by Brianna Karp
Dennis and I sat on a grassy patch near the Jamba Juice parking lot. Suddenly, he was inquisitive. He wanted to know what was going through my head, how I was feeling, and this time he meant it. I assume it was an odd thing to be present and watch such an intimate moment in anybody’s life, much less his ex-girlfriend’s. Now, of course, I look back and wonder if he was mining this scene for future monologue fodder, but at the time I was grateful for the conversation. Pathetic wimp that I was, I desired nothing more than to keep him by my side, regardless of his value as a person or a companion. I didn’t want to be alone, needed to be loved in the most heinously desperate way, and indiscriminately. I couldn’t stand to lose anything else, even if it was dead weight that clearly should have been jettisoned.
So I talked. I rambled and spilled out everything I was feeling or, rather, not feeling, about Bob’s death. I talked about some of the crazy things Bob had done while hopped up on drugs. I reminisced about the pet hamster I named Benjamin that Bob had bought for me, that I merrily would drop off my top bunk bed onto the floor, watching it bounce and then scurry away, terrified, while I giggled as only a two-year-old can, unaware of my own cruelty. Then, emboldened by my own stream of verbal diarrhea, I spoke about Dennis and how he had hurt me. I spoke of the pain I experienced every day knowing that a man who was, by all accounts, honorable and sensitive would cuckold me. His own father had left his mother and run off to Italy with another woman. Dennis abhorred infidelity, swore time and again that he could never cheat—it was against his very nature. I finished off by telling him that he wasn’t the man I thought he was, and that I missed that man. To my surprise, he agreed.
“I’m not the man that I thought I was, either.” He said regretfully, tinged with a hint of melancholy and self-loathing, perhaps. “Please believe that I’ve stayed up late nights wrestling with this, with everything that you’ve said here today, and I don’t like myself any better for it. We both may need to accept that I’m not necessarily a good man anymore; that I’m an asshole and that’s just how things are.”
“But why would you want to be an asshole? Why would you want to accept being anything less than the best version of yourself? I don’t understand. There’s plenty I don’t like about myself—it’s an uphill battle against my worst urges every day. I fight them constantly, though, because settling for less, becoming the very person I hate, would sicken me to my core. So why?”
He had no answer.
My mother greeted me at the door upon my arrival home. “I called Joe about Bob. He let Moll know. She burst into tears when she found out.”
Molly. Molly, Molly, Molly. Blonde, tiny, beautiful, zealously preachy Molly. My little sister, off in Arizona knocking on doors, trying her darndest to convert as many unsuspecting saps to Jehovah as she could (before Armageddon came and burning meteors whipped from the heavens to destroy the other 99 percent of the human race), and stalking some poor nineteen-year-old kid in her congregation she had decided was her future husband nearly the second she had laid eyes on him. Even for a fundamentalist cult member, she can be a little nutty. I had a hard time reconciling how one person could be simultaneously so highly intelligent, as I know her to be, and yet exhibit all the awareness of a sack of rocks—nearly every sentence she utters a parroting of one or several Jehovah’s Witness buzzwords and catchphrases, in place of her own independent thoughts and ideas, her creativity and potential quashed in the face of intense pressure to conform.
I also had difficulty reconciling our two wildly different reactions to the same news. Molly would only have been a year and a half, maybe two years old, the last time she saw Bob. Although I harbored some very vivid images of him, I wasn’t sure how much she could possibly have retained. On the other hand, perhaps that was why she cried.
My mother acted relatively blasé about the news, but there was a trembling undercurrent to her voice that belied her words. I knew that she had lived in constant fear of him showing up again one day, the man who had driven her out to the desert in the dead of night, and left her in only a T-shirt to grope her way back home. The man who had taken Molly and me as covers on trips to Mexico, stuffing large quantities of hard drugs into our car seats on the way back, to resell them in California. The man who had suggested that my mother let Molly die when she was born with a life-threatening condition requiring open-heart surgery, because they just couldn’t afford the medical bills. The man who had taken me and Mom out to the garage, held a gun to our heads and threatened to blow our brains out all over the Plymouth Voyager, before killing himself, too.
Now, he really had killed himself, and I could see that Mom didn’t quite know what to do with the two decades of fear she had nursed to the point of paranoia.
“I’m just so glad he didn’t take anyone else with him. You know he so easily could have,” she kept repeating, over and over. Yes, I knew.
The following morning, I received a frantic voice-mail message from a young girl. While I still couldn’t feel anything for Bob, it broke my heart.
“Um, hi, this is Patricia Neville—Patty—and I live in Texas and I think you knew my dad, Bob Neville, that is, I think that you’re maybe my older sister, and I’ve actually been looking for you for a few years, and my mom was helping me, but we didn’t know your last name so we couldn’t find you but now the coroner found you. My mom is Charlie, I think you used to know her when you were little. She married my dad, our dad, and basically I’m trying to find out anything that I can. The coroner said that you’re kind of in charge of things from here, and if you can tell me anything about my dad, please, please, please give me a call back.”
