The Favorite

She did not stand alone, but what stood behind her, the most potent moral force in her life, was the love of her father.

~Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

Growing up, I always believed I was nothing like my father. I was blond and blue-eyed like my mother, her carbon copy everyone said. I was certainly never under any illusion that I was Dad’s favorite. That position was reserved for my older sister, born in Hawaii during the first year of my parents’ marriage, or maybe my brother, the only son, who would carry on the Remick name and take over the family business.

I was the one whose birth Dad had missed, the one who stopped living with him at age three when my parents divorced. So, when he died, I almost felt like I had no claim on him, nor even the right to thoroughly grieve the loss. By my own admission, we were never really close.

Yet somehow our relationship would unfold and grow after his passing, and most of that development would take place within the vivid dreams I had of him in the weeks following his death. I would come to think of them as visits, snatches of time when I could have him all to myself, saying things meant for only me to hear.

The first one occurred right after his funeral. The setting for it was the living room of the Bickley House, where I’d spent my adolescence. Oddly enough, I’d never lived there with my father. He’d never even been inside. But the Bickley House was the first place I could truly call a home, the first place where I had my own room and felt I belonged. It was natural that my father would visit me there in his spiritual state, in the place where I had always felt safe and at peace.

We both knew he was dead, but that fact seemed a mere inconvenience, just another hurdle to jump in our obstacle course of a relationship. There was no question as to why we were in this house where I no longer lived, where he had never been. Both of us accepted that while this meeting was unpleasant, it was necessary — and ultimately inevitable.

“I don’t know how I’m going to do this,” I told him.

“Oh, you’ll be fine,” he said. “You’ve always been fine. You always find a way to work through things. You don’t need me. You never did.”

I started to cry. How could he think that? Why did he think that? Of course, I needed him. It was he who didn’t need — or want — me. Could I tell him that now? Would he be open to hearing it?

So, I let him have it. I told him how I felt he’d always favored my older brother and sister. How he bought her a house and then let my brother have the family home when he moved to Baltimore to be with his new wife. How he went to dinners at my sister’s place and spent weekends working on old cars with my brother but somehow always seemed too busy for me.

“I know I’m not the favorite,” I sobbed. “And I’ll never carry on the Remick name for generations to come. But can’t I have something? Aren’t I special to you for any reason at all?”

He stared at me for a moment, processing my words. I feared I’d said too much, that he would walk away from me and decide to be permanently dead.

But then he said, “Rachel, did you ever think that maybe you were the favorite? That you are the one I believed would carry the Remick name? That you are my hope?”

Upon waking, I remembered nothing after those words. But as I lay there clinging to this fleeting dream, my life with my father came at me in flashes: his enrolling me in a private high school, writing a check for the expensive tuition without hesitation because my getting into a good college was so important to him, a high-school drop-out. His smile when he announced to his family at his fiftieth birthday celebration, “We just may have a writer in the family.”

His driving my friends and me to a local, live televised dance show and waiting for hours in the parking lot for us to come out. That was so unbelievable at the time to my fourteen-year-old self, a girl who grew up under the assumption he’d never been there for me. The pride on his face when he told me he watched me dancing on the old black-and-white television he plugged into the cigarette lighter.

The time my car broke down in Cape May, and he drove down in his tow truck to pick me up, and we stopped to have chowder in the Lobster House cafeteria. Three days later, the car was parked in front of the Bickley House, running like new.

Shortly after his funeral, I was going through the things in his old bedroom in my brother’s house and found dozens of notebooks, scrapbooks, picture albums, and school composition books. They were all meticulously maintained, written in brightly colored pens and pencils, mementos taped to the pages like the wrapper he saved from the stick of gum offered to him by a school crush. There were photos from road trips he’d taken in the fifties, including one of the Devils Tower in Wyoming that was eerily similar to the shot I’d taken on my own trip some forty years later. I saw myself in those pages: the writer, the dreamer, the planner, the wanderer, the explorer, the documenter, the romantic. I’d inherited it all.

The last time I saw my father was at the Cape May house. He was waving to me in the driveway as I backed out my car. My eyes teared up as I drove away, and I resisted the urge to turn the car around and go back, throw my arms around him and tell him I loved him. Of course, I didn’t and have regretted the decision ever since. But years later, I had a dream that would give me my chance to make it right.

It was a continuation of that day, yet this time I knew my father was dead. I knew for certain when I drove away that I would not see him again.

This time, before climbing into the car, I told him that I loved him. I told him that he didn’t need to worry about me. He was right when he told me I was going to be fine, that I was capable, that I knew what to do. That even if I couldn’t see him, I would know he was still with me, always watching over me. That I would be the one to tell our story. That I was the hope. The legacy. And, like his other two children, the favorite.

— Rachel Remick —