I was confused for many years about the kind of man my father was, in large part because when he was with my stepmother, it was easy to attribute the positive experiences Sarah and I had at their house to both of them. Now it is easy to separate those memories and realize that she was the one who swam with us in the pool, and she was the one who organized camping trips and held my hand when I cried over my first breakup. At the time, though, after my parents split up, I felt my father’s presence more than I ever had before, and I loved him for that.
My father enjoyed having a rapt audience. Having turned eleven, I was just old enough that I wanted to listen. Sarah was too young to hold his attention for long, and no matter how often she trailed behind him or broke a dish or screamed, he never gave her more than a glance or a growl. My father liked to talk, to engage, to impress, and he never was good at pretending he was interested in being around little kids. In the fight for his love, I noticeably came out on top.
This changed when my father and stepmother split up, just as I was finishing up treatment for my cancer. My father moved into a shitty one-bedroom apartment, and my stepmom stayed in the house she had built. It was a contentious split. My father told us a number of things that we found out later were lies: Sharon was having an affair with her best friend, Debbie, Sharon had taken all his money, Sharon threw him out without even a change of clothes. Shortly after, I left for a six-week celebratory postcancer backpacking trip through Italy. I left behind the rumors, the shitty apartment, my father and sister, and went to Rome to forget.
For the first time in almost twenty years my father was without a partner, girlfriend, or mistress. I think he felt unmoored in a way he hadn’t felt before. Despite his charm and stories, he had been unable to fully convince the people in his life that Sharon had done the things he accused her of. Sarah had recently turned twelve; she was smart and precocious. He turned to her for comfort for the first time in her life. When I returned from my trip, their relationship looked totally different. “Your sister really saved me,” he told me. “I was in a dark place, and she stuck by me.” It was unsettling to come back to a completely different family dynamic. I had never seen my sister happier. She beamed when she was near our father. She was eager to impress him, to keep his attention after he had ignored her for so long.
I was warier of my father than I had ever been. I had figured out the many lies he had told about his breakup with Sharon. I left for college, keeping him at a distance. I rarely called him or emailed. By the end of the next summer, we would be completely estranged. He lied to me about cosigning a student loan, which put my second year of college in jeopardy. In the fallout, my father hit my sister across the face. He interrogated her about me and my financial situation, and when she refused to tell him, he slapped her. I left him a voicemail telling him if he ever touched her again, I would come after him myself. He never attempted to reach out to me after that.
Sarah never stopped trying to love him. She never stopped trying to be in his life. I believe she thought she could save him, as he had told her she did when she was twelve years old.
I suppose I should have realized earlier what kind of man my father, Gary, was. He had a son, Jed, who he had abandoned when Jed was twelve. Jed would come and visit on the weekends when I was young, before Sarah was born. He was exactly what I wanted in a big brother: protective, funny, and he played terrible pranks on me that I later found hilarious. One time I was bitten by a spider, and Jed convinced four-year-old me that it was deadly. He helped me write out a will and everything. Gary was furious when he found out, but I thought it was funny. I thought everything Jed did was funny. Jed kept visiting after Sarah was born, but there are only a few pictures of him holding her when she was a baby. Soon after, Jed stopped coming on the weekends, or rather, my father stopped picking him up.
The next time I saw Jed, he was an angry seventeen-year-old. After some teenage rebellion that included crashed cars and a run-in with the police, Jed’s mother called Gary and told him it was time for him to step in. Jed moved into Sharon’s house, and the next few months were fraught: raised voices, Jed planting pot in the front yard, Jed blowing smoke in my face when I tried to talk to him. One night Jed chucked a heavy flashlight at Gary during a fight, in the dark, and it glanced off the side of Gary’s face. After Jed’s eighteenth birthday, he walked out of Gary’s life for good.
Jed would eventually reconnect with Sarah and me, after he had grown up and started a family of his own. His children would run up to him and throw their arms around him. I watched at dinner as he teased them, laughed with them, and told them no when they needed to hear it. In short, he became the kind of man, the kind of father, that we all wished Gary had been. He had grown in opposition to what was modeled to him.
I only wish Sarah and I had been able to do the same.