THE SUMMER BEFORE MY DAD WAS arrested, we took a family vacation to the West Coast, driving up the 101 from Monterrey to Crescent City, California. I spent the whole week staring out the window of the rental car at craggy cliffs, dense forests, and the glinting sapphire ocean. It was my first time out of the Midwest and I felt like a foreigner in my own country, my head spinning with all this new, exotic beauty.
Of all the little hotels and motels we stayed at along the way, my favorite was a little inn on the Yurok Reservation in Klamath, California. One morning, while mom and Stevie Junior slept in, me and my dad went whale watching along the promenade behind our hotel. It was misty that morning, and the sky smelled like the sea. They didn’t make mornings like this in Chicago. Together we leaned over the fence at the top of the cliff, our faces damp with mist, and suddenly my dad cried out, pointing to a black speck out on the water, “I see one! I see one!” As I craned my neck to look, a member of the Yurok tribe who was fishing with his kid nearby laughed.
“That’s just a big old rock!” he said, and handed us his binoculars.
“Shit, man! I could’ve sworn that was a whale!” Dad squinted through the binoculars at the waves that crashed against a black boulder.
The man told us that if we heard dogs howling at night it was probably because a bear or some other large mammal was lurking around, and Dad told him about the time when a cougar—“a fucking mountain lion—thing weighed almost two hundred pounds!”—wandered down into the city from somewhere in Northern Wisconsin and ended up strolling down the middle of Hoyne Avenue in the twenty-sixth district “like it owned the place,” and how the cops hadn’t known what to do with it, “so we just shot the fuckin’ thing. Gangbangers, we can handle. Drug dealers, child molesters, murderers—no problem. But a cougar?” He had laughed. “We shot first and asked questions later.”
The Yurok man shook his head.
“No wonder you can’t tell the difference between a whale and a rock,” he said, and turned back to the water.
I thought about the Yurok man’s words now as my mom and I drove west through the endless beige and cloudless blue of the American prairie. The drive from Chicago to Clay County, Nebraska, takes over nine hours, eleven when my mother and her pea-sized bladder are at the wheel. We’d left at sunrise on a cool morning near the end of May and had barely merged onto I-88 before I fell back asleep. I awoke again in the full light of the day when we stopped for gas in a little farm town near the Iowa border. My mom went inside to pee, and as I got out of the car to stretch, looking over the flat plains rising with new corn, what struck me as weird, as totally unbelievable, was not that my father was spending the next decade or two of his life in prison but that he lived in Clay County, Nebraska. After all, Steve Boychuck was Chicago: corrupt, brash, proud, thick-wristed and dark-mustached, full of quick anger and fierce love in equal measure. How could he survive out here in this quiet, polite, decent stretch of America? How could he even make sense?
It was dark by the time we arrived in Clay County, and the sky above the Roadside Inn parking lot was scattered with prairie stars. We checked in, dragged our bags up the metal staircase to our room on the second floor, and walked to the Cracker Barrel for dinner, our jackets whipping in the wind. We were close enough to the highway that we could hear the never-ending whoosh of cars driving back and forth across America. I ordered a grilled cheese; my mom got the meatloaf, but neither of us ate much. When we got back to the hotel, we changed into our pajamas, climbed into our side-by-side beds, and my mom clicked off the light on the nightstand.
“Good night, honey,” she murmured.
“Good night, Mom.”
“Tomorrow is going to be just fine, okay? It’s going to be good.”
“Okay.”
I lay there for a long time, blinking up into the darkness, pretending to sleep and knowing, by the tense stillness emanating from my mom’s bed just a few feet away that she was doing the same thing. Eventually, though, I must have fallen asleep, lulled by the soft moaning of the highway and the wind outside the window.
