Not long after my fifteenth birthday, my father’s alarm clock sounded off in his bedroom in the middle of the night. The sporadic crackle from his radio sharpened the silence in the house. For as long as I could remember, he had always played the radio to fall asleep. I don’t know if this was something he did when my mother still shared a bed with him, or if it was a habit he picked up after she began sleeping in another room.
He knocked on my bedroom door.
Gah Lee, he said, hei san, wake up. I yawned and followed him to the garage. We were headed to the cemetery in Fairfield. I wasn’t sure why, just that the night before over dinner, he turned to me.
Hey. He spat tiny bones from a steamed fish onto a napkin. Maybe tomorrow morning we can go to the cemetery to pay respect to your mommy.
OK, I said. I didn’t ask any questions.
In the van, I watched the strip malls fly by on Route 15 as we drove the hour from Wethersfield to Fairfield. I was replaying a fight my father and I had earlier in the week. We were on the way home from an after-school activity; I had a Rolodex of excuses to stay late at school so that I wouldn’t have to take the shuttle or spend as much time at home. It was some variation of I needed help with math or I wanted to join this club. The structure of activities felt safe and controlled and normal, despite how I wasn’t excelling in classes the way my father wanted.
That afternoon of our argument, we were in his Miata, which he’d brought home a few years before my mother died. You couldn’t have gotten a car with enough seats for the whole family? She glared at the two-seater convertible. And then, because my parents’ bank accounts were separate, and because my father rarely paid for the family’s expenses: Where’d you get all this money? He shrugged and offered to give her a ride around the neighborhood.
My father accelerated into a turn and we tipped in our seats. The roads were slick with rain and the car felt flimsy.
Seriously now, Daddy. Stop driving like this. Are you trying to get us killed? I said. I grasped at my door handle. One family member dead is enough, don’t you think?
He paused.
Stop talking to me while I’m driving. You’re stressing me out.
Don’t start on stress, I said.
You have no reasons to be stressed. You’re fifteen, he said. You should be able to handle it. Adults have real stress. I was too caught up in my own life to understand how he had accrued new responsibility—of bills, of a daughter he had to look after, of the day-to-day logistics of having a dead wife. He was no longer in the background and had emerged to stand at the front of the stage to lead the drama of our family’s play.
Don’t you realize that your parenting just takes away from me and my freedom? I said, as though parenting should be anything but that. Grounding me because of bad grades for months and months until I bring them up, when maybe we both know it’s not school that’s the problem? What type of parent are you? How do you expect me not to be depr—?
It’s been a year since she died. This is all in your head. His driving was jerky.
Arguments like these always became so personal, some form of If you weren’t so lazy, you could get good grades. Or, if I was home and he didn’t want to drive me to see friends: If your friends really liked you, they would pick you up and drive you the twenty minutes to their party. Or: You’re making this harder on yourself by being sad. Or: Everybody dies. You can’t keep going on about this.
All in my fucking head? I kicked at the rubber rug.
Stop using that language! You have to respect me. He shouted, far from any normal speaking voice.
Respect? I said. How can I respect you when you’re so goddamn controlling?
You should respect me because I am your father, he said. See, Katelin, you never respected your mother. She spoiled you too much. She let you walk all over her.
If you didn’t get your way, you would whine and be manipulative like you are, and she’d baby you.
A silence fell between us as we turned onto our street.
Maybe she was too nice to you, he said. Maybe that’s why she’s dead.
I sucked in a breath.
Yeah, well, maybe it would have been better if you had died instead.
I think at the time we both believed what we said. My father found me needy and spoiled: Our mother had stretched herself to give her daughters—especially me—unnecessary things that she could not afford: lessons for horseback riding, tennis, violin, or oboe; summer camps at the town’s nature center. From his perspective, I sapped all my mother’s energy. For my part, I often wondered—and still sometimes do—what our lives would have been like had my mother lived and he died. Would she have remarried? Would I have had the childhood I did, or the life I have now? I hate her death for how it knocked my family down, but I hate also how I believe I needed it to become who I am.
* * *
In the cemetery in Fairfield, our van and the moon were the only sources of light. My father aimed the car in the direction of my mother’s grave. He cut the engine and left the headlights on bright to illuminate our path. Yi Ma later tells me that it’s taboo to visit the cemetery at night or late in the afternoon. No good to do that, she says. That’s when the spirits roam, I gather.
My mother’s grave still did not have a stone. It was marked only by a flimsy plastic sign, a remnant from her burial. I cannot remember now if my father said anything as we stood over her. If he mumbled about how she was up there, wherever she was, heaven, maybe, with all of our other dead relatives.
I rewound to the past hour when he roused me from sleep and we made our way here. Just before that, he had swung himself from the bed he once shared with you, his pillow tucked under the covers to approximate your form, his blankets still warm. In the middle of the night, I occasionally woke to a shout from his room. I would creep to the hall to make sure there was no intruder, only to discover that he was talking in his sleep, his voice loud even when dreaming. He sounded as though he was pleading. I wondered if you were visiting him then, and what you were asking or telling him. In my journal from high school, I wrote, “My father mourned in his sleep, where you seemed to haunt him most.”
Standing in the path of the headlights, my father and I bowed three times before your grave. A fog settled under the moon, and our faces were constellated with silver.