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RUNNING TOWARD RECONCILIATION

A Thesis in Nonfiction Writing By Jean O’Neill

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing

Chatham University May 2014

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would not have come to fruition without the help of many. First and foremost, I would like to thank my sister, Heather Iacono, not only for her love and support and for just being my sister, but for her tremendous help with details and research. Thanks to Sheryl St. Germain for your guidance and direction, and for keeping me focused. Thanks to Lori Jakiela and Marc Nieson for your constant encouragement, kind words, and inspiration. I’d also like to thank Jeff Oaks for teaching me a long time ago not to be afraid of my own words. Finally, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my friend and fellow MFA classmate, Alysa Landry, who always made me feel strong whenever I felt weak.

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For my sister, Heather, for having the courage to dream.

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Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….……….v Author’s Note…..........................................................................................................................xvii Part One: The First Twenty Miles Communion……………………………………………………………………………….2 What I Don’t Remember………………………………………………………………….4 The Girl with the Dead Father…………………………………………………………...12 Portrait of a Sad Clown………………………………….……………………………….26 Christmas Meltdown……………………………………………………………………..31 Crash Course……………………………………………………………………………..39 Lessons From Under a Sleeping Volcano………………………….…………………….46 Turning 35 Part I: Dream Chasing……………………………………………………….50 Turning 35 Part II: Powerless………...……………………....….………………………54 Out of Commission………………………………………………………………………59 Suddenly Celiac………………………………………………………………………….65 This Medal……………………………………………………………………………….71 Like Father, Like Daughter………………………………………………………………79 Part Two: The Last 10K Road Trip…………………………………………………………………………….…..88 Following His Footsteps…................................................................................................99 Return to Ficus Street…………………………………………………………..………119 Epilogue………………………………………………………………………………...138 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...……….141

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INTRODUCTION

Discovery through writing can be a liberating and redeeming experience. At the same time, it can also be incredibly daunting and scary. In crafting this manuscript, I realized that I am the daughter of an alcoholic. I knew that my father drank, and drinking is ultimately what caused his demise, but it never dawned on me until I began to write this thesis that being the daughter of an alcoholic comes with its own set of rules, its own set of complications. This discovery was not something I had anticipated. In short, this thesis is an investigative journey about a confused and frightened little girl who, now grown, wants to gain a more realistic and nuanced understanding of who her father was as a person, and ultimately how the relationships with her family and experiences with them has had a hand in shaping who she has become, for better or for worse. More importantly, this thesis is a quest for finding peace and forgiveness. This work is also a trauma narrative. Though the main theme throughout the manuscript centers on my father’s death, other themes of trauma float to the surface. Themes of sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse, neglect, and abandonment all become salient during the process of writing. My sister also plays a key role throughout the manuscript. Now that both of our parents are gone, and my brother and I don’t speak for reasons that are made clear in the manuscript, my sister is all that’s left of my immediate family. We were never all that close growing up, but we got along for the most part and took care of each other. A special bond formed, however, when, after our mother died, I discovered that my sister had wanted to run the New York City Marathon since she was eleven years old, the same year our father died. My sister is the reason I became a

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marathon runner. I encouraged her to try, and I made a promise that I would run the New York City Marathon with her, if that’s what it would take for her to do it. I kept that promise.

Structure I cannot ignore the impact that marathon running has had in my life over the past seven years, how it’s boosted my self-esteem because I am capable of doing something that most people can’t or won’t even attempt to do: run 26.2 miles. As it turns out, I’ve learned that I’m fairly good at it. Most importantly, marathon running has strengthened the bond between my sister and me. We have something special that most sisters don’t share — the unique experience of training for and running marathons together. For this reason, I decided to structure this manuscript around the two main parts of a marathon: the first twenty miles and the last 10k. This is not a thesis about running, however; it’s about the daunting journey I take from childhood to adulthood, as I to try to discover a hidden past and try to make peace with that past. Taking this journey was hard work, just like running a marathon. You must stay focused and committed, follow a plan, and stay on track. The first twenty miles of a marathon are often the hardest, most grueling part, and this is where the meat of my thesis takes shape. In order to make the manuscript work, I used a combination of techniques, some borrowed from fiction, such as the use of scene, dialogue, character development, and description of place and landscape. Some of the essays that occur later in the manuscript are more reflective and lyrical in nature due to the adult perspective, but I tried to bring balance to the manuscript by moving between scene, summary, and reflection.

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Part One: The First Twenty Miles moves chronologically for the most part, each essay representing another mile marker of sorts. The first essay, “Communion,” sets the tone, and acts as “the starting line” for the first part of the manuscript. “What I Don’t Remember” happens five days after my First Communion and describes the night I found out that my father was killed in a car accident. Even though I knew what death meant, as an eight year-old child, I had no idea what to do with this information on an emotional level. As the essays progress and I get deeper into the narrative, my goal is for the reader to still be chugging along with me, enduring the challenge and experiencing the accomplishment of “The First Twenty Miles.” The last 6.2 miles of a marathon is often referred to as “the last 10k.” When you’ve hit the 20-mile mark, you’ve only got 6.2 miles to go. 10 kilometers. At this point, you know you’re going to reach the end, you’ve come this far already — there’s no point in quitting, and there’s no point in stopping, as much as you want to and as much as your body begs you. Your feet feel like cinderblocks on the ends of your legs, which feel like sacks of wet sand. Your entire body aches, and you just want the whole stupid race to be over with. You question your sanity, and try to remember why you decided to do this in the first place, much like writing a thesis and completing an MFA in creative writing. But within those last few miles, you also realize your accomplishment, the hard work you’ve put in, and you know you’re almost to the finish line, again, much like writing a thesis and completing an MFA in creative writing. “The last 10k” of my thesis includes a series of linked essays regarding a recent trip I took back to Long Island, New York, where I had lived from the time I was six years old until my mother decided to move our family to the Pocono Mountains in Northeast Pennsylvania the summer after I turned thirteen. I wanted to face my childhood head-on with an adult perspective, to reflect on what I didn’t know then, and what I know now by revisiting the homes I had lived

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in, the schools I had attended, and by going to the place where my father had worked and then to where he had died.

Craft I want the reader to come along with me on my journey, to be involved while the narrative evolves and develops, to experience what I experience as it happens. For this reason, many of my earlier essays are written from the perspective of a child. As I grow older, and the essays evolve and develop along with me, so does the voice of each piece. The manuscript is written in two tenses, past and present. Part One: The First Twenty Miles, is mainly written in the past tense. It only makes sense to put my childhood where it belongs — in the past, but also because it provides a foundation for my questions and a solid ground for the seed of doubt that had been planted. Part Two: The Last 10k, is written mainly in the present tense. As I struggle with the secrets of my past, the questions that I need to address are here and now, in the present. These essays are also the most recent, and form their own closely linked narrative. The manuscript as a whole contains three types of essays. The earlier essays are written primarily with scene and dialogue. I intend for the beginning narrative to move fast and quick, much like the way a runner starts off a race. “Communion” is the warm-up. “What I Don’t Remember” is the starter’s gun. Other essays such as “Portrait of a Sad Clown,” and “Crash Course,” tend to be slower, more reflective, as I begin to question and doubt the validity of everything I’d been told as a child. Finally, there are the essays that lean toward lyricism, a technique that allows me to step away from the events as they happened to me as a person in order to be able to look at them through a different lens as author.

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Challenges and Struggles The genesis of my thesis began when I wrote an essay about an intense argument I’d had with my brother five days after my mother had died back in 2007. I had written the essay for Writer’s Journals, a class taught by Jeff Oaks at the University of Pittsburgh. It was the first time I had ever written such with raw and honest emotion, and it was absolutely terrifying. I didn’t know I was capable of such a thing. When the assignment was due, I waited until all of my classmates had left before I approached Jeff to hand in my paper. My heart pounded and my tongue swelled and dried up as if every drop of saliva and moisture in my mouth suddenly had somewhere else to be. The paper shook as my trembling hand reached for the pile on Jeff’s desk. “I’m absolutely terrified of what you’ll think of me after you read this,” I said. “Write that down,” he said, smiling his gentle and warm smile as he handed me a pen. I scrawled illegibly as my hand still shook and tried to write down what I’d just told him. There was no turning back. As much as I feared I’d be judged for writing such awful things — the way I felt about my brother and the pain I’d felt when he told me I’d killed my mother, I had nothing else to hand in. My relationship with my brother had always been a tumultuous one, and one I never understood. I needed to know why he seemed to despise my very existence as far back as I could remember. In order to discover why our relationship was the way it was — full of animosity and disdain for each other, I needed to write about it. I found, however, that as I wrote about my brother, I vilified him, and wrote with anger and disgust. I found that I could not write about him objectively and honestly. My anger spilled onto the page and not in a good way. I was still too close to the hurt. I had to put the project of writing about him aside for the time being until I was

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ready, a time that may never come. Instead, I put my energy into writing from a more positive angle: finding peace and forgiveness within myself, letting go of anger, resentment and negativity. Another stumbling block I’ve encountered along the way is my inability to remember things accurately, or sometimes, at all. This is one reason I decided to take the trip back to Long Island. I thought that by seeing the physical surroundings where many of my experiences took place, I’d have an easier time remembering or accessing memories that eluded me. The effect didn’t always work as I’d hoped, however. For example, in “Road Trip,” I decide to go for a run from one of the schools I attended as a child. I thought it would be interesting to run from the school and find the house I had lived in, to see if I would recognize it first, and secondly to see which experiences I’d remember. But instead of having the instant memories I’d hoped for, I have a panic attack while sitting in my car in the school’s parking lot. In his book, Brain Rules, John Medina likens memory retrieval to detective work. “Retrieval begins by summoning the detective to a particular crime scene, a scene which invariably consists of fragmentary memory…Based on inference and guesswork, the detective then invents a reconstruction of what was actually stored…retrieval is an active investigative effort to recreate the facts based on fragmented data.” (Medina, 128). By incorporating new knowledge into past experience, every time we retrieve a memory, it may become distorted oftentimes making our memories inaccurate. As a way to overcome this challenge, I asked a lot of questions. I talked to a lot of relatives, asked them about my behavior as a child, asked them what they remember about my father, his accident, and his relationship with my mother. I relied heavily on my sister’s input, asked her to read my essays for accuracy, and often incorporated her memories (as her own) into my essays as a way of alerting the reader that something may not

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have happened exactly the way I remember it. I used this technique in “Christmas Meltdown,” an essay about my mother losing her temper and throwing our unopened Christmas presents at my sister and me. It’s been almost twenty years since I earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Psychology from Penn State University. It wasn’t until 2006 that I realized I had a story to tell, but in order to tell it, I needed to learn how to write, and in order to learn how to write, I needed to learn how to read. Critical and analytical reading were both difficult for me to master, as I’d had little experience with literature in high school or during my undergraduate years at Penn State. However, while earning a 24-credit certificate in English Writing between 2006 and 2009 from the University of Pittsburgh, and during my graduate career at Chatham University, I was lucky enough to be exposed to some pretty fearless and influential writers.

Major Influences and Aesthetic Vision Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss was the first memoir I read that convinced me to write about the difficulties I have with my family. She spoke about her “no flinch” policy at a conference in Pittsburgh, and I immediately adopted the practice. Put pen to paper, and no matter how scary it is, write it down. Don’t scratch it out; don’t delete it just because you don’t want to see the words on the screen or on the page. Kill the internal editor. She had a story that needed to be written, and she needed to be honest with herself and her readers. Harrison had originally written her story about the sexual relationship she had with her father as fiction, but the truth was it wasn’t fiction, and it had haunted her. Her memoir is written entirely in the present tense, giving the narrative a sense of immediacy, intimacy, and closeness. Harrison’s writing is concise and pithy,

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driving the story forward with a delicate balance of scene and reflection. In two small sentences she gives us the scene that changed her life: “My father pushes his tongue deep into my mouth: wet, insistent, exploring, then withdrawn. He picks up his camera case, and, smiling, he joins the end of the line of passengers disappearing into the airplane.”

And then a few paragraphs later, she reflects with depth and honesty, but the writing is still just as vivid as the paragraph referenced above: “In years to come, I’ll think of the kiss as a kind of transforming sting, like that of a scorpion: a narcotic that spreads from my mouth to my brain. The kiss is the point at which I begin, slowly, inexorably, to fall asleep, to surrender volition, to become paralyzed. It’s the drug that my father administers in order that he might consume me. That I might desire to be consumed.”

Conversely, Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, is written primarily in the past tense, and often in the voice of a young girl. In her memoir, Walls struggles with her love for her homeless parents, and her embarrassment of them. She depicts her parents with such care and tenderness that the reader has no choice but to fall in love with them. Her childlike innocence makes it easy to sympathize with Walls as we follow the struggles she endures resulting from her parents’ quirky behavior. “We were always doing the skedaddle, usually in the middle of the night. I sometimes heard Mom and Dad discussing the people who were after us. Dad called them henchmen, bloodsuckers, and the Gestapo. Sometimes he would make mysterious references to….FBI agents who were after Dad for some dark episode that he never told us about because he didn’t want us in danger, too.”

Walls’ memoir allowed me to validate my own ambiguous feelings about my family — wanting to love and be loved by them, while at the same time wanting to pull away from them. After reading Deborah Tall’s A Family of Strangers, I realized that there is a way to write a memoir when you don’t have all the answers. Tall’s memoir is about her search for information

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about who she is and where she comes from. She asks questions of her father, but he keeps quiet and won’t answer her questions. The writing is sparse, yet full of lyricism and also delicately balanced with fragmented or compressed scene. “Uncomplaining self-discipline was always his modus operandi, reticence the vault in which his character rested like a jewel, untouchable. So when my father suddenly became ill at age sixty-eight, he wouldn’t talk about it. Six weeks before his death, the cancer squeezing his spine not yet diagnosed, he sat stoically, hands clenched, at our Thanksgiving dinner table, hardly able to smile or small talk, assuming it was a backache he’d learn to bear. But it was so unbearable, a heart attack took him first.

Similarly, many of the essays I’ve composed for this manuscript are based on fragmented and disjointed memories, containing gaps that cannot be filled because the people who may have the answers are no longer a part of this world, or are simply unable or unwilling to provide the information. I found that when I could not come to a conclusion about a specific event, either based on memory or research, I employed a technique I learned from Lori Jakiela called “perhaps-ing” — nonfiction’s way of dealing with fantasy or imaginings. I tried to answer many questions by inserting “perhapses,” “maybes,” and “I imagines,” instead of trying to force a memory and calling it truth. This technique informs the reader that I am thinking about what the answer could be, or what it might have been.

As a graduate student in Chatham University’s MFA program, many of the literary nonfiction selections I studied helped me to learn the craft of creative nonfiction, to find my voice, and ultimately helped to shape my writing. Notably, Lori Jakiela’s memoir, The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious, is driven by scene and dialogue, the chapters are short, and the narrative moves quickly. Michele Morano xiii

wrote an essay called “Crushed” about confronting her unorthodox feelings for a young boy. This essay, which appeared in the eighth volume of the Ninth Letter Arts and Literary Journal, was written mainly with scene and dialogue making the narrative incredibly compelling. Jakiela and Morano both told their stories by showing the reader simply what happened. Show, don’t tell: the writer’s words to live by. Many of the essays I’ve included in this manuscript are composed largely of scene and dialogue. When the memory is clear, I can write what I know, and show the story as it happened in scene. Sheryl St. Germain’s Swamp Songs: The Making of An Unruly Woman is more lyrical, reflective, and metaphorical — on the opposite end of the spectrum compared to Jakiela and Morano. St.Germain’s memoir taught me the use of lyricism and metaphor to capture and express emotion. This manuscript is largely an investigation. Often, the memory is muddled and unclear, or I’m not sure how to feel about a particular incident. As questions, doubts, and ambiguous feelings arise, reflection and lyricism help me press harder and further probe the inquiry. Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood taught me to choose my words carefully. Her language flows and swells with lyricism and great storytelling. Using lyricism helps me to provide distance, a way to step back and reflect, to broaden the scope and give the narrative room to breathe. Most recently at the Association of Writers and Writer Programs Annual Conference and Book fair in Seattle, I attended a panel called “A Bag Full of God: Female Memoirists with Daddy Issues,” where I met memoirist Liz Prato. In the panel, Prato discussed how she wrote about her difficult relationship with her father who refused to take care of himself, and among other things, lied about his attempts at suicide. In her essay, “In Sickness and in Health,” she

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weaves a dual narrative about her father’s unhappiness and health issues with her own depression and illnesses. She writes honestly about herself and about her father, and yet takes care to write objectively about both. Using the braided structure when addressing a difficult or heavy topic is a way to give the reader a mental break between narratives, which is sometimes (and often) necessary in trauma writing. Not all the selections I studied were nonfiction, however. As part of my thesis writing and research process, I reread the coming of age classic, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume, I wanted to see not only how well I remembered the book, but I also wanted to get an adult perspective on a book that had been a staple of my fourth grade year. In “The Girl with the Dead Father,” Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret is not only a key component of the essay, but also served as a primer for all the girls in my class that year. Dr. Heather McNaugher suggested that I read Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, a fictional work that addresses childhood friendships and bullying. Atwood’s tone is fundamental for the story to work. She writes matter-of-factly about the main character’s cruel friends, which helps the reader to sympathize with the protagonist, Elaine. “I’m standing outside the closed door of Cordelia’s room. Cordelia, Grace, and Carol are inside. They’re having a meeting. The meeting is about me. I am not measuring up, although they are giving me every chance. I will have to do better…. This is how it goes. It’s the kind of thing girls do to one another.”

Even though Cat’s Eye is a work of fiction, Atwood writes with the feel of narrative nonfiction. She travels in and out of time, goes back and forth between the adult Elaine and the child Elaine. Elaine does not vilify her classmates, but simply behaves and does as she’s told. That is, until she finally begins to think for herself.

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Cat’s Eye has not only given me a way to approach writing objectively about my father and other family relationships, but it’s also given me the ability to reevaluate how to write effectively and objectively about the (anti) relationship I have with my brother.

Audience I hope to reach a wide-ranging, diverse group of readers. Almost everyone has experienced trauma in their lives in one way or another. Some of these readers may find comfort in my manuscript, perhaps having been through a similar traumatic experience. While this is not a manuscript centered on running, there is a bit of a “running” theme that I think would appeal to some athletes and competitive runners. Many runners, I have found, tend to be running from something — maybe from a past they’re trying to reconcile, or they’re running toward something — maybe to reshape who they are into who they want to become. We runners typically have something to prove — not only to those around us, but also to ourselves. It’s what makes us feel good about who we are, not just as runners, but simply as human beings. This manuscript is for anyone who needs to heal, to find peace through whatever means necessary. It’s about learning to forgive, and learning to let go of a past by reconciling, reconstructing, and rebuilding it. It’s about moving forward, no matter how long and arduous the task may be. The finish line is never too far, and it’s never unreachable.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

Much of the writing in this manuscript occurred while I was in the process of being divorced after being separated from my husband for almost two years. Six months after the divorce was finalized, my ex-husband died suddenly and suspiciously. Due to legal issues and tensions with my ex-in-laws, I decided to go back to my family name, O’Neill. There are points in the manuscript where I refer to myself as “Jean Hopkins,” because at the time, that was my name.