In the morning, I got dressed in the outfit I’d picked out as appropriate visiting-my-dad-in-jail attire: a plain black blouse, jeans, and a pair of black flats. I wanted him to see that I’d grown up—no pink, no florals, no glitter—but I didn’t want to wear anything too stylish or memorable—nothing that would reveal very much about the person I had become. After I finished getting ready, I lounged on the bed, flipping through the TV channels, while my mom took forever in the bathroom. When she finally emerged, reeking of the jasmine perfume that she barely ever wore anymore, I saw that there was a visiting-my-husband-in-jail outfit, too, and it consisted of tight pants, a bright red top with lipstick to match, and curled, teased hair.
“Are we going to a prison or a salsa dancing class?” I asked, looking her over skeptically.
“I try to dress happy when I visit Daddy,” she snapped, her carefully done-up face collapsing into a pile of hurt. “I think it helps.”
The first thing I learned about prison visits is that everything happens at least an hour after they say it’s going to happen. If you make your visiting appointment for ten a.m., for example, you probably won’t get through security until at least eleven. It was late morning before we got our visitors’ passes, and my mom’s curled hair was already starting to wilt. We had to lock up our purses in a metal cubby, then get patted down, sent through a metal detector, and branded with an invisible stamp on the underside of our wrists. Finally, we were escorted into a green-painted cinder-block room with shiny linoleum floors and a lingering odor of disinfectant and bad breath. We settled down at a table with our approved belongings in front of us: a clear plastic bag of quarters for the vending machines, our IDs, and a harmonica, which the CO had allowed my mom to bring in as Dad’s birthday present only after holding it in the air and shaking it, as if he expected a snowfall of contraband drugs to sift out of the chamber. As we waited quietly for my dad to come out, I passed the time by listening to the nervous chatter of the other inmates’ families and reading the signs posted all over the walls that said things like “KEEP HANDS IN PLAIN VIEW AT ALL TIMES” and “ALL VISITORS MUST REMAIN SEATED” and my personal favorite, “FEMALE VISITORS MUST WEAR BRA AND PANTIES.”
We sat there for about half an hour before Dad finally appeared in the doorway. He was freshly showered—his hair was still damp—and when he stepped toward us, I could smell the harsh detergent of prison soap.
“Wendy,” he said, and the sound of his voice saying my name summoned tears to my eyes. I was wiping them away when he hugged me, which is why I wasn’t able to properly stop him, though it was more of a letting-him-hug-me situation than a mutual hug, and I hoped he could tell the difference.
“You look great, honey,” Mom said brightly, wrapping him in a hug brief enough not to violate prison policy. This was a chipper, well-meaning lie. He did not look great. His arms and shoulders were so bulked up with muscle they strained at the faded orange of his prison shirt, but his face was like one of my English papers after Ms. Lee finished marking it up—scribbles of purple veins across his cheeks, brackets springing out around his gray eyes, deep wrinkles of parentheses enclosing his mouth. How was it possible for him to have puffed up his muscles to the size of a bodybuilder’s, and yet still seem smaller and much, much older? And his hair: Could it really have turned gray like that in a couple years’ time? Could it really have receded that much, revealing a new strip of shiny skin across the crown of his head?
“I’m so sorry about Alexis, Wendy,” Dad began. “I really am. What a goddamn thing, huh?”
“It is what it is,” I said. I wouldn’t look at him.
“She was always a real nice girl.”
“May she rest in peace,” my mom nodded, making a quick sign of the cross.
“Now, see, Bernie,” he said, “I’ve always had an issue with that phrase: ‘Rest in peace.’”
“What are you talking about?” she demanded. “How could anyone have a problem with ‘rest in peace’?” I had to admit it: It was sort of nice to hear the two of them bickering. It reminded me of the before, when our lives were normal.
“Well, it’s fine if someone old dies. Like your mother. Or my mother. They both suffered from cancer for years. They had no peace. They were both almost eighty. But when a young person like Alexis dies? Think about it, Bernie. What sixteen-year-old ever wanted rest? Or peace, for that matter? Sixteen-year-olds want to grab the world by the balls. They want to dance in the goddamn rain. That’s what they want. Do you know what I’m saying, Wendy?”
