I would still now want him with me
BEFORE MY NEPHEW was born, Eileen moved from her old apartment into one in Red Lion, near our grandmother and our aunt. I helped her move in before I left. We painted matching portraits of snails to hang above my nephew’s crib.
Eileen still didn’t drive, so while I was home, I sometimes gave her rides to and from McDonald’s, where she worked most nights.
Her boyfriend, the father, moved in.
“His mom is Native,” she told me one afternoon as I drove them to the grocery store.
“Athabaskan,” he said, from the back seat. “A crazy Indian, like yours.”
I find out, years later, that she got pregnant the night he broke into her apartment; the night she found out our mother and father had slept together on that graduation trip. Eileen was overwhelmed. She didn’t love him—had already left him—but she felt alone and vulnerable. It was easy to fuck him, to forget.
I visited my sister again a few months after I moved to Boston, a few weeks after my nephew was born. Eileen had to teach me how to hold him. His socks slipped off his little feet. He had our mother’s eyes and her ears and her nose.
I don’t know how long my sister was clean. My grandmother told me that her boyfriend started dealing, and then that my sister started dealing, but there was no way for my grandmother or me to know. A year later, Eileen was charged with possession and tampering with physical evidence; I would find the public records on York County’s website. The courts sentenced her to probation for twelve months. She started attending NA meetings and talking about God. But not long after, she started using again. She broke probation, and the courts sentenced her to confinement at YCP. She surrendered custody of her son. She’s just like your mother, Grandma would have said; would say.
A few weeks later, Eileen sent me a letter. “I seen dad in jail,” she said. She described walking back to her cell from medical, and on the way, spotting my father looking hungover and lost in his prison jumpsuit. “I was hoping I’d run into you,” he said, wearing the weird, knowing smile he got when the universe aligned the way he always envisioned it should. In her handwriting, large and sharp: “It freaked me out.”
But before her letter even arrived, my father called to tell me his version of the same story. When he told me he saw Eileen in jail, I assumed he had visited her, but he told me he ran into her in the hallway. He had been picked up on a drunk-and-disorderly, and spent a few days in jail.
I pried for more details, because I was confused—didn’t they separate the sexes?—but my father didn’t want to elaborate.
“Do you think I could come and see you in Boston for a couple of days?” he asked. His voice sounded small.
“Of course,” I said, without thinking.
Instead of calling to tell me he’d bought a ticket, my father called from the bus to tell me he was already on his way.
I was supposed to meet a guy from OkCupid for a first date that night—I should have canceled, but I didn’t. We met at a bar a few blocks from my apartment. I ordered a taco and a strawberry margarita.
When my date mentioned he smoked weed and relaxed with a beer every night, I panicked. “I don’t really drink,” I said, prodding my straw against the bottom of my margarita glass. “Alcohol makes me nervous.”
“Really,” he said.
It wasn’t a question, but I felt compelled to elaborate. Most people don’t talk about family trauma on first dates, but as my father’s bus tore through the miles between Pennsylvania and Boston, the distance I had placed between my adult life and my childhood felt distressingly small.
“My parents were alcoholics,” I began. I told him my mother left when I was young; that my grandmother had adopted me and my sister, but she had let us live with our father for months or years at a time.
“Maybe we should talk about something less serious,” he suggested.
But once I started talking, I couldn’t stop. I told him about the time my father, as a teenager in Colorado, had shot a man on a ski slope but pled criminal insanity and served his sentence in a psychiatric facility. In his twenties, in California, he’d tried to set fire to a building so the owner could collect the insurance money, but he was too drunk or too high and set himself and his truck on fire instead. Later, in his late twenties, when my sister and I were little and still living with him on Nokomis, he called the White House and threatened to kill the president if they didn’t let him speak to the president on the phone. The FBI showed up at our door and hauled the three of us to the police station. They called Grandma to come fetch us girls, and when she arrived, she begged them not to press charges against my dad. “He isn’t going to hurt anybody,” she told them. “He’s just a drunk.”
