“The eggs are good,” Clio says because she can’t bring herself to say anything else, because it’s an easy and true sentence, because it fills the silence, but adrenaline starts to cruise through her veins and panic builds. There are things she needs to say and ask and she can’t keep waiting for the right moment. There will be no right moment.
“I have a talent or two,” he says.
She pushes her plate away from her, takes a deep breath. “We need to talk, Dad,” she says.
He looks up from his plate.
“We never talk about her. Why don’t we ever talk about her?”
He stares past her and it’s clear he’s thinking. “I don’t know why, Clio.”
“Our lives were flipped upside down last year and we just sit here carrying on, eating eggs. Isn’t there something wrong with this?”
He looks at her again. His glance is sharp. “It seems you think there is. Go ahead. Diagnose what’s wrong with this. You’re good at that. I don’t know what you want from me, Clio.”
“I want you to look at me for once,” she says. “Look at me.”
He looks up, fear and rage in his eyes. He says nothing. Anger rises like steam inside her. She grips the edge of the table. The shell cracks. The armor is gone. She is just a daughter. “What do I want? I want us to take a moment from the lives we are so intent on piecing back together and talk about what the hell happened to both of us a year ago. She hanged herself, Dad, on my swing set, the swing set you built. She’s gone. She left us. I want us to talk.”
His face reddens and he looks down. Shreds his paper napkin. “You’ve made it hard to talk, Clio.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He hesitates. “Are we really doing this?”
“Yes,” she says emphatically, her spine stiffening. “We are.”
9:31AM
“Me too.”
She feels dizzy, impossibly nauseated, but wills herself to focus. What if she’s having a panic attack? She feels some relief when she remembers the bottle of pills stashed upstairs.
“Do you know how sad and angry I’ve been for all of these years? All I wanted was for you to be there for me for one minute, for you to look at me.”
“I’ve gotten the distinct impression that you do not need me,” he says. “You’ve made that pretty clear.”
“Are you kidding me, Dad? I’ve needed for you for more than thirty years. I’ve taught myself not to need you, I’ve convinced myself that I don’t need you, but it’s all bullshit. I’ve always needed you.”
“Well, I’m sorry I’ve been an awful, absentee father. That was never my plan. I did my best, Clio,” he says, resignation in his voice. “But let me tell you something: we—and that includes me—must have done an okay job because look at you, right? You are successful and strong, tough as nails, feisty as all get-out with your poor old man. I think you turned out just fine, Clio, and I’m going to claim an ounce of credit for that. Maybe most of it was despite our bungled efforts, but let me believe I had a small something to do with this.”
“Believe what you want to believe,” she says. “But, tell me, is it outlandish that I actually want to talk about what happened? Is it that crazy that I want to have a conversation?”
“It’s a two-way street, Clio,” he says, looking down. “I’ll be the first to admit I’ve messed plenty of things up, that I haven’t been the best father, but I’m not so sure you’ve given me a chance to be. You come home when she dies and then you run away. You promise to visit, but you don’t. And shit, Clio, I get it. I’d do the same thing in your shoes. I don’t blame you, but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t fault me for shutting down and avoiding everything when you’ve done the exact same thing.”
She listens. There is something painfully true about what he says, something that slices her. “But this is not just about her, Dad. It’s always been about her, yes, but what about me? I was the kid, the daughter, and you never even saw me. All I wanted was for you to see me, to notice me, to ask me questions. I felt invisible, Dad. I just wanted you to come to my plays and my games and take me for a walk or a meal at the diner or take me to college. Shit, Dad, you could have taken an hour. Something.”
He nods. Looks down at the floor. “I’m just saying it’s a two-way street,” he says again. “You call for a few minutes each week and we talk about bullshit and I’m the one not noticing you? How about asking me how I’m doing? I lost my wife, Clio, and maybe this is impossible for you to understand, but I loved her.”
He stands abruptly and yanks their dishes away. A fork falls to the floor. He escapes to the sink, drops everything inside. Braces himself against the counter. She hears something. He’s crying.
“Dad,” she says, walking up behind him, guilt pulsing under her skin. She puts her hand on his shoulder. “Dad.”
He turns slowly to face her. There’s a familiar quality to his eyes, a gloss of fear, of shame, of regret. “Look,” he says, his voice calm. “I have no idea how to do any of this.”
A lone tear snakes down her cheek. “Neither do I.”
He throws his arm around Clio and pulls her into his chest. Hugs her tightly. She weeps into his shirt. They stand there like this for several minutes before separating and wiping their eyes dry.
“Can we sit and talk for a minute?” Clio says. Much of the anger and anxiety has washed away; something has shaken loose.
He nods. Takes her hand and walks her through the door into the living room.
“Let’s talk,” he says, lowering to sit on the big tattered beige sofa. Her parents found it at the Salvation Army.
