The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily

by Laura Creedle

Dad took a chair next to Mom at the dining room table as Iris pulled the last pancake out of the pan. He bowed his head and closed his eyes while Mom sipped her coffee and stared off into the middle distance, like there was nothing at all strange about this. To be fair, Mom usually spent Sunday mornings sucking down coffee with her eyes glazed over.

  “Are you praying?” I asked. Disconcerting. It was bad enough that Dad disappeared for five years and reemerged with a new family—but a new religion?

  “Just meditating for a moment,” Dad replied, his eyes still closed. “Mindful awareness.”

  “Cool!” Iris said. “I studied mindful meditation in my Religions of the World seminar last year. We had a field trip to a Buddhist temple and . . .”

  I zoned out as Iris and Dad began talking about prayer bowls and different states of consciousness. I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted to be with Abelard, walking one of the many mountain trails that “dot the rustic landscape surrounding the Isaac Institute.” I’d been reading the Isaac Institute website just so I’d have visuals when my mind returned to Abelard. Because my mind always returned to Abelard.

  “. . . I live near a temple. We’ll make a visit when you come to Portland.”

  “Could I go to Portland, Mom?” Iris said, her eyes shining with enthusiasm.

  “Yes, let’s all go to Portland,” I said bitterly. I was done believing anything Mom or Dad told me.

  Mom and Dad exchanged a look. For some reason, Mom and Dad had jumped right back into communicating by gesture and eye contact over the rims of coffee cups, and it annoyed me deeply. Everyone perfectly happy but me.

  Dad dove for the pancakes.

  “These look great, Iris,” he said. “So, Lily, this boyfriend of yours—what do you do when you guys are together?”

  Present tense, like he’d forgotten that I’d broken up with Abelard. What was it Dad had said? I didn’t even give him a chance.

  “He’s in New Mexico, so nothing.”

  Dad helped himself and handed me the pancakes. I took one, tore a bit off the edge, and shoved it into my mouth.

  “I think your dad meant when Abelard was living here,” Mom interjected.

  “We played games.” I pushed the pancake around on my plate. “Mostly we played chess.”

  “Chess?” Dad smiled. “I remember teaching you how to play chess.”

  “That must be why I suck at chess,” I said.

  “Language, Lily,” Mom said. She threw Dad an apologetic look. I didn’t know why they were suddenly best friends. Even Mom had to see that Dad had fallen down on his paternal chess instruction duties. Who knew how many things I would have learned if he had stuck around. I’d probably be driving now.

  Because—five years. Five years was a hopeless lifetime of failing algebra and taking stupid drugs, of skipping class and thinking that my dad might show up at any moment and rescue me. I flashed on a memory of Humberto the Star Trek therapist gently trying to steer me toward the notion that maybe my mother wasn’t the only thing keeping Dad away. I never wanted to hear it, but now I understood. Humberto knew the truth. Dad had moved on and never looked back.

  “But I do suck at chess,” I said. “It’s not like I’ve played a lot since you left. Now that Abelard’s gone, I’ll probably never play chess again.”

  I pushed back from my plate and folded my arms across my chest, feeling the monster rise up. My feet itched for the door. It had been a couple of days since I let my impulses off the leash and followed where they led. I missed the freedom. And soon my impulse to bolt would be gone, excised from my brain forever by the implanted electrical device. Perhaps one last run—for old time’s sake.

  I stood. And Dad stood. Almost simultaneously, as if he knew what I was thinking.

  “I thought we might all go for a walk on the greenbelt after breakfast, burn off some spare energy,” he said quickly.

  “I can’t. I have to work on a project with Exene,” Iris said. She looked genuinely regretful, as if she actually wanted to cancel a homework assignment for more time with Dad. I’d never seen this expression on her face before. “Can we go later in the afternoon?”

  “Sure,” Dad said, still standing. “What should we do until then, Lil?”

  I sank back into my chair. My impulse to bolt evaporated. I regretted the loss.

  “Still have a chessboard?” he asked.

  I would have sworn we didn’t have a chessboard, but Mom dug out an old glass set from the back of the hall closet. It was just like the one Magneto and Professor X played with at the end of one of those movies. Appropriate, since I felt like I was playing under duress.