Laughing, I shared these stories about my father as if they were charming anecdotes, even though my date avoided my eyes and tried to sidetrack me with questions about what I studied in school and what books I read.
After we finished our meal, he claimed he was supposed to meet his friends for pool across town. He didn’t invite me to tag along.
As we were walking out, I spotted my roommate Nathan unexpectedly drinking with his cousin and his cousin’s wife by the bar. I parted from my date and joined them for another round of drinks.
“How was your date?” Nathan asked.
“I don’t think he’s calling back,” I laughed, and I quickly explained to them how the date had derailed.
They steered the conversation back to Nathan and his new girlfriend, who had been over to our apartment a handful of times.
“Don’t you think she has daddy issues?” I asked. “All she kept talking about was what her father wanted her to do with her life.”
“Who has daddy issues?” his cousin asked, and we laughed.
Sometime between my second drink and my third, I answered a call from a number I didn’t recognize. A man on a bus told me my father would be getting off near Harvard Street.
“My dad’s here,” I announced, standing to leave.
Nathan looked at me, his mouth set in a frown. “Good luck,” he said.
I walked outside and into the drizzling rain. From beneath the bar’s awning, I watched the 57 bus pull away from the curb. A cluster of students scurried away. My father wasn’t there. I realized I had forgotten to ask which bus my father was on.
I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head and started walking. I waited on the corner across from a tattoo studio where the 64 and the 66 buses stopped, but they came and left without him. I wondered if I might have already missed him, so I started walking home. I waited on my front porch for twenty minutes, constantly checking my phone, but as my buzz started to wear off, I berated myself. I knew better; I should have been sober.
The clock edged past midnight, and I jumped off my porch and started walking north, toward Harvard Square. I felt like if I just started calling his name he would hear me. I turned down Western Avenue, where the 70 and the 86 buses ran, and then I cut back toward my house. As I approached the McDonald’s, I found my father sitting on the sidewalk, his feet drifting into the street, his head between his knees.
I stopped beside him and said his name.
He lifted his head and stretched his arms toward me. “Oh, Danielle,” he groaned. “I got lost.”
I hooked my arms under his and helped him stand. The smell of alcohol was thick on his breath.
“I knew if I just started calling your name you would come find me,” he said.
“You’ve been drinking.”
“I stopped to ask for directions,” he mumbled. “If I’d—if I’d just turned left.”
I walked him back to my apartment. The weight of his body was heavy on my arm.
The next morning, I tried to establish ground rules: No drinking or smoking in the house. But when I came home after work, I found him sipping from a giant McDonald’s cup full of orange drink mixed with cheap vodka, as if this weren’t an old trick. As if I wouldn’t be able to tell he was already drunk.
I stood at the end of the couch and clenched my hands into tired fists. “What is the one thing I asked you?”
“I’m not hurting anybody,” he said, beginning to roll a cigarette.
“What is the one thing I asked you not to do?” I repeated.
“I had a little to drink.” He swiped a few threads of tobacco onto the floor. “I don’t see what the big deal is.”
“You don’t respect me.”
“Yes, I do,” he laughed, and he smiled up at me—his dark eyes glassy and far away.
“You don’t,” I said, shaking my head. “I asked you not to drink, and you did it anyway. This is my apartment. I’m not a kid anymore.”
“It’s just another state of mind, Danielle.” He ran the tip of his tongue along the rolling paper’s adhesive and sealed it with a pinch of his tobacco-stained fingers. “Like when you were in the hospital and you had that stutter. Do you remember? Do you understand?”
I understood.
My father was stuck. His mind was an old record, the grooves scratched and collecting dirt. The needle skips backward, repeating the same notes.
“Your grandmother was a worse drunk than me,” he said. “You had it easy.”
“Easy?” I repeated. “I had it easy? You say that because you don’t remember. You drink, and you blackout, and you don’t remember anything. But I remember. I have to live with it every day.”
