Chapter 1

March 1999

I expected to feel something as I watched the man being cut open. It was an autopsy, and I stood close to the glass separating us from the room. I watched the rough touch of the medical examiner as she prodded and removed, marked and noted. I thought I should feel something for the loss of a human life, though I had not known him. This man was old, and looked like he hadn’t cared much for himself while living. He had been found dead in an alley, probably dead of a simple heart attack, but the job here was to make sure. Maybe he had a family. Kids who still mourned him. A wife left alone, too old to date, too young to give up. His face was empty of emotion, his brow smoother than it must have been in life, his eyes closed. I imagined he hadn’t time to resist before death sunk in its claws.

The tart odor of disinfectant combined with the musky smell of sweat in the viewing room. I put my nose to my own shoulder to see if the musk came from me, but my body was dry. The dark-haired woman standing next to me wiped beads of sweat from her upper lip. Her bangs stuck to her forehead in damp strips. She blinked at the open chest cavity, then looked right at me as I watched her. I might have been embarrassed to be caught staring, but her gaze went through me. I hoped she would turn the other way when she threw up.

The room itself was ordinary. It looked like a large, open office. There were closed cabinets and shelves filled with books, videos and DVD cases. The walls were white and featured large dry-erase boards that had been wiped clean. Only a flash of stainless steel table here and a curtained-off section there belied the room’s purpose. This was where the dead were dissected.

I could not assign any theatrical romance to the process. I suspected some of my classmates wanted to become doctors based solely on television shows they’d seen. There were rumors about a new one in the works, something about crime scene investigators. It all seemed silly to me. The basic reason for an autopsy was to find out how people died in order to aid the living. It was that simple, not romantic. Not dramatic.

I knew something was wrong when I lost my sense of taste. A cheeseburger felt mealy in my mouth, like chewing congealed potting soil. I couldn’t feel the carbonation of Coke on my tongue. Jalapeños were like rubber bands in my jaw. Just before the autopsy class, my classmates fasted for fear of vomiting chili dogs onto the examination room floor. I devoured a turkey club with Thousand Island dressing, large fries and a vanilla milkshake. It all congealed on my tongue like wet cotton balls.

My own mother died almost five years ago. She was on a table just like this man after her car was totaled by a drunk driver. Standing there in my advanced anatomy class, I watched a man become nothing more than a collection of parts. I felt nothing. Too many people believe that the worst thing in life is to be hurt. There’s so much talk of unbearable pain, whining about physical and emotional hurt as if it could break one’s will. We spend so much time and energy trying to avoid getting hurt, or at least, doing what we think will help us avoid being hurt. Most of the time, we just end up in a different kind of pain than we had anticipated. The problem is, feeling is a part of the human condition, and feeling isn’t always a good thing. But we do feel, and that’s what reminds us that we are still alive. You might be suffering, but you’re still here, and that counts for something.

Pain is what actually pushes us forward. We have to do something to stop the pain—take the drugs, get a divorce, move away. Forward might not be in the right direction, but it’s better than doing nothing at all. What worth does life have if there is no motivation, even is that motivation is negative? What’s the point?

Having experienced some of the worst emotional pain in the world when my mother died, I know how motivating hurt can be. It reconnected me and my sister Maren with our father, it pushed me to go to Duke so I could be near Maren, it made me want to try as hard as I could to succeed, to honor my mother in some small way. I’m not saying all that is good—by choice, I haven’t seen my father in years. I wanted to go to Berkeley, but couldn’t leave my sister. I sometimes wonder what it might be like to do something totally unexpected for a career, but my mother wanted me to be a doctor, so I’m going to be a doctor. The main thing is, the pain kept me alive, kept me moving.

Now, numbness is a different thing altogether, a far worse thing. If you can’t feel, how do you know you’re still alive, and who cares if you’re not? When I realized that the pain I’d lived with for years had been replaced by numbness, I knew something was terribly wrong.

When did I become so numb? I used to feel everything, and, now, nothing. Death is an old friend; first my mother, then a few years later, my grandmother. I knew death. Grief is familiar. Maybe this familiarity with death meant that my life no longer meant much.