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Part One: The First Twenty Miles

2 Communion

I made my First Holy Communion in April, 1980. In the preceding months, we had learned our lessons, drawn pictures and written down what we thought were the right answers to questions like, “What does it mean to be Catholic?” We learned the rituals we’d go through on Communion Day — left hand over right, what to say when the Priest said, “The body of Christ?” Don’t forget to make the sign of the cross, and genuflect at the statue of Jesus. Finally, I wouldn’t have to stay back in the pew waiting while everyone else went up to receive communion. I’d be just like the grown-ups. Communion Day was sunny and muggy that late April morning. It felt more like summer as the day went on. I wore the white dress my mother made me, and I hated that I didn’t have store-bought one like the one my sister wore for her communion. To me, my dress wasn’t a “real” communion dress because it was homemade. Made of scratchy cotton and covered in lace eyelets, one sleeve was longer than the other, and it felt funny on my shoulder, as if the sleeve started too soon. When I spun around in circles, it just puffed out at the waist; the skirt didn’t fly out like I wanted it to. My mother made everything I owned on her Pfaff sewing machine, or I wore my older sister’s hand-me-downs. Except her communion dress — hers had been a gift from my grandmother. A string of pearls was sewn into the neckline, and a silver cross dangled from the center. They matched the pearls sewn into the veil. All the girls in my class wore pretty, store-bought communion-style dresses. White with pretty lace and chiffon, and veils topped each of their heads. No veils, our CCD instructor had said. I was the only one who had obeyed. I knew obedience like a bad dog. My father had beaten or shamed it into me. We’d sometimes get the belt if we so much as turned the volume up or down on his TV which was a forbidden act. But

3 the sound of the belt snapping and just the threat of it alone was actually scarier than the belt itself. More often, we’d get the back of his hand for using bad words or if we talked back. White chrysanthemums, yellow bows, and other spring flowers adorned the church. Wax from the candles scented the air; the small ones in the red glass votives and the bigger ones up at the front of the church flickered with their yellow-orange flames. Yellow and white bows adorned each of the dark, wooden pews. I stood with my class around the altar, looking around at all the other girls who wore veils that day. My bare head with its short, dark, Dorothy Hamill-styled hair stuck out like a black stain on a white cloth. Father Frank’s words sounded like meaningless buzzing in my ears. I hated that I didn’t have a veil and all the other girls did. Too preoccupied with being different, I don’t even remember receiving Communion. But I know that I must have. Afterward, my grandfather brought in rolls and bagels fresh from the deli. A platter of cold cuts sat on the kitchen table. A cake adorned with a blessing written in icing waited to be cut. The grownups all congregated in the kitchen, sat around the table, smoking cigarettes and enjoying a glass of Riunite, or having a beer to celebrate the occasion. I kept my dress on as I carried the flowers my parents had given me, and paraded around like I’d won first prize in a beauty pageant. My father, a dabbler of photography, took my picture as I posed with my flowers on the piano bench to commemorate the day. My sister played Heart and Soul on the piano, and my brother took off to go hang out with his friends. This was my day, and I took ownership of it as my relatives doted on me, the missing veil already forgotten. What I didn’t know then was that in just five days whether I had made my communion at all would hardly seem to matter. In five days, my father would be dead.

4 What I Don’t Remember

I don’t remember much about my father. I don’t remember the last thing I said to him before he died or the last thing he said to me. He comes to me in bits and pieces. The time we rode our bikes to the Heckscher State Park in East Islip. Listening to him play Memories on the piano. My sister would inherit both his playing ability and the piano itself. How he looked in his ratty, old, navy blue Eta Kappa Nu sweatshirt, his love for college football, and watching shows like Twilight Zone and Outer Limits with him on boring Saturday afternoons. Every evening at 6:00pm just after dinner, we’d all watch his favorite show, Star Trek, together as a family. I remember his warped sense of humor, how he would tease and scare me by making creepy faces and knocking under the table, reciting “Wee Willie Winkie.” The empty cans of Olympia Beer strewn about the basement rec room in our house in Olympia, Washington. I remember the smell of those beer cans, their sweet, stale bitterness. I remember how much I liked that smell. Then there are those memories I wish would I could just erase, memories that stick in my head like a bad infection. Like the night at McDonald’s when I was six years old.

We had all piled into the car, a dark green, egg-shaped Pacer. I sat in the back in the middle with my feet on the hump, as always, flanked by my brother and sister. Mom sat up front and smoked while dad drove. No one wore seatbelts. We arrived at the neighborhood McDonald’s and sat at a booth. I ordered my favorite meal, a Filet-O-Fish and fries. I only liked it because it came in a bright blue Styrofoam container, which when opened, made a place for me to dump my fries. My mother never let me

5 order a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder because she said they were too big for me to eat. But I wanted to eat from a Styrofoam container, to feel grown up like everyone else. We all took our meals from the brown plastic tray as we settled into the booth. Not long after, my father started flinging his French fries at us. One by one, a fry would hit one of us in the forehead, and he’d sit there and giggle. When he tired of that (or ran out of fries, I don’t remember which) he decided to play a different game. “Everyone trade meals with the person to the right.” His voice boomed throughout the room and people stared. My brother gripped the edges of his open Styrofoam box and glanced around the table as if to ask, was he serious? Only his eyes moved; his head remained still. Who knew what my father would do if we didn’t play along? Dad was acting strange again, and I didn’t like it. “I hate this! You’re embarrassing me!” I said, and my father jumped out of the plastic booth, yanking me out of my seat by the hood of my jacket. He held me up to eye level, held me there by the back of my jacket where I dangled like a ragdoll. My face got hot and my heartbeat pulsed in my ears. “You know what I hate?” he said. “You. I hate you.” And he tossed me back into the seat. I don’t remember eating the rest of my meal, just the ring of those words in my ear as they circled around and around, and made me dizzy. I didn’t know what was wrong with my father. I knew he acted weird and could be really mean sometimes, but I never understood why. Not until years later when my sister confirmed what happened that night in McDonald’s, did it finally make sense. “He was drunk that night,” she had told me. “That’s why he was flinging French fries at us, and wanted everyone to trade.” She said this as matter of fact, surprised that I didn’t know.

6 I didn’t know what had caused him to act that way. I was only six at the time, so back then, I didn’t know what being drunk meant. I didn’t even know such a thing existed. When he got like that, I only noticed that it made my mother unhappy. I felt her unhappiness in my skin, sensed it in my muscles. I don’t remember my mother that night at McDonald’s. I know she was there, but I can’t place her in my memory. I don’t remember my sister, either, but I know she must have been there, too. How else could she have remembered the flung French fries? Still, I only see my brother in my mind, his eyes unsure as he contemplates whether to pass his meal to the right and play along. I remember the hotness in my face and the dizziness in my head and those words I’ve never been able to forget. I don’t remember the ride back home that night to my aunt and uncle’s house in Bayside, Queens, where we were living until we could find our own house. We had moved across the country from Washington State to Queens, New York because my dad had just quit the army, and my parents wanted to move back to New York to be closer to family. Another uncle had offered him a job. I later learned that my father hated that job. I remember throwing myself at my Aunt Maureen when we came through the door that night. I wrapped my arms around her waist and sobbed. I don’t remember why my mother hadn’t consoled me, or why I hadn’t sought protection from her first. Had she been just as fearful of my father? Afraid to stand up to him like I had done? Or had she, and I just don’t remember? Why she is absent from this terrible memory, I don’t know. “He didn’t mean it,” my aunt said, hugging me as I sobbed big fat tears into her stomach. Of course he meant it, I thought. Why else would he say it? “How do you know?” I asked between sobs.

7 “Because I know your father loves you.” She rocked me back and forth as she tried to console me. I didn’t believe her. What did she know? I thought. She hadn’t heard what he had said to me. “No he doesn’t,” I said, hiccupping. “He held me up in my jacket in front of everyone and told me he hated me!” She didn’t know that to me there seemed to be truth in his words, truth in his actions that echoed in my head over and over. I saw it in his green eyes, and heard it in his deep and powerful voice. Even if he hadn’t really meant it, it felt to me like he did. Any six-year-old child would believe anything her father said to her. Especially if the thing he says is “I hate you.” My father died only two years later, just a few months after we’d moved to Ficus Street in Port Jefferson Station, a quiet suburb on Long Island. I liked this house much better than my aunt’s house in Bayside. There weren’t any trees or grass in Bayside. Everything smelled dirty, but not like the dirt in Olympia. The air in Bayside tasted grimy and metallic, and the houses were all attached to each other. The houses here on Long Island were separate, and each had its own lawns and trees. It smelled better here, at least a little cleaner and less like dirty pavement and car exhaust. But we wouldn’t stay long in this house. The night my father died, I bolted upright in my bed at the sound of my mother’s wailing. Her shrill voice bounced off the bare walls, raced around my room like an angry ghost. I sat in the middle of my bed in the almost-dark, clutching my Winnie the Pooh. I stared at the half-open door and listened with wide eyes to the horrible sounds coming from my mother and the muffled voices downstairs. Too scared to move, I sat there, cross-legged in my bed, Winnie the Pooh choking in my grip. I listened and stared, and waited for the screaming and yelling to end. Without a clock in

8 my room, I had no way to tell time. Only the thump in my chest to measure out the seconds…minutes…what felt like hours. Every time I heard her scream, I felt sick to my stomach and couldn’t breathe. Too scared to wait anymore, I snuck out of my room and onto the landing that overlooked the foyer below. I stood in the upstairs hallway and watched the two police officers at our front door. Rain pattered the stoop outside behind them, and glistened in the yellow porch light. Both held their dripping hats in their hands. Their sullen faces and awkward stance told me that something bad had happened. “No! NO!” my mother screamed between sobs. She shook her head as if it could undo the horrific news they had just told her. To make it be a lie. “We’re very sorry, Mrs. O’Neill,” said the one on the left. He laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off and continued to heave. She covered her mouth with her hand, and steadied herself on the doorjamb. Her wails bounced off the linoleum floor, ricocheted off the paneled walls, and traveled up into the hallway and bedrooms upstairs — where I had been sleeping until her cries and screams had woken me. From the second floor hallway, I watched the scene below. I had a front row seat and the balcony to myself. My brother and sister were still seemingly asleep in their rooms. They slept with their doors closed. I did not; I was still afraid of the dark. It felt like I had a rock lodged in my throat. My clenched stomach made it hard for me to breathe. Did I even remember to breathe? My tight fists gripped the black wrought iron railing. The light from the foyer chandelier threw off a macabre yellow. It caused a white glare on the dark faux veneer paneling tacked to the walls. The dry, dirty smell of stale smoke from my mother’s last cigarette still hung in the air.

9 “Is there anyone we can call for you, Mrs. O’Neill?” She shook her head no, and then caught sight of me watching out of the corner of her eye. I remember how I was afraid I’d be in trouble. Because I was out of bed. Because I was eavesdropping. Because I was too young to understand what I saw. “Jean, go back to bed,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Now.” At first I just stared back at her, unable to move, unable to comprehend. And then finally, I asked, “What’s going on?” It came out more like a choke caught on fear than a question. My words were barely audible, even to myself. “We’ll talk about it in the morning. Go back to bed,” she said with a nod. The cold, wrought iron railing had grown warm inside my clenched fists. Some of the paint had flaked off into my palms. “Go,” she directed. The black pools of her eyes told me not to disobey. But the distress and sadness in them scared me. I did as I was told. The light from the hallway spilled onto my bed. I left the door open, so I would see my mother walk by. The thump in my chest beat harder with each passing moment. I sat on the edge of my bed and listened to the muffled voices below, waited for my mother to come and tell me what I already knew. When the cops finally left, my mother came to my room, and sat on the edge of the bed. She must have known I’d be waiting. “Is he killed?” I asked, knowing, but not wanting to know. She wiped her eyes, then gently stroked my hair. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.” The sickening feeling in my stomach told me I was right.

10 I don’t remember if I slept anymore that night.

When I came down the stairs the next morning, Aunt Maureen sat on the couch in the living room, her stark blonde hair a bright contrast to her red, blotchy skin. I could tell she’d been crying. I hugged her, and remembered how she hugged had me that night my father told me he hated me. How her hug had made me feel better but didn’t. I didn’t want to be reminded of that awful, ugly night, but feeling her hug me made me feel loved. I didn’t get hugs very often. “Why are you here?” I asked. I had not yet made the connection between last night’s events and her presence here now. “Your mother is in the other room, waiting,” she said. “There’s something she needs to tell you.” I went into the den where my mother sat on the couch with my brother and sister. The TV slept in the corner, and the morning’s grayness leached through the blinds in the sliding glass door into the dark, wood-paneled room. I stood there, near the glass door and faced them all as they sat on the couch. My mother’s eyes were puffy and red. She took a deep breath and tried not to cry. The three of us waited for my mother to tell us what my gut already knew. “Your father is dead.” Just like that, she blurted it out. “He was killed last night in a car accident, by a drunk driver.” My sister burst into tears. She bawled and wrapped her arms around her own body as if holding herself together, like she would come apart and melt into a puddle of if she let go. My mother held onto my brother who heaved his own ugly and horrible sobs. Across the room, I stood and watched my family disintegrate from all this grief and sadness and felt confused. I wanted to feel what they felt, but nothing came. No tears, no emotions. It wasn’t emptiness or numbness, but more like blankness. By now, I knew that drinking too much beer

11 made people drunk, and I knew that driving drunk was bad. Someone who’d drank too much beer had killed my father, this much I understood. And I understood the meaning of death. But my heart had no idea what it meant, no idea what to do with this information. I didn’t feel sadness. I didn’t feel anything. I just stood there as the three of them huddled together and watched like an outsider.

12 The Girl with the Dead Father

When I returned to school the week after the funeral, the whole class seemed to know that my father had been killed in a car accident. I found out later that while I was away, my second grade teacher, Ms. Mones, had told everyone in my class to be nice to me. “I’m sorry,” a classmate said and reached across the aisle between our desks to touch me on the arm. I never got used to hearing those words, mostly because I rarely heard them. “For what?” I asked, confused. He hadn’t done anything wrong, so why was he sorry? “About your father,” he said. I couldn’t understand why people kept apologizing to me. I had been out of school for a week, and now that I was back, everything felt different — people were being nice to me. People I never talked to would come up to me and say they were sorry. It felt awkward, everyone apologizing. I didn’t know how to react, or what to say. I didn’t want to talk about it. “It’s OK,” I’d say, not even sure what that meant. Was it OK? I just wanted everything to be normal again, for everything to just go back to the way it was, to pretend like nothing had happened. No one else had a dead father, and I didn’t want to be different. Maybe I would wake up, be able to breathe because it had all just been a bad dream. But no. It was real. Things were different now. I was the girl with the dead father. I sat at my desk at school for the first time since the funeral and tried to pay attention, but my mind continued to wander off. The week my father died, we spent most of our time at the funeral home. Up until then, I’d never been inside a funeral home before. I’d never seen a dead body before. Inside the coffin (“casket,” my mother later corrected,) my father looked fake. Maybe he looked different because he wasn’t wearing his glasses; I rarely saw him without them. Or maybe it was the dim, quiet,

13 yellow light. Whoever lay inside this coffin didn’t look anything like my father. A new scar on his face was all caked-over and covered with make-up. I later learned that he’d been thrown through the windshield, and a piece of glass had stabbed him in the heart, killing him almost instantly. He hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt when he crashed head-on into the oncoming van. He lay with his hands folded upon his chest, glasses missing from his face. A rosary adorned his folded hands. He never went to church, so I didn’t understand why he held a rosary. Maybe it would help him get to heaven, I thought. I couldn’t see the scar under his chin, the scar from the skiing accident that had happened long before I’d been born. When we weren’t at the funeral home, we stayed with my grandmother in Flushing, New York. My grandmother lived in a first floor apartment building that overlooked a courtyard. It always smelled musty at my grandma’s apartment. Of propane gas and old radiator heat — smells I always associated with Grandma O’Neill. After one of the viewings, we had all gathered in grandma’s warm living room. Aunt Patty sat on the floor and I sat on my feet in front of her. “God wanted to talk to Dad, right?” I asked Aunt Patty, my Uncle Jimmy’s longtime girlfriend. “That’s why he’s gone, right?” I prompted. “No, honey.” she said. I didn’t understand. She looked at me with kind eyes through her thick, rounded eyeglasses that took up most of her face. “But that’s why he’s gone, isn’t it?” I insisted. “Because God wanted to talk to dad.” It was no longer a question. I pictured my father up in the clouds having a conversation with a man in white robes and long beard. I imagined my dad shaking hands with God as if they’d had something important to discuss. I hoped that God would send him back when they finished talking. Later, I would sometimes imagine my dad walking down the street, coming home. I’d

14 fall asleep at night with the vision in my head and when I’d wake in the morning, I sometimes thought it was real. “No, it’s not like that,” Aunt Patty said. “One day you’ll understand.” I thought I understood perfectly. God wanted to talk to Dad. Nothing else made sense. Nothing else could make me not hate God for taking my father away. On the last day of the viewing, I sat in the front row where the immediate family sits, watching everyone approach the casket, kneel down, get up and walk to the side. My mother came up to me and said, “Come on. Let’s go say goodbye.” She pursed her lips as she tried not to cry. Later, she would make this face more and more as time went on. I’d never get used to seeing it. She held her arm out and ushered me to the kneeling bench in front of the casket. “You mean we’ll never see him again?” I asked. I knew full well I’d never see him again, but I also knew saying the phrase out loud might make me cry, make me feel something. And finally the tears came. I wanted everyone to see me cry, because that’s what you were supposed to do when people died. You cried to show you cared. But my tears felt forced. I didn’t feel them in my heart. I wanted my mom to know I cared, and the only way I knew to show her was to cry. But still, my heart felt blank, like a freshly erased blackboard.

Three months before he died, my father and I had celebrated our birthdays together. I had turned eight and my dad had turned thirty-five. His birthday was the day after mine, and we always celebrated together. The cake always said, “Happy Birthday, Terry and Jean.” I was his birthday present, he always said. I wondered how we would celebrate now that he was gone. Would I still buy him a present? I imagined tossing a box wrapped in paper and tied with a bow into the air. I didn’t really think it would magically evaporate into the clouds, but I wondered

15 what would happen. Would a pair of hands come out of the sky, reach down and grab it? I thought maybe I could just leave the box on the ground, maybe put it under the bush by the mailbox. Would he find it? Would he be able to take it back to heaven? Would my mother still buy us a cake, and would I still blow out the candles for both of us like I always did? Would it still say “Happy Birthday, Terry and Jean” on it?

