Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  And then, suddenly, everyone involved lost a new house in the tight box canyon that is Telluride.

  I left Colorado, humbled in my shame and carrying a version of heartbreak. Both the shame and the heartbreak passed soon enough, but the scars remain. Simple though he was, Racer was a sweet and decent man in his own way. I know that if time travel were possible, he would have taken those years back, erasing me entirely. I certainly would never be able to blame him.

  But I am not sure I would have taken those years back. After all, we are products, ultimately, of our experience. To deny the past is to deny the self. Not that it is acceptable to sacrifice, even temporarily, the happiness of another for the sake of one’s own edification. Nevertheless, Racer was, for me, a painful but defining experience. I resolved then that matrimony – the institution itself; the spousal bond – was not something that I could trust anyone enough, myself included, to commit to honestly and without any self-denying regret.

  I resolved, much like Iris Rhuton, to live as a woman notoriously single and devoted only to my own integrity. And with that decision tucked firmly into the back pocket of my heart, I packed up my things and gathered up my latest unfinished book, and flew home. To Ohio.

  Ohio had been looming ever larger in my mind for some years. Before I moved from Bellingham I made a brief trip to New Orleans to attend my brother’s wedding to an exceedingly odd but likeable woman named Caitlyn. It is their granddaughter, Sadie, who visits my body in this bed several times a week and reads aloud to me and does her homework as the news burbles on in the background like a fountain, perpetually recirculating itself. Her mother is a royal pill at times, if you ask me. Too imperious and impatient, although you might expect as much from a doctor. But Sadie has her grandfather’s kindness and enough of Caitlyn’s irreverent enthusiasm to make her an interesting girl.

  I was delighted to see my brother after so many years, and to meet his bride and to hear of their adventures in helping to reestablish some semblance of order in that once half-drowned city. The three of us spent two full days together, preparing for the wedding during the lit hours and, when the sun went down, laughing and altering our consciousness on the torch-lit patch of grass beneath a flowering Empress Tree out behind their tiny house. It reminded me powerfully of the Waterberry tree in Mombasa, where Blair and I had started our journey together. It already seemed like a lifetime ago.

  If David and Caitlyn envied my relative wealth and celebrity, they did nothing to show it, even when I stopped to sign autographs for people we passed on the street. My careers, old and new, were the subject of discussion, but never to the point of preoccupation. They had seen The Lion Tree on the night of its release only two weeks prior. They offered glowing opinions that were in line with the general critical reviews, raving about the performances and the script and the direction. But I suspect their actual feelings were somewhat closer to the lack-luster verdict of the movie-going public. It would be another forty years before that film began to assume the mantle of a classic.

  If there was any envy between the three of us, it was entirely mine. I envied them for their bond. For how right and natural and normal and certain they seemed. In that pre-nuptial glow I was self-conscious about my divorce from Brent, which was then still very raw. They made it look so simple and easy, identifying as part of a couple; two halves making a greater whole. David was sensitive enough not to dwell on my failed marriage, but some version of that envious feeling endured long enough to nurture my desire to try again. In that sense, my envy for my brother’s simple, pre-validated normalcy was partly to blame for my decision, years later, to marry Racer.

  On my third day in New Orleans, my parents arrived in a taxi with my younger brother. It was a warm reunion. I had tears enough for everyone, especially my mother who was crying before she could even open the car door, but also for little Ben, who was no longer little. In fact, he was not only taller, but he had also lost much of the infantilizing doughiness that I associated with him in my memory. He was looking more like a man than I had ever imagined.

  But his beautiful face, the purest countenance I have ever experienced, like something brand new to the world, was the same. He bounced and hopped at me, wires dangling from the buds in his ears, until I could pry myself from my mother and hug him and kiss him and cry for the lost years. We held hands and danced circles on the sidewalk as Benny sang some version of the lyrics to I Will Survive. Caitlyn and I joined in and then so did the others until we were all singing and clapping around my parents’ luggage. The cabbie rolled away like this sort of thing happened every day in New Orleans.

  And maybe it did. But it felt indescribably good; like it was too good to ever happen again. I felt part of a family again. Not even Benny’s ridiculous atonal singing could help my crying. Benny and I fell onto the grass in a heap of laughter.

  It was my father’s hand that reached down to help me up. I took it and he pulled me out from beneath Benny and into a hug. It lasted a long time; too long to be comfortable. I could feel the others, especially my mother, looking on as Benny continued to roll around on the grass and sing. He pushed me back, hands on my shoulders, and gave me a once over.

  “Hey Dad,” I breathed.

  He took a moment and then nodded and wiped my cheeks with his thumbs and winked and moved on to David.

  I cannot honestly say that by that time I had fully reformed my father’s place in my head or my heart. I had not. That would ultimately take another divorce and many more years of living and the perspective that that will bring to one paying attention. But I did recognize him, at least in some respects, as a different man than the one who I had left so many years before. I could say that he had a greater humility about him. A greater solicitude for the feelings of those around him. A greater interest in inclusion.