But there was a person lying there on the table, and that fact deserved at least a small bit of emotion. If not compassion or pity, then perhaps disgust, even anger. More than nothing. The circular saw buzzed on. Time to look at the brain. The sweating, dark-haired girl clapped a hand over her mouth and rushed from the room. The sounds of her vomiting echoed from the hallway.

“Ellison, are you going to be next?” whispered a classmate who was always competing with me to get the best exam grades. He thought of us at rivals. I didn’t think of him at all. But he’d just given me a good excuse to leave—I didn’t care if he and everyone else believed I couldn’t handle the gore.

I excused myself, and made some vague exculpatory motions with my hands. Maybe the professor, who knew me well enough to know that nothing in anatomy class ever made me queasy, would think I was going to help the girl whose name I couldn’t remember, or had never known. I walked out of class and got into my BMW, the same one my mother bought me before she died. I drove, expecting to end up on the highway, escaping. That’s what I did. When I needed to think, I drove. When I needed to escape, I drove. My car was a refuge, the place where I could turn up the music and feel the world rushing by. Driving was what I did right after I found out my mother died. Since then, driving was the way I felt closest to her.

Our mother died instantly in the crash, and in that moment, my life, as well as my sister Maren’s, changed in ways we were still discovering. We moved from our upper middle-class neighborhood in Evanston to live with our father, Calvin, in Durham. We were no longer privileged kids attending an expensive and exclusive private school. We were reunited with a father we hadn’t seen in years, a man we didn’t know, a man I discovered I didn’t even like. Maren’s troubles were worse than mine, although I had my share that first year.

Since then, I’d done fine. I was going to one of the best universities in the country. I was poised to get into any medical school I wanted. I would be a success. Not having a mother since I was seventeen wouldn’t hold me back. Not on paper, anyway. But I always looked good on paper. It was only recently that I began to think that I wasn’t okay at all, that my accomplishments were hollow. It wasn’t until I fell in love with Angela, then lost her, that I realized I had nothing, felt nothing.

The thought of it made me want to sleep, all day, all night. But I didn’t, because Ellison Emory was an A student. I would graduate with honors. The world expected me to be okay. I gave the world what it wanted.

But as I drove, I thought that maybe I should stop worrying about what the world wanted and try to figure out what it was that I wanted. So I got in my car and drove. But instead of ending up far away from Duke, I found myself just a few miles away from school, sitting in front of what was my grandmother’s house before she died. It was where I lived after my mother died. It was where my father now lived alone.

I used my old key. I would not consider the question of why it was still on my key chain. I hadn’t set foot in this house in nearly four years, not since I left for college. Maren, before she left for the University of Florida, always came to campus to see me. I would not, could not, share space with my father. When Grandma Esther died, I skipped the wake.

What brought me back today of all days? I suspected that the numbness had begun in this house. Before then, I felt. After I moved here, feeling became a burden I could not bear.

I could hear the keys clacking on his father’s typewriter. His office was upstairs, in the back of the house. I suppressed my annoyance that my father used a typewriter. It was 1999. My father was one of maybe five people left in the world who thought it was romantic to use an actual typewriter instead of a computer.

I took the stairs one at a time and knocked on the office door. Just as my knuckles brushed the surface of the door, it occurred to me that this might not be a good idea.

But my father heard the soft sound. The clacking stopped and the door opened.

“Ellison.”

I nodded at him. “Calvin.”

Calling my father by his first name had begun as a way to show my contempt. Now it was necessary. I didn’t think of the man as a real father. We had only known each other during the years since my mother died. Before that, my father was a stranger. Now, I was twenty-two years old, and believed I no longer needed a father. Calvin.

We made our way down to the kitchen. It felt like neutral ground.

Calvin glanced at his watch. I looked at mine, too, a reflex. Maybe our watches would tell us what to do next, how to talk to each other. I didn’t think there was any way to bridge the chasm between us. It was too old, too deep. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to be closer to my father. I was just here.

“Want a drink?”

My watch read three-thirty in the afternoon, but I hoped Calvin meant something stronger than iced tea.