The week after the funeral, a girl in my class approached me during recess. “My father had a heart attack last week.” “Did he die?” I asked. “No,” she said, looking surprised at my question. If he hadn’t died from it, I wondered, then why did she tell me that? “He almost died,” she said, “so I know how you feel.” “But your father isn’t dead,” I said, still confused. “It’s not the same thing. You can’t know what it’s like.” Her father may have been sick and may have spent a few days in a hospital, and maybe she had been scared that he might die, but he hadn’t. Her father was still alive. No one knew what it felt like, no one understood. She still had a father. Everyone else still had a father. Except me. Except my sister, except my brother. Why did we have to be different? That summer, only months after dad died, we moved to a new house, to a new neighborhood and started a new life. Each of us had our own room complete with brand new bedroom furniture. My room came furnished with two dressers, pale yellow and speckled with white. Each had three drawers and a hutch with shelves topped each dresser. A night table stood next to the bed, and I now had a desk with a chair. It all matched. I loved my desk, loved that I had a place to sit and draw, read, do homework. I displayed my plastic Smurfs on one shelf of

16 the hutch, books on another. I loved that I had a place to put my stuff. I displayed knick-knacks and other treasures on the shelves, everything placed just so. The light yellow furniture made the room feel airy. Brighter somehow. My sister’s room had more modern furniture — gray with mirrors everywhere, and she got the biggest room of the three of us. Her room had dusty mauve paint on the walls, and a mirrored mauve and gray border at the top near the ceiling. Her brand new maroon comforter matched the muted colors on the walls. My brother’s room had boy’s furniture. Dark and ugly woodgrain modular pieces fit on top of each other and could be moved around in different ways. He spent most of his time outside or at his friends’ houses. The new house on Andover had a huge backyard, complete with an in-ground pool that had a diving board and a slide. A high wooden fence kept the dogs in the yard for the most part, giving our two Irish Setters plenty of room to run. Each house on the street matched the one next to it or across from it. All of them had the same exact floor plan. Lawn mowers could be heard at all hours of the day during the spring, summer, and early fall. The neighborhood kids rode their bikes up and down the street, rollerskated, and played basketball in front of our house where someone had hung a basketball hoop on a telephone pole long before we had moved in. Being outside on an ordinary street, with ordinary kids doing ordinary things helped me feel normal, even if normal didn’t exist inside the front door of our new home. Every day I went to school. Every day, I came home. Every day I bickered with my brother and sister as usual, ate dinner, watched TV or read, did homework, and went to bed. I played video games, swam in our in-ground pool during the muggy Long Island summers, and

17 went sledding in the forbidden sump across the street during the winters. Routine created normalcy. Two years had passed before I no longer noticed the table set for four instead of five, or how I could leave my shoes lying around without the fear of my father whipping them at me. The sting of a thrown shoe landing square between my shoulder blades seemed to fade with his memory. Our mother no longer threatened us with, “Wait till your father gets home!” By the summer I was going into fourth grade, my sister would be going into seventh. She would start cross-country in the fall and then track in the spring. On weekends, she’d run laps around the block. I’d usually be on the front lawn teaching myself to do front handsprings or seeing how long I could walk on my hands. I’d watch her as she ran past the house and up the street, turn the corner, and follow the curve of the road around the block from Andover to Groton Drive. And then I’d run after her. I’d cut across Eton Drive, the shortcut that connected Andover to Groton, bringing me at least a little closer, even if it were cheating. No matter how fast I ran, I could never catch up to her. I just really wanted to be with her, even if she didn’t know I was there. After she’d finish, she’d run straight through the house and through the sliding glass door to the back yard. She’d strip off all her clothes and dive straight into the pool. I’d chase her all the way through the house to catch her in the act. Me too, me too! And then I’d realize I didn’t have my bathing suit on. My sister had planned ahead. I’d run upstairs and strip off all my clothes, search for my wadded up bathing suit that still lay in a damp heap from the day before and without unraveling it, I’d scooch it up my legs and over my torso. It would take too long to unravel, but it always got stuck as I pulled it on, and the straps always got twisted around as I pulled them onto my shoulders. I had to hurry. I didn’t want to miss a moment with my sister.

18 That year in fourth grade, a woman came into my classroom and whispered to my teacher, Mr. Davis, my favorite teacher of all time. He was tall, with dark, curly hair, and a goofy personality. He always smiled and joked, and made us all laugh in class. He’d pretend to pick his nose and fling fake boogers made of glue at us. Sometimes out of nowhere he’d burst into song, “Jean, Jean, roses are red!” which embarrassed me, but I secretly loved the attention. When the social worker whispered to him, he pointed at me, and then called me to the front of the room. Everyone looked at me when he called my name and pointed me out. My cheeks flushed hot as everyone stared. I could feel my heart beating in my face. What did I do wrong? Sometimes I’d forget that I was the girl with the dead father. Times like this reminded me that I had a mark on me that I was sure everyone else could still see. Mr. Davis told me to go with the woman, and so I did. But I still didn’t know why. She took me to Mr. Sebastianelli’s office, just down the hall from my classroom. Mr. Sebastianelli was the band instructor who had taught me how to play clarinet. I had lessons in this tiny, cluttered room three days a week with Darlene and Cindy and another girl named Teresa. Darlene was the first friend I made when I first moved to Clinton Avenue Elementary from Queens two years prior. I had only been at Clinton Avenue for half a school year before my father died. Cindy was Darlene’s identical twin sister, and only I could tell them apart. No one else figured out that Darlene had one dimple when she smiled and Cindy had two. Darlene was the smart, quiet one while Cindy liked to be goofy and funny. Darlene stood about a half inch taller than Cindy (we measured once) and her face was long and thin compared to Cindy’s squatty, round face. They were small differences, but I knew them. It felt weird being in Mr. Sebastianelli’s office without Darlene and Cindy and Teresa. The woman who pulled me out of class took the seat behind Mr. Sebastianelli’s desk, and I sat

19 next to her on a stool that spun. His small office contained only a standard metal desk and some chairs with metal music stands in front of them. Papers, scores of music and music instruction books cluttered the room. Various instrument cases lay strewn about the floor. The walls and ceiling looked like a giant pegboard, covered in perfectly round holes to absorb sound and drown out the noise. But I wasn’t there to talk to Mr. Sebastianelli. Or to play clarinet with Darlene and Cindy and Teresa. The woman called herself a social worker. “I’m not the kind of social worker who takes children from their parents,” she explained. What did that even mean? Who was this woman? What kind of person would take children from their parents, and why would she tell me that? What did I do? Why was I here? “I’m here to talk to you about your father.” “Why?” I asked. I didn’t like talking about him. I didn’t like thinking about him because it reminded me that he had once told me he hated me. And I didn’t like being reminded that I wasn’t normal, that I was the girl with the dead father. At home, we didn’t talk about my father. He no longer existed, although the reminders were there. My mom always wore his ratty, old Eta Kappa Nu sweatshirt. The big 32” console TV in the living room had been a birthday gift for him when I turned four; the upright piano my sister took lessons on my mother bought for him when I turned six; the bobble-head hobbit that sat on the bookshelf along with the all of his old, musty books — my sister and I swore the doll’s head moved by itself once. Pictures of him could only be found in photo albums that my mother tucked away in the bottom drawers of the hutch in the living room. I’d often spend hours sifting through them all one by one. I didn’t know what the social worker woman wanted me to say. I still didn’t know what I had done wrong, why I had been pulled out of class to talk to this woman in the band teacher’s

20 office. Maybe it was because of the haiku I had written about my dad. About how he’s in heaven because God wanted to talk to him. “I’m here to talk to you about how you feel,” she said. I couldn’t quite feel anything, really. Up until that point, I had been so busy trying not to be different that I hadn’t really thought about what I actually felt. Pulling me out of class only reminded me more that I was different, and I didn’t like it. What could I say that would make me seem normal? What could I say that would get this lady to take me back to my classroom? But would I be just as noticeable going back? ‘There’s the girl with the dead father,’ I imagined everyone thinking. Thirty pairs of eyes staring at me as I walked back to my seat. I didn’t like that kind of attention. I didn’t know what to say to this woman; I didn’t know the answer to her question. I picked up a magnetic doodle game that sat on the desk. I used the magnetic wand to pick up little metal balls through the plastic covering, and placed each one in a divot. I began to form words with the little metal balls, placing each precisely so that the letters looked right. As I focused on my work, the social worker woman asked me what I was drawing. “Nothing,” I replied and shrugged. Then she peeked over and saw what I had written. “Who’s Lenore?” she asked when she saw “I hate Lenore” in block letters made of little metal balls. “A girl I hate,” I said. Lenore was my next-door neighbor. We had been friends since the day my family moved to Andover Drive the summer after my father died. We had tumbled outside on our front lawns as we honed our gymnastics skills, played “school” and “house” in her basement, rode bikes and roller skated up and down Andover Drive, but never crossed Canal Street. We rode the bus together, but because we were in different grades at school, I only saw

21 her at recess, and only sometimes. She usually played with friends from her grade, and I usually played with friends from mine, like Darlene and Cindy. “Why do you hate her?” the social worker woman asked. “I don’t know.” I didn’t want to tell the woman about the fight I’d had with Lenore, how she had gotten mad when I snubbed her at recess. I had been with my other friends and I hadn’t wanted her to know what we were talking about. The girls in my grade were all talking about the book, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume. This book seemed to be forbidden and secret, something we’d get in trouble for reading. It was all about periods and all sorts of other stuff I didn’t understand. Even after I asked, I still had no idea what a period was, or why this thing that would eventually happen to my body hadn’t happened yet, while it had already started happening to all the other girls my age. “What is it?” I had asked. “What’s a period?” No one would tell me. “Why is it called that? What does it mean?” It wasn’t just periods, either. We wandered around the playground and talked about boys and why they have “things,” and why we (us girls) don’t. We talked about how if a woman poops when she gives birth, she loses the baby. “But where does it go?” I had asked. “Does it just disappear?” I hated not knowing what everyone else knew, that no one would tell me or help me make sense of what they were all talking about. Mostly I just hated the fog of not understanding, and I hated feeling left out. Just like at home. Sometimes, I’d barge into my sister’s room and plop down next to her and her friends, pretend like I belonged. It never worked. “Mom! Brat’s in my room again! Make her go away!” she’d shout, but never to me, always like I wasn’t there.

22 In the playground, Darlene finally told me “the man plants a seed.” I imagined a yellow tulip growing out of a woman’s pink insides, which didn’t make any sense to me either. Darlene’s twin sister Cindy nodded along to everything she said as if to help me be less confused. The three of us huddled closely, walking slowly as we circled the perimeter of the schoolyard. Darlene and Cindy did everything together. They wore the same clothes, finished each other’s thoughts, told each other everything and never ever fought. It made me jealous that it couldn’t be like that with my brother and sister. I listened intently to everything Darlene and Cindy told me, thankful for their matter-of-fact voices and for not judging me for not knowing anything. I didn’t notice Lenore until she interrupted us. “What are you guys talking about?” Lenore asked, as if hearing something she knew we shouldn’t have been talking about. “Nothing,” I said, afraid she’d tell on me if she knew, like talking about something so forbidden would break some kind of law. I turned away and kept walking with the twins, while they tried to explain what Judy Blume called a period and where babies came from and the birds and the bees. My sister never talked to me about this stuff, probably because my mother never talked about it with her. I couldn’t ask my mother, either. I didn’t know how to ask. I thought she would be mad at me for asking, and I didn’t want to break the law. Our conversations only went so far, and were often one-sided. Stop whining. Clean your room. Dinner’s ready. Wash your hands. Did you do your homework? Even at 10 years old, I sensed that asking my mother to explain where babies came from, what a period was, and what you used sanitary pads for would break the law. Just like talking about my father was a forbidden subject. We didn’t talk about those kinds of things in our family. We didn’t ask those kinds of questions.

23 “Sanitary napkins now come with adhesive!” my dad’s TV blared. “No more of those uncomfortable belts!” “What do you do with them?” I asked my sister once, but she refused to answer. Did she not know either? I thought maybe you wore them like a bra or something. Wasn’t that the only difference between a grown woman and me? A woman grows boobs, and mine hadn’t grown yet. I wanted to know what Judy Blume and the television commercial meant, but no one would tell me. Everything I wanted to know seemed to be forbidden. Why wouldn’t my sister talk to me about it? Maybe I was asking the wrong questions. Maybe she thought I was stupid for asking. I felt stupid for not knowing. I felt stupid for asking. Maybe I’d know when I became a seventhgrader like her. The afternoon I had snubbed Lenore, she wouldn’t let me sit with her on the bus. “You can’t sit here,” she said and blocked the seat with her book bag. “How come?” I asked. She said she hated me and didn’t want to be friends anymore. She didn’t say why. I had forgotten about the playground, forgotten how I had wanted to be all grown up, and treated her like she was too young to know. I slumped into the empty seat behind her and looked out the window. The trees and grass close to the edge of the road whizzed past faster than the bigger trees further away and it made me feel lonely. The rest of the way home, even as I protected myself like a fragile piece of glass wrapped in bubble plastic, I couldn’t turn off the sadness in my heart. It squeezed inside my braless, boob-less chest, couldn’t beat without hurting. On the stool in Mr. Sebastianelli’s office, I spun back and forth while I told the social worker woman about Lenore, that we weren’t friends anymore, but I wouldn’t tell her anything else. I didn’t want her to know what had caused the fight.

24 “How did it make you feel, this fight you had with your friend?” she asked. “I dunno.” I shrugged again, didn’t look up. “Sad, I guess.” I wanted to say whatever would get me out of this awful, uncomfortable situation. “Don’t you want to be friends with her?” she asked. I moved the metal balls with the magnetic pen inside the Magna-doodle, focused on my work. This time I tried forming a picture of a house and a tree. I wanted everything to go back to normal. I wanted it to be better than normal. I wanted my dad back; I wanted my sister to talk to me, to tell me what she knew; I wanted my brother to like me, to think I was funny like him; I wanted mom not to shoo me away, to hug me, to maybe even hear her tell me she loved me. I wanted to be front and center, but not picked on, or laughed at, or made fun of. I didn’t know how to ask for any of it. I didn’t even know how to wish for any of it. I had only said I hated Lenore because she had said she hated me first. Just like antagonizing my brother and sister was easier than being likeable. I didn’t really hate Lenore and I didn’t really want to be unlikeable. It only made me feel worse, lonelier. At least when Lenore and I were friends, I could be happy for a few hours, have fun in the yard, and play games. That Friday, on the school bus home, I passed a note to Lenore before slumping into the empty seat behind her. It felt like forever ago that we had been friends. “Can we be friends again?” the note said. Maybe if we were friends again, the lonely feeling in my heart would go away. Maybe if I apologized to her, then maybe everything could be normal again. “Ok,” she wrote back. As we got off the bus and walked toward our houses, she asked, “Do you want to stay over tonight?” Yes, I thought. I was glad we were friends again and looked forward to making a blanket fort in her bedroom that night. But I always felt weird at bedtime at

25 her house. She’d kiss her mother and father goodnight, and for some reason, I felt obligated to do the same. Her father’s thick, bushy mustache reminded me of my own father’s mustache, and it reminded me that I didn’t have a father to kiss goodnight anymore. When I walked through my own front door, ate my dinner later that night, and got ready to go to Lenore’s, I tried not to think about how I’d always be the girl with the dead father.

26 Portrait of a Sad Clown

At the top of the stairs at 18 Andover Drive, a charcoal drawing of a sad clown’s face hung on the wall between my bedroom door and my mother’s. Every time I climbed the stairs to go to my room, I saw this drawing. Even if I didn’t look at it consciously, it’s where my eyes fell every time I turned onto the landing at the top of the stairs. My mother loved this sad clown, but I never knew why. I never understood why she’d want something so dreary hanging between our bedroom doors, forcing us to look at it every time we passed. This sad clown traveled with us every time we moved — from Washington State to New York, from East Islip to Port Jeff, Ficus Street to where it now hung on the wall at 18 Andover Drive. The sad clown, encased in heavy frosted glass, hung on the wall by a single wire, wound tightly and attached to the back. It had a black, inky signature in the bottom right hand corner. The other corner of the glass was cracked. Shortly after moving to Andover, my mom took up bowling to be on a league with her friends from the old Ficus Street neighborhood. Every Saturday night, my mother would go bowling with Mr. and Mrs. Love, the Lopez’s, and the Deutchmanns. Cheri Hertel came with her husband Gary, who later divorced. Everyone all paired up except for my mother. Every Saturday night it was a block party reunion. Even the neighborhood kids got together then and would wreak havoc in the bowling alley, running back and forth from the concession stand to the game room. When we had enough quarters, we’d play video games like Night Driver, Space Invaders, and Asteroids. Pac-Man hadn’t come out yet. Sometimes we’d sit still long enough to watch the adults bowl. It was here, at the Port Jeff Bowl, that I saw Hank for the first time.

27 I watched him stroll past the plastic row of chairs one night, saw him as he leered at my mother and watched her intently as he walked away. Even as he passed, he kept his eyes locked onto her, looked over his shoulder as if a magnetic beam turned his head. He had a scruffy beard and wore a leather bomber jacket with his hands stuffed into the pockets. I lingered on him, not sure why, but I knew that this man would play a role in my life. At nine years old, I doubt I understood intuition well enough to pay attention to it, but just like I knew my father had been killed the night the policemen came, I knew to pay attention to this man who slithered past. Who is that man, I wondered. I remember now not like a flashback or hindsight, but in that moment, as my eyes stayed on him, I had a feeling we’d know each other soon. My mom took her turn and returned to the seating area to drag on her cigarette. “Can I have some quarters?” I asked, “and a Coke?” And then I dashed off to the concession stand with just enough money for a soda and two video games.

The next time I saw Hank, he stood in the foyer of our home, leaning against the front door as if he belonged there. I bounded down the steps and stopped short halfway down. I had no idea what to make of what I saw. I recognized this man as the man from the bowling alley. But I didn’t recognize the happy woman who snuggled in his arms. My mother, a good six inches shorter than him, wrapped her arms around his neck and his arms fell to her waist, pulling her close to him. My mother never seemed that happy with my dad. They never snuggled with each other, and I never or rarely saw them kiss. Not like this. My mother tilted her face up to this bearded man’s, pecking his lips with her own in a way I’d never seen her kiss my father. The sun shone through the glass in the front door and seemed to have breathed life back into my mother. Or maybe it was this strange man from the

28 bowling alley. This bearded man, who nauseated me when I looked at him. I remembered the feeling from the bowling alley when I had seen him there. The same sickness, the same warning flip-flopped in my belly. I didn’t like that he seemed comfortable, or that my mother wrapped herself in his arms. Maybe because she clung to this man in a way she had never clung to my dad. My mom and my dad just weren’t affectionate people, I guessed. Mom even said once that she couldn’t touch him while he slept. A holdover from his days in the trenches in Viet Nam, he’d freak out if she so much as tapped a finger on his shoulder. Maybe because dad was gone, she felt the need to cling tighter to someone else, afraid that maybe she would lose him too if she didn’t hold on tight enough. Or maybe the excitement of someone new in her life, finally feeling like the darkness that surrounded us all had finally evaporated and broken apart. It helped that we didn’t live on Ficus street anymore. When we moved into the nice big new house on Andover drive, with the big back yard and an in-ground pool, the sky seemed sunnier and the breeze a little lighter — at least for a little while, anyway. My sister and I often wondered if Mom and Hank would get married. Sometimes we’d ask them. The answer was never “yes” or “no,” but more of an alarmed stare. Each week Hank showed up with a grocery bag full of clothes, as if he was moving in. They’d been together for maybe a year or so, and the relationship seemed to be going well. But something didn’t feel quite right. Something I couldn’t quite identify. My mother’s happiness was sporadic. She’d be happy for five minutes and then she’d return to being the hardened woman with too much to do. I wonder if maybe my mother felt guilty for falling in love with someone who wasn’t my father. Or maybe she feared that Hank would abandon her, too. The color seemed to fade once again from my mother, like the drawing of the sad clown that hung on the wall between her bedroom door and mine.