She rattled off her cell phone number.
Her voice had cracked at a few points and I agonized for her. There was very little I could tell her about Bob since the time I’d known him, and certainly nothing of great comfort from what I did remember. I didn’t feel like a sister to this stranger, not yet, but I did feel considerable pain on her behalf, and that was something.
Over lunch at Marie Callendar’s that afternoon with my parents, I broke the news of the call. My mother immediately launched into a diatribe.
“I don’t think that you should contact her! There’s no reason that you should contact her! You have nothing to tell her. Let her mother tell her whatever she wants to know about Bob—that’s her responsibility! Did you ever think of that?! It’s not your place to tell her all the negative crap about Bob! You don’t even know what kind of people these are!”
Quietly, I pushed some peas around with my fork. “I wasn’t planning on going into gritty details with her, Mom. I just thought, you know, she reached out. Perhaps I can drop a kind word or two, and if they want some input as to arrangements for the body, let them give it. Besides, I might eventually have to speak with them anyway, if I have to divvy up any property. You didn’t hear the message. She was pleading with me. She’s a kid, Mom. She just lost her father. It would be rude just to ignore her call.”
“No, I don’t think it would be rude at all. There’s nothing rude about it. You’re under no obligation to her, and I’m sure she’ll understand that.” I stared at her. Her face was impassive, but danger was lurking there. The anger I knew all too well bubbled just below her skin. Her eyes had gone empty and cold as they did whenever she wanted to slug me. I decided it was best not to push her in this mood, and shrugged lightly, choosing instead to snorkel through my minestrone soup. Abruptly, she stood and left the table for the restroom.
I looked at my mother’s husband, Joe. Poor, poor Joe, the Jehovah’s Witnesses all murmured in the congregation, and at times I was inclined to agree. Rarely did anybody ask Joe what he thought. Meek and pale, with fading reddish hair and a sunburned balding spot on top of his head, Joe was generally considered to be quiet, humble and unassuming. Or, more often, a wuss who couldn’t keep his damn wife in line as the Bible commanded. I felt for Joe, as I often felt for my mother. The ill-suited match had taken its toll on both of them.
�
�Dad. What do you think? She’s already made it clear what she thinks, but you haven’t said anything since this whole thing began. What’s your take?”
He was surprised that I asked him. I caught just the briefest glimpse of a double take, but he gazed back at me calmly and scrunched up his forehead, rolling his eyes heavenward and quirking his mouth as though the answer were obvious.
“I think you should call her back. I think it would be rude not to. You need to understand, your mom has lived in fear for a long time. Now he’s dead, but the fear is still there, and these two girls are a link to that fear—evidence of it. Perhaps if they had contacted you while he was still alive, my answer might be different. But he’s dead now and I don’t see how just a phone call to see where things lie can hurt.”
“That’s what I was thinking, too. Thank you, Dad. I’ll call her back. I don’t think Mom needs to know just yet.” We locked eyes. We had an unspoken agreement.
Patty Neville was seventeen and her sister, Penny, was fourteen. Bob had dropped out of their lives when Patty was eight and Penny was five. Their mother, Charlie, had remarried after divorcing Bob and moved the family to Texas. Bob ignored all phone calls from the devastated girls. He reappeared four years later, urged on by a new girlfriend’s prompting. Since then, he had been part of Patty and Penny’s lives—to a degree. They would visit him in California for holidays and school vacations, sleeping in his mother’s garage as Molly and I had as toddlers (although she was a kind and hardworking woman, Jesse had OCD, which did not permit potentially messy children to enter her house; she kept a rake by the door, should somebody step on the carpet and reverse the direction of the piling). A year before his death, Bob would put Jesse into a nursing home and, as trustee of her financial affairs, refinance her paid-off house. He took the $200,000 the bank gave him and blew it all on drugs and toys before the year was out.
My half sisters last visited their father just before Christmas, mere weeks prior to his death. At the airport for their return flight, Patty claimed Bob had stooped to her and his voice had halted with emotion as he admonished, “Don’t be an idiot and do drugs like me, Patty.” I tried to picture this scene in my mind, but had a hard time doing so. All I knew about Bob was an amalgam of pain, molestation and neglect. It’s fair to say that I never much fantasized about any possible human side that he might have.
The girls became concerned when they called Bob to wish him a Happy New Year, and received no response. Even more troubling, he failed to call and acknowledge Patty’s birthday a few days later. Right around the same time they were repeatedly dialing his cell phone, Bob’s tenant, an old man renting his mother’s garage, called 911 and insisted that something was wrong. He had not seen Bob for days, and that was unusual. Knocks at the front door went unanswered. Hearing Bob’s cell phone ringing nonstop inside the house, the man begged the police to come. They arrived, entered the house through the bathroom window and found his body.