Calvin puttered around the kitchen and sat down after he set two mugs of Heineken on the table in front of us.

I nodded at my father and looked around the room. The kitchen had been redone: new appliances, shining white and black floors and white walls, one of which was covered with gleaming copper pots. Plantation shutters on the windows. Expensive. Tasteful. I turned back to Calvin.

“You’ve made some changes around here.”

“Mama would never let me do anything for so many years. It was always her house. It never really felt like mine. Not until she was gone.” Calvin paused. “That sounds mean, doesn’t it? Like I’m glad she’s dead.”

I shook my head. “It sounds real.” In fact, it was the most genuine thing I could remember him ever saying to me.

We sat back, sipping. I appreciated that Calvin didn’t ask me why I was here, didn’t bring up the past, didn’t do anything except sit.

“I walked out of class today. Anatomy.”

“Too gross?”

I leaned back and took a long drink to finish the beer.

“No. That was the problem. We watched an autopsy, right there in the viewing room. It wasn’t gross. It wasn’t hard to watch. I didn’t feel a thing.”

Calvin paused before responding. “Maybe we watch too much TV. Crime shows, all that. It makes us casual about death. Or…”

I looked away.

“Or.”

The word hung in the air. It was the closest we came to talking about the numbness that covered me, a clammy, filmy substance that wouldn’t rub away.

Calvin nodded as though something had been decided. He pointed at my glass.

“More?” Before I could answer, he was up and pouring.

We sat that way, drinking, saying nothing, listening and watching the afternoon grow into evening. It was companionable, and I tried to remember the last time I sat with my father without arguing. Perhaps never.

“I’ve got a new book out. The tour starts next week.” Calvin’s voice was matter-of-fact, but I knew this was important to him. Maren kept me informed of our father’s movements whether I wanted to be informed or not. She’d told me about the book, Calvin’s third, his first with a major publisher. It would be his first tour, the first time he’d been paid any real money. I looked around the kitchen again and wondered how much longer my father would live here.

“Where are you going?”

Calvin ticked off cities on his fingers: Atlanta, D.C., Baltimore, down to Florida. West Palm Beach, Jacksonville.

“I’m going to stop in Gainesville to see Maren.”

I swirled the foamy remains of my beer.

Calvin cleared his throat. “Maybe you should take some time off. Come with me. I could use an assistant.”

I looked up at Calvin’s mischievous smile. It was March, and I was expecting letters from medical schools. I applied only to the best ones. It did not seem like a good idea to skip out on the second semester of my senior year to follow my father around on a second-rate book tour. I should be studying, preparing, planning. It was just like my father to suggest this. Irresponsible. Foolish. I stood up, ready to lash out at Calvin, accuse of him of not understanding what it meant to pursue a goal, to get an education, to be where you were supposed to be. But standing over my father, I felt only the numbness. Even righteous indignation escaped me.

“When do we leave?”

* * *

I didn’t pack much for the trip, just a couple of pairs of jeans, a few T-shirts and one nicer outfit for the actual book signings. I didn’t prepare much at all, because preparing would mean thinking, and thinking might cause me to second-guess the most irresponsible thing I’d ever agreed to in my life. Thinking might mean actually talking to someone at Duke, maybe applying for an actual leave. But I reasoned that we would only be gone a couple of weeks. Lots of students were absent from classes a lot longer than that without setting off major alarms. Maybe I would make up something about an illness when I returned.

Calvin, on the other hand, stuffed three bags into the trunk of my BMW. He made a halfhearted offer to drive, but I wanted to feel in control of something. I liked to drive, and I knew my father did not. I made a point of not commenting on his luggage. I stuffed my own duffle bag into the backseat.

About thirty minutes into the trip, I started to think I’d made a mistake.

“So maybe we should talk, you know, get everything out there,” Calvin began.

I groaned. “Come on. We haven’t seen each other in four years. Let’s just leave the past behind us.”

Calvin looked over at me. I pretended that I-85 needed my constant visual attention.

“Do you really believe that’s possible?”

No. “Yes.”