29 Every other weekend, Hank brought his 7-year-old son, Ryan, with him. Ryan looked nothing like his father. He had dark curly hair and dark, ashy skin, features he inherited from his Latin-American mother. He was a first-grader who followed me around and asked too many questions. “What are these?” He’d ask holding up a pair of hair clips. No matter how many times I told him the answer, he’d always ask the same questions over and over. “Barrettes,” I’d say for the third time that day. “They go in your hair.” I had told him that the last time he’d asked. “Berni-nettes,” he’d say and clip them to his wispy, dark curls. He liked to make up words or purposely mispronounce them to be funny, a quirk I found tremendously irritating. I’d try to play games with him, but he didn’t like to play by the rules. He’d make his own rules up as he went along, and they never made sense. Only that they were always in his favor. Sometimes, I’d just want to be left alone, and he’d barge into my room without knocking. “Dad says you have to play with me,” he’d say. “He’s not my dad,” I’d say. Hank and Ryan remained in our lives for a little over a year, and then disappeared as quickly as they came. I later learned that my mother had lent him sixty grand from my father’s life insurance payout because Hank wanted to open a gas station. My mother never saw him again after that, and never brought anyone else home again. It was as if she made a vow to herself that she wouldn’t allow another man to destroy her like my father had, or like Hank had. I told myself that she had us to think about, her three kids who needed food, shelter, and a mother. Her happiness would have to go on hold. She must have been lonely, but more often than not, she seemed frustrated and angry. She’d snap at us and lose her temper quickly. Like the time she

30 threw the ketchup bottle and said the F word for the first time because my sister complained that my brother had used it all. She scared me when she got like that. When she wanted me to move quickly, to go clean my room or to pick something up, she’d grab a fistful of my hair and shove me forward. Over the years, it took less and less for her to snap, and I sometimes wondered if she resented us, or if we were just in the way of her anger. As her hair turned from brown to gray, as the wrinkles in her face deepened, I realized that the colorless and broken charcoal drawing of that sad clown that hung with the tight, wound up, wiry tension between our bedroom doors now reminded me of her.

31 Christmas Meltdown

It’s December 1982, and my father has been dead for almost two years. I’m 10 years old, going on 11 and have seen E.T. The Extra Terrestrial three times since it’s been out. My bedroom is covered in all things E.T. Posters from the movie adorn my bedroom wall. I have E.T. buttons pinned to my book bag; notebooks with E.T.’s face on them are inside of it. When I want to be alone, I read or draw pictures of E.T. I sit at my desk like an artist, feeling important as I try to replicate him from the pictures I see in magazines and on colorful buttons and pins with my magic markers. I draw first with pencil, taking my time, making sure my marks look exactly like the ones in the picture. It takes hours. I try to match the colors exactly by mixing the markers when they’re wet on the page. It makes the paper soggy. But it looks right. I’m proud of my work, and I show my mother. “Very nice,” she says, and returns to watching her show. The Christmas tree stands near the painted white brick fireplace in the living room. The tree is fake, and we make fun of it because it has a square top. Our mother hates when we make fun of it. “The top is not square!” she says when we tease her about it. Then she bends the wire branches to make the top appear pointier. The angel that tops the tree usually sleeps in a box year round marked X-MAS; she is wrapped and stuffed with the other Christmas decorations, and over the years, it’s given her permanent bed-head. This angel has topped my parents’ Christmas trees for longer than I’ve been alive. It sits off-kilter on the upright-most wire branch. Her body is a cone of fabric-covered plastic. A doll’s head is glued to the top. Her cardboard and fabric wings are stapled to her back, and wires dangle from under her cone-shaped gown. She wears a halo of colored and white lights that blink on and off. The doll’s hair sticks out like a blond

32 infant’s and makes funny shadows that bounce on and off the walls every time her lights blink. The shadows flash rhythmically on different walls depending upon which lights on her head are blinking. I don’t watch the lights on the angel’s head or the twinkling lights on tree. I watch the shadows. I love how they exaggerate the angel’s silly hair on the wall. I like to do my homework lying down at the base of the tree, with only the lights from the tree to see by. I lay my books down, open to the right page, and lay on my stomach. My feet crisscross in the air behind me. Lying on the floor like this feels like home, like something good, like a kind of warmth that only comes from happiness. We’ve only lived here for a year and a half, but it seems like much longer. My mother’s stereo plays Christmas songs. The records are old, and smell musty. The pictures on some of the album covers have worn away, from being pulled out and slid back into place over and over again. My sister and I like to play with her records and listen to music. Sometimes we make up skits and dance numbers, and we perform them for our mother when she finally surrenders to our pleas. We Need a Little Christmas plays and my sister and I twirl around and then she hoists me up by the waist as I pretend to put a star on top of the tree. My sister is older than me, and stronger. She likes to toss me around when we dance to our Christmas music. It’s a way we show we love each other. This year, I cut a big cardboard box into the shape of a Christmas tree and then painted it with my mother’s acrylic paint for her ceramics. I taped it to my bedroom window so it looks like I have a Christmas tree in my room. Or, at least that’s what I want it to look like. I have silver and gold tinsel (later someone will tell me it’s called garland) taped around the edges of my window like a sparkly gift box. I sprayed fake snow in the corners. I mark off the day on my handmade calendar, and when I close my eyes to go to sleep, it’ll be one day closer to Christmas.

33 This is our second Christmas without dad. A third of my life has passed since he died, but it’s not something I think about often. I don’t know if I think about it at all. Like most other 10year olds, I just want Christmas to come. My dad always scared me. He only seemed to acknowledge me when I did something wrong, like when we’d leave our shoes laying around. He’d whip them like torpedoes and they’d hit us square between the shoulders. He made me go hungry once when I was six because I couldn’t eat the chili he made. I sat at the dining room table for four hours that time. Even though the can had said “mild,” it still burned my tender sixyear-old taste buds. As much as I wanted to eat, I couldn’t. Instead, I sat there and starved, my mouth filled with what felt like dragon-fire. Sometimes he’d give us “the belt” when we disobeyed. My sister called my brother a “bucker” and my father smacked her so hard, she’s never uttered a swear word since. Bucker sounded too much like fucker. He loved the beanbag chair fights we all had, though. My mother would get mad when they’d spring a leak and little white Styrofoam balls would find their way into everything. I always wanted to play, but as soon as I’d get walloped upside the head and knocked off my feet, I’d cry and not want to play anymore. I hated him for that. I wish he’d have been a little gentler with me. Widowed at the age of 34, my mother worked nights as a Nurse’s Aide at a local nursing home because she didn’t have any kind of college education. Working nights meant more money. But it still wasn’t enough. She always complained that money was tight. December 1982 was the year that my mother couldn’t deal with the three of us kids anymore. This same year, my fifteen year-old brother convinced our older cousin to buy a halfgallon of vodka for him and his friends. I’m told they drank almost all of it, and the next morning, my brother threw up all over the place, all over himself, all over the bathroom and all

34 over our Christmas presents that had been placed under the tree. The following year, I would find the gin that tasted like pine trees and the vodka that tasted like burning. I’d sneak down in the middle of the night and swig the awful stuff just to see what it tasted like, to see what would happen. Doing something forbidden like my brother had done excited me. I thought that if I did bad things like he did, then maybe he would like me and would want me around. It’s the week before Christmas, and I’m playing video games on my sister’s Atari in the den. Outside the window, I can see tiny flakes of snow falling in the front yard. It won’t amount to anything — maybe just an inch or two in the Long Island suburb. But it still excites me. Christmas is coming! I don’t remember what happened next the same way my sister does. After all these years, I always thought it happened like this: I hear our mother pull our enormous Coachman Van into the driveway. It’s the same van my mother bought just after dad died, the same van we drove to Florida for a two-week vacation in Disney World. It’s become the neighborhood vehicle, and my mother being the parent with the largest vehicle always gets stuck driving my brother’s soccer team around. “What am I, the town schlep?” she always says. My mother slams the driver’s side door and heads into the house. I toss the game controller aside and run into the foyer to see what she brought in with her. She lets out a heavyhearted sigh and seems to be in one of her “go away and leave me alone” moods again. She’s probably tired, probably thinking about things that I have no cause to think about. Things like house payments, car payments, what to buy us kids for Christmas, or more likely how she would buy those gifts for us. My Christmas list contains just about everything from the toy section in

35 the Sears Christmas Catalog. It even includes some toys for boys only because they looked kind of fun – matchbox car race tracks, Nerf toys, and hand-held video games. “Where are you hiding the presents?” I ask, only half-serious. “Are they in the van? I bet they’re in the van!” I exclaim. Only a few wrapped items have been placed under the tree so far, the rest needed to be rewrapped or were thrown away, with my brother having recently vomited on them. Even still, I can’t take the anticipation. “Come on, Mom!” I tease, but my mother isn’t in the mood for my pestering. “Can we open just one?” I beg. My mother’s face contorts into something no longer human. “You want your Christmas presents? FINE!” she shouts. Her eyes turn to lasers and her face appears to drip off of her skull. My sister watches from the dining room. “Go!” she shouts and throws her keys at me. I bend down to pick them up, keeping my eyes locked onto hers. I step away from her as if she’s a crazed animal. “Go! Take them. But that’s all you’re getting!” I stand frozen in the foyer and stare, afraid to move, afraid to speak. My heart seems to have stopped beating as I watch my mother transform into a raging lunatic. I’d seen my mother lose her patience with us before, but never like this. Never to the point where it scared me into thinking that Christmas would be cancelled. She lunges at me and grabs a fistful of hair at the nape of my neck as she shoves me forward toward the front door. I feel a few hairs rip out from where she has grabbed. I hustle out the door to the van. My neck throbs and my heart resumes its thudding in my chest. I no longer want to see what lay hidden there; the gratification I had hoped to feel no longer exists. I lift the bags out, and bring them into the house. I just stand there in the foyer; I don’t know what else to do.

36 But my sister says it happened like this: “How come she gets an E.T. doll and I don’t?” Heather asks, accusatory, as soon as my mother walked through the door. “I love him more than she does!” My mother had hidden some of our gifts in her bedroom closet and Heather had snooped. In the closet, she had seen an E.T. doll with a Christmas tag on it for me. In a fit of jealousy my sister had stormed down the stairs and accused my mother of buying a gift for me when it should have been for her. This is where my memory is muddled and unclear. In Heather’s version of the story, she says our mother stormed up to her bedroom closet, to where my sister had spied the E.T. doll with my name on it. She returns with a large shopping bag full of unwrapped gifts. I have no memory of this, perhaps because I had gone out to the van, and didn’t see it happen. When I come back in, my mother shouts, “Here! Take it! All of it!” In a fit of rage, she whips the E.T. doll at Heather, and then she throws one at me. There were two. One for her and one for me. My mother had gotten one for her after all. My sister just hadn’t seen it, or had stopped looking as soon as she saw the one with my name on it. I stand in the foyer, and watch in horror as my mother’s face transforms again. She stares at us with eyes like deep dark pools of sadness, disappointment, and resignation. It’s a look I’d like to forget but never will. She furrows her brow, and purses her lips as if it will stop her from crying. “None of you appreciate anything I do around here!” The tears spill down her cheeks before she can turn back up the stairs. I carry my would-be treasures upstairs to my room. The bag contains the electronic quiz game I had asked for along with some note pads that have secret messages in them. You have to use a special marker to reveal them. I pull out the two E.T. dolls; each one even has a pinkish belly to show his heart light. I tear open the box to the quiz game and put batteries in it. But it

37 isn’t any fun. I bring the game to my sister’s room and ask her if she wants to play. I find her lying face down on her bed, sobbing. “Do you want to play a quiz game with me?” I ask. “No. You shouldn’t have opened them,” she says, her voice muffled in the pillow. “Why not? Mom made us take them, so why can’t we play with them?” “We’re not supposed to play with them. Put them back.” Confused, I head back to my room. E.T. sits on the floor next to me with his belly exposing the soft red hue of his heart light, and I think about taking my sister’s E.T. to her, but I feel like an alien myself, not sure what to do. It’s still a week before Christmas, yet, here I sit with all the toys I would be opening Christmas morning. As I put everything back in their boxes, I slowly realize what had happened. We had ruined Christmas, the one day we’re all supposed to be happy together. I wish I hadn’t pestered my mother. I want to rewind to before she came home, erase everything that had happened. I glue the torn pieces of the quiz game box back together with Elmer’s glue, re-wrap all the presents, and bring them down to the Christmas tree.

Later, when I’m in my early 40s, I will realize the stress my mother must have been under back then. I didn’t realize that she had to do everything — take care of the house, cook, clean, make repairs, run errands, buy groceries, go to work. She must have felt like an alien, too, always the odd number when out with friends. Alienated because she was now different, having to make do without a husband, without a father for her children. My sister still has her E.T. doll. “Why do you keep it?” I asked her once. I got rid of mine decades ago. “Why would you want to be reminded of that awful day? Doesn’t it make you sad?”

38 “I draw strength from it,” she had said. I recently asked her what she had meant by that. “I really loved the E.T. movie,” she began. “And I remember wishing at night that I could have a close relationship like that.” She said it reminded her of losing our dad and gaining a friend. To her, the E.T. doll felt like a best friend or something she could hold onto for comfort at night. I wish I still had mine.

39 Crash Course

The year I turned sixteen, my family had been living in the Pocono Mountains for three years. We had moved from Long Island shortly after my brother joined the Navy in 1985. For three years, we lived in a gated community in a backwoods town called Tobyhanna located in the middle of nowhere in Northeast Pennsylvania. In three years, we hadn’t overcome the culture shock of living in the Poconos. Certain conveniences like having a grocery store five minutes away simply didn’t exist here. Where we lived on Long Island, a five-minute car ride got us to Grand Union or Pathmark. We even had a choice. My mother would usually make a quick trip on her way home from work to pick up something for dinner or to grab a carton of milk. Living in Tobyhanna, it took twenty minutes to drive four miles to the grocery store on a twisty, turny, unlit two-lane road. You didn’t make “quick trips” to the store when you lived in the Poconos. At least one or two deer always lay dead on side of the road. “Poor Bambies,” my mother always said with a pout when we’d drive past. No one lived “nearby.” Neighbors didn’t exist. Having a 646 telephone exchange meant a long distance phone call for anyone else that didn’t have that same exchange. I couldn’t understand why my mother wanted to move to a place so seemingly desolate, and I hated her for it. She had torn me away from finally feeling settled in a place, only to be replanted in an area so vast and empty, which came with a culture that we simply couldn’t understand. When my mother got depressed or overwhelmed, she would pick up and move. The longest I ever lived in one home was five years, and that was after we moved from Ficus Street to Andover Drive. Even then, the ghost of my father still seemed too close. My mother told me once that she sometimes saw my father sitting in the back seat of her car.

40 “I’d look in the rearview mirror and see him sitting there,” she said. “‘How you doing, Hun?’ I’d say.” I had a hard time believing her. Why didn’t I see him? I assumed she imagined it, or just liked telling the story. She embellished a lot. “At first it scared the bejesus out of me, but after a while,” she continued, “I got used to it. It was comforting.” Even if I didn’t really believe her, I still wondered what it would be like, seeing him like a ghost. I wanted to believe her. I secretly hoped it would happen to me. But seeing him there, in the rearview mirror every time she got into the car got old for her. She needed a change, she said. Before we moved to the Poconos, my mother still ran into a lot of the same people that had known her before my father had died. After he died, people treated her differently. Her friends came around less and less, didn’t call as often. My mother seemed lonely, sad. But she tried not to show it. She focused on getting things done around the house, making things better. She had the kitchen and the upstairs bathroom remodeled. She repainted the living room and had new carpeting put in. Outside, she removed hemlock bushes with her own hands and her own backbreaking labor. In their place, she hand-built a permanent charcoal grill out of brick and mortar. Her friends’ husbands would offer their services to clean out gutters, cut down broken tree limbs, and the other things men typically did to maintain a house. But she didn’t like to rely on anyone to help her. Her friends, the wives, accused her of trying to steal their husbands. And so they had abandoned her. The memory of her old life seemed to be too much for her anymore. When we moved to the Poconos, I think my mother thought it would be some kind of escape to Paradise, or so the brochure said. Beautiful Mount Airy Lodge right off our backyard, she claimed. Our backyard didn’t come with a manicured lawn, or grass of any kind for that matter. I looked like a lumpy, crumpled paper bag, consisting mainly of clay dirt and rock and

41 nothing green. A garden was out of the question. Nothing grew except for brush and trees, and only in summer. Like me, she had trouble making friends. Being transplants from New York, we were unpopular with the locals. Most of the kids I went to school with had been friends with each other since kindergarten, some since birth. My classmates’ parents and their parents before them had long-lived histories. They didn’t like us New Yorkers coming in and wrecking the place. Trying to fit in was like trying to bust through the Berlin Wall that wouldn’t come down for another year. By then, the Poconos had finally begun to feel less foreign to me, but my mother still hated it. She would always be a New Yorker. The day we left New York, we drove across the George Washington Bridge out of Queens and into New Jersey, a state away from “Pee-Ay” as she called it, and my mother tried not to cry; I could tell by the way she pressed her lips into a kiss. I could see the tears glistening in her eyes. Holding the tears inside, she sang along to the radio with Dionne Warwick and Friends. “Keep smiling, keep shining, know that you can always count on me,” her voice wavered as she tried to keep the tears in. As the tears finally spilled, I could see the anguish she tried to hide and I could feel her heart breaking as if it were inside my own chest. She knew no one in Pennsylvania, and I couldn’t understand why she wanted to leave our beloved house in Port Jefferson Station behind on Long Island. The red taillights in front of us glinted on the windshield, a sight I often cherished when we’d later make the trips back to visit New York, but soon began to despise. I wrote letters to old friends back in New York, but responses took longer and longer until I didn’t receive them at all. When we’d visit, conversations felt forced, as if too much had changed while I had been gone, and we’d had nothing left to talk about, nothing left in

42 common. But my mother still clung to New York, despite her need to leave it and my father behind. These were the only trips my mother didn’t mind making. The winters in Pennsylvania were brutal, not at all like winter on Long Island, where two inches of snow on the ground would be considered a blizzard. My mother hated driving on the icy roads in winter. Ice storms coated the bare tree branches and made them look like post cards. But when those thick, ice-covered branches broke and fell, they could be deadly. Worse, the ice storms made driving treacherous. Having a rear-wheel drive sports car just didn’t cut it in the Poconos. After a while, my mom learned to stack wood in her trunk for weight and traction, something we never had to do on Long Island. “The roads are a sheet of ice!” She’d use that as an excuse as often as possible. She just didn’t like driving in the winter, even if we weren’t having bad weather. No one did. But it’s what you did to survive. You did what you had to do to get around. It was the spring of 1988 when my mother bought me my first car — a 1972 Volkswagen Super-Beetle, school bus yellow with keystone mag wheels, tinted windows, and racing louvers on the rear window. It had a four-speed standard transmission, bald tires, and bad brakes. It was the same age as me and I hated it, hated that I drove something as uncool as a VW Bug. Everyone in school had newer cars — big sedans or pickup trucks. Some of the girls drove smaller, cuter cars. My mother paid $500 for my beat-up, unreliable piece of crap. It often stalled out on the rare occasion that it started, and the brakes failed more than once. The speed limit in our development was only 25 miles per hour, so having questionable brakes didn’t seem to be much of an issue. I had taught myself how to drive the stick shift through trial and error, a lot of bucking and clucking, and somehow managed not to burn out the clutch.

