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“I killed him,” I whispered.
Even then, I wasn’t entirely sure why I was being so quiet about it. On one hand, my throat and lungs were worn out, strained and exhausted after a near death experience. It only made sense that they would need me to take it easy. But on the other, there was the weight of what I was saying that was pressing on my chest, restricting my ability to speak, and muffling my volume. This truth had always been there, torturing me, but I had been good at ignoring it until then. Until I couldn’t anymore. Until it had almost killed me.
As I finished talking, Professor Evory was already starting to shake his head, and I thought we were only going to have a disagreement about relevance. So I jumped ahead to that part of the conversation.
“How do I tell Lynette? The whole reason she won’t meet our dad is because I killed him.”
I thought back to the phone call I missed in the car and how that might have been the only chance I would ever get to talk to my sister. Assuming it was her, of course. But that room for doubt wasn’t behind the strange sense of relief I felt at the thought. Part of me wanted to miss her call. Part of me never wanted to speak to her. After all, how was I going to tell her about his death and the role I played in it?
But Professor Evory refused my lead and pulled us back to where the story ended. “You didn’t kill him,” he argued.
And maybe he had a point, but it felt like we were splitting hairs, somehow. He was looking to the specifics, to the listed cause of death written on my dad’s death certificate. My name was not on that specific line. I just didn’t think that it mattered, but if we were going to play that semantic game, I would do my part.
“It’s still my fault,” I insisted.
“He was already dying.”
“He might have pulled through,” I snapped back.
The thought even surprised me. I hadn’t been aware of it. That fleeting hope was something I had long thought gone. But really, it was just lying dormant and waiting for a chance to slip through my carefully crafted defenses. Right then, when I was weak and bed bound, the chance was there, perfectly presented and ripe for the taking.
We both recoiled, but Professor Evory caught himself quicker than I did. “Mia, congestive heart failure is incurable. And you don’t know how far it was at that point. But if he was already thinking about the end...”
Professor Evory didn’t finish the thought. He knew I couldn’t always be reasoned with, but he was right. Neither of us knew how far my dad’s heart failure had progressed. He never told me. And he never met Professor Evory.
From there, Professor Evory redirected the conversation to get to the thing that mattered most. “Any good parent would have jumped in. We’re not going to let our children die.”
I shook my head.
“What is it?” he asked.
But his question was met with silence, which stoked his worry and his discontent. I could see it in his eyes and the way they widened as the question hung in the air. He was desperate to get to the heart of my objection, but even I wasn’t sure what it was.
He took the first lead that came to mind with full hope that it would get him where he wanted to go. “You said Lynette has a daughter, right? Do you think she would let her little girl drown?”
No, I thought. But I didn’t say that. It didn’t feel like a fair comparison. It felt irrelevant. But my silence only continued to grate on his nerves. It only fueled his fears for me.
“Talk to me,” he begged, desperately thickening his words.
But even still, I hesitated. “Everyone kept saying that at least he died for something, you know? Like at least it wasn’t in vain. But it was. I wasn’t worth saving.”
Professor Evory masked a flinch with my last remark, but he soon regained control of himself. The steadiness of his features returned to him, and he studied me carefully. “Is that why you put so much pressure on yourself?” he asked. “Because you have to make your father’s death mean something?”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to lie to him, and I didn’t want to face the truth. It was a difficult impasse to navigate. Honestly, I had hoped he would have done the most obvious thing: argue with me, insist I was worth saving, no matter what I thought of myself. It’s what anyone else would have done. And I would have been armed with my carefully curated rebuttals. I would have all these half-related side points, tangents, and hair splits that would have made me think I had won when in reality, opposing him on this issue made me a loser by default. But instead, he had gone for the deeper blow that I couldn’t push back on. Because that wasn’t really a question. He just phrased it like one, and I was left scrambling for an answer.
“I don’t know,” I croaked out.
He shook his head. “I think you do. I think you’re smart enough to at least recognize it once it’s said aloud.”
There was a flash of regret in his eyes when he said it. He hadn’t meant to be so biting or to take that tone with me, but we had reached that point. I was sitting in a hospital bed now, laid out because I had been too stubborn to get the asthma taken care of. Or that’s what the medical team said happened. That was the best-case scenario, frankly.
I took a deep breath through the nasal cannula, surprised at how challenging it was for me. When I was growing up, my father had a few heart attacks, and in the aftermath of those attacks, he would be in a hospital bed with the same hook up on his face. He had made breathing through these tubes look so easy. But it wasn’t. And I almost felt more winded with each breath I tried to take.
But I still mustered the strength to look Professor Evory in the eye. All I could say though was “It was so hard.”
He nodded. And then I remembered that he lost his father the same calendar year I lost mine. It came out haphazardly one day. It had just slipped out like so many thoughts do. When he compared our wounds, he told me that it was hard enough as an adult to endure that loss and that–consequently–part of him hoped that I was secretly forty. It would make the tragedy less tragic. But I wasn’t forty then. I was eighteen, and I was fourteen when my father died. The timing hadn’t helped, but it would have been hard regardless.
“I know,” he said to that effect.
“I just wanted it to mean something.”
