the labor hall. He had to borrow money from Sebastian’s bank account to buy the ticket to Boston, and he wants to put the money back as soon as he can. The labor hall sends him to an office in Cambridge to install new cubicles, and even though he only works for two hours, they pay him for a half day. He rescues a like-new office chair from the Dumpster and rides it home on the train, rolling around one of the metal poles with the movement of the car.
A snowstorm hits that week, and my father’s phone chirps incessantly with offer after offer to shovel snow. He didn’t bring enough cold-weather clothing, so we take a quick trip to my favorite thrift store and dig through the dollar-a-pound pile for used sweatshirts.
Before he leaves for work in the morning, I pack him lunch—pulled pork sandwiches and a container of beans—but after the end of his first long day, he complains of muscle aches.
The next morning, I pack him a banana.
When he comes home, he lays the banana in front of me—its skin black and shriveled. “I killed your banana,” he says.
“What happened?” I gasp, laughing.
“I think it was the cold!”
It feels good to play house with my dad. Even after I return to work, we spend every evening together. We watch BSG, and sometimes, my father tells me stories—not the ones I remember from childhood, but stories I have never heard before. I close my eyes to listen—to write new memories over the old. He tells me about working for his brother’s company, which hired him to perform maintenance on large mainframe computers, like the PDP-10 and the Foonly F1. The names make me laugh. My uncle sold the computers to colleges and businesses both in and out of California, which was how my father ended up in Prescott, where he met my mother. But he wasn’t ready to talk about my mother yet.
I realize I missed him, but also that we had never spent so much time together when he was sober.
I am sad when my father decides to leave. He made enough money to buy a ticket back to Pennsylvania and to rent a motel room for a week. He tells me he misses my nephew, who he watches most weekends, but says that if he can’t find work in York, he might go back to South Carolina, where it’s warm. He feels too old to sleep outside in the cold anymore.
We don’t have time to finish watching Battlestar Galactica before he leaves. We watch the end of the first season, then agree to watch the final episode. I worry the heavy-handed religiosity of the show’s finale will disappoint him, but he cheers out loud when the rebel Centurions are given their own Basestar.
“Maybe they’ll come pick me up and I can get a fighter pilot girlfriend,” he jokes.
A few hours after he leaves, he sends me a text: Made the train ok but still no sign of Centurions.
A few days later, he calls me from my uncle’s cellphone, but I immediately hang up. I can tell from the sound of his voice that he is already drinking again.
Nobody is ever
IN THE SILENCE my father’s absence creates, I begin writing about my mother. I call out of work and write for twelve, fourteen, fifteen hours a day. I write about our childhood. I write about the days I spent in her hospital room. I open the box of her possessions and begin writing around the things I find. I am like Christopher Columbus discovering the Americas—laying claim to things that are not mine.
Each time I finish a section, I print it out and mail it to Eileen. She tells me the guards recognize her mail by how thick the envelopes are. She worries she sounds like an addict; she worries what people will think of her. But she tells me she has been sharing the pages with her fellow inmates—that they think it’s good—and she encourages me to keep writing. She asks me to consider fictionalizing the story, but writing the truth, or my understanding of it, is the only path I can see through the weeds.
TITLE: A card sent from Eileen and Danielle Geller to “Tweety” Lee.
DATE: circa December 1997
TYPE OF RESOURCE: birthday cards
DESCRIPTION: A card sent from two daughters for their mother’s birthday and Christmas with a request for her t
o call, but not collect. The card doesn’t say much, but in Lee’s diary from December 12, 1997, she writes, “I received a Birthday Card from Danielle. I burst into tears and thought of how much I miss the two of them and how much are bound is still there. I Love Them So!”
TITLE: “Tweety” Lee, pregnant with Alexandra, sits on Tony’s lap and kisses him over her shoulder.
DATE: circa May 1998
TYPE OF RESOURCE: color photographs
DESCRIPTION: Lee and Tony day drink on a porch with their friends. Months pregnant, my mother curls her fingers around the neck of a brown bottle. My father always bragged that he never let her drink when she was pregnant with us, but my mother tells me when I am older that she still drank wine coolers, because the doctor said it was okay.
TITLE: “Tweety” Lee holds her newborn daughter, Alexandra, on the porch.
DATE: circa May 1998
TYPE OF RESOURCE: color photographs
DESCRIPTION: Smiling, Lee poses with her newborn daughter, Alexandra, swaddled in a white cloth with an indiscernible blue pattern. She sits on the back porch of the house she shares with her boyfriend, Tony.
TITLE: “Tweety” Lee and her daughters Danielle and Eileen Geller embrace.
DATE: 1999
TYPE OF RESOURCE: color photographs
DESCRIPTION: My mother surprises me and my sister in front of our apartment building in Yoe, Pennsylvania. After our initial shock, the three of us hug one another and cry. My grandmother takes a photograph of us, the straight sidewalks, the tidy lawns.
TITLE: “Tweety” Lee and her daughters sit at the kitchen table with a stack of childhood photographs.
DATE: 1999
TYPE OF RESOURCE: color photographs
DESCRIPTION: My mother brought us a gift of childhood photographs, of me and my sister as toddlers at our apartment on Nokomis Avenue. She labels the photos in her neat cursive as we talk. My sister smiles, her teeth showing. My parakeet, Ripple, sits happily on my mother’s shoulder. I bundle myself in two blankets and appear pale and tired.
TITLE: “Tweety” Lee and husband, Ron Sims, celebrate their wedding at Sneakers.
DATE: 2003
TYPE OF RESOURCE: color photographs
DESCRIPTION: My mother and Ron celebrate their wedding at Sneakers, their favorite dive bar. Ron feeds a piece of cake to my laughing mother; there is icing on the tip of her nose. My mother did not tell me she was getting married, and she did not invite us to the wedding. I did not meet him until after they were already divorced.