43 “I got it into third gear today!” I exclaimed to a friend’s father once, excited that I finally figured out how to coordinate my feet and hands at the same time. Driving a stick shift took a lot of multi-tasking; you had to learn to lift your left foot gently off the clutch while pressing on the gas with your right in the same proportions. Meanwhile, I had to make sure I put the shifter in the right gear while keeping both hands on the wheel, a task that seemingly required a third hand. Kelly’s dad laughed heartily at me, his large face turning red as he howled. “What?” I asked, disappointed by his reaction. I thought he’d be proud. It’s not like Kelly knew how to drive a stick, or even had her own car for that matter. “What did I say? What’s so funny?” He wouldn’t tell me, just looked at me and shook his head, like I’d said something ludicrous. I didn’t know I needed to get it all the way up into the highest gear so the engine didn’t scream when I pressed on the gas – a lesson I later learned from another friend who liked to work on cars. A few months later after I’d finally figured out the art of driving a manual transmission, my mother let me run small errands outside of the development. As I pulled up to the gated guardhouse, I downshifted into a lower gear, and pressed on the brake pedal to slow to a stop. But the car kept moving forward. I furiously pumped the brake pedal over and over, hoping that the repeated, instinctual motion would make the car slow down. As I pumped the pedal, my heart pumped in my chest, ready to explode. Please, God! Stop! The car kept rolling forward no matter how much I willed it to stop. The Bug’s metal bumper thunked against the metal bumper of the heavy sedan in front of me. The man in the car threw his arms up in the air, stunned by the unexpected impact. “I’m so sorry!” I shouted. My stomach twisted and knotted and I couldn’t breathe. My eyes felt hot and stung with tears that caught in my throat. I thought I would get sued for every

44 penny I didn’t have. I also didn’t have insurance. My mother refused to put me on her insurance because it cost too much. Instead, she had doctored the insurance card to make it appear to be valid. “Just don’t get into an accident,” she had warned. At this very moment I thought the universe hated me. My head spun. I had no idea what to do as the man got out of his car to inspect his rear bumper. I just sat behind the wheel of the car and shook. After a few moments, I finally came to my senses and got out of the car. As I opened my mouth to apologize, no words came out. Instead, I sobbed at the man, heaved and wailed. I wanted to apologize, tried, but I couldn’t stop my uncontrollable bawling. The more I tried to calm down, the stronger the sobs became. I just couldn’t help it. I stood next to my car at the guardhouse and bawled while the man whose car I’d hit inspected his bumper. “There’s no damage,” he said after a cursory inspection and for a brief moment, I felt relief. But then another wave of emotion hit me. Careening into the back of this man’s car reminded me of the accident my sister and I had gotten into two winters prior. We had been late for school, and she hadn’t had time to warm up the car. She scraped a little patch on the windshield just enough for her to see out. I couldn’t see anything. The roads hadn’t been treated yet, and we still needed to pick up her classmate who lived deeper in the community. When my sister took a turn a little too fast, I reached around and put my seatbelt on. No one wore seatbelts back then. It hadn’t become a law yet. My sister’s driving that morning made me nervous, though. She drove too fast on the icy road, and I hated that she didn’t scrape the windshield enough. I held my book bag up in front of my face. Just in case. I couldn’t see anything anyway, but something told me doing this would protect me. As we rounded the curve to her classmate’s house, another car sped towards us, causing Heather to swerve a little. I felt the car lose traction as she veered to the left. The car slid off the road and

45 crashed hard into a tree. Into the one oak tree that stood just at the bend in the road. Her head smashed into the windshield, the glass now a huge web of spider cracks. As she opened the door to get out, she fell, having broken a small bone in her leg. She’d end up with a concussion, and the broken leg would put her out of commission for the upcoming track season. Weeks later, she’d still find pieces of glass in her scalp and hair. The EMTs arrived and loaded my sister into the ambulance. People from the neighborhood swarmed the scene. When my mother arrived, she seemed angry. “This brings back too many goddamned memories!” she shouted. I hadn’t thought about my father’s accident in years. As I stood next to her, looking at the rumpled mess of the tiny, red Mitsubishi, it dawned on me how lucky I was. If I hadn’t yanked my seatbelt on, I likely would have been thrown through the windshield, just like my dad had when he died. I came away with nothing more than a tiny bruise on my elbow along with the fear of being a passenger in any moving vehicle. For the next two years, I would sit in the back of the car whenever my sister drove. I would sit on my hands and look out the side window. I didn’t want to see anything in front of me.

46 Lessons from Under a Sleeping Volcano

I want to go back to that lake in Tacoma, the one just beyond the woods where we would watch fireworks on the Fourth of July, and squeal when the sand squished in our toes. At sunset, I could see Mount Rainier, the sleeping volcano surrounded by yellow and pink. Across the brown and lapping lake, I had watched this mountain under its blanket of snow, imagined its eyes closed and the lava inside keeping it warm and cozy. Don’t wake it up; don’t make it angry. I want to go back to Mount Rainier where the sky was so thick with blue it looked purple, almost like midnight. I was maybe five years old the day we all climbed in the snow, up the side of the mountain, in only our sneakers and gloveless hands. My family and me, and our neighbors, the Days -- Janet and Ricky and their mom and dad, Leslie and Rick. We had all driven out to Mount Rainier from the army base in Fort Lewis to climb up and wander through the mountain’s trails. (“Sleeping volcano!” my sister corrected.) We all followed my father into the woods on the hard-packed snow, while people on skis slossed and shushed down the groomed mountainside. I wore a heavy wool sweater the color of a fresh bruise that matched the cloudless and purple-blue sky. We hiked the snowy, sloping trail that wound through the mountain’s woods. Out of breath and out of energy, hands cold and stinging, we all stopped for a break somewhere in the middle. The fat and tall pine trees poked at the purple sky, and Janet, my friend, took off her coat. She wore only a short-sleeved t-shirt underneath. “You’re gonna get in trouble!” I warned. How could she take off her coat with all this cold snow around her? I didn’t want her to get yelled at. “I’m too hot,” she replied. I pushed my own sleeves up to my elbows and the bright white snow burned my eyes. A picture of us together shows Janet in her tiny shirtsleeves with a cartoon

47 drawing on the front and me in my heavy wool sweater. In the picture, she’s already more than a foot taller than me but she’s not even a year older. I’d always been small for my age. My mother often used the word “little” to describe me. “Jean, squeeze back in the corner; you’re little.” On the way home, I sat in the middle of the bench seat in the back of the car, squeezed in between my brother and sister with my feet on the hump. I looked out the back window of our little green Pacer and watched the midnight sky fade to light blue, watched the sleeping volcano get smaller and smaller, and then for a while, I probably slept, too. We stopped at a little shop where I watched the man behind the counter make blown glass art with his mouth and a metal toothpick. As he blew through a straw and twirled the liquid glass around and around on the little metal toothpick, a tiny pink trumpet had formed. It can’t be glass, I thought. It’s too melty and stringy and liquid. Glass is hard and flat and clear; this looked like melted sugar candy. I wanted to eat it. In this little shop my mother bought a clown with big blue feet, yellow pants and a white face. It was a happy clown that would later live on the hearth of the white brick fireplace once we moved to Olympia. I was four when we moved from the army base in Fort Lewis to Olympia. My dad still worked in the Army, but I never saw him in a uniform. He wore khakis and casual slacks and button- down shirts with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms. They were muscular and hairy, manly, and fatherly arms. On his right hand he wore a large college ring from Manhattan College, where he had earned a degree in Engineering. He didn’t drive trains, so I didn’t understand what being an “Engineer” really meant. He wore a silver watch that clasped around his thick wrist and when he took it off, I would play with it, wear it like a bracelet. It hung on my wrist like a gigantic silver bracelet. I had to push it all the way up to my elbow to make it fit. My father’s palms were soft, the knuckles cracked and dry. He smoked Kool cigarettes and often

48 smelled of smoke and stale beer, a smell I would later always associate with him. We were always surrounded by a cloud of smoke. My mother’s breath always smelled of cigarettes and stale coffee, a smell I would always associate with her. I want to go back to the year I turned five, to the Officer’s Club Beach near Tacoma where I pretended to swim. I held myself up in the shallow water with one arm, and then pretended to stroke while I switched hands. My father asked if I wanted to swim, and I said, “Yes! Look, I can swim!” But it wasn’t swimming at all. He scooped me up from the where I waded in three inches of water, took enough steps to be waist high and tossed me into the ocean. After that day, I didn’t hang around in three inches of water; I didn’t have to pretend to swim anymore. I want to go back to our garage door in Olympia where my brother would take me for rides. He would lift the garage door and tell me to hang on, and I’d dangle from the bottom of the door. And then he’d jump up and pull it back down, we’d ride down and then we’d jump off. “Again!” I’d shout. It was like floating or flying or both. That same year I got a new bike for Christmas – a two-wheeler with the big U-shaped handlebars and a black banana seat. The chain guard was painted in a colorful carnival scene, and the bike itself was the color of the sky on a bright sunny day. My mother had tested it out in our driveway on Quinault Drive in Olympia. She rode it in front of the open garage door, which was tucked up in its place, too high for me to jump up and dangle. She rode down the driveway and back up again, her butt cheeks spilling over the edges of the seat. My dad stood with me in the street, my sister by his side. I wondered when it would be my turn. When my mother deemed the bike ready for me to ride, she and my father held it and let me climb on.

49 My father took over, and my sister watched from behind. “What are you looking at?” he asked. My head was down, facing the front tire. “The tire.” I said. “That’s what Renee told me to do.” Renee was a third-grader in my brother’s class who lived in Tacoma. She and my sister had tried to teach me how to ride a bike. “Hold onto the handlebars,” Renee had said, “And peddle your feet. Look at the tire in front of you.” She had hair called “dirty blonde” and I wondered if that meant it would be “yellow blonde” if she washed it. She and my sister held the bike up for me as I pedaled. I didn’t so much as pedal as let the pedals move my feet. I didn’t know to put pressure down, and as my sister and Renee moved the bike along, the pedals moved on their own. “I won’t let go,” Heather had said, and she didn’t. But the heavy bike worked against her as she struggled to keep it upright, and I had no sense of balance. We didn’t get very far. But now with my dad teaching me, I had to unlearn what Renee had taught me. “No, no,” my father said. “Keep your head up and look at the road in front of you.” “Then how will I know where the tire will go?” “It will go where you’re looking,” he said. I started pedaling and he promised not to let go. I pedaled and pedaled until I heard my sister shout, “She’s doing it! She’s doing it!” I turned my head over my shoulder and saw my sister jump up and down, and the bike and I crashed in the street. My sister came running and made me get back on, while my father stood in the street and grinned. Behind him I could see a tiny and faint Mount Rainier, like a painting or a dream or the moon watching over me in the distance. My father watched his two daughters struggle together, the older one holding the younger one up and running behind, and then suddenly the younger one pedaling away.

50 Turning 35 Part I: Dream Chasing

“I’ve always wanted to run the New York City Marathon,” Heather said half to herself. It was my 35th birthday, and we were taping photographs of our mother onto poster board to display at her funeral. We had three posters to display. We called them “Pre-kid,” “Pre-teeth,” and “Post-teeth.” Pre-kid obviously held pictures of our parents together before any of us, my brother, sister, and me had been born. The Pre-Teeth photos we selected showed our mother with her crooked teeth. She hated her teeth and never smiled in her photographs, but these pictures showed the mother with whom we’d grown up, the mother who wore the plastic red Superman boots with the ¾ length fur coat. My sister and I hated those boots, but we remembered how much our mother had loved them. That picture went front and center on the Pre-Teeth Poster. The Post-Teeth pictures showed our mother after she’d gotten her teeth “done,” as she had called it. Our mother had had all of her teeth removed and replaced them with dentures. Her new smile changed the way her face looked. She seemed happier, smiled more often, showed her “teeth.” She no longer resembled the mother we’d known previously. In these pictures her hair had turned stark white. “Why don’t you?” I asked, referring to the New York Marathon my sister just mentioned. I kept my eyes on my work. Neither of us looked at each other. Making eye contact would have burst this very fragile bubble of conversation. My sister rarely shared her feelings. “I can’t run a marathon, are you nuts!” She stopped and looked up. “I’ll do it with you.” My eyes met hers. For a split second, running a marathon didn’t seem like that big of a deal. I don’t know what made me think it we could do it; I just knew that we could. We had run cross-country together in high school. The coach had allowed me to run

51 with the team during practice as an eighth-grader, but I had to wait until I became a freshman to compete, which happened to be my sister’s senior year. During a meet later that year, she’d snap her ankle, costing her the season. It would be the second time in less than two years that she’d break her leg and wouldn’t be able to run. My freshman year would be the only year I’d run cross-country in high school. “Seriously?” she asked. “Yes.” I wanted my sister to realize she could do anything she set her mind to. But more than anything, I wanted to her to have something for herself. She seemed sad, and often complained that her husband and kids demanded too much from her. She had told me once that her coach said she might make it to the Olympics one day if she kept at it. I think she must have forgotten about that life when she got married. She cooked, cleaned, ran errands, did the laundry, dropped her kids off at soccer practice, and went to football and little league games. She balanced the books for the construction company she and her husband owned. It left little time for hobbies or dream chasing. Running the New York City Marathon with my sister would bring us closer, I thought. How cool would it be, I thought, to do something most people wouldn’t even attempt to do, and be able to share such a unique experience with my sister? When I was a kid, I used to chase her around the block, and she’d never knew I was there, trying like hell to catch her. Now, I’d be able to run with her, by her side, and together, we’d accomplish something great. I took to training as soon as the weather broke in the early Pittsburgh spring. Dirty snow still slushed as cars drove past, but I didn’t care. I wanted to start running. I loved that I had something new to look forward to, and finally a way to connect with my sister. Stupidly, I started running with total blind ambition. I tried to remember my cross-country training, and thought I

52 could pick up where I left off. I started out going just two miles, but that didn’t seem like enough, so I doubled it the next day. On the way back home, my ankles began to burn. Each step felt like someone had whacked my ankles with a lead pipe. I gimped the last mile home. The shoes I had bought from the hunched over man at New Balance on Forbes Avenue were too big and too heavy. I didn’t know any better. It hadn’t dawned on me why the man walked hunched over, or that maybe he hadn’t given me the best the advice. I later returned the shoes for a smaller, more appropriate size, but I wouldn’t be able to run for a while. I’d sustained two sprained ankles and would be out of commission for two whole months. After I healed, I found a reputable running store where I learned that you’re only supposed to increase your distance by no more than 10 percent per week. I also learned that even though I had exchanged my shoes for a smaller size at New Balance, they were still way too heavy for my stature. “These are like running in cinderblocks,” the clerk said. “They’re meant for someone much heavier than you.” No wonder, I thought. They were terribly uncomfortable, and every time I took a step, I felt a shock of pain shoot up into my ankles. But I figured running came with a certain amount of aches and pains. When I told the clerk at the running store that I was training for a marathon, he asked, “Which one?” but I didn’t have an answer. “I’m just training, you know, building up. I’m not registered for anything yet.” Heather and I had decided that we wanted to build up to run the New York City Marathon, but we hadn’t actually chosen one to train for. We didn’t know any better. The clerk looked at me like I was nuts. “Oh,” he said, with a sideways glance and continued with my purchase. Sometimes on my runs, I’d envision myself running the New York City Marathon with my sister. We are together through the entire race, but then towards the end, she wants to quit

53 with only a few miles to go. Feeding off of the melodrama, I imagine myself holding her up and I carry her with me. Her arm is slung over my shoulder, and mine supports her waist. There is no way I will allow her not to finish this race, and I will not finish without her. In my daydream, we cross the finish line together, arm in arm. On the days that I feel sluggish or unmotivated, these fantasies play like a movie in my head, and empower me. I stand taller, shoulders back and relaxed, and I take longer strides. My arms pump and I feel invincible. I can do this. I can run the New York City Marathon. In the back of my mind, though, I kept expecting my sister to quit, or never even to begin. I’d send her emails and often leave messages informing her of my progress and asking about hers. She’d rarely respond to the emails, and seldom returned my calls. I worried that she never really intended to do it, that it was all just bravado. I had to force myself to trust that she was training, even though I hadn’t heard from her. Relief settled in when she finally called. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve just been really busy!” The training was going well, she said, and the tightness in my stomach loosened. She told me about the marathon training plan she found online and how she was following it with gusto. I told her about my sprained ankles and what I had learned at Elite Runners and Walkers, about the dog that chased me up a hill, and the farthest distance I’d gone. “There’s a small marathon in the Poconos in May,” she said. “Do you want to do it?” She asked. By then it was November, 2007. We had six months. We’d be ready, I thought. “Yes,” I said, and smiled. The thought of running our first marathon together made my muscles twitch with excitement. In only a few months, we’d be marathon runners.