I bit my lip and concentrated on the patterns in the Formica table. He was right, of course, though I would never give him the satisfaction of agreeing. Alexis had wanted to make her violin sing for the Vienna Philharmonic. She had wanted to see Carmen at the Royal Opera House in London. She had not wanted eternal rest. She had wanted Juilliard and New York and life and life and life.
“I guess I see your point.” Mom pushed the harmonica toward him. “This is for you. Happy birthday, Steve.”
Dad picked up the harmonica and stared at it, wide-eyed, like Mom had just brought him the crown jewels of England or something.
“You always said you wanted to learn,” she said shyly. “And now you have the time.”
“There’s a guy I know in here used to play in a blues band,” he said, turning the instrument over in the palm of his hand. The meaty skin just under his fingers was white with calluses from all the weightlifting he’d been doing. “I wonder if he can teach me ‘Thunder Road.’” He held the harmonica to his lips, puffed out his cheeks, and blew into it, emitting an off-key bleat like a defective party horn.
“Inmate!” boomed a guard, who in two strides made it across the visiting room and hovered at our table, the brown fabric of his crotch level with our eyes.
Dad put down the harmonica and lifted his hands.
“Sorry, pal.”
The guard sauntered back to his position against the wall.
“Jagoff,” he muttered. He grinned at us, revealing his teeth, which were still strong and straight and white. “They don’t let you have much fun in here, these guys.”
I got up and bought us some treats from the vending machine: Oreos, Fritos, Starburst, and a couple cans of Dr Pepper. Dad tore open the Oreos and stuffed one in his mouth.
“I’m pretending that I’m sitting in our kitchen,” he said, spewing little bits of black cookie dust into the air, “and that this is your mother’s homemade Christmas stuffing.”
We don’t have that kitchen anymore, I thought. We lost it because of you. But I didn’t say anything. I just stared out the barred windows at the highway and the flat blue sky. Maybe, maybe, if I ever visited him again, I’d actually talk to him. But for now, my physical presence was all I was willing to give. If I talked, he might think I’d forgiven him. So I just sat there and pretended I wasn’t even listening while he and my mom chattered away about safe topics—registering me for my senior year at Lincoln, my mom’s job at the hospital, Stevie Junior’s shore leave in Cambodia—as if it really was just another family dinner at our kitchen table. Eventually, when they’d run out of things to say to each other, and an awkward silence had settled around the little table, Dad broke out the standard clueless-parent question.
“So Wendy,” he said, smiling at me, “how’s school?”
I shrugged, hunching my shoulders to pick at a shred of dried skin on my thumbnail.
“Grades good?”
I shrugged again.
“Wendy’s in all honors classes this year,” my mom piped in, her voice as full of fake sugar as the perfume she’d doused herself with earlier that morning. “She even signed up for a couple AP classes at Lincoln next year!”
“AP, huh?” my dad boomed proudly. “Those are those college classes, aren’t they?”
“College?” I looked up, meeting his eyes for the first time since we’d arrived.
“Yeah—they give you credits, don’t they? I think I remember Stevie taking one of those at Saint Mike’s.”
“You think I’m still going to college?” My voice was hard, flinty—I almost didn’t recognize it as mine.
“Well, sure, hon,” my dad said, blinking. “I’ve always dreamed that for you.”
“With what money? The money’s all gone now. We used it on you. On this.” I waved a disgusted hand at our surroundings, at the cinder-block walls and prowling guards and vending machines.
My dad looked down at his big hands, stretched them so the knuckles cracked hollowly.
“You have every right to be pissed off as hell,” he said. “I won’t sit here and say you don’t.”
I caught the hangnail between my teeth and yanked, tasting the blood as it welled. I stared past him, out the window at the prairie sun. He looked at me for a moment longer, his gaze a painful pressure, until my mom, desperate to keep the peace, drew him back into conversation with some petty news about the neighborhood. Soon enough, though, one of the guards announced a five-minute warning, and as I started to get up, relieved that our visit was almost over, my dad leaned down to pull a rolled-up piece of paper from his pant leg.