  We cleared the breakfast dishes and set up the game at the dining room table. Dad beat me the first game, but I watched him play and realized that he relied heavily on his knights and his rooks. So for the second game, instead of targeting his king, I went for his knights and took them both away pretty quickly. It was gratifying.

  “You’ve been practicing,” Dad said. He seemed, if anything, pleased to be on the receiving end of a chess beat down. Weird.

  “You haven’t.”

  “I’ve been kind of busy.”

  “It must be hard work raising the ‘sweetest kid ever,’” I blurted out.

  Dad moved a pawn away from his left rook. Rooks, the Hulk-smash pieces of the chessboard. Dad played like me—he moved pieces out quickly and ignored his delicate bishops. If I could slow down, plan, and play cautiously, like Abelard, I could beat him. Big if.

  I moved a bishop three spaces.

  “You’re angry with me,” Dad said.

  “Duh.”

  I crossed my arms and leaned back in my chair. Dad contemplated his next move, and the way he knit his eyebrows and bit his lower lip reminded me of Iris working on her Math POW. He looked like a bigger, rumpled version of Iris, same straight eyebrows and deep brown eyes. Iris in male form, left out in the sun too long.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Dad moved his rook out.

  “No,” I shot back.

  There was something I’d planned to do with my bishop three moves down the road to take his rook, but now I couldn’t remember. Distracted. Annoyed.

  “Okay, maybe I do want to talk about it. So little Jacob is what, six years old?”

  “Caleb?” Dad replied. “He’s five.”

  “Five years old.” My voice trembled. “So were you already with someone else when you were living with us?”

  “Lil,” Dad said softly, “Caleb is not my biological son. I’m the only father he’s ever known, but I didn’t meet Mara—his mother—until two years ago when I played a show at his daycare.”

  I’d held this image in my mind for so long of Dad herding goats, farming organic beets, and teaching English and history to misfit weirdoes. Waiting for me. Now I had to replace that image with Dad playing the lute for toddlers. And Caleb, the “sweetest kid ever.” Strange.

  “Two years ago. That’s when you went off Facebook and you stopped messaging me.”

  “I’m sorry, Lil,” he said. “I meant to get back to you, but . . .” His voice trailed off. I guess he was not completely unaware of how lame this sounded.

  I moved my bishop to place both his rook and a pawn in peril. He moved his rook, and I had to settle for taking the pawn.

  “So what did you do for the first three years after you left us?”

  “What did I do for three years?” Dad laughed bitterly. “I drank. And then I stopped drinking.”

  I flashed on the mostly empty plastic quart bottle of cheap vodka that was still in the back of our closet. A middle school friend had wanted to drink the vodka, but I stopped her from having more than a swig, because it was a memento of my dad. Stupidest keepsake ever. I could see that now.

  “So you messaged me while you were drinking, but after you stopped drinking, you stopped messaging me? That’s messed up, Dad.”

  “It had more to do with your mother. When I finally sobered up, I realized I needed to leave her al
one for a while. And frankly, I thought you guys would be better off without me.”

  Dad moved his left bishop. Quickly and decisively, like he’d just remembered he had a bishop and it had to be somewhere in a hurry.

  He went to the kitchen and poured himself another cup of coffee while I pondered my next move. It was his third, maybe fourth cup of coffee of the day. Mom had made an entire pot of coffee, while knowing that Dad would drink it all and probably not even wash his cup. He might forget his cup on the bookshelf, or the bedside table, leaving milky rings on the furniture. I remembered how you could always tell that Dad was working because half-drunk cups of coffee littered the house, cold and skinned over, like liquid land mines. I never saw the cups until I sent them flying. Poor Mom. She was always cleaning up after the both of us.

  “You were pestering her,” I said absently.

  “Pestering—Jesus, what a terrible word!”

  “Sorry. Coach Neuwirth says it all the time. I guess it stuck in my brain.”

  “Yes, I was pestering your mother.” Dad sighed deeply and sat down across from me. “So, Lil . . . about your mom. Do you think she’s happy?”