She sits beside him. Looks at him and then down at her lap. This is her chance. All those years and they never really discussed things. They reacted to Eloise, weathered her brutal storms, but there was a dearth of actual conversation about what was going on. Clio felt shut out of most of what was happening, relegated to the proverbial sidelines, a mere bystander. She worked to absorb what she could, to glean clues from her parents’ cryptic, anger-laced exchanges. She scribbled the names of the swarm of doctors they visited, worried about the arguments she witnessed on a daily basis. She was left to piece together what she could, to guess when her mother was taking her medicine and when she’d stopped.
“I’ve been really lonely, Dad,” she says, biting her lower lip, willing herself to keep breathing. Lonely. The word catches in her throat. “When she was alive, I felt peripheral, like I was getting in your way, maybe even making everything worse. I just wanted you guys. I wanted you to see me and notice me. I’m dredging all this up now because I want so badly to move on, Dad, to have a normal life, but there’s so much I haven’t processed and we haven’t talked about and I think it’s been getting in the way.”
He nods. “I know.”
She looks at him. Braces herself. Swallows. Takes a deep breath. Asks the question she’s been wanting to ask, the question she knows is terrible to ask, the question she’s vowed never to ask anyone who has been through what she’s been through. “Did you see it coming?”
He pauses for a beat and then looks at her. “Yes and no. She was terribly depressed, but you and I both know there were plenty of times when she was that way. I keep going over it in my head, wondering if I missed something, a clue, if there was something I could’ve done.”
Clio nods. “Me too. Maybe if I had come home for Thanksgiving instead of going to Costa Rica? Maybe if I had called that day . . .”
Her father puts his hand on her knee. “We can’t do this to ourselves. She was sick, Clio. She was so incredibly sick. This wasn’t our doing, but I am sorry that I was so focused on her, on how she was doing, on keeping her alive, that I wasn’t there for you like I should have been. I can see that now. And I’m sorry. I was trying to protect you and then I couldn’t anymore. All of a sudden you knew everything and there was nothing I could do to give you your innocence back.”
Innocence. What a foolish, quaint word. Is this someth
ing she ever had?
“I want you to have them,” he says, pointing at the boxes of books in the center of the room. “But only if you’d like to have them. I can store them for a while. You can think about it,” he says, backpedaling.
“I think I’d like them,” she says, picturing that big empty shelf at Henry’s hotel.
“She’d want you to have them.”
“What’s in the little box?” she says, pointing to the one smaller box by the larger ones.
He stands, walks over to it and picks it up and carries it back to Clio. Hands it to her. “I found this while I was packing up our closet a few days ago. It was shoved way back on the upper shelf of her side. Take a look inside.”
Clio peers inside. It’s a jumble of unfamiliar items. She pulls a small plastic circle from it. There are words. Her name. Clio Marsh. Baby Girl.
“Your hospital bracelet,” her father says.
Something in her comes alive. She pulls a larger bracelet from the box.
“Hers,” he says. Her name—Eloise Marsh, Mother—is printed in matching type.
Clio reaches in again. Pulls out a Ziploc bag with her first lock of hair. She was almost white blond. Then a photograph of Clio and her mother on her first Easter. Clio wears a frilly white bonnet and is barefoot. There are papers at the bottom, and Clio lifts them out and studies them. They are her school reports from each year since kindergarten. Her Yale acceptance letter. Printouts of some e-mails Clio sent her mother.
“I can’t believe she kept all this,” Clio says.
“You were her pride and joy,” he says. “She loved you more than anything in the world, Clio. She talked about you all the time.”
This is a different story than the one Clio has told herself all these years. In Clio’s version, she’s the Mistake, the fruit of an accidental pregnancy that caused an unwanted marriage and an unwanted life.
Clio closes the box, sees that her hands are shaking as she places the lid back on top. She will have plenty of time to sift through the rest of the contents. This is her time with her father. This is a morning she will not get back, this last morning in her childhood home. She looks up at him, smiles.
“You know something?” he says, standing, walking toward the far end of the room, gesturing toward some green crayon marks on the wall. “She loved it when you did this.”
“She did?” Clio says, surprised, standing to join him.
“Yes,” he says. “She was proud of you. Decided that you were a little visionary. A note taker like she was. For your first birthday, she gave you a package of index cards and a box of crayons. She wrapped them in newspaper and I remember thinking how odd it all was, but that’s it, I just thought she was odd and eccentric and I loved that about her.”
Clio imagines herself as a toddler, taking to the wall with a crayon, scribbling on the wall, her mother different than many others would be. Most mothers would race over and grab a wrist and chide their child. Instead, she had the wild and offbeat mom, lingering in the background, a portrait of shifting smiles. Maybe for her mother, Clio’s young scrawls were tiny bits of genius, hieroglyphics, budding shreds of communication. That she didn’t try to scrub them away, but instead rearranged the furniture—what little there was of it—to afford a better view of these mini masterpieces, offers some ineffable solace in this moment so many years later.
“What was she like when you guys were young?”
At this question, her father’s face lightens. He smiles. “She was gorgeous. Wild. Lit up every room. When things got bad later on, I would imagine this version of her and that would help. I’d remind myself that I landed Eloise Marsh. She was quite the catch, you know. I would have never imagined the turn things took.”