TITLE: Eileen and Michael Geller pose together in Eileen’s apartment.
DATE: 2008
TYPE OF RESOURCE: color photographs
DESCRIPTION: Eileen and my father pose together for a photograph; my sister smiles. They each hold a bottle of beer. My father wears a blue shirt with the words THE FRIENDLY BUNCH across the front.
TITLE: Michael Geller gropes “Tweety” Lee while drinking in their daughter Eileen’s apartment.
DATE: 2008
TYPE OF RESOURCE: color photographs
DESCRIPTION: Eileen takes a photograph of our parents. They are still smiling and laughing and have not yet had too much to drink. My mother wears red nail polish. The scar from my father’s spiral fracture is visible on his left shin.
III
a woman without her people
a woman who can never return home
is crazy with grief
and always longing
I am that woman
even the crazy moon is lonely
—DEBRA MAPGIE EARLING, The Lost Journals of Sacajawea
I woke up with a dream about me & mom & dad & Christmas and how the light of God pulling me into the life that is now teaching what I have to do.
THE DAY I flew to Albuquerque to meet my mother’s family, the entire United States seemed to be smothered beneath a single dark cloud. Occasionally, the cloud cover broke, allowing the sun to shine on patches of the winter-brown earth below. As a little girl, I imagined these pillars of light were sent from God—each sunbeam a conveyor, lifting souls to heaven. But I had not believed that in a long time.
When I called to tell my grandmother about finding my mother’s family, about the memorial service we would be holding on the reservation, she asked me not to tell my sister. “She’ll just get upset,” she said.
I had already sent Eileen a letter telling her about the trip. I had already packed paper and envelopes to mail her another letter while I was there. “I’m not going to lie to her,” I told my grandmother.
“I just don’t see a reason to upset her,” Grandma complained.
I imagined the news would upset Eileen. I imagined she would be hurt to miss out. But I had just begun to earn my sister’s trust, and I could not risk losing it again to keep my grandmother’s version of peace.
* * *
—
A FEW WEEKS earlier, at a midwinter gathering of the American Library Association in Philadelphia, I stumbled across a Navajo jewelry vendor, an elder with graying black hair, with a booth in the main exhibition hall. I lingered at the booth and, sliding her rings on and off my fingers, watched her interact with another conference attendee.
“I just love Native jewelry,” the attendee said, holding a squash blossom necklace in the air.
The Navajo woman nodded and smiled politely, but the woman left the necklace on the table and walked farther down the row. I waited to see if she would recognize me as like her; if she would ask me about my family. But she remained silent and watched my hands.
“My mother was Navajo,” I said, finally.
The woman said, “Oh,” in a noncommittal way.
“She died in September,” I said without meaning to.
She apologized but seemed to be looking elsewhere.
Nervously, I walked my fingers over the rows of rings and necklaces and bracelets in their black velvet cases. I had intruded, but I needed to find a way in. I didn’t imagine she knew my mother’s family; I didn’t even imagine she cared. But I had reached the limits of my documentary sleuthing—the letters from my mother’s family were old, the addresses and phone numbers ancient—and this jeweler seemed like my last chance. “I haven’t been able to get in touch with her family on the reservation,” I said, “to tell them she died.”
“You should put an obituary in the Navajo Times,” she offered. “Everyone reads the Navajo Times.”
Feeling suddenly very stupid, I said, “I should have known that.” It hadn’t made sense to me to place an obituary in a Florida newspaper, but I should have thought to write one for her family on the reservation.
The woman said nothing.
My hands kept returning to the same ring—fourteen skinny beads of turquoise arranged in a diamond pattern on a thin silver band. “I’d like this one,” I said, setting the ring in front of her.
After I paid for the ring, I left the conference and returned to my hotel room. I looked up other obituaries that had been placed on the Navajo Times website and followed their format as best I could: Most of the obituaries included a person’s blood clans, but the family tree my mother had left me was in my apartment in Boston, and I had never committed my blood clans to memory. I included her name and the nickname her family gave her, Tweety. I included the day she was born and the day she died. I included the names of her surviving family: me, my sister, and my nephew. I included the names of her parents, who were already deceased, and the name of her sister, whose name—I would learn later—I misremembered. I asked the editor to include my contact information—my name, my email address, and my phone number—so that her family could reach me. I could feel the nervous pulse of my heart in my fingertips as I clicked Send.
An entire d
ay passed, and I heard nothing.
I returned to Boston from the conference and waited a second day, and a third. Nothing.
On the fourth day, I received a call from an Arizona number. A man’s voice asked, “Is this Danielle?”
I said yes.
“You’re Tweety’s daughter?”
“Yes,” I said again.
He told me he lived across the street from my aunt—that he had watched my mother and her siblings grow up. “I found your number in the Navajo Times,” he said, “but I’m a little confused. I got a Christmas card from your mother two months ago.”
“That’s not possible,” I said, but I instantly began to doubt—not that he knew my mother, not that we were talking about the same Laureen “Tweety” Lee but, magically, that my mother was dead. When I closed my eyes, I imagined her alive, sitting in the Florida sun. Could she still be alive? Could she be hiding from me? Could the last five months have been a dream?
His voice interrupted me. “What happened?” he asked.
“She had a heart attack,” I said, rejecting the dream.
“A heart attack?” He sounded skeptical.
I explained that my mother had been drinking a lot before she died—that when she tried to stop, she died from withdrawal.
He offered to give me my aunt’s number, but I didn’t call my mother’s sister immediately. I was too worried she would be angry with me—I should have found her earlier. I walked back to my desk and sat in front of my computer and stared at the screen, but it was impossible to get any work done.
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