The open door let in the muffled, stormy sound of Rachmaninoff, played live at a small upright piano. I stepped into the living room of my childhood home, dark red curtains hanging over two-story windows, a cold, cathedral-like space that had somehow once seemed like home. Now it made me feel exposed, nauseated; I turned to go back through the door, back to the office, where at least I’d had some semblance of agency, but I found that the knob was suddenly at chest-height, and on the other side of the doorway was just the same room again. Before and behind me, my father, nowhere to turn.
I looked down at myself, and as I did so, a raggedly edged sheet of hair fell forward over my right eye. My eyes felt sandy, sore. One brass-colored pigtail trailed forward over my left shoulder, over my collarbone, tied with a dark blue bow. It matched my skirt. School uniform. My right fist was clenched; I looked down, and in it was my other pigtail, a matching bow at one end, a red rubber band carefully doubled again and again around the other end to hold it together.
Following the memory as I would a script, I approached my father where he sat at the piano, his back to me. His iron-gray hair had recently been cut, almost military short. He had loosened the collar of his shirt; his tie was untied but still draped around his neck. As I came around to the side of him, circling like a wolf in the shadows, his angular profile rotated slowly into view. He did not look at me or stop playing.
I tried to speak, but the words lodged in my throat. I silently laid the braid on the piano keys. An offering.
That stilled his hands, and he finally swiveled to look at me. I’d forgotten that his eyes were so blue, that his nose had bent in the middle. Except, I hadn’t, or it couldn’t have been shown to me. I’d forgotten how kind those eyes could look.
“I don’t want to argue anymore,” I said. Fresh tears leaping to eyes I’d thought drained.
He looked at me for a moment. “I wish you were more your mother’s daughter,” he said, “and less mine.”
I held still. He never talked about her. This was important. If I moved, I would break whatever was happening. I had done something magical, laying my braid on the keys. I had passed his test.
“I was closing a deal on a rental property in Mississippi,” he said. “She was at the house next door. Pinching the dead blooms off the petunias on the porch. Wearing something that looked like it had come from the Salvation Army. Three dogs lying near her feet. The sun was low, on the other side of her, and I couldn’t see her face clearly, but I remember all three of the dogs were watching her with the same look, as though her every move was the answer to everything. And I knew in that moment that she didn’t belong there. That she deserved so much more. I’ve never felt anything like that, before or since.”
He turned back to the keys. His left hand climbed up, then back down, the notes of a scale. Harmonic minor.
“Children were important to her. She thought she’d finally feel at home here, if she had them. And there’s nothing I wouldn’t have done to make her happy. But she . . . we had some trouble. It took years. When it happened, it was like a miracle for her.”
“You didn’t want me,” I said. I probably hadn’t said that, at ten, but part of me was still me, still grown, still looking back on this with all of my new understanding.
“The two of you loved each other like nothing I’d ever seen,” he said. Hand wandering up and down another scale. Natural minor.
“The way you wanted her to love you,” I said.
“I wasn’t good with babies. I let her handle everything. But she was so tired, and then one day she had this . . . strange rash on her legs. These bumps. She almost didn’t go to the doctor about it, but she was so determined to be at her best for you.”
“It was cancer,” I said. “I forget what kind. Something rare.”
Because I couldn’t remember, neither did my father. “She was dead in two weeks,” he said.
“I don’t remember her,” I said. “Not even a little. I know I should feel sad about this, but I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“I never let you keep a nanny more than a few months.” This part I was sure he hadn’t told me as part of this long-ago conversation. We’d gone off script, mixing memories.
“You never let me keep them? I thought they all quit.”
“You know they didn’t,” he said. He turned, met my eyes.
I thought it over. “They always quit right when I started to get attached. Eventually I wised up and stopped getting attached.”
He gazed at me with a quiet sorrow.
“Except they didn’t quit,” I realized. “You fired them because I started to love them. Because it made you angry that I could just . . . forget her, and you couldn’t.”
