Chapter 2

ON AN EARLY WINTER morning a few years after graduating from college, I drive from Ithaca back to the cottage. It, and the newer house my parents built next door, has been closed for winter. My tracks in the snow will be the only ones except for rabbits, squirrels, maybe a deer. I get out of the car, search in my pocket for the key, push open the door to the house, and turn on the light, grateful that the electricity has not been turned off and that there is still a little warmth.

Nothing really changes here, and my father’s presence, even in the stillness, is powerful. A shadow can so easily be transformed, his voice imagined, and for just a moment I envision him there. I hear the familiar sound of his footsteps on the stairs, but of course I see nothing—only the empty steps in the faint morning light.

Although I should be, I am clearly no further along in this grieving process. I haven’t found a teaching position, and so I sub in elementary schools when I can and tutor. It isn’t lost on me, though, or those around me, that I’m on auto pilot, not fully present, not really engaged, at all.

As I walk from room to room I find the quiet unbearable and so in the kitchen, I switch on the radio—my mother’s station, the last one played—classical. The music breaks the silence, but it feels jarring, droning, and I quickly turn it off and walk into another room.

In a closet I find what I have come for. My father’s box of old letters, his 511th Airborne booklet, other memorabilia, and the family photo albums, a myriad of colored covers, each one marked with a specific year. I sit on the floor, the books and letters and other items spread before me, and I open the first album; Dad on the boat saluting behind the wheel; playing poker with his friend Dick; swimming with my sister and me in the lake; Dad rolling around with the dogs on the lawn. Another album, then another, a slide show of images flashing too quickly, on and on, until the pictures stop on a half-filled page because weeks later my father was gone.

I get up and stand at the window, watching as a bird feeder, empty for years, swings precariously. I look at the vanishing light and the falling snow, and I am surprised so much time has passed.

Kneeling again on the floor, I begin stacking the albums, carefully refolding the letters and other items and placing them into the box. I see I have forgotten to put my dad’s old yearbook in. I open the cover and find him quickly. His brown eyes looking back at mine.

I return the book and close the top, ready to set it back on the closet shelf. But I worry about the dampness and the passage of time, the erosion of what remains, and quickly decide this time I will not leave it behind. I will take the box with me. These things cannot be lost.

I stay a moment more in the silent room, the empty house, knowing that I’ll have to keep doing this. I will have to keep looking. That in order to go forward, I will have to go back because even all this time after his death, his absence feels unmanageable, implausible still.

At the landing I reach again in my pocket for the key and lock the door behind me. It has begun to snow heavier and I can barely see my tracks.

Starting the car, the wipers battle the falling snow and a blast of air hits me as I turn down the gravel drive and begin back . . .