54 Turning 35 Part II: Powerless

It was my 35th birthday and my mother had been dead for four days. She died undergoing a routine heart catheterization. My mother had all sorts of health issues, especially after she got older — cardio-pulmonary disease, heart disease, an aneurysm in her stomach. She had suffered her first heart attack at the age of 43 and had undergone five-way by-pass surgery before I graduated from college. My mother was only 59 when she died. I had mentioned that I thought it would be nice for the three of us — my sister, my brother and me, to go out to dinner to celebrate my birthday. That mom would have wanted us to “just get along for once.” “I don’t care that it’s your birthday!” my brother spat. “No one does. Everything’s always gotta be about you!” My brother shouted and pointed a stiff finger three inches from my face. “You’re the reason she’s dead!” I tried to smack his hand away, but like a child, he tried to grab onto it, twist it, break it maybe. I wanted to punch him in the face, break his nose, his jaw, his teeth. Smash his head on the floor. But instead I just stood there, unable to speak. I should have expected this from him, I thought, as a mushroom cloud of fury erupted between us. It seemed he needed someone to blame for her death, and instead of blaming the doctor that nicked an artery, causing her to bleed out, he blamed me. He didn’t blame my mother for continuing to take her blood thinners after her doctor told her to stop taking them three days prior to the procedure. He didn’t blame the allergic reaction she’d had to the anesthesia. For 35 years, he’d resented my existence, and I could never figure out why. I’d even asked my mother about him when I was a teenager. My brother had been in the Navy at the time,

55 and my sister was away at college. It was 1988, and I’d been reading Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard. I’d seen television commercials advertising the self-help book. It had drawn me in by the promise that if I read this book, I’d become a happy, well-adjusted individual. The book suggested that individuals who were unplanned or who were unwanted pregnancies had a tendency to be depressed, had low self-esteem, and had trouble making friends, among other things. He described the people in these categories as “aberrated.” I really had no idea what this word meant but I took it to mean someone who is “not-well,” or someone who had trouble being happy with him or herself. At the time, I had certainly fit the description. I wondered if maybe I was one of these people, someone who’d been unplanned or unwanted. Someone “aberrated.” I put the book down, and walked to the back of the house into our living room to where my mother lounged on the couch, watching TV. “Mom?” I said. She raised her eyebrows in acknowledgement, but didn’t look away from the television. “I need to ask you something difficult, and I want you to be completely honest with me. No matter what.” My heart pounded inside my chest, but I had to know. She swung her legs off the couch, making room for me to sit down next to her. “Uhm,” I started. Finding the right words to ask this question was harder than I thought. “I need to know something.” I paused again. “Uhm, Ok. Uhm.” I couldn’t get the words to come out. Then finally, “Was I an unplanned pregnancy? Please tell me the truth.” She took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said and looked down. I had half-expected the answer, and had braced myself for it, but still hearing the word, hearing her say it, deflated me. “When I found out I was pregnant,” she began. “I told your father, ‘Shit, I’m pregnant again. I need to get an abortion.’ But your father wouldn’t hear of it.” So L. Ron Hubbard was right. I was an unwanted pregnancy. I was, in fact, aberrated.

56 Then her face brightened and she said, “But then you came and everyone loved you.” She smiled at me as if we were in some kind of after-school special. I didn’t buy the response. It wasn’t enough. “Not Donald,” I said, still stinging from the initial response. I tried to pretend it hadn’t hurt. I could handle this, I told myself. I’d rather know the truth. She could tell I wasn’t satisfied with her answer. She sighed. “I was so sure you were going to be a boy,” she continued, “you already had a name.” My name would have been Joseph Thomas, JT for short, she told me. I’d already been nicknamed. “You were eight weeks early. You weighed only three and a half pounds and spent a few weeks in an incubator.” I already knew that part. She was avoiding the question. I wanted to know why my brother seemed to hate me ever since I was born. “So when we brought you home,” she said, “your brother asked, ‘What’s she doing here?’” My brother was not quite four and a half years old when I was born, and apparently had been expecting a little brother. He’d only been two years old when my older sister had arrived; his memory hadn’t fully developed. To him, she’d always been there. By the time I had arrived, he’d remember life prior to my arrival.

“You caused all the stress in her life that killed her!” My brother’s words shot at me with the precision of missiles. I wanted to pummel him, to beat him to a bloody lifeless heap for the things he said to me. But my fight or flight response wouldn’t engage; I couldn’t think, couldn’t speak. Couldn’t act on this visceral need to wrap my fingers around his throat, crush his

57 windpipe, to knock him to the ground, to make him choke, watch him gasp for breath. Watch him suffocate, just like he had suffocated me my whole life. I wanted him to suffer. “She didn’t care about you anyway!” It didn’t make sense. Either she cared about me, and I caused all the stress that killed her. Or, she didn’t care about me at all which meant that she wouldn’t have been affected by any of the stress that he claimed that I had caused. “You’re as disposable as an ex-girlfriend!” he shouted. I didn’t even know what that meant. “You’re married now so you’re not even an O’Neill anymore!” Every word that left his mouth was unfiltered, soaked in pure hatred, and meant to do more than just wound. Nothing he said made sense. Every cell in my brain came to a screeching halt, my mind full of static and noise. I couldn’t form a coherent thought let alone any words to defend myself. I stepped up close to him, my nose almost touching his. I glared deep into his greenflecked hazel eyes. I wanted him to know that I no longer feared him, that I would no longer cower before him. I stood face-to-face with him with not so much as a breath of air between us. I stood there, unwilling to break my gaze. Unwilling to swallow the lies and acid he spat at me. Unwilling to let him defeat me with his ugly, horrible words. With my shoulders back and my chest out, I held onto everything I knew about myself, everything I knew about him, and everything he didn’t know about me. In his eyes, I saw his fear, almost smelled it. I’d never stood up to him like this before. He didn’t know how to react. He turned and walked away. I turned after him, couldn’t let him walk away after everything he said. But I couldn’t bring myself to act either, couldn’t unleash the fury I felt inside — pent-up like a raging forest fire out of control. It filled me with white-hot blackness and hate. I stormed after him but he refused to acknowledge me. He grabbed his coat and slammed the door. Times like this made it

58 impossible for me to remember that anger comes from hurt, even though my own hurt fueled my anger toward him. I just didn’t know what I had done that had hurt him so badly. I crumpled into a chair and spewed a torrent of yowls, as my insides turned to blackened ash. “What was that all about,” my sister asked as I sat at her kitchen table and hiccupped, trying to stifle my sobs. “I don’t know why he hates me so much, Heather.” “I don’t know why, either,” she said. “For whatever reason, he says he just can’t stand you.” Inside my chest, I felt an emptiness as big as the Grand Canyon, as if an unbearable force had swallowed me whole. My brother’s ugly, hateful words had turned me inside out. I held onto myself and sobbed. That day I grieved for the loss of my family. I had to let them all go — my father who once told me he hated me and then died two years later without an apology, my mother who hadn’t wanted me to be born, and my brother whom I’d never have a relationship with because he just didn’t want one. Grief shredded my insides. A loss due to hatred hurts so much more than a loss due to death. Death is permanent; there’s nothing you can do about it. But trying to win the love of someone who simply wants nothing to do with you feels impossible.

59 Out of Commission

It’s mid-October of 2008, and I just ran four times around the lake at North Park, in the North Hills of Pittsburgh. It took me two hours, 43 minutes and 36 seconds to run exactly 20 miles. Excited about my fast time, I limp to my car to call my husband, to tell him how well I did on my run. He’ll be happy for me, I think. My shin throbs hard, as if I’d torn a muscle or maybe ripped some tissue. “I think I can run Philly fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon,” I say to him, ignoring the pain in my leg. “At this rate, I could even cruise the last 10k at a 10-minute mile and still qualify!” “Awesome!” he says. But what the heck is wrong with my shin? I wonder, and I’m afraid to tell him about that. “I’ll be home in a little bit,” I say, and end the call.

what’s called a “stress edema.” The MRI shows a white blob on my shin. The white blob is a sack of fluid caused by inflamed tissue on my shin, which is what is causing my pain. I’m not allowed to run until it’s healed, he says. I have to wear an “air cast” on my left leg, which will help to reduce the swelling by keeping pressure on my shin. I have pushed myself too hard, forced my body beyond its limits. Had I just been naïve to think that I could run six to eight or even nine miles a day every day? I love coming home from work, lacing up my shoes, and heading out the door, especially in the early fall when the leaves change colors on the trees. I love the contrast of orange and red against the bright blue and cloudless sky. The way the sky turns pink as dusk begins to settle over the town. I love the first

60 quarter mile downhill jaunt from my house through the cozy backstreets of Mount Lebanon, but despise the half-mile long hill on Cochran Road I need to climb that takes me to the main road, linking Mount Lebanon with Bethel Park, another suburb further away from the city of Pittsburgh. I often wonder if the hill on Cochran Road is anything like Heartbreak Hill in Boston. One day, I’ll find out, I hope. Sometimes Cochran Road seems impossible to climb, gravity pulling on me as if I have an anvil chained to my waist. Other days, I feel great, and bound up the hill as if my feet are made of Flubber. Once I get up the hill, I can take Washington Road to the Galleria Mall. Or I can turn onto Mount Lebanon Boulevard, and run past the McDonald’s and the Wendy’s, cross over the T-tracks and smell the pizza as I turn the corner at the Pizza Hut. It always smells like bread dough, Italian spices, and red sauce. Smells that make me salivate. For my longer, fifteen or twenty mile runs, I prefer to go to North Park Lake. Each lap around the lake is five miles, and it’s safer there. If I need to stop for whatever reason, my car is never far. I can compete with or join other runners. Water fountains and bathrooms are abundant and generally clean. When I run at North Park, I don’t need to worry about stoplights or getting hit by cars. And the rolling hills keep it interesting, but not too difficult — just the opposite of Cochran Road. My doctor says the injury is from “overuse,” meaning I run too much and don’t rest enough. But I don’t want to rest. I can’t rest. If I stop running, I might not start again. Getting started is always the hardest part. But once I get out there, feet pounding on pavement, my breaths rhythmic (in two three, out two three,) with every step I feel invincible. I like to imagine I’m an Olympic athlete, or that I could actually be fast enough to make the US Olympic

61 Marathon Team one day. It’s a silly daydream, but fun to think about as I speed past pedestrians on the busy boulevard in Mount Lebanon. When my sister and I finished our first marathon earlier in the year, I caught the addiction. I had run the 2008 Pocono Run for the Red Marathon in four hours and three minutes. Not bad for a newbie.

Running has now become my drug. It makes me feel normal, keeps me sane. Running lets me shake off my negative energy like a cat whips its tail. I love it best when the sun is out, or when I’ve had a shitty day at work. I like to imagine scenarios in my head where I replay a conversation I had and change it to what I wish I would have said. I run hard and fast on those days. Arms pumping, chest heaving, eyes focused on a spot in the distance — usually the top of a hill, an intersection, or on the next turn I’ll make. Anger is often my fuel. The running becomes secondary, like breathing. I can run for miles and get lost in my own thoughts before I realize how far I’ve gone. But now, it’s late-October, and I’ve been out of commission for the past two weeks. The 2008 Philadelphia Marathon is only three weeks away, but the tremendous pain and swelling in my right shin and ankle still hasn’t subsided, bringing my training to a standstill. The mental lubricant achieved through running now sits stagnant, cold. It longs for that crisp fall day, blue sky the color of azure, orange and red leaves still clinging to life as they hold fast to their branches. The weather outside is perfect for running, crisp and clear with a slight breeze and a chill. Yet here I sit, sloth-like, disgusting, disgusted. The beautiful day wastes away before me as I lie sideways, going in and out of consciousness. Bad TV serenades me, lulls me to

62 sleep. The front door remains closed. I don’t want to see the beauty on the other side of it. The light of day fades to night, and I am still in the same position. Frustration builds along with laziness, self-doubt, and worst of all, self-pity. I need to run. My source of self-worth and self-esteem diminishes before me as I sit motionless on the couch. The one thing I am good at, the one thing that gives me a sense of accomplishment, the one thing I can tell myself, “I am better than you think I am,” suddenly slips away. But I’ve worked too hard and come too far not to run the 2008 Philadelphia Marathon, not to qualify for the Boston Marathon. Two weeks before the Philadelphia Marathon my doctor tells me I can start running again, but he strongly urges me not to run the marathon. I ignore him, thinking I’m fine. My leg has healed and I need to get back to training. I buy new running shoes, which is Rookie Mistake Number One. I later learn that you shouldn’t wear brand new running shoes the week before a marathon. They need at least three or four weeks to be broken in. I know this, but ignore the rule, thinking a twenty-miler on my treadmill the weekend before the marathon ought to do the trick, which is Rookie Mistake Number Two. It’s the middle of November now, and snowing. I don’t want to ruin my new shoes. Running on the treadmill isn’t the issue. Running twenty miles the weekend before a marathon is. I didn’t find out until later that three weeks before a marathon, you’re supposed to “taper” your long runs. Tapering means you do your last twenty-miler, then the following week drop your long run to thirteen miles, and then down to no more than ten miles the week before the marathon. Tapering helps your body to restore glycogen, and gives your muscles, bones, and joints a chance to rejuvenate. I think it’s odd that I didn’t have any of these issues when Heather and I ran our first marathon. But I also wasn’t pushing myself as hard then.

63 After about sixteen miles on the treadmill, my right foot turns inward at an awkward angle. I can’t make it go straight, and if I try, searing pain shoots up my ankle. Despite the pain, I keep gimping along until I hit twenty miles. I ignore the “listen to your body” rule, which is Rookie Mistake Number Three. The “stop running if you feel acute pain” rule. I’ll be fine, I tell myself. It’ll go away. I hope. I start the Philadelphia Marathon with gusto, but my heart aches a little because my sister isn’t with me. She sustained a stress fracture and can’t run. But she’s watching for me with my niece by the thirteen-mile mark. I run the first half of the marathon at a qualifying pace, racing at faster than 8:30 minutes per mile. When I see my sister she hoots and hollers and shakes a pink and purple pom-pom at me as I run past. I get choked up and want to cry because we should be running together. I breathe deeply to loosen the vice grip my emotions have clamped around my chest. At mile fifteen severe pain shoots up my right ankle. Both of my knees are on fire. I stop to walk at mile 23. I start to run again at mile 24. By “run,” I mean limp with a hop. I’m running at barely 12 minutes per mile. Almost a walker’s pace. As I cross the finish line, I am scooped up by two medical personnel and hoisted onto a gurney. I don’t go through the finisher’s corral. I don’t get my Mylar heat blanket. I don’t get my medal. I don’t get my dignity. I took four hours and fifteen minutes to finish, more than ten minutes longer than it took me to run my first marathon. I cry from pain and I cry from shame. This is what rookie mistakes and arrogance got me. But my sister tells me she’s proud of me, hugs me, and then goes to get my medal and Mylar blanket while I wait to be evaluated in the medical tent.

64 Next time, I tell myself. I’ll get it next time. I cross my fingers and hope that I don’t do anything stupid next time.

65 Suddenly Celiac

My sister Heather and I met up her old college roommate at Pamela’s Diner in Pittsburgh the day after we’d just run the 2009 Pittsburgh marathon. They hadn’t seen each other in over 20 years, and I enjoyed watching them catch up. We ate Potatoes Lyonnais and drank horrible coffee, and then my sister mentioned having a strange lump in her throat. She told us that didn’t want to go to a doctor. “Maybe it’ll just go away,” she said. As if trying to change the subject, she reached into her oversized purse and asked, “Does anyone want any bacon or sausage?” Both her roommate and I half expected her to pull out a full plate of perfectly cooked breakfast meats from her handbag. It seemed she had everything in there. But she didn’t fool us. After a good laugh, we were back on track, and convinced her that ignoring the lump wouldn’t make it go away. The following week, my sister saw a doctor. It turned out she had a disease called Celiac-Sprue, a genetic digestive disorder that prevents the small intestine from absorbing nutrients whenever gluten is consumed. Gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley, malt, oats, and rye, was the culprit. Whenever Heather ate anything containing those ingredients, the villi in her small intestines became inflamed. Over time, gluten would eventually destroy the lining of her intestines making it impossible for her to absorb the nutrients she needed to survive. Without proper nutrition, Heather’s body struggled to produce red blood cells. Even though she ate regularly, her body couldn’t process the food she ate. She was essentially malnourished. If she continued to eat products containing gluten, it would lead to a whole host of other health problems. Her immune system would become weak and eventually shut down making her susceptible to all sorts of viral and bacterial infections and all sorts of cancers. Even organ failure was a possibility.

66 “Thank God,” Heather later said with a sigh of relief. “It’s not cancer.” Earlier in the year, Heather had slipped and fallen in her garage, and as she threw her arms back to break the fall, her wrist broke. It had just snapped. After learning that her bones had weakened from not producing the red blood cells she needed, it all started making sense. No wonder, she thought. It was all related. A gluten-free diet was the cure. No more bread, no more pasta. No more pizza, cakes, cookies, or pies. No more beer. No more eating out at restaurants for fear of cross-contamination, or using utensils or food prepared on surfaces that had touched something containing gluten. The smallest of crumbs is enough to cause the body to shut down the villi in the small intestine. No more batter-dipped, deep-fried anything. No more buns on burgers or even French fries if they’re fried in the same oils as breaded and battered items. Salad. She can have salad as long as they don’t put croutons on it. She would need to make sure wait staff understood what it means to be gluten-intolerant. Thankfully it’s a little easier these days as more people are being diagnosed, and more restaurants are providing gluten-free menus, and educating their servers and food preparers. For the rest of her life, my sister must read the label on everything. The law requires all ingredients to be listed and if a product contains any of the major allergens like wheat, soy, milk or tree nuts, it must be highlighted. It baffled me to find out things like chicken stock and soy sauce contained wheat. Products containing “modified food starch” are “questionable.” Best to just avoid those altogether. Which leaves out pretty much everything. Thank God for chocolate and ice cream. They’re still safe as long as they don’t have additives like cookie pieces or bits of cake or pretzels in them. My sister accepted her fate, and after a year of being gluten free, she began to feel better.

67 Later that year, just before the 2010 Pittsburgh Marathon, I injured my knee and it was taking forever to heal. My knee had popped when I pushed back into child’s pose one day while I stretched. This time my orthopedist told me I had Osteoarthritis, Patellar Tendonitis and Fat Pad Impingement. I’d already dealt with two stress fractures, constant shoulder and neck pain, simultaneous sprained ankles, stress edema and Iliotibial Band Syndrome, which is an inflammation of the thick band of connective tissue that runs from the outside of the hip to just below the knee. I couldn’t understand why I kept sustaining more injuries. I struggled through two other marathons after Pittsburgh. In both Seattle and Chicago, I had no energy and felt bloated as if I’d swallowed a sock full of wet cement. Stomach cramps became constant and relentless. I started to hate running. I’m not good at this anymore, I thought. Why couldn’t I run as fast I used to? And why, for the love of God, did I always feel like I hadn’t slept in weeks? I asked my primary care doctor to check my thyroid levels again. Having had my thyroid irradiated 15 years prior due to Grave’s Disease, it had to be what was causing these issues, or at least it would explain why I felt so lethargic and sluggish all the time. I felt like someone had pulled my plug and I simply couldn’t function. I constantly struggled to stay awake, head lolling to and fro with eyelids as heavy as garage doors that kept slamming shut. “Your thyroid levels are fine,” my doctor told me. “But let’s do a full CBC panel and see if something else comes up.” A few days later, results indicated a low red blood cell count. Other test results were flagged as too high or too low. Without knowing their meaning, these results clearly indicated that something was obviously wrong.