  “No,” I shot back. Annoyed. It was like Dad had completely missed the point of this little familial get-together. We weren’t happy. None of us. Well, maybe Iris.

  “Why not?” Dad seemed genuinely surprised.

  “Dad, I make her miserable. Why do you think I wanted to come live with you? If I were gone, she’d be happy again.”

  A lump rose in my throat. Sometimes you don’t see the truth until you say it out loud. The jar of antidepressants under my bed, all my ridiculous fantasies about picking beets and milking goats and homeschool cooperatives was about one thing. Leaving. I was wearing my mother down to a frazzled nub of her former hopeful self. She and Iris would be better off without me.

  “That’s not true,” he said.

  “How would you know?” I asked. “It’s not like you’ve been here.”

  “Happy or not, your mom is never going to give up on you. She’d worry just as much if you came to live with me.” Dad moved his rook out. It was a careless, doomed move. If he’d been paying attention, he wouldn’t have made it. “Probably more.”

  “I guess so.” I took his remaining rook with a pawn. “Once I have the surgery, Mom won’t have to worry about me anymore.”

  Dad tipped his king over so abruptly I wondered if the gesture was accidental. I’d probably beaten him, but I wasn’t sure. I probably could have chased his one sad bishop around on the board for a while. He might have battled back.

  “Just make sure it’s what you want,” he said.

  Dad and Iris cooked dinner together, curried cauliflower and brown rice. Now that Dad was a Buddhist, he’d also become a vegetarian. I could tell that the moment Dad left, Iris would insist on enforcing a vegetarian diet on all of us, and of course Mom would cave. She always does where Iris is concerned.

  When Rosalind texted, I went to my room.

  “Hey, is your dad still there? How is he?”

  “Good. It’s like he never left. He and Mom are being super congenial with each other.”

  “Well that’s nice,” she texted.

  I thought about it. The decision that we would all act like the best of friends was sort of nice, but sort of not.

  “Actually, it’s kind of creepy. Like someone replaced my normally argumentative family with pleasant robotic duplicates.”

  “Weird. So why did your dad decide to come visit now?”

  The question annoyed me. I had the feeling that she was fishing for dad’s opinion about my impending surgery.

  “No reason,” I texted.

  “So does he know about your brain surgery?”

  I knew it. She wanted to know if Dad approved of the surgery.

  “Yes.”

  “So what does he think? Does he want you to have the surgery?”

  “Not really. But then, he doesn’t have to deal with old-brain sad me.” I finished the line with a super-tragic emoji. Normally I don’t use emojis, but in this case it seemed—applicable.

  “You’re angry that I put you on suicide watch,” she texted.

  “No,” I shot back. I realized the moment I sent the text that this was not true. I was angry. Angry with her, angry with Dad, angry with everyone. “Okay, yes. I’m angry.”

  “Can we talk in person? You could come over.”

  I didn’t really want to talk to her about suicide watch or my surgery.

  “I can’t do it now.”

  “Meet me for lunch tomorrow?” she texted.

  I had an appointment with Dr. Brainguy, but I’d probably be done by noon.

  “Lunch,” I replied.

   Chapter 33

  “Wake up,” Dad whispered urgently. “The secret is in the old clock. It’s been there all along.”

  I rolled over.

  “Really, Dad?” I mumbled. “Nancy Drew?”

  He laughed.

  I sat up in my bed. Sun streamed in the window. “Where’s Iris? What time is it?”

  “It’s nine o’clock. Iris has already left,” he said. “Your mom sent me in to wake you up. You have an appointment with your doctor in an hour.”

  Ever since I agreed to brain surgery, Mom had become extremely lackadaisical about my school attendance. It was like I’d had a semipermanent Get Out of Jail Free card.

  “I have to go,” Dad said. “Your mom is taking me to the airport. I wish I could stay longer, but I have work.”

  I blinked. My brain refused to process this new information. Dad was leaving just when I was starting to get over being angry with him for leaving the last time. “Bye—I guess.”

  “Why don’t you come to Portland? We have a spare room I use as my office, but you’d be welcome to stay as long as you like. You’d like Mara and Caleb.”