My father avoided my eyes.
I wanted to make him remember—the way he treated us, the things he did, the things he said. I recited my memories—my childhood on Nokomis, the years with Fran in Yoe, and the short, terrible months in York—but the more I talked, the louder my voice became. I screamed at him, out the open windows, for the whole world to hear.
“I’m sorry, Danielle,” he said, reaching for me with his hands. “Can’t you forgive me?”
“I’m leaving,” I said. I grabbed my keys and my wallet and ran out of the house.
I had nowhere to go. No friend I felt I could call. I walked circles through my neighborhood and brushed the leaves of vines growing on fences; avoided dogs barking in their yards. I walked until my calves burned and my head ached, and then I walked back to my apartment.
I was relieved to find him asleep—head back, mouth open—on the couch.
I went to my room and closed the door and passed out.
I woke, hours later, to his weight on the edge of my bed.
He rested his hand on my shoulder. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t remember.”
I sat up, and he pulled me into his arms. “Please forgive me,” he begged, his body shaking with tears. “Forgive me. Please.”
“It’s okay,” I whispered, beginning to cry. “I forgive you.”
The next morning I went to work, and when I came home, he was sober. We didn’t talk. My father was always short-tempered and quiet when he didn’t drink. We sat on the couch and watched one of his favorite films, Alice’s Restaurant, set in a deconsecrated church-turned-home. Alice, the titular character, opens a restaurant in a nearby town. She is involved with a man named Ray but has an affair with Shelly, an artist and ex–heroin addict. In one of the final scenes, Shelly returns to the church obviously high. Ray beats him until he reveals his stash, hidden in his art supplies, and then Shelly leaves on his motorcycle and dies.
My father was a boy in the sixties and missed the antiestablishment, antiwar, countercultural movement that he idealized by a decade. Instead he grew into a punk, shaving his hair into a mohawk. He and his brothers all had motorcycles; my grandmother described them riding the bikes up and down the wooden stairs to the second floor of their apartment and parking the bikes in the living room.
He was also a heroin addict, before my sister and I were born. He contracted hepatitis B from a needle and spent half a year unable to get off my grandmother’s couch. A few months into his illness, Grandma asked him to install a toilet paper holder, then found him weak and sweating on the bathroom floor. I never learned how my father stopped using heroin, but it was possible his illness was enough to scare him straight.
My father didn’t stay with me long after our fight. He bought a bus ticket back to Pennsylvania, back to my grandmother’s couch.
A FEW MONTHS after my sister was released, I received a call from a New York number I didn’t recognize. The man on the phone told me he had bought my sister a bus ticket, arriving at three-thirty in the morning, and asked if I could pick her up.
At the time, Boston’s public transit stopped running at one, but I convinced Nathan to give me a ride to South Station. He waited in the car while I ran inside.
In the center of the bus terminal, my sister sat perched on one of three gigantic suitcases. She was draped in a lime-green shawl that kept falling off her shoulders as she tried to right the suitcases that kept toppling over. I tried not to laugh.
She followed me outside, to Nathan’s two-door car. Only two of her suitcases fit in his trunk.
“What do you even have in these?” I complained.
“God, just put it in the back seat!” she snapped.
On the drive home, I watched her reflection in the rearview mirror. Nathan’s back seat was too small, and so she reclaimed her perch atop her suitcase—teetering back and forth each time the car took a turn. She wove an elaborate story about the man from New York, who was an opera singer she had met in a club. He had offered to let her stay with him while she and her girlfriend got clean. There was another house; his son; more names than I could remember; shenanigans with a phone. The story ended when he found out she was using again and kicked her out.
She told me she wanted to get clean. I didn’t believe her, but I agreed to help.
We let her stay in the same spare room my father had stayed in a few months before, but we didn’t give her a key to the apartment, because she couldn’t be trusted alone.