He turned away from me then, rested both of his hands back on the keys, just to the left of where I’d laid the braid. But he didn’t play.
Something flared up inside me, hot and bright. I snatched the braid back, clutched it against my heart.
“You didn’t want me yourself. But didn’t let anyone else love me either. What the fuck did you think you were going to turn me into, Dad?”
He stared at the keys, looking bowed, broken, he and the piano both getting subtly, physically smaller somehow. It only made me angrier.
“You drove me away! You don’t get to play the lonely victim here!”
“How can you be angry,” he said to the keys, “at someone who hates himself so much?”
He looked smaller because I was myself again, fully grown, standing on prosthetic legs, my braid still clutched in my right fist.
“You never let me feel safe,” I said. “You demanded my love when I wasn’t in the mood, rebuffed it when I was. Just so I would always be sure to know whose story this was, who was the main character in this tragedy. And when I moved to L.A. to clutch desperately at a chance to center my life around myself, you jumped off a fucking building just to make it your tragedy again, once and for all. You made yourself the martyr.”
“You broke my heart,” he said to his hands.
“No! Bullshit, no, you’d already ruined your own life. But I still had a shot! You hadn’t killed me yet. You just killed my love for you, on purpose, and then suddenly you wanted it back? Fuck you! I had a chance at happiness and I fucking leaped for it!”
He swiveled, sharp, in that way that had always filled me with such fear as a child. Even now I couldn’t help but step back. All the gentleness gone from those eyes, blue as Alaskan ice. “You leaped,” he said, “and you broke yourself to pieces. Look what you’ve done with this ‘shot’ of yours. Look where you are.”
“Do you even know where we are right now? Do you even know why? You’re a figment of my imagination, Dad. You’re not even you; you’re my memory of you; you’re me.”
“This is so typical of you. Trying to have control, trying to be the director.”
My eyes filled again. “Dad, can we not do this? We’re both dead now; what does it matter?”
“Both of us?”
Why had I said that?
“They’re going to execute me,” I explained to him. To myself. “We’re both ghosts now. Let’s not fight anymore. Can you just—will you play me another song? Can I just pretend I have some kind of closure here? The aria, from the Goldberg Variations. That’s what you played, after I gave in about the haircut.” I laid my braid back on the piano. “This is my mind, isn’t it? Can’t I make you play it?”
My need to hear that song was so sharp, so strong, that I realized I’d lost. There was no victory to be had over my father here.
He began to play the Goldberg aria, its notes so tender, so slow and speculative. My heart unfolded like a morning glory. I began to shrink again, into my childhood self.
Sometimes he’d made milk shakes from scratch, in the kitchen, I remembered. Almost boozy tasting with vanilla extract. Sometimes he’d held my hand when we walked to the school bus together.
“You’d have been hit by a car if I hadn’t,” he said calmly, as though I’d spoken aloud. “You were always lost in your own thoughts. As for milk shakes, I loved them, but the recipe I learned was meant for two people, and they don’t keep in the refrigerator or in the freezer.” As he spoke, he continued to grow, until I was looking up at him from a toddler’s height. “I’m sorry,” he went on, watching his hands and not me, “but I never really cared for you, even when you were small and appealing. And now? Look what you’ve made of yourself. How do you expect me to feel now?”
I staggered away from him, through the suddenly huge room, my legs as wobbly as a two-year-old’s. This time, the door let me leave.
I stepped out of it at my full height, blundered into Daystrike Forest, wintry and haunting. I shivered; the air felt so real, and it was uncomfortably cold. Even so, I had no desire to turn back as I heard the door close behind me.
“What’s next?” I said, hearing my voice get lost in the soaring expanse of trees. “Caryl, right? This is where I find out she never loved me either?”
“No,” said a voice behind me and to my left. A voice that was familiar in an intensely creepy way.
I turned and saw not Caryl standing there—but myself.