“Of course you do,” he agreed. “It was the hardest thing you ever went through. And it probably seems like it will hurt less if you know it produced something of value. But it doesn’t have to mean anything, Mia. Most people aren’t going to be martyrs. Most people want to die of old age in their beds. I personally think that sounds great. I’d love that. But that death isn’t going to mean anything. Who knows if I’ll even be awake enough for a goodbye. It’s not the death we have that gives our life meaning.”
I shut my eyes. I didn’t like to think about Professor Evory dying. I didn’t like the idea of losing another father figure. But the concept brought back a picture of Stephen and with it came the litany of my father’s failures. It was not just his inability to hold a relationship together or the numerous daughters only partially connected to each other. It was his silent nature. It was his inability to say what was on his mind, to love, to confess, to hurt that caused so many of his problems.
All of these memories came back, but none of it was helpful. Try as I might, those were ghosts I couldn’t chase away.
Then there was Professor Evory who hadn’t left yet but maybe should have. To him, I said, “Don’t say it’s life that matters because his life wasn’t without flaws, okay?”
He pushed on. “I’m saying, or eventually going to say, that you aren’t answerable for his life either, Mia. You didn’t kill him. You don’t have to make his death justifiable, and you don’t have to somehow change who he was.”
It was a lecture, a compact and efficient one. He had a point in mind and was focused on it. But I couldn’t see this point in the distance, this mark in the horizon he was gesturing towards.
“But what about my sister?” I asked. “Don’t I have to tell her what his life was?”
He shook his head and started to reach for my hand with his injured one, only to realize his mistake when he saw his bandages. He pulled it back and gave me the other one.
“This isn’t a eulogy. You don’t have to romanticize the dead. In fact, maybe it’s better if you don’t. She has to draw her own conclusions. You can tell her who he was but not what to think of him.”
I closed my eyes. There was no comfort or absolution in what he said. My guilt remained swirling within me.
Professor Evory insisted, “You don’t have to atone for his mistakes.”
“I’m not trying to atone,” I replied with a pleading tone in my voice. It was my desperation leaking through. “I’m trying to not repeat them. I don’t want to make the same ones.”
He nodded, acknowledging what I said, but he did not miss a moment. He replied immediately, “And isolating yourself or overworking yourself is somehow going to prevent that?”
I shifted in bed, trying to expel some of the discomfort growing within me, but it was inescapable.
“When you put it that way, no, but I can’t help it,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
It was the only logical question, but I didn’t have an answer. However, I suspected that this was the sort of question someone asked because they knew not necessarily what the answer was but where the conversation needed to go. It just wasn’t a leap they could take on their own. They needed to be pulled over by the person they were talking to.
Ever the dutiful student, I answered. “I’m his daughter,” I said. “I’m so much like him.”
“I don’t see it,” he replied.
And I started to roll my eyes because of course, he didn’t. He had never met Will Vogel. He didn’t know what to look for.
Despite the nonsensical response, Professor Evory leaned forward. “All I see is my former student, Mia. I see a very talented author who never believed she had talent. I see someone who loves hard but won’t let herself receive love. And I see someone who lives in fear that she will not be enough. Why is that?”
In a hushed whisper, I answered, “I don’t know.”
“Because she insists she has to pay a debt for the life of a man who wasn’t real.”
I scoffed. “Professor Evory, I knew him.”
“You think you did. In the same way all children think they know their parents. But you never had the liberating moment of realizing that your dad was just a person who did what he could with the cards he was dealt. He might not have even done his best all the time. And he did what he thought he needed to do. You romanticized him while you had him, like kids do, and then you never stopped. But Mia, there’s a danger in romanticizing the dead. You’re just making up your own ghost to haunt you. And because you made it, because it’s a part of you, it will never leave you alone. Not until you stop feeding it the fiction that’s keeping it alive.”
I watched him carefully while he made his argument. I watched the passion come out in his voice and eyes. But I wasn’t sure what else to look for. There was a vein in his neck that would appear whenever he was complaining about a choice the university president or administration was making. I didn’t see it then. There was a way he would twist his lips when he was stuck in traffic. I didn’t see that either. But maybe I thought he would burst out laughing or tell me he was joking and things really were as bad as I thought they were. There was a part of me that always thought Professor Evory was only being nice to me because he didn’t realize how screwed up I was. And one day, he would realize it and regret all the time he had invested in me. I looked down at his hand again. It seemed like a now or never situation. He was now literally scarred because he cared about me. Or he likely would be when his wounds healed. Regardless, he didn’t have to put himself in that position. He didn’t have to risk his wellbeing in that way. In fact, he had so many times or opportunities to bail ship without consequence. So why hadn’t he?
Maybe because he actually cared? It seemed impossible, but something fake couldn’t have lasted as long as he had. This has to be genuine. He had to be genuine.
And if he was going to be genuine, then I needed to be as well. “I don’t know how to stop,” I admitted softly. “I don’t think I can.”
With a shrug of his shoulders, he gave me the smallest win he could but then immediately undercut it. “By yourself, maybe not. So why won’t you let those of us who love you help you? Why don’t you take the love we’re giving?”
And I didn’t have an answer for that either.