Every day, she rode the train downtown and tried begging for money—she told people she had lost her Charlie card, or forgotten her wallet—but she came home with more spare subway tickets than cash. She tried to find work at one of the only strip clubs downtown, but she missed the audition, or wouldn’t make enough money, or didn’t like the club—her stories always changed. Instead, she called some of her old contacts, men with too much money, to wire her hundreds through Western Union.
One night, after I came home from work, I sat with her in the living room and listened to her rattle off a list of all the drugs she had tried. The list began with the usual suspects—heroin, ecstasy, LSD—but also included dozens of pharmaceuticals and acronyms I didn’t recognize. Her eyes glowed. It felt like she was testing me—like she was trying to see how far she could push me before I snapped.
“I’m not going to sit here and listen to you glorify this,” I said, finally. “You sound just like our dad.”
Eileen groaned. “When are you going to realize our parents’ lives weren’t that bad, Danielle? You’re the miserable one,” she laughed. “You’re not happy.”
I shrugged and tried to change the subject. “Why don’t you just go back to Pennsylvania and serve your time?”
“I’m not a criminal,” she said, but her voice got louder. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You did do something wrong,” I said. “What about your son?”
Eileen rolled her eyes. “I’m leaving.” She leapt out of the chair and paced toward the kitchen. “I’m not going to sit here and listen to you. You sound just like Grandma.”
I followed her through the kitchen, upstairs, to the tiny spare room. As she texted one of her new friends, who lived a few blocks from me, to come pick her up, I surveyed the room: Her entire life—her clothes and her makeup and her photo albums and her lingerie and her sketchbooks—was scattered across the floor. I skirted around the edge of the mess and picked things up, piece by piece. I tried to find a logical place for each thing, but she dropped to her knees and used her arms to shovel pile after pile into her suitcases like a front-end loader.
“Why do you even have some of this stuff?” I asked, holding a heavy-framed photograph of her high school best friend.
“I don’t know,” she snapped.
Her phone rang, and she answered, “Hey, baby”—her voice suddenly sweet and small. She spun the fantasy of a girl lounging on a chaise as she fumbled with the zipper on her suitcase. She leaned heavily on the suitcase to try and squeeze it closed, but instead of groaning with the effort, she giggled a tinkling giggle for whoever was on the phone. She dragged two of her suitcases out of the room, and I picked up the last and followed. Halfway down the narrow stairs, Eileen tripped over her luggage and tumbled the rest of the way down.
I froze in place and squeezed the banister. “Are you all right?”
“What do you care?” she yelled back. Then, in that other voice, apologized to the man on the phone.
I followed her through my apartment to the street, where her friend waited in a car parked out front. I helped her load the bags into his car, and then she closed herself into his passenger seat. We didn’t hug or say goodbye; she never even got off the phone.
An hour later, she called me from the bus terminal. She didn’t have enough money to pay for her extra bags and wanted to know if I would pay her friend back if he swung by. She told me she could send me money later, but I knew she wouldn’t. I told her no.
“Why do you always have to be such a bitch?” she asked, and then hung up.
MY FATHER SPENT the next two years bouncing back and forth between my grandmother’s and his girlfriend’s apartments. He spent a few short months in South Carolina, where he slept on the steps of a courthouse and on other people’s porches; he claimed the cops didn’t bother him in South Carolina the way they did in York. One summer, he emailed me with plans to hike the Appalachian Trail, complete with photographs of camp stoves built out of aluminum cans and tea candles. Then he told me he wanted to build a tiny house; he tried to convince my grandmother to buy him a small plot of land in West Virginia. But mostly, he sat in my grandmother’s apartment and watched the few channels they got through public access.
My sister spent the next two years avoiding the warrant for her arrest. She kept a low profile on social media and rarely texted me. She spent a few months traveling with one of her girlfriends. She hopped freight trains and hitched rides with semis across the country. She slept on the street, like our dad.
When my mother called, she asked me how my father and sister were doing. I told her the few things that trickled through my grandmother to me and acted like I knew more than I did.