“A lot of people had problems with my dad,” Patty said when I called. “I know that not a lot of people liked him. But…do you think he was a good man? Carol called us a couple of nights ago and started right in, nagging on about how horrible he was. I know that he did some very bad things…but do you think there was good in him?”
Er…he kinda sorta molested me for several months. And was on drugs. And beat my mother to a bloody pulp. But besides that, oh, yeah, he was a great guy. A real stand-up character.
Patty had thrown me for a loop. She was clearly desperate for consolation, and grasping for straws. I considered lying my head off. At any rate, I couldn’t relate my version of Bob to her. She was a grieving kid who had just lost her father. Finally, I gave her the best answer I knew how.
“I didn’t know him all that well, Patty. I hadn’t seen him since I was little. I do know that he clearly had some demons of his own to battle, as we all do. But forget what I think about him. What’s more important is how you want to remember him. It sounds to me like you think he did his best to be a good dad to you toward the end. It sounds like you loved him very much, and you feel that he loved you back. And it’s not my place, or Carol’s place, or anybody’s place, to try to take that away from you. If you have good memories of your dad, hold onto them. Remember him as you knew and loved him.”
I waited, suddenly feeling dumb and sentimental—My god, that answer was cheesy beyond belief, even for me. But it was the best I could come up with. A long, long pause.
“Thank you, Bri. That was perfect. That was exactly what I needed to hear.”
Charlie, Bob’s second wife, was delighted to speak to me. I still remembered vague bits about her—her name, her living in an apartment with Bob at some point while he still had visitation rights, how kindly she had treated me and Molly—but that was about it. It turned out that she had told Patty and Penny about Moll and me several years earlier. Patty, in particular, was intrigued and wanted to track us down. Charlie and Patty tried for about three years, but couldn’t find anything on us—they didn’t know my mother’s new married name. Now Charlie was gushing over the phone, sweet as ever, and planning a visit out to California with the girls.
“I didn’t communicate much with Bob,” she confessed, “other than making arrangements for the girls to visit. Things were strained there. But the girls are taking it very hard, so I was thinking of bringing them out there for a sort of mock funeral.”
“That reminds me,” I interjected. “I wanted to talk to you guys and find out if you had any specific wishes for his body. I can’t afford a burial, but perhaps you or Jesse might want that. If not, we can look into cremation.”
“We’ve already spoken to Jesse. None of us can afford a burial, so she said to go ahead with cremation. The coroner told us over the phone that you have the sole right to release the ashes to us. Would you be willing to do that?”
“Oh, gosh, yes, of course. Absolutely. I don’t want them.”
“Great. We’d love to come out there and let them go over the sea. He had a little boat, you know. He loved sailing and fishing, so I think it would go a long way toward helping the girls heal.”
“About the boat. I’m also going to be stopping by the coroner’s and the public administrator’s offices. I’ll find out what we’re looking at as far as property. I don’t imagine he left a lot, but of course I would want you and your girls to get your fair share. I don’t…I didn’t expect any of this. I’m not out to get anything. Clearly, you guys would be far more entitled to anything he left than I would. To them, he was actually a father. I’ll keep you posted on what I find out from the coroner and the public administrator.”
Charlie hesitated, as if she wanted to bring something up but didn’t quite know how. “We aren’t too interested in property; if anything, the most important thing to the girls is that they get some photos that he took on their last trip out. He took them to the lake and he rode his old Jet Skis. If you go by the house, could you look for the photos?”
The house. That was a little unnerving to me—the guy had killed himself there. Still, I assumed I’d have to go by at some point if there was any property to be dealt with.
“Sure, I’ll do it. Where would the photos be?” I hoped against hope that she would say the garage or the living room or…
“They’d most likely be in his bedroom.”
His bedroom. Where he blew his brains out. Oh, thanks.
I met with the coroner on a gray, rainy Saturday. I wasn’t sure what to expect. It turned out to be a large, courthouse-style building in Los Angeles with very cool turn-of-the-century architecture. Not particularly scary to me—more awe-inspiring than anything, fascinated with old buildings as I am. My parents accompanied me, and I nervously cracked death jokes the entire way there, lightening the mood. We all laughed, the reality of the whole thing not having quite set in.
My mother had been furious when I revealed that I had contacted my half sisters. I tried to assure her that they were very nice and just your average
grieving family, but she had locked herself inside her room and refused to speak to me for several hours, which was actually quite minimal for her—she was famous for going weeks or even months on end doling out the silent treatment, positive that the deprivation of her presence was killing all of us. This started when I was nine and my sister eight. It always made Molly sob. She would camp outside my mother’s door and pound on it with her tiny fists, begging her mommy to love her again. Molly did not get beaten as I did, so the worst punishment that she could ever fathom was the complete withholding of our mother’s sparse affection.