“Wendy, I don’t know if you’ll even want this, but I brought a present for you just in case,” he said, pushing the paper across the Formica table. I looked down, considering whether I should open it. This wasn’t like all the cards he mailed that I just threw away. He was here, sitting across from me, and I could feel his eyes, the tense coil of his muscles, wanting and needing me to accept his gift. I picked it up.
“There’s this art class they give once a week,” he said quickly as I began to unroll the paper. “I know it’s probably a crap version of the original, but, you know, I’m still learning. How to work with the watercolors and whatnot.”
In the painting I held before me, a yellow-haired girl sat on the back of a pontoon boat, her face raised to the sun, one leg folded beneath her and the other stretched out, the toes reaching for the water. I only knew that the girl was me because I was familiar with the original photograph, taken up in Crooked Lake when I was ten or eleven. It used to hang in a frame in our basement TV room. “Sad thing is,” he continued, “I did about twenty of these, and this was the best of the bunch.” His voice was doubting, humble, almost shy, and I had to look up to make sure it was really my dad who was speaking.
As far as I knew, Sergeant Stephen Boychuck had never been an artistic man, and his prison painting class had not brought out any secret talents. If he had submitted this painting in Sister Attracta’s Art I class, he probably would have gotten a C or a C-. My face, which was blurry and marked with water spots, was composed of generic, amateur features that could have belonged to anyone. The bathing suit was painted in sloppy strokes of red and green stripes, the legs disproportionately long. The sun was a lopsided ball in the center of the sky above me, and the waves of the lake were painted in sharp ninety-degree angles, like teeth. There were spots here and there of heavy paint, where he’d tried to cover up his mistakes.
The thing was, though, if the painting had been beautiful, I might not ever have been able to forgive him. But the way that he was looking at me now, anxious and full of hope, while I examined the thick paper and tried to come up with something nice to say . . . I guess I had what Sister Dorothy might call a moment of grace. It made me think about how maybe the art class had become something he looked forward to all week—the bright spot in the endless march of mealtimes and showers and roll call and rec time in the concrete square that stood under the harsh glow of the treeless Nebraska sun. What was it like, a prison art class? I pictured a bunch of thugs with easels, sitting in a cinder-block room like this one, taught by some do-gooder art teacher with brassy hair and breezy tunics, the kind of lady Dad would rip on mercilessly in his real life, his Chicago life. She would stroll around the easels with her hands behind her back, commenting, correcting, and when she reached my dad, she would ask him what he was painting and he would tell her it was his daughter, basking in the sun on the family pontoon up in Crooked Lake, Wisconsin.
“I’m painting my old life,” he would say. Then he would return to his composition, his thick fingers around the paintbrush, clumsily, lovingly, trying to bring the old life back.
“It’s really good,” I lied. “Thanks, Dad.”
“Wendy,” he said, his voice catching, “I’m sorry for everything I put you through. I’m sorry for what I did to those people. I’m just—I’m so sorry.”
Apology was as foreign to him as Nebraska, as clumsy on his lips as a paintbrush in his hands. Even though I knew he meant what he said, he still stumbled over his words.
A buzzer sounded then, and the visiting hour was over. When he reached across the table and tried to hug me, I meant to push him away, to show him that he deserved the collective hatred of our city, that the widening ripples of pain he’d inflicted could never be undone. But instead, I was struck by a feeling that was both fierce and uncomplicated. He was my dad, and I loved him. That was all. Even if he deserved my hatred, I was still going to love him anyway.
I hugged him back, burying my head in his thick, familiar chest, and my mom reached over and sandwiched me between them, and we didn’t let go of one another until the guard yelled “That’s enough, inmate!”—which was probably for the best because if the guard hadn’t stepped in, we’d probably still be there now, clinging to one another while the skies over Nebraska went dark. I understood now that forgiveness was like letting go of a deep, long-held breath, or like stepping out into the city on the coldest day of the year. It didn’t make you feel better. It just made you feel alive.