  Portland. With my dad. This was all I’d wanted for so long, but now everything was different. Now I was heading into surgery, and maybe I had a chance at going to college, without the clever homeschooling I’d imagined. Who knew when I’d see Dad again?

  “Could Abelard come with me?” I asked.

  Stupid question. Abelard was in New Mexico, and I was here, and we weren’t together, but I couldn’t let go of the image of Abelard and the train trip, stars rolling by our window.

  “I don’t know if your mother would be okay with that.” Dad glanced toward the door as if Mom was lingering in the hall, eavesdropping.

  “Yeah, I don’t actually care what Mom thinks about my boyfriend,” I said, in case she was.

  Boyfriend. A word for what Abelard once was to me.

  Dad laughed. The skin around his eyes crinkled and folded in unexpected ways; otherwise, he was the dad I remembered. Making fun of Nancy Drew when I was six. Laughing at random comments. I’d spent so much time imagining our new life on a farm with goats and the children of freaks and nineteenth-century novels that I’d forgotten Dad was a real person. And Dad had forgotten that I’d grown up. Weird.

  “I think you have to talk to Abelard first.” He leaned over to hug me. “I love you, Lil.”

  “I love you, too, Dad.”

  And then he was gone.

  An hour later, Mom dropped me off at Dr. Brainguy’s office.

  The nurse called my name and escorted me into the conference room. Dr. Brainguy was at the head of a long table with his serious-as-a-heart-attack students, two men and two women in scrubs who trailed in his wake, always taking notes, asking questions. It was dawning on me that Dr. Brainguy was kind of a big deal. I didn’t get that when I first met him. It wasn’t until I cleared his intake round that I began to see Dr. Brainguy as the king of a small, nervous fiefdom, filled with surgical students and psychiatry residents. They tended to talk to me as if I were just a little smarter than the average trained monkey with an active understanding of several hundred words of English.

  “Hello, Lily,” Dr. Brainguy said. He nodded in the direction of a cha
ir across from one of the doctors. “How are you today?”

  “My father made a surprise visit this weekend. He just left,” I said. “I guess my mom told him about the surgery.”

  Two of Dr. Brainguy’s students dove for their pens and frantically scribbled notes. It didn’t improve my mood.

  “How did that go?” Dr. Brainguy said.

  I shrugged. If we’d been alone, I probably would have told him all about the visit, playing carnage chess, walking on the greenbelt with Dad and talking about Abelard. But I wasn’t going to say anything while his students were recording our conversation for posterity.

  Dr. Brainguy glanced around the room and smiled as if he got it. “Today you’re going to work with Dr. Sheerrlll, and we’re going to observe.”

  I sat across the table from Dr. Golden, feeling surly. Dr. Golden brought it out in me. He was like the straight-A captain of some mythical high school football team in Perfect Everywhereland. Like everything in his experience was completely antithetical to everything in mine. His sandy blond hair and easy smile predisposed me to hating him on sight.

  He began reading words from a verbal test that I swear I’d done five times already with Dr. Brainguy. The other students watched.

  And suddenly, I needed to leave. Something my father had said about Abelard stuck in my head, but I couldn’t focus on it with Dr. Golden looking at me like I’d just crawled out of a petri dish and developed a couple of brain cells. I twitched in my seat and reduced my answers to yes and no.

  Dr. Golden turned to Dr. Brainguy.

  “Isn’t it pointless to try and test for emotional lability in a splinkal setting?” he said. “What if the subject doesn’t honestly spork?”

  “You want to see emotional lability?” I said. “Keep talking like I’m not in the room.”

  I left for the bathroom. Behind me, I could hear Dr. Brainguy’s voice, low and measured. Lecturing. Perhaps he was congratulating Dr. Golden for pushing me into demonstrating a lack of impulse control. This was why I was here, after all. Hulk smash!

  I pushed through the satisfyingly heavy bathroom door. The bathroom—cool, dark, industrial. An oasis. What the hell was I doing here? It wasn’t like I was having a wart removed. I was here to trade in my emotional lability for something else. But what? Would I wake up after surgery as smooth and untroubled by actual human empathy as Dr. Golden?