“Dr. Michaels thinks our family spends too much time covering up our emotions,” Calvin said. “We need to open up in order to move forward.”

I snorted. “I take it Dr. Michaels is your shrink. He doesn’t even know us—who made him the expert?”

I had survived my mother’s death and the aftermath only by keeping things inside. It was the only way I could function. If I let my emotions loose, I might never regain control. So no analysis for me. I was strong, not weak. I didn’t need to talk to a stranger about my feelings.

I told this to Calvin, who frowned. “Maren saw Dr. Michaels after…well, you know. It helped her.”

I kept my face from showing my surprise. My sister had never told me anything about therapy. I just figured that her relationship with our half-uncle Chris had served as a wake-up call. I frowned, remembering how I caught them in the middle of having sex. I remembered the anger, the guilt I felt for not seeing what was going on right in front of me. That was when I knew I would stay in Durham, go to Duke instead a college far away from my father. It turned out I hadn’t needed to go across the country to avoid Calvin. All I needed was to go to a college that was a few miles away but was its own insulated, self-contained world.

I realized my father was waiting for a reply.

“I’m not like you and Maren.”

This sounded mean, although I didn’t mean it that way. It was the simple truth. They both tried to make everything okay, tried to smooth over life’s bumps as if they weren’t there.

These days, I couldn’t even be bothered to complain about the little things that bothered me. Right before Christmas, a girl I was seeing, barely an acquaintance, really, accused me of being cold before she flounced out of my dorm room. I never had a chance to tell her that what I felt was more like anesthesia than ice.

Calvin sighed. “Look, I don’t want to argue with you. But I do think you need to deal with your issues.”

How very enlightened of you, I thought.

“Let me worry about my issues.”

Calvin shook his head. “I worry about you. I’ll always worry about you. I’m your father.”

I looked at him. “Drop it. Calvin.”

Calvin pursed his lips and looked out the window. We didn’t speak again until we were halfway through South Carolina.

* * *

Calvin on Ellison as a child:

Ellison was always a difficult little boy. He didn’t misbehave much, and he always did what he was told. It was more that he had a way of interrogating me about the littlest things. You know how adults give kids an answer just to stop the questions, to shut the kid up? That never worked with Ellison. Any answer I gave inspired follow-up questions. It was like I was always on trial, being cross-examined by a trial lawyer who had never lost a case and had no intention of starting now.

I once tried to slip out the door on a Saturday. I don’t know where Vanessa and Maren were, but Ellison appeared in front of me just as I was about to open the door.

“Where are you going?”

I was going to visit the woman I was seeing behind my wife’s back, but I couldn’t very well admit it to my seven-year-old son.

“I’m going out, Ellison. I’ll see you a little later.”

He shifted to stand in front of the doorknob just as I reached for it.

“Out where?”

“I have a meeting.”

“Why do you have a meeting?”

“It’s for work.”

“It’s Saturday. Nobody works on Saturdays.”

“Yes, Ellison, some people do work on Saturdays. What about the people who work at the library and the bookstore? We go there on Saturday sometimes, and people are always working there.”

He knitted his eyebrows together. “You don’t work at the library or the bookstore.”

I sighed. “Ellison, I’ll play with you later when I get back. We’ll play checkers.”

“I don’t want to play checkers. Who are you meeting with?”

I was about to make up an answer when Vanessa walked into the room. I suppose she had been playing with Maren, because she held a doll in her hand. She looked at me with the same frown Ellison was giving me.

“Aren’t you going to answer the question?” Vanessa asked, her voice deceptively mild.

I looked away. She knew. No matter how hard I tried to hide my dalliances, Vanessa always knew. She waited a moment, then spoke to Ellison.

“Come on, honey. Your father is going to a meeting. I’m sure it’s very important to him.”

Ellison narrowed his eyes at Vanessa, then at me. He knew I was up to something, too. He just didn’t know what. As I left, relief flooded through me. I’d survived the interrogation once again. Sometimes, I dreaded being around my son. He could see through my cheerful act, and I resented him for it.

—From Save Me: A Memoir by Calvin Emory