“I guess that’s what scares me,” Clio says.
“What does?”
She meets her father’s eye. “I love Henry, Dad. I want to be with him.”
“That’s great,” her father says.
“Yes,” she says, “but what will things look like a year from now, or five or ten? You and I know better than most how everything can change on a dime.”
He nods, grows pensive. “True, but you know something, Clio? Even after everything, even after her diagnosis and all the nightmares and heartache, I wouldn’t change a thing. I’d do it all over again because I have you.”
I’d do it all over again because I have you. The words stun her and she feels an internal shift, a shaking loose, a thawing. She looks over at him and smiles. “You don’t need to say that, Dad.”
“I know I don’t need to, but it’s true and I apparently need to get better at saying these things,” he says. “I loved her to her last day, Clio. I loved that woman. I still love her. And she’s not here anymore and I’m still making sense of that, but you are here. And so am I. And now it’s my turn to figure out how to be a better dad to you. And you’re going to have to help me.”
Clio nods, thinks about this. “And you’re going to have to help me figure out how to be a better daughter.”
He smiles. “Sounds like a plan. So, are you going to give Henry a chance?”
“I want to,” she says, suddenly feeling a drifty, almost pleasant light-headedness. There’s something surreal about these moments, the finality of them, the symbolism. She looks around and around, a dizziness descending, and throws her arm around her father. He clutches it and they stand together in silence.
“He wants us to live together,” Clio says. “He’s even mentioned having a family.”
“Is that what you want?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” Clio says. “I think so maybe. Do you think Mom would’ve liked him? He’s a lot older than I am.”
He laughs. “Mom would have loved him. A smart, successful, suave Irishman courting her little princess. She would have called him delightful. She would have swooned over the slight accent and flirted up a storm. She’d want this for you, Clio. She was always enormously proud of you and wanted you to have a happy life.”
Clio wants nothing more than to believe everything her father’s saying, and though her doubts rise quickly and her cynicism stings from within, though this sounds nothing like Eloise, she looks over at her father, the openness in his cerulean eyes, and she decides to believe him. Maybe because she wants to, because she needs to, because she’s exhausted from questioning every little thing, because believing him will make moving forward easier, but it really doesn’t matter.
There is a freedom in this. In deciding to believe. In deciding to take a chance and move on.
Clio looks around the room, the room that will soon bear witness to another imperfect family, and she feels something, a twinkling of gems that have long eluded her, that have seemed fictive: peace, progress, closure.
“I’m so sorry, Clio,” her father says, pulling her to him. When her head meets his chest, she hears the refrain of his tears once more.
And through fresh tears of her own, she mouths words. Me too.
11:21AM
“I’ll be fine.”
I’ll be fine, Dad,” Clio says at the station, even though there’s no way for her to know this.
He kisses her forehead like she remembers him doing when she was a little girl before she’d run into school for the day. Or maybe she doesn’t remember this at all. Maybe it’s something she made up because she needed to, because it couldn’t all be so sad. It’s hard to believe that she was a little girl at all, but that’s just how she feels right now, small and scared. She doesn’t show her father this though. She protects him. She does something she’s grown skilled at: she pretends, finding a smile.
She hugs him. “I’d really love to see your new place,” she says. “I can get a later train.”
“No,” he says. “Let me get settled in. You’ll see it at Christmas.”
“Okay,” she says, hugging him once more, descending the escalator to the tracks.
At the bottom, she looks up. He’s still there, waving.
She rides th
e train with the box on her lap. She sifts through it, examining each item as if it were one of her specimens, as if she were gathering data, and the truth is she is.
Time passes. The world blurs. The train hurtles toward home. Home. That’s how she thinks of it. New York City. Home. When did this happen?
At some point, she drifts off. She’s never been one to nod off on a train, but the lulling motion and the weight of what she’s just weathered catch up with her and she surrenders to a stretch of surprisingly peaceful rest. She even dreams. In her reverie, she’s on the swing set with her parents. Her mother’s in the middle, barefoot. She’s laughing her infectious, tinkling laugh and her hair is long and tangled, flying behind her.
Clio startles awake as the train pulls into Grand Central. Disoriented, she looks around her, down at the box she cradles on her lap. She lifts the lid and fingers the treasures inside. This is when she sees it, resting at the very bottom of the box.
An envelope.
Nothing’s written on it, but she holds it up to the light and through it she can see her mother’s handwriting. A note. It must be a note, the note, she decides. All these months and she’s been hoping for some kind of note, some kind of something, an explanation or words she could mold into an explanation. Anything. Anything but this crippling confusion and silence. Oh, the hours she wasted on the Internet trying to determine whether suicide notes were common in situations like this. The answers were mixed. Some people found notes, notes that were surprisingly articulate or utterly nonsensical. Some people never found a single clue. All this time and she’s held on to a sliver of hope that she’d be a note finder, but now that she possibly has it, she’s incredibly afraid. What if her mother has taken one last opportunity to hurt her with words, to break her heart?
The Ramblers Page 26