  But the difference in my father evaded a mere tallying and adjustment of qualities. The whole feeling of him was different. Something once closed, was open. Something once dark had lightened. Something once resistant was accepting. Not just towards me, but to everything.

  What accounted for this change I could only guess. My mother’s decision to divorce him was certainly part of it, but the emotionally transforming mechanism at work within him and between them is still a mystery to me. Maybe it was selling the house and living separately from my mother. Maybe it was a satisfaction in assuming the role of primary caregiver to Ben when, as was increasingly the case back then, my mother was traveling around the county from one rally and organizational campaign to another, vetting candidates and lobbying Congress and organizing college students. Maybe it was that in her new freedom, my mother was happier and, because he loved her so desperately, he was happier.

  Whatever the catalyst, whatever the mechanism, I know that my father seemed twice as devoted to my mother after the divorce than before. Fawning is certainly the wrong word. He never lost his dignity or stopped being Hollis Johns. But he was open with his respect for her, and he was not threatened by her success. When she campaigned mightily for Barak Obama in 2008, my father and Ben turned out every night at the Columbus Campaign headquarters to help make signs. When President Obama was in the process of deciding to send another thirty thousand troops into the lost cause of Afghanistan, my father coordinated an email campaign as my mother helped set up a protest group in Washington and became a favorite talking head among the cable news outlets. When she went to Columbus to protest Governor Kasich’s push to roll back collective bargaining rights, my father and Ben followed along behind, passing out petitions. When she threw herself headlong into Ohio’s Occupy Wall Street protests, my father, retired banker, carried signs demanding accountability from the same financial industry that he had once served.

  Before she died, my mother witnessed five presidential inaugurations since her speech at Kent State. One of them she witnessed from the comfort of a chair behind windscreens with a good view of the rostrum. For the other four of them she was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with thousand
s of others watching a huge screen on the trampled grass of the Washington Mall, that venerable carpet of protest. For all five inaugurations, my father was there to hold her hand.

  He attended the next two inaugurations without her.

  I cannot say whether his politics had truly changed or if it was that suddenly, they simply mattered so much less to him than supporting the woman he clearly still loved and who clearly still loved him. Divorce has never looked so good as it did on them.

  The first inkling I had that my own feelings about my father were mutable came before I had left Hollywood for the first time. He appeared one Sunday morning, as if by magic, unannounced, on my doorstep. He was much older than the default picture of him that I carried around in my head; the one taken when I left home for Wesleyan. That dissonance certainly contributed to my confusion as I stood in my doorway staring at the familiar man with the white hair and the sagacious hazel eyes and the broad sloping shoulders. Swimmer’s shoulders. Shoulders that could have lifted the entire world.

  That was not a warm reunion. It was an awkward and shocking encounter. I hugged him perfunctorily and stuttered half-questions at him, keeping him on the stoop, although less deliberately than it might have seemed to him or someone watching. I was just so flabbergasted I did not know what to think.

  “Why didn’t you call? I could have … I mean if I had known…”

  “If you had known, you would have run off to Africa, like the last time I called.”

  “Dad, I was… I had so much to do …”

  He gave me a subdued smile.

  “Kidding, Tilly.”

  “Is everything okay? I mean… Mom... Ben…”

  “They’re fine. What did you do to your head?”

  “Long story,” I said, thinking of Angus. I fingered the scab self-consciously.

  “Is there a place we can go for a walk?”

  I took him to Griffith Park. We made small talk on the way, limiting ourselves to the people and places we passed. Baby steps. We were relearning how to talk to each other. It was not until we had parked and strolled twenty minutes, meandering the paths beneath the oaks and the flowering manzanitas, that I learned something of his motivation.

  “I’m worried about you,” he said.

  “Me? Why?”

  “A friend of yours paid me a visit last week.”

  “A friend of mine?”

  “Angus Mann.”

  I stopped in my tracks and stared at him, disbelieving. He stopped a few paces ahead and waited for me to regain the power of locomotion.

  “He’s worried about you,” he shrugged simply. “So then I’m worried about you.” We walked in silence to a picnic table beneath a stand of cypress. He sat and watched me, reading my face.

  The day he left, in the wake of his story about Julia and Iris, Angus had told me that he refused to worry about me. I should have listened more closely to what he was really saying. He was saying that he was afraid to care about me; afraid that I was already in a position to do him damage. He was saying that he had not worried for someone, anyone, in a very long time. I finally sat down.

  “Angus came to see you,” I said, looking for confirmation.

  My father nodded.

  “Rang the front bell. Introduced himself. Then asked if I wanted to go fishing.”

  “I don’t believe this. Angus Mann just showed up and asked you to go fishing.”

  “We both got skunked, but we had a great day. He’s quite a guy. I have to say I liked him a lot. The man knows his lures. Took me all the way out to Leesville Lake.”

  “Leesville Lake.” I shook my head. I pictured the cottage I had never actually seen. “Christ.”

  “I used to take you and David out there. Remember? Way out there past…”

  “I know where it is. Dad. I … know.”

  He took a deep breath and studied me, furrowing his brow and tightening his lips in a refocused concentration.

