You told my sister this eight years ago. Eight years.
I'm lost, Dad. We both are.
I remember when I was little. I slept on the left side of the room. I didn't know you in any meaningful sense, then or now, but I remember you would come into the room sometimes late at night and rest your hand on my forehead. I remember the way the edges of your callouses scratched my skin. I remember when my head still mostly fit inside your hand.
I remember how we used to go to Marfa in the fall. October. Always October, the leaves falling, the desert cooling. What magic that place was to me. I understood what you meant. When we were there, I felt like I wasn't too much for you, like we spoke the same language.
Try to retrace your steps.
I remember calling you a year or two after I returned to Texas for nursing school, even though we never talked on the phone, because it was late and you still weren't home. Mom was gone for the weekend. You hesitantly asked me to come to the office, another thing that never happens.
I remember walking into the paper, which always smells like heat and ink, smells that comfort me because I associate them with the father from my childhood, broad chested and brown armed, pinstriped shirts, a notebook in his back pocket.
Except now there is no more father, there is an old man asking me how to send an email, and the article on the screen is gibberish. You have been laboriously copying it from an older article, a printout you found in the archives. Just send it, you said.
Something is terribly wrong. I had known it in some form or fashion for months, years, maybe even stretching back to my teens, but now I finally let the thought, fully formed, break the surface. For the first time in my life, I could smell my own dread, an actual scent rising from my skin, like I was a cornered dog.
Everything inside me is cold but I lay that aside, to examine later or not at all. I sit down to rewrite the article, send an email to the editor to apologize for finishing it late, and then walk you out the door, knowing you will never walk back in as a writer, or the man I remember as my father. The air outside the sliding door is hot on my face even though it's fall again. I'm twenty-six years old.
Then there are other memories. Crouching in the living room like a child, terrified, knuckles against my mouth, while you mutter the alphabet, then the numbers one through ten to yourself, out of order. One, three, two, nine. One, A, three, D. My mother, always braver than me, walks in to face what I can't, and tries to help you recite the alphabet in a last-ditch effort to keep your driver's license, which reminds me horribly of the thousands of times when you both helped me with my homework, bent over the table whose leg I now clutch for ballast. You can't count to ten anymore. How had we failed to notice that you couldn't count to ten? Wait until the sheer body chemistry-induced sense of terror subsides.
I remember when you looked me in the eye and told me that you
never had any connection with me, and never did, not when I was a child or any
time after that. You don't remember that, but I do. I remember the glass table
smooth under the heel of my hand, how I briefly wondered what it would feel
like to tip it over, just once in my goody-goody life, to break a fucking
table, but then I pictured my mother picking up the pieces.
You told me that I am not a good person, that anyone who chooses to be with me will need all the luck they can get. I could see the way your brain was wasting in the blank flat way you looked at me, but you had intuited still somehow how cruelty best works, the way to hold a spark against a stripped nerve. It speaks to how our relationship had deteriorated since I was that small girl feigning sleep that I had no way to be sure if you knew what you were saying or not.
Think back to the last point where you weren't lost. So many years have passed since the last point when I knew where I was, since the last time I passed by something familiar. Was it Marfa? Was it camping in Big Bend? Was it even earlier, your hand on my forehead?
Marfa gave way to a blue flickering television screen, then the blank flat glow of your laptop, the almost constant hiss and pop of Diet Coke cans being opened and drained. I used to find the cans shoved in the sides of your chair, rolled under the couch. The chair itself finally broke, gave out against holding your weight day in and day out. You slept in that chair. You couldn't bear me, couldn't abide me. I couldn't abide you. We just passed each other during the day.
I do remember one of the last times I thought maybe things could still be normal. It was fall, again, my first one back. We went on a walk together, just us, something so unusual. Maybe we were just tired of fighting, of avoiding each other. It was mostly silent, which was okay. We're quiet people.
You broke the silence to say, You're going to take care of me, right?
You must have known then that you were not going to be okay. You must have known, even though you never told us, would never have told us. You lived almost only inside your own head, well or otherwise. I never knew you to be any other way.
I thought of the time we woke up early at our cabin in Big Bend and there were javelinas in the front yard. I thought of how you spent the whole drive up to Flagstaff trying to convince me not to move there but then you helped us unpack and set up our wifi anyway. I thought about you bent over a math textbook, my feet too short to touch the ground, the furrow between your brow deep as a riverbed.
I thought about how much you loved my sister, how much you worried about her when you thought she might be sad. I thought about the fury that coursed through me when you refused to help us clean the house, again, and I drove straight to the recycling center and tipped an entire bin of your old articles into the blue metal container, heat radiating off the side and burning my forearms, Texas Morning fluttering around me with a faded, long-haired picture of you, a version of you that was long gone by the time I showed up. All I knew was that you loved your old things more than you loved me or my mother and I would burn every single goddamned scrap of them to the ground just to get you to look me in the eye one time. I was already years too late.
I thought about the time you pulled the car over in Ballinger to look at the gypsy goatherd trailer and you longingly told me you wanted to be a goatherd and that convinced me that I actually was your daughter, that we came from the same stupid bloodline of people who long to be goatherds but work in offices speaking politely on phones. How it felt like you never really wanted to talk to me but you always wanted to read what I wrote, and that was why I started writing.
I thought about the way the camping closet stinks because of all that waterproofing stuff you sprayed on it over the years that probably causes cancer, and how you helped me build my bike trailer, and how I let you show me how to draw a saw through the wood even though I already knew how, because I always used to try to ask you how to do things like that just because you would know what to talk to me about for a few minutes, and it soothed me to hear you talk. You would show me how to do something over and over again, and you never mocked me during those times even though you must have secretly wondered if I was stupid, why I could never remember how a saw or a drill worked.