68 Low red blood cell count. Immediately, I thought of my sister. Could I have Celiac’s Disease, too? It is genetic, after all, and it made sense. I emailed my doctor and told him about my sister. Another blood test and a biopsy later indicated I tested positive for the disease. It came as a huge relief and an utter disappointment. I’d feel better soon, but no more beer. No more beer ever again, I realized as my heart sank like a brick landing squarely with a thud in the bottom of my stomach. The year before, friends had asked, “Would you rather give up ice cream or beer if you had to choose?” I can’t remember which I chose, but I never expected I’d ever have to give up either one. They’d both been staples of my not-so-healthy diet for as long as I could remember. But after only a few weeks of being gluten-free, I actually began to feel better. My stomach didn’t hurt and I had energy. My moods evened out, and I felt happy. Strangely enough, my knee didn’t seem to bother me as much, either. Had it actually begun to heal? When I’d registered for the 2011 Boston Marathon that previous October, I hoped that my knee would have healed in time for the race. Marathon Monday is always the third Monday in April, but by the time I had been cleared to start running again that February, I’d had little, if any, time to train. The longest run I’d done was only ten miles. In order to run competitively, I needed at least two or three good twenty-milers under my belt, which I knew wouldn’t happen. But I wanted my bib number and t-shirt, and we’d already bought the plane tickets. I reasoned that I just wanted to get away for a few days. I had earned my bib. I wanted it. Once my husband and I arrived in Boston, the wheels began to turn and I made up my mind. I had been clever enough to pack my running gear knowing I’d want to run at least once or twice while we were there. Just a small ten miler, and perhaps to see what Heartbreak Hill would

69 be like. What’s the difference, I thought, if I do my long run from the start of the marathon in Hopkinton? “You’ll regret it,” my friends had said. “You haven’t trained.” Like I needed the reminder. Ten miles is a far cry from 26.2. Despite everyone’s warnings, one thought continued to haunt me. When will I ever get this opportunity again? Probably never, I thought. Since the Boston Athletic Association had recently made it harder to qualify by tightening the qualifying times, I didn’t think I’d ever get the chance to run Boston again. To qualify again, I’d need to run another certified marathon in less than three hours and forty minutes, and I didn’t think I’d be able to do it again. It just seemed too hard. I promised my husband, who supported me, albeit with reservations, that I would take it slow, and would go only as far as I could. “I will carry my phone and call you if I need to quit,” I said. “Deal,” he said. Race day was blustery, and a little rainy to start but as I headed to the starting line, the temperature rose to a brisk 55 degrees, and the sun poked through the overcast sky. Little by little the clouds broke apart to reveal the azure blue behind them. It was going to be a beautiful day. Ten miles in, I called my husband, as promised. “I feel great!” I told him. And it was true. I kept going. My feet felt like they were gliding on air; running took no effort at all. Ten miles turned into the half, and the half turned into 15 miles. By mile 18 I realized I’d have less than two miles before I reached the infamous Heartbreak Hill.

70 I kept my promise of going slow, yet the energy stores I still had left overwhelmed me. The crowds invigorated me with their shouts of “You got this!” and “You’re doing great!” I felt like a rock star as they’d reach out to slap my hand as I ran past. At mile 20, I strode effortlessly up a steady and gradual incline. “Is this the hill?” I asked a spectator. I was shocked at how easily I ran up the famous “Heartbreak Hill,” the name coined by Boston Globe Sportswriter, Jerry Nason. In the 1936 Boston Marathon, 2nd place runner, John Kelley overtook Ellison Brown assuming he would fade before reaching the top. Kelly tapped him on the shoulder as he passed which only motivated Brown to regain the lead. In the end, Brown won the race, thus “breaking Kelley’s heart.” My own heart swelled as I reached the top of the hill knowing I had only a 10k to go. Only 6.2 miles. There was no way I would quit now. I’ve got this; my mantra was solid. It took me five hours and ten minutes to complete the 115th Boston Marathon on April 18th, 2011. I had only trained for ten miles, and still managed to finish with little struggle. It wasn’t the running that I hated. It was the gluten. So, goodbye, beer, I’ll certainly miss you. Goodbye bread and pasta, cakes and pies; it was nice knowing all of you. But as far as I’m concerned, nothing tastes as good as I feel.

71 This Medal

I wear my 2013 Boston Marathon finisher’s medal close to my heart, its memory bittersweet. I had trained hard and smart to qualify for this race, earning my spot by running the 2012 Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pennsylvania in less than three hours and 36 minutes. In order to qualify as a 41-year-old woman, I only needed to finish in three hours and 45 minutes. I’d beaten my qualifier by almost ten minutes — something I’d hoped for and worked hard to achieve, but never really expected to do. The night before the 2013 Boston Marathon, my sister had driven from Northeast Pennsylvania all the way to Boston just to see me run the next day. I had planned to run Boston on my own. Separated from my husband for almost two years, I had only recently started dating someone, and didn’t feel comfortable asking him to come. My sister, who hadn’t been able to qualify for Boston, wanted me to have someone to hug at the finish line. Being a runner herself, she knows how important it is to have someone to support you not only on the sidelines but at the finish line as well. “You can’t run Boston by yourself!” she had scolded me when I told her I’d be going it alone. “Of course I’ll be there!” she had said. She had already planned to make the ten-hour drive and wanted to surprise me. Both of us being Celiacs, she brought gluten-free pasta with her, gluten-free cookies, protein bars, snacks and chips. She wanted to make sure I had enough to eat. She lugged a cooler packed with Gatorade and several bottles of water. After we noshed on the food, we looked at the course map. “Heartbreak Hill is between Mile 20 and 21,” I said. That’s where I wanted her to be. I wanted her to see me run up the hill.

72 “But I want to see you more than just once!” she complained. It would be difficult to traverse the city with spectators numbering in the tens of thousands, and navigating an unfamiliar city around road closures. We scoured over my information packet to find where the “cheering sections” were located, and used Google Maps to determine a route that would work for her to drop me off at the start in Hopkinton, which was twenty six miles west of the city — about a 45 minute drive, we figured. I laid out my gear, pinned my runner’s number to the shirt I would wear the next day, and packed my bag of clothes that I’d change into after the race. I didn’t want to waste any time in the morning. I set my alarm, and checked that it was on at least three times before finally deciding and trusting that it was actually set. I wrote in my journal, and read for a bit before fitfully falling to sleep. When the alarm went off, I awoke uneasy, nervous. It’s how I always awoke the morning before a big race. I wanted to do well, have a good day, a good race. I hoped the weather would be OK, hoped it wouldn’t rain. Hoped I wouldn’t have any stomach issues or injuries. Hoped I had prepared for Murphy’s Law. After a gluten-free bagel and a banana, we were off. The city disappeared behind us as the four lane highway turned into a two lane rural route. The occasional ranch house or farm dotted the landscape between trees. The quiet ride to the starting line felt long. We chit chatted about nothing in particular; I barely listened, barely responded. I worried instead, that I’d be late. Hopkinton seemed a world away from Boston. Part of my race day routine included worry. Once we arrived in Hopkinton, my sister dropped me off at the Runner’s Village where I’d wait another hour for the race to start. She hugged me and wished me good luck. The next time I’d see her would be on Heartbreak Hill. My worry switched gears and morphed into

73 excitement. This would be my second Boston Marathon. I was healthy and injury free. It would be a good day. Patriot’s Day, also known as Marathon Monday is a Boston holiday. The Boston Red Socks always play at home, and no one goes to work. The small town of Hopkinton is no different. People line the streets with coolers packed with beer and booze, and everyone who isn’t running is usually drunk or well on their way by 9:00am. My nerves shake loose as I find my groove, my rhythm, my pace. I don’t need to remind myself to have fun; the crowd is a big enough reminder. They all scream and cheer and shout and clang cowbells and blow horns. Some hold up funny signs that say things like, “If a marathon were easy, it’d be called Your Mom!” and “You trained for this longer than Kim Kardashian was married!” I absorb their hoots and hollers like fuel. Under my feet, the miles pass as if someone sped up the earth. At mile thirteen, the hallway point, I pass what’s known as the Wellesley Scream Tunnel, where the young women of Wellesley College all lean out for hand slaps, and I’m happy to oblige. They all hold up sign saying, “Kiss me, I’m single!” or “Kiss me, I’m a Runner, too!” It’s my favorite part of the race. The excitement and enthusiasm they exude is enough to make me run on air. I ramp up my pace a little, exhilarated and energized by the never-ending crowd that snakes along the entire 26. 2-mile course. If I push it, I might be able to qualify for my next Boston at Boston. You don’t just qualify once to run Boston. Each year, you must requalify with a new race, which is no small task. With its constant rolling hills, the Boston Marathon is a tough course. In order to finish with a qualifying time, I’d really need to push myself hard. But I

74 remind myself first and foremost to enjoy the race and the beautiful day. The sky is overcast, but it doesn’t rain. It’s a good day. I reach Heartbreak Hill and scan the crowd for my sister. I search left and right, but I don’t see her anywhere. The hill is a mile long, and I feel my energy drain as I look for her. I need to focus, conserve strength. By the time I reach the top of the hill, I still haven’t seen her. My heart breaks a little, but I can’t do anything about it but move on. Just a 10k to go, 6.2 miles, and I’ll have completed my second Boston Marathon. I’m pushing myself even harder now. The finish line is getting closer. The Grim Reaper holds a sign near Mile 25 that says, “The End is Near,” and it makes me smirk. At this point, I certainly feel like death, that’s for sure. But I still have the energy to smile, and still feel like it’s been a good race, a good day. I cross the finish line after three hours and 52 minutes, and I’m OK with that. I enjoyed myself, which is what I had set out to do. But the beautiful day turns blustery and cold. Wind rips at the Mylar sheath that a volunteer has draped around my shoulders, and I shake with cold. I pull my nearly dead cell phone from my back pocket and text my sister to let her know I finished. I finished! 3:51:36. Where are you? I ask. At the corner of Boyleston and Arlington. My phone’s about to die, she responds. OK, I’ll find you, I text back. About 15 minutes later, I find my sister just where she said she’d be. She runs over to me, hugs me and cries. “I’m so proud of you!” she says, hugging me, and then BA-BOOM! Something explodes like canon fire at the other end of the street. We jerk our heads toward the noise and see smoke

75 billowing from a building, just across from where I had crossed the finish line not more than 15 minutes earlier. “What the fuck was that!” I shout, watching the billowing white smoke cloud over the finish line. “Oh, they always do that,” a woman standing next to me says. She is dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt; she’s not a Boston runner. “They always set off a canon or something like that, don’t they?” “Not while the race is still going! Not while there are runners still finishing!” BA-BOOM! Siren screams flood the air; police cruisers rush off, wailing, their lights flashing. Policemen on foot shuffle us off the streets, away from the commotion, away from the explosion. Finishers like me draped in our Mylar sheaths run to the back of the street, as fast as our exhausted bodies will allow to get away from the smoke. I text my boyfriend back in Pittsburgh. Turn on the news. Some asshole just bombed a building. Find out what’s going on. Are you OK? He responds. Yes, I’m fine. And then my phone goes dead. My sister and I make our way to an open restaurant, hoping to get something to eat, get something to drink, and to find out what the hell just happened. A man in the entranceway has an iPhone plugged into an outlet.

76 “Can I borrow that please?” I ask. He sees I am a Boston finisher, and quickly releases his charger, handing it to me. My sister heads into the bar area, to watch the news, to see if she can find out what happened. She returns in tears, a look of shock locked on her face. “People…are…dead,” she says, weeping. And then she hugs me. Her tears and weeps turn into full-on sobs. “Someone planted a bomb! And three people,” she chokes, “three people are dead!” Her chest heaves and her tears soak my neck. “That could have been you!” she cries, over and over. “That could have been you!” I hold her and hug her and tell her I’m fine, we’re fine. We’re OK. My head swims a little, and then I can’t breathe. It could have been me. And I had such a good day. I reach up and touch my finisher’s medal that hangs around my neck. It’ll be weeks before I can even begin to comprehend what I was just a part of. Later, we’ll find out that the number of casualties was a lot higher than three. At the airport, while waiting for my flight home to Pittsburgh, I pull up to a barstool to order a glass of wine, and the emotional impact of the previous day’s tragedy finally hits. I see the news, and I begin to cry. I’m wearing my Boston Marathon shirt, and the woman next to me says, “Oh my God, you were there.” She gives me a hug, and then tells the bartender she’s buying. You can tell who we are, the runners of the 2013 Boston Marathon. We head to our gates at the airport, wearing our Boston yellow and blue. We wear it like a badge of honor and courage and strength, now more so than ever. It connects us, forever links us like quicksilver. We don’t ask each other, “How was your race? Did you make your goal? What was your time?” Instead, we acknowledge each other with a nod; we smile a sad smile. Sometimes we say,

77 “Glad you are safe,” followed by “Were you able to finish?” or “Where were you when it happened?” These are not the right questions to ask.

In the weeks that follow, I continue to watch the news, follow the story of the Boston Bomber until the younger one is caught. And still I feel rage. I feel rage because this medal I wear is no longer a symbol of pride and accomplishment. It hangs around my neck; the bright blue and yellow ribbon cuts into my skin with its weight from the sadness it holds. I wear it for the dancer who lost her foot, for the man who lost both of his legs. I wear it for the 29-year-old restaurant manager, for the graduate student from China. I wear it for every ounce of pain, for every lost life, for every single scratch, cut, bump and bruise caused by an exploding pressure cooker filled with hate. I wear my finisher’s medal like an amulet that gives light and strength and courage and resolve. With it and through it, I send them all my love. I wear it for the shivering woman I gave my extra sweatshirt to who had only a Mylar sheath draped over her bare goose-fleshed shoulders. I wear it for every runner who was unable to finish, who stood freezing in the cold wind, somewhere along the marathon route wondering why they had stopped, wondering what on Earth had happened.

I wear my finisher’s medal for Bill Richard, who earned his own medal just moments before his family was torn apart by flying shrapnel. For his brain-damaged wife and for his daughter who lost a limb. For his son, especially for his son, Martin Richard, the boy who lost his life as he ran to tell his mother that his father had finished, this boy who once held up a colorful sign full of hand-drawn block letters that said No more hurting people. Peace.

78 This young boy had it right. He knew that everyone deserves the right to life, the right to live, and the right to be happy. This eight-year-old boy must have known compassion and unconditional love in a way that many adults struggle to understand, like my own mother. The daughter of an orphan, my mother had difficulty showing affection and love. Her mother, my grandmother, had been raised by nuns and had grown up in a Catholic convent after her parents, my great-grandparents, had both died of Influenza. As much as the nuns cared for my grandmother, I don’t think they could provide her with the same love that a mother feels for her child. I’m sure my grandmother loved her two daughters as much as any mother loves her children; she just didn’t know how to show it. And I think my own mother never learned how, either. Maybe Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the two brothers who had planted those bombs at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, had never felt the same kind of love Martin Richards had probably known. Perhaps if they had, maybe they would have thought twice about the consequences of their actions and the lives they destroyed that day. But nothing will ever make up for such a horrific deed — not prison, not even their own deaths. They will never be forgiven. Not by me, not by anyone.

79 Like Father, Like Daughter

I know I shouldn’t drive drunk; it’s dangerous and incredibly stupid. But sometimes it happens. When I leave the bar or my boyfriend’s house, I’ll feel fine, not intoxicated at all, but then when I get on the road, I’ll realize that I’m really not OK. It’s like leaving the house without your glasses. You see fine inside the house, maybe because you are accustomed to the inside of your own house, but then when you get into the car and start to drive, you realize you really can’t see as well as you thought you could. I wonder if that’s how my dad felt when he left the “afterwork” party the night he died. My father had only worked for Minolta Business Systems for about two weeks before he died. I’m not even sure what he did there. All I know is that his office had thrown some kind of after-work party the night he died. I don’t know where the after-work party happened. Perhaps they had an office party — people drank in their offices back then. Or maybe there had been a happy hour at a local bar. Maybe they were celebrating something, like sealing the deal with a big client. Congratulations on a job well done, maybe. My Uncle Gerry, Dad’s youngest brother, told me that my father had taken someone home after the party, but he was alone when he died. This means that this other person made it home safely before my father turned the car the wrong way onto a four-lane road. My Aunt Kathleen would later tell me that my father disabled the wires connected to the seat belts so the car wouldn’t “ding” when he drove without his seatbelt. I knew he never wore a seatbelt, and I wonder if wearing one would have done him any good. It was actually the impact of his body hitting the steering wheel that killed him. The speed at which he drove must have far exceeded the speed limit, because the impact of the head-on collision with a van threw him through the

80 windshield. He was probably already dead at that point. My sister told me he died of a “hemothorax” — where the heart fills with blood after a traumatic impact, but I don’t know how she knows this. She said she saw it on the death certificate, but she can’t seem to find it. She can’t find the accident report either. I’ve gotten lucky on more occasions than I care to count. Once, back in the late nineties, my boss threw me a going-away party at a local bar. I had gotten promoted from Assistant Manager to Sales Manager, and I’d be moving to Martinsville, Virginia to run my own record store. My boyfriend had driven to the bar, knowing I’d be drinking quite a bit. I liked to party, and being promoted was cause for me to celebrate. Several Snakebites later (shots of Yukon Jack and lime juice) I found myself on the toilet in the ladies room. I had fallen asleep on the commode — with the door open. Mortified, I pulled myself together and washed my hands. As I stared at myself in the mirror, I repeated to myself, “Be sober, be sober, be sober.” My boyfriend, knowing that he’d need to drive us home later, thought a few drinks wouldn’t hurt, and had a few celebratory shots with me, along with several beers. But by the time we left, my boyfriend confessed he’d had too much to drunk. I’d have to drive us home. I knew in my heart that I shouldn’t be driving, and part of me vaguely remembers mentioning that to the people in my group. Part of me also vaguely remembers my boss (or someone else) saying, “Oh, you’re fine.” Perhaps I wanted to appear sober, or appear that I could handle my liquor. Perhaps I didn’t want my boss to know how drunk I actually was, even though he had been the one who bought most of the shots I drank. Maybe that’s why no one questioned it when I slid into the driver’s seat of my boyfriend’s car. I yanked on the seatbelt, mad that I had to drive when he’d promised to be my designated driver. I was taking a huge risk.