  “How are you, Tilly? I mean …really.”

  I did my best to assure my father that while I was having a tough time of it lately, I was not a danger to myself. We talked about Zack. I explained my feelings dispassionately, as I might have to a stranger I did not quite trust with intimate knowledge. I kept the wall up between us. I tried. But your father is taller than any wall you will ever erect. He simply looked down over the top.

  “You blame yourself. You think you did something wrong.”

  “I turned my back on him, Dad. He needed me and I abandoned him.”

  “Mmm.” He nodded, absently tracing gang insignia cut into the table. “Doesn’t sound like he treated you very well.”

  “Oh, how would you know?” I snapped, all of the old fights about the boys not worthy of my time already reloading back up into my brain. “Is that from Angus too?”

  “I read the magazines.”

  I snorted. “I think not. Mom would have told me.”

  “She’s not with me when I get my hair cut or go to the dentist or go to the book store. I keep up more than you think. I’m just saying that he didn’t treat you very well.”

  “You can’t believe that shit, Dad. It’s all crap. They just make it up. Zack was very good to me.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “Did I… no. No, I didn’t love him. That’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?”

  “I don’t like myself very much right now. Okay? That’s the point. I’m sad and I’m angry and I wish I were someone different. I wish I was David.”

  He was like a human magnet, pulling it out of me. He was the consummate fisherman. I hated that he was there. I felt sick and weak in the stomach.

  “Trust me,” he said. “You don’t wish you were David. Not lately.”

  “This isn’t helping, Dad. I know you’re trying. Can we just change the subject?”

  A change of subject was not what I wanted. What I really wanted was to run. I wanted to stand up and flee. Up to the observatory or out into traffic. Anywhere he could not follow. He took a breath. Held it. Let it go.

  “Tilly. I know why you’re angry. You’ve been angry most of your life.”

  “No. Dad…”

  “Since you were nine, Tilly. You’ve just learned to turn it all inward.”

  “No, goddamnit! I am not …”

  “It’s got nothing to do with your friend Zack. I’m sorry for you and I’m sorry for him. I really am. It’s tragic. But he’s just bringing it all back to the surface. Like a thousand other things in your life. Like just about everything I ever said to you as a teenager. It’s all old anger in new clothing. And it’s not going away until we…”

  “No!” I slammed the flats of my hands on the table and stood up wanting to scream at him, to slap at him, to pummel him with my fists and claw at his face. Anything to stop the words. My eyes filled with tears. I pointed at him. “I am not having this conversation. Go home. Just … Just leave me alone and go back home.”

  I spun around and stomped off down the trail, breaking into a run as the tears came. People stopped and looked at me as I passed them, stunned by the realization that they were in the presence of an actual celebrity meltdown. But I was moving too fast for them to do anything to record the moment for posterity. For awhile I was moving too fast even for history, leaving all of the mental images in the dust, like there was actually some hope of shedding my own skin. I was able to keep myself distracted with my own exertion, and the fight for oxygen was enough to hold most of it at bay. I did not know where I was going and I did not care. I ran. I followed the sound of water.

  But I had to stop sometime. When I did, emerging through the trees at the Mulholland Fountain, gasping for air, all of time reunited. The past is a cheap grindhouse zombie. You can outrun it, but it always catches up eventually.

  I collapsed on a stone bench and buried my face in my hands, snuffing out the sun and plunging the world around me down into the dark. The water fell into the fountain pool like heavy rain, overflowing it
s basin into the gutters of my memory, and carrying me, like a paper boat over the falls, all the way back to my ninth year, walking home from school in the pouring rain.

  I was not supposed to be walking home. I had told Mrs. Gladson that I needed to pee. Preoccupied with the others, she had let me go. I calmly left the class, grabbed my coat off the wooden peg in the hallway, and slipped out the side door into the rain. Steve McQueen could not have made it look any easier. When I hit the playground I broke into a run, heading for the parking lot and, beyond that, for the sidewalk that in four short blocks connected with the driveway of my home.

  I knew full well how much trouble I would be in if I was caught. But my powers of magical thinking were formidable and, at nine, nearing their zenith. I believed I had it all figured out. If confronted by Mrs. Gladson, I would tell her that I felt sick and that I had thrown up in the bathroom and that there had been blood in the throw up and that I needed to go home and lie down. If my parents confronted me, I would tell them that Mrs. Gladson had gotten sick at school and that she had thrown up in the bathroom and had to go home because there had been blood in the throw up and so everyone got to go home early. There was something about the prospect of bloody vomit that convinced me that any urge to scrutinize my explanation for inconsistencies would be set aside for the sake of a more general concern, either for my health or for Mrs. Gladson’s health, depending on the circumstances of the lie.

  I was soaked through with autumn rain before my little feet had carried me a full block. But I was as oblivious to the rain as I was to the likelihood of being caught in what would be the first of many acts of truancy in my life. All I could think about as I splashed my way up the street was fish. A red beta and a blue beta, to be exact, just like the ones my friend Chloe Pillegi had in her old bedroom.