I remember you waiting in the driveway for me to tie my shoe. Ten, twenty minutes. You have to learn how to do it yourself. I was so nervous about starting kindergarten, no one there to tie my shoes except me.
Of course I'll take care of you, I said.
I close my eyes. Offer thanks. I'm not back on the trail, because the trail I'm frantic for doesn't exist anymore. I sit square in the middle of the forest.
I learned so many things from you. How lovely the desert is. How to write, or write better. How an old building, or the quality of sift light against the trees, or a weathered sign in an old town can bring such joy.
There's a permanent furrow between my eyes now too. I felt my husband once run his finger along it while I was falling asleep. I know it looks like I should be able to release the tension from my forehead, but I can't. I thought the same thing when I wandered inside from playing and watched you sleeping on the couch, my face level with yours.
My rage masks my pain. When I think of your gentleness, I cry. You love animals, small dogs and cats, helpless things. I remember you lying flat on your stomach at the farm for forty-five minutes, trying to make a starving chihuahua come to you so she wouldn't freeze in the January night. Now you feed her treats every hour or so and she looks like a linebacker. I remember the fathers of my friends, who cheered when they hit squirrels with their cars.
I'm a public health nurse, something neither of us would have predicted, but my job has strange similarities to your forty years as a columnist. I drive all over our little valley to talk to people I've just met about their lives. I imagine you next to me as I drive to home visits with my clients during the day and watch the countryside pass in flashes- the sign outside a ramshackle house reading "The Literate Book Collector," or the archway in the middle of nowhere made from driftwood. It was gone the next time I drove by it. You would have loved that.
But you weren't able to show me how to not get lost. That was maybe the one thing you were most desperate for, to keep me safe, to keep me alive, and in the desperate bid for my survival you forgot to give me what you wanted too and didn't have, the gift of knowing a father. There is no not getting lost. There is only having someone to come home to. Or not.
Are you still here, somewhere? Where?
When I was still that small girl you made up Princess Anne and Princess Kate stories for me and my sister. We were always the stars of the story, rescuing hapless princes and riding magical horses. You made them up on the spot, inventing characters like the WereWolf (who was always lost and not scary at all, per our request) and the River Why, who was tricky to get across. You had to ask it a question to which it couldn't just reply "Why?" or it would, trapping you in an endless loop. (I suspect this was your revenge for our toddler years.)
We need to cross the river! Why? Because we need to save the prince! Why? And so on.
I think about the time, twenty-something years later, when I screamed long and loud, right up against your face, and tried to tip over the refrigerator. My fury felt like some version of dying, a blackout of rage.
I think about the time I had to call an ambulance because I fainted in the kitchen after selling too much plasma to pay for my nursing school textbooks- not my finest moment- and you heard it on the police scanner at work and ran all the way home.
I'd called Mom several times, but she was in class. It didn't even occur to me anymore to call you. Even when I was younger, I knew that if something happened, Mom was the one to call. But you came, even so.
I remember thinking as I was falling asleep that night that this would probably crop up in one of your columns someday and embarrass me. Then I realized no, it wouldn't.
Where has my father gone? Where is his love for mornings in Marfa? Where is the tuneless way he whistles? Who is this man now, who carefully reads the phone book, places a bookmark to hold his place and sets it down beside his chair? There are so many horrible snapshots, but for some reason that one haunts me the most.
You should write a book, he always said. He always read what we wrote. Part of me believes, irrationally, that if I finally wrote a book for him he would read it and come back to us.
He would remember Big Bend and Club Sandwich and the days before I existed when he had long hair and cars that never worked and when I was born and the nurse pressed my feet against his chest and how he carefully folded up that hospital gown and placed it in a box in the closet and when I found it he said, Look! You were so tiny! He would remember.
Take a deep breath.
I remember you reading The Luckenbach Moon every time we had a Club Sandwich party.
You walked to work every day when I was in high school so Anne and I could have cars. I remember the full moon of sweat on your back every day when you got home. You never brought it up, how your daughters drove three blocks to the high school in air-conditioned cars while you sweated through your pinstriped shirts. You only walked.
Sometimes I think I learned more about life from that than from the rest of your parenting combined.
Slowly, carefully start again.
It's easier to be mad at you. When I start to mourn what we've lost, that's when I feel a grief I can't get to the bottom of. How you will never take my daughter to Marfa or talk to her about gypsy wagons. How I can't ask you anything anymore, not the definition of a word, not the name of some random terrible seventies band.
How you will suffer in the exact way you were always the most afraid of suffering and I can't stop it, I can't make this not have happened to you. How you were sixty-two when you lost your father, but I was twenty-six when I lost mine. How I will never know how long this was happening to you, when it started. How that day was the last time you would be there when I fell down and neither of us knew. Why? Because. Because we need to cross the river somehow, and this is your path.
Here's my lost advice: Feel the ground under your feet. Memorize the plane of it, how it dips and rises under you. You didn't choose it, and it didn't choose you. It doesn't matter. It will hold you nonetheless.
What you thought was your trail isn't there anymore. It's gone. Don't look for it, the same way you wouldn't look for the dream you had last night. You are a human moving over the earth. This stretch of land will work the same as any other.
Don't look over your shoulder. Don't try to remember where you used to be, where you thought you were going. Don't tell yourself stories about what lies ahead or about what lies behind. Moving forward into the unknown is a risk, and it's the only option anyone has ever had. Keep walking. This is what your father is doing, despite what he told you. Can you be brave too?
Of course I'll take care of you, I said. He said, Okay. That was all. We kept walking.