81 As I pulled out onto Route 550 in Bellefonte, PA, a small working-class town in the middle of Pennsylvania, I remember my grip on the wheel — my fingers felt slippery, and I was afraid to let go. My vision was so impaired that I prayed, please get me home, please get me home, as I aimed to stay between the four sets of lines that appeared on the windy two-lane road. “If you have to drive drunk,” someone once told me, “aim for the middle.” It was both good advice and a death wish all at once – it taught me that drunk driving was OK as long as you knew how to do it. “How am I driving?” I asked my boyfriend, who sat beside me in the passenger seat of his own car, my fingers wrapped so tightly around the wheel, they may have well been wired there. Terror kept my eyes wide-open and unblinking. “You’re doing fine,” he said. He had had more to drink than he had planned and didn’t want to risk driving. I’d been elected to drive simply because of my ability to appear sober. He didn’t think I was “that bad,” he said, but surely he wasn’t nearly as intoxicated as me. And now it was up to me to get us home. At best we’d make it home safely. At worst, we’d both end up dead and I didn’t want that responsibility. The drive home seemed to take forever, each passing second feeling longer than a minute. There wasn’t much to see on the dark, rural, two-lane road in Bellefonte, and I wasn’t paying attention to scenery. Being as drunk as I was, my vision blurred and doubled everything I looked at. I needed to choose which lines to stay between, to know which lines were real, and which ones were hallucinations. I prayed and aimed for the blackness in the middle, the blackness between the yellow lines on my left, and the blackness between the white lines on my right. I needed to pee, which only made my ability to drive that much worse. I maintained the speed limit as exactly as possible, which probably looked suspicious. I don’t know anyone who

82 drives the exact speed limit unless they’re up to something. Lucky for me, there didn’t seem to be any cops or sobriety checkpoints out that night. An occasional car drove toward me, blinding me with its headlamps, lighting up the road momentarily, and then burning spots in my eyes. Route 550 in Bellefonte runs mostly through farmland; we seldom passed any houses, which meant pure blackness for most of the way. After reaching 322, the main highway to State College, where we lived, it was a little easier to see. This highway was well lit, but it was also more heavily travelled, which meant a greater chance of being pulled over. We made it home without incident, and I thanked God as soon as I parked the car outside our apartment. It wasn’t the last time I’d get lucky. Another time happened just after my brother’s wedding in 2000. I wasn’t drunk, but I was drinking while driving. I had an open bottle of beer in my car, and I snuck gulps here and there — at stoplights, or when I knew there were no other drivers around (especially cops) on my way back to the hotel for that in-between time after the wedding but before the reception. This was a practice I had perfected after I had graduated from college at Penn State. At the time, I was still living in State College, where I worked at a record store by day, and by night, I hit the bars with my friend Michelle. We’d do a shot or two before we left the house, and grab a beer for the road. We knew how to sneak it. Sometimes we’d transfer the contents into a “sippy cup” and we never got caught. I didn’t get caught after my brother’s wedding, either, but drinking a beer in the car as I drove back to the hotel had upset a lot of people, my mother especially. “Are you stupid!” she had yelled. “What if you had gotten caught?” “I was fine!” I argued back. I knew what I was doing, I’d said. But she was right. It was remarkably stupid.

83 The last time I got lucky was on April 24th, 2013, several boyfriends and a defunct marriage later. It also happened to be one day shy of the 33rd anniversary of my father’s accident, a little tidbit I kept tucked in the back of my mind. That night, I had been at my boyfriend’s house in the South Side area of Pittsburgh, and we’d had a couple glasses of wine. I hadn’t eaten much, and the glasses were large. Two glasses each emptied an entire bottle. I grabbed a diet Pepsi for the road, and said goodnight to Ed. I felt OK, trusted myself that I could drive, didn’t feel the need to question it. I like to drive fast. I like to zip in and out of traffic in my little MINI Cooper and get to where I’m going as quickly as possible. I push my luck. When I left Ed’s house that night, I got on the Parkway East and headed toward Monroeville. The Squirrel Hill tunnel project had been an ongoing endeavor, although I never saw any work actually being done. The “reduced speed” construction signs were covered with a black tarp, yet they had blinking lights on top. I sped into the left lane, and ignored the speed limit. I slammed on the brakes and realized construction crews up ahead were actually working that night. A moment later, blue and red blinking lights appeared in my rearview mirror, at a distance. A Pepsi delivery truck matched my speed in the right lane. I needed to get around it in order to let the cop pass me, to get to whatever emergency he was responding to. I sped past the truck and pulled into the right lane. The cop pulled in behind me. Fuck! The construction crews had placed orange cones and barrels in far right hand lane. I didn’t have anywhere to go to pull over. The line of cars in front of me had come to a crawl as we all inched toward the tunnel. I took my foot of the break to see if I could maneuver my car between the barrels. Where else could I pull over?

84 Without warning, I heard a loud CRACK! on the driver’s side window and then, “You don’t run from a cop! You don’t run from a cop!” My hands shook as I tried to find the lever to roll down the window. I had no idea what was happening. I had no idea this enormous man, this hulking, angry monster had pounced on my car until I heard the crack against the glass. I hadn’t seen him get out of his vehicle — he didn’t have a flashlight. Did he have a gun? Why was he yelling at me? “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I pleaded, “I’m trying to pull over!” I wanted to crawl under the seat or hide in the back, anywhere to get away from this raging police officer. I thought he might flip out on me, yank me out of my car, beat me to death, or even shoot me. Too terrified to do anything else, I cut the engine where I sat in the line of traffic and managed to find my license and registration and handed them to the police officer. My heart raced and my hands shook, precursors to the onset of a panic attack. I took some deep breaths to calm down, to keep from getting dizzy. That was always the worst part. When the officer took my credentials and returned to his vehicle, I cracked open the diet Pepsi and guzzled it to get the wine off my breath. Even though I felt OK, I wasn’t sure I could pass a sobriety test, and I certainly wouldn’t pass a Breathalyzer. Only a few days had passed since I had run the 2013 Boston Marathon, since two terrorists had set off bombs two blocks away from where I had stood only moments after I had finished running the course. Loud noises and sudden movements still terrified me; what had happened in Boston still affected me. My heart pounded in my chest, my hands shook, my head spun with dizziness. A panic attack was inevitable, and there was absolutely nothing I could do but ride it out. I hoped the waves would subside, reduce in intensity. Breathing deeply, I closed my eyes and concentrated on being calm. The alcohol in my system didn’t help.

85 When the officer returned to my car, I tried to plead my case. “I ran the Boston Marathon last week,” I said. “I’ve had a really difficult week, and I’m hoping you’ll give me a break.” I held up my 2013 Boston Marathon jacket to prove I wasn’t lying, wasn’t making it up. Surely, he’d understand, I thought. Everyone knew what had happened. Everyone knew what we runners had been through. People had been concerned and thoughtful. It was the only card I had to play. He barely let me finish my sentence before he cut me off with a “No” as sharp and cold as broken glass. Other than that, he didn’t flinch, simply handed my license and registration back along with a citation for $200. In the comments section, it said, “Had to chase down on foot.” Fury flooded every cell of my body. I didn’t understand. What did he mean? Did he mean that I tried to get out and run on foot and he had to chase me? Then that was simply an outrageous lie. My seatbelt was still on, and I’m a marathon runner. I could have outrun him if I wanted to. Or did he mean he had to chase me down while I was driving? If I hadn’t been so mad I would have found the humor, me in my little MINI Cooper going no more than 1 mile an hour so this 300lb man could catch me. The whole idea infuriated me. The fact that he had put it in writing made me feel a rage on a level I’d never felt before. My brain felt fuzzy and numb, full of static, and I shook so violently I thought I would disintegrate. But still, I knew I had gotten lucky. I could have been facing a DUI instead. Or worse. Maybe my dad had thought he’d get lucky, too, that night he left the Minolta after party. He’d done it so many times in the past. I remember one afternoon not long before he died: the white Pontiac Sunbird sat in the driveway, and my father had the passenger side door taken apart. He seemed to be pounding out a dent with a hammer. The Long Island weather felt warm and damp. It might have been early spring.

86 “What happened?” I asked, simply curious. He seemed annoyed with my question, and didn’t answer right away. I continued to observe while he worked on hammering out the door, wondered how the dent got there. “It’s none of your concern,” he finally said. He talked like that sometimes, cold and distant. Matter of fact. As a military man, he provided information only on a need-to-know basis, and as his eight-year old daughter, I didn’t need to know. Thinking back, he was probably embarrassed and angry with himself, and he probably didn’t want to answer to a child. My mother had probably already chewed him out. Maybe he didn’t realize how lucky he’d already been in the past. And the night he left the Minolta party, it seemed my father had pushed his luck one too many times. Sometimes I think my dad looks out for me, watches me from above and beyond to make sure I am safe. I like to think this is his way of protecting me, his way of saying, “don’t end up like me.” Maybe getting pulled over was my father’s way of shaking his finger at me. I learned my lesson, and thanked my dad for watching out for me, knowing it could have been far worse. A few weeks later, I received a letter from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to notify me that my driving privileges would be suspended for a total of 15 days from August 1 through August 15, 2013 for violating Section 1535E of the Pennsylvania Vehicle Code which imposes a “mandatory suspension for certain violations that occur in a Work Zone.” Resigned, I sucked it up and turned over my license to the state. For 15 days, I rode the bus to and from work, and shopped locally. I took rides only when they were offered, and sometimes I even declined them. This was my penance. Even if I disagreed with the original ticket, I still believe that my father had been looking out for me, that he wanted to teach me a lesson. He influenced Officer Joyner that night, and he had let me off with a warning.

87

Part Two: The Last 10k

88 Road Trip

Thirty-four years after my father’s accident, I find myself in the parking lot of the third school I attended in first grade. I am not sure why I decided to come here. Maybe I just thought it would be interesting to see. Maybe I thought it would it help me to remember aspects of living here, after we left Uncle Timmy’s house in Bayside, New York. I don’t remember who my teacher was, who my friends were, if I had any, or what the classroom looked like. I sit in the parking lot of John F. Kennedy Elementary School in East Islip, New York, and I shake. My hands tingle and vibrate, my heart pounds and races. I feel a bit nauseous and dizzy. I don’t understand what has caused this reaction or why. I don’t recognize the school. I take deep breaths as I try to understand why I am having a panic attack. Maybe it’s because I don’t recognize the school. Maybe it’s because I expected to be flooded with memories and that didn’t happen. I hate when this happens, these panic attacks. The uncontrollable shaking, the nausea, the dizziness. It’s the third time in two weeks that I’ve had such an attack. It’s something I seldom experience but it’s been happening a lot more lately. I sit in the car until the waves subside, and then decide to pull my car around back. It is a Sunday morning, and my car is the only vehicle parked in front of the school, which is located on a main road. I feel like I don’t belong there. I don’t want anyone to bother my car or me. I am there because I have planned a run through the neighborhood and hope to find the house I used to live in, which is nearby. I can’t remember the exact address, but I have a good idea. It’s on Connetquot, my sister told me. It sounds familiar. The air is chilly but warm for January. When I packed my running gear, I had planned for temperatures to be in the mid-forties — balmy for January and perfect running weather. I have

89 on only a pair of spandex shorts, two long-sleeve tech shirts, and my trusty, faded Pittsburgh Penguins baseball cap. This hat accompanies me on almost every run, unless the temperatures are below 40°, or above 80°. It seems to be silly attire for January on Long Island. The gusty wind easily penetrates through the shirts and my skin, chilling me immediately. I hope that I will run fast enough and hard enough to stay warm enough. But I also want to make sure that I pay attention — not just run through some random neighborhoods, but really try to find where I used to live, where I used to ride my bike as a child, where I used to play. The sun is out after torrential downpours and a constant icy rain over the last 24 hours. The weather has been less than predictable and much less cooperative. As much as I hate the wind, at least it is sunny, and for that I am thankful. My first steps take me across the main road and into a neighborhood covered in tall pine trees. Amidst the pines are bare oaks. Together, they provide a richness and depth I never noticed as a child. I am surprised by how much these trees and their canopies remind me of my beloved Washington State. Small ranch houses under layers of evergreen and bare branches. Lawns are still green and lush from the previous day’s rain and the unseasonably warm temperatures. None of these homes ring a bell. None of it brings back any memories. Even the street names elude me. Why can’t I remember anything? The neighborhood is nothing like I remember. These houses are all very expensive looking, well-manicured, well-maintained. The house we used to live in was grimy and dirty. The city, back in 1979, back when we had lived here, had been in the process of replacing all the sewer lines. I remember we had a huge hump in front of our driveway, and gigantic concrete tubes lined the street. There is no evidence of that now; I worry that I won’t recognize our old house.

90 I come to an intersection and don’t recognize the street names. They don’t correspond to anything on my map and suddenly, I feel lost. Nothing looks familiar. I had only lived in this area a short while, only the last few months of my first grade and then we moved again that summer. But still, I assumed it would have left some kind of impact. A lot happened in those short months. I remember one time my mom and dad argued about something — probably his drinking, and the next morning I saw a broken plate in the trash. The sewer constantly backed up in the house we lived in, and I can remember my mother shooing us down the street to Friendly’s Restaurant for ice cream every time it happened. She wanted us out of the way so she and my father could fix whatever was causing our basement to flood with raw sewage. I remember a friend who pulled a red wagon with her everywhere she went. She lived behind my house and she asked me if I knew George Washington when I told her I had moved from Washington State. “No,” I had said, thinking she was really stupid. “Washington STATE,” I had said. Didn’t she know that George Washington had been dead for almost 200 years, that one really had nothing to do with the other? We’d get candy from the candy man and we’d open it all up and put it in her wagon. It was then that I learned that Jujy Fruits and Ju-Ju Bees were not at all the same thing, and I hated them both. I wish I could remember her name. I get my bearings thanks to the GPS on my smartphone. I’m the blue dot on the map, and I figure out which way I need to go to get to Connetquot Avenue. The name is funny, like “squat” or “cumquat,” and a sideways smile forms on my lips. Connetquot Avenue is the one thing that sounds familiar in this whole place and my insides tingle just a little bit with excitement. The panic — the shaking, the nausea, the dizziness, is gone as if the wind blew it away and cleansed me from it. I can breathe now. The wind continues to rip, but I put my head

91 down and push through it as I continue my run. If I keep my head up, the wind will take my favorite Pittsburgh Penguins baseball cap for a ride. The constant gusts sting my ears and I wish I had worn a warmer hat. After about two miles, I come to the corner of Union Boulevard (a road that means nothing to me) and Connetquot Avenue. Part of me wants to take a picture of the road sign and email it to my sister. To say, “Look! I’m here! I made it. It’s real.” I’m not sure why I don’t. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to look like a weirdo in my spandex shorts, long-sleeve shirt and baseball cap in the middle of January, taking a picture of a street sign. I scold myself for being silly, for caring what other people, strangers, might think as they drive past. And then I decide I don’t need to take the picture; I don’t need the reminder. This name, Connetquot, is ingrained in my memory. If I want to get a picture on the way back, I’ll do it then, I decide. In order for me to continue my run, I need to cross the busy intersection. I trot across the four-lane road, but find there are no sidewalks on Connetquot. Instead, there are paths a few feet into the wooded areas — Long Island is full of these. Paths created by people who needed to get from one place to another, whether on foot or on a bicycle. The dirt and brush have been packed down from decades of wear. Normally, when I think of Long Island, I think of “Main Street USA” where on every corner there is a McDonald’s, a Walgreens, and a supermarket: nondescript. I had forgotten about the woods and the trees. I had forgotten what a beautiful place it is. I had forgotten how I used to ride my bike on paths like these when I was a kid, how I’d get lost in the woods if I went in too deep. I must be careful of my footing; I’m not used to trail running. Once through the woods, I come to another main road, and then see residences on the other side. This must be it, I think. My belly flutters for a moment — I’m nervous about what I may or may not find up ahead. Will I see my house? Will I remember it? My sister told me she

92 thinks the address to our old house was 106 Connetquot, but there is no 106, and there are no residences on the left hand side, which is where the house would have been. I think it’s funny how I can remember my address when we lived in Olympia, Washington, when I was only 5 years old, but I can’t remember the address when I lived here in East Islip. Disappointment sets in — I was afraid the address might be wrong. Connetquot is a busy road, comprised mostly of local shops and businesses. Dry cleaners, convenience stores, delis, tax and law offices. I’m convinced this is not the street we lived on. I push on, hoping something will jog my memory. I come to a street named Jefferson, which catches my attention. This tiny, residential street sounds familiar for some reason. It’s not on my route, but I decide to take it anyway. My phone will tell me where to go if I get lost. I do not want to pass up the opportunity, nor do I want to ignore the gut feeling in my stomach, in my chest. The feeling is visceral — Jefferson is important, but the reason why currently eludes me. I notice on this street that there are seams in the pavement. Seams that could house large sewer pipes. Was it this road I lived on, I wonder? The houses look right. They’re small, but well-kept. On the right hand side of the road, I notice a house that makes me slow down and pause. It’s shaped like a shoebox and has a door on the side that leads to the back yard, which is fenced in all around. Undeveloped property full of brush and bare trees occupies the area on the left side of the house. It could be the one we lived in, but I’m not at all sure. And I hate that. I wish I could hear what my insides were telling me. There is something about this house that’s important, but then I wonder if I’m making it all up. Is it the house or isn’t it? I have no way of knowing for sure. The back yard has a giant trampoline on one side, which wasn’t there when we lived there. (That is, if that is where we had lived.) But the backyard is certainly large enough to contain the above ground pool that took up a large part of the yard in the house we lived in. The

93 pool water had been green and scummy, and my father would sit in a blow-up raft and skim the sludge off the top with a tennis racket that had screen mesh attached to it. We didn’t care. It was water, a pool, and a place to swim. My mother constantly poured Clorox and HTH Pool Shock in the water to kill the bacteria and any other tiny hazardous creature that swam and lived and pooped in that water. It didn’t have a pump or a filter, they said. That’s why the water was green. I want so much for this to be the house. I continue to jog past, taking in as much as possible without stopping because I don’t want to appear like I’m casing the place. I’m out of my element on Long Island. These people are New Yorkers. They are tough, strong-willed, and very protective of their homes and families. They typically don’t like strangers. I know because I was once one of them. New Yorkers don’t like people messing with their stuff. By standing and staring at this house even from the middle of the street, I’m inviting trouble. The house is pink now, or maybe it had always been pink, and I just don’t remember. Or maybe this isn’t the house at all, and I’m just wishing it were, trying to force the memories. I don’t remember the day we moved to this house in East Islip, but I remember the relief I felt when we left Uncle Timmy and Aunt Maureen’s house in Bayside, Queens. Their house was narrow but tall. My father, sister, brother and I all slept in the basement on cots. On weekends, we weren’t allowed upstairs until my dad got up. Sometimes he’d sleep all morning, and I’d get bored and sneak upstairs where it was light. Sometimes I’d go down to the basement and play by myself when everyone was upstairs. I didn’t like being around people much. I wouldn’t say I was shy, but more like I had an apprehensive discomfort around people. In this house in East Islip, I remember the relief I felt when I woke up in a bedroom that had windows and light. No longer would my cousin Timmy watch me in the bathtub. Aunt

94 Maureen would make him check on me when I took my baths. She had all boys. She didn’t understand my need for privacy even though I was only six years old. Thirteen year-old boys didn’t belong in the bathroom when I took my bath. He’d only ever poke his head in, face red, and make sure I hadn’t drowned. He never fully came in, thankfully. But still, I wanted to shout, “GET OUT!” But the words could never form in my mouth, the wind in my belly could never push them out. No longer would I feel Uncle Timmy’s hand creep down the back of my pants to cup my small, bare bottom in the palm of his large and calloused hand. I remember the last time it happened. Or maybe it only happened that one time. Maybe I don’t want to remember how often it happened. But this last time, I had been down in the basement by myself, playing with my games and toys when Uncle Timmy came down the stairs. Numbers Up was my favorite – you had to put the numbered pegs in order before the timer buzzed and the pieces flew everywhere. Superfection and Operation were both fun, too. Uncle Timmy was a New York City Police Officer and liked to do sit-ups in the basement. He was tall and lean and strong. His beady little marble eyes sunk into his forehead just under the ridge of his brow, and he had a crazy sneer like Jack Nicholson. I remember he wore a pair of gray sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt with an embroidered New York City Police patch stitched just over his heart. He always asked me to hold his feet while he did his sit-ups. I liked that