I was the one who found my father.
That is the question people are really asking when they find the courage to whisper, “How are you doing now?” Who found the body? Was it you? If I tell them, they get bolder. Usually, the next question is “How did he do it?” Most of the time, I don’t answer, because the thought of all that blood still makes me dizzy. If I do respond, though—“He slit his wrists”—this generally shuts them up. But I know what they are wondering, even if they already know that people who slit their wrists do it in the bathtub ninety-nine percent of the time. Where did he do it? I’ve never been brave enough to ask them in turn what they picture. Do they see the tub in our house? Or did he, in their minds, do it in some seedy motel?
For whatever reason, they don’t seem to have any trouble asking me whether he left a note, even though this is the most personal aspect of the suicide, his final words to his wife and daughter. And this, almost always, is the last question they ask. As though this finally satisfies their curiosity, which is something they feel entitled to demand of me.
Dad closed himself in my childhood bathroom—the only one in our small house, the one with the geometric midcentury wallpaper he’d pretended to hate—drew himself a bath, tested to see if the temperature was right, disrobed and climbed in, then opened up his veins with deep, certain cuts, and died alone. Everything about the ritual was deliberate. He knew he was going to be found, and he went to pains not to make a mess. There was no blood on the floor, and almost no splatters above the water line. He had been thoughtful to that extent: Whoever found him, my mother or me, wouldn’t have to mop up any blood. All we’d have to do was pull the plug and flush the stain down into the sewer. Nevertheless, the water was as red as wine. And I was the one who saw it first.
What no one ever asks is why. I’m grateful for that at least, because I don’t yet have an answer, and I don’t know if I ever will. But I think why is the wrong question, anyway. The right one is: “Did he know you were going to find him?” I have reached the only conclusion I can live with: No, he didn’t know I would be the one to open the door. He loved me too much for that. I think he put the possibility out of his mind, because that’s the nature of this act, and there was no real way to eliminate this risk.
He hadn’t been in there long. We had seen each other in the morning, when he drove me to the diner on Main Street, where I was scheduled to work the brunch rush. It was a short commute, about fifteen minutes, and I spent most of the time complaining to him about Tuck. Tuck and I had been fighting, in fits and bursts, about everything, and I was ready to break up with him. Dad listened to it all and gave me the same advice he usually doled out. Don’t let him walk all over you, speak up. But then he cleared his throat and said something about how I wasn’t just who I was to him. I was an amalgam of all the Bettys whose hands he’d held over the years, since I was born. You used to be so tiny, he said. You insisted on being carried everywhere. I held you on my shoulders for so long walking around the house, I’d almost forget you were there. I still think of you that way. I laughed, but didn’t say much in response, because we had already reached the diner. He didn’t lean over to hug me. But when I opened the passenger door to get out, he grabbed my arm and held me there, to take another look at me. I stared back at him, confused. Then I climbed out. “Thanks for the ride,” I said, and slammed the door. I didn’t look back to wave.
In the end, my shift got cut short. I was still upset about my fight with Tuck, so I didn’t want to go back to the small room I shared with him in a house we rented with another couple. I went home, to Dad.
There was no note. Only a photograph, on the floor next to the tub, its edges curled and wilting from the steam, of my mother and me. The picture is old, out of focus, so that my mother is a blur of blue eyes, white teeth, and shimmering hair. She’s clutching my infant body tight to her chest as though my father is trying to take me away from her. There’s a splotch in the corner of the frame that could be a clumsy thumb over the lens. Or maybe Dad actually had been reaching for me.
I called my mother’s office from the side of the tub. Her first words, when I finally made myself clear enough to be understood through the tears and coughs—the smell was thick enough to stick to my clothes, my hair, and I couldn’t get the taste of blood out of the back of my throat—were “He’s awful.” No questions, only that. And then: “He hates me.”
She was the one who notified the authorities. I sat with him in our bathroom, in total silence, until I heard my mother arrive outside, with the police. I kissed his cheek goodbye, like I had every day growing up when he dropped me off at school, and then I walked away. When my mother declared that we wouldn’t be having a funeral, I wanted to ask her why, but I didn’t, because I knew she wouldn’t tell me. I’m sure she had her reasons. She was angry with Dad, for killing himself, or she was ashamed, as if his suicide was somehow a reflection on her. She just wouldn’t tell me, because all I was to her was her daughter. Still, I was relieved, because I didn’t want to see his casket or his gravestone. I wanted to believe my father was out there somewhere. Maybe he was back in Iceland, eating sharks from the ground and climbing glaciers, waiting for me to join him.
I wonder if I should tell Anthony this. To tell him that I understand. Certain wounds can never heal. Sammy, his arms cinched around his neck, screaming at him to say Sorry, sir, and still not relenting, Darla’s impotent pleas, witnessing his humiliation. These ghosts haunt him, the same way I sleep with mine.
I was the last person to see Dad alive before he drove himself back home, calmly, maintaining the speed limit, before he shut himself in the family bathroom, before he disrobed, before he filled the tub and climbed into the water, before he emptied the blood from his body. And I was the first person to see him dead. I can never speak to him again. I can never tell him how sorry I am. How much I miss him. I can’t heal. I will just keep living, without him.
This is the past I’m running from. This is the present I’m locked into. This is the future that awaits me. There’s no escaping my ghost. Nor do I want to. There’s only learning to live with it. Exactly as Anthony is seeking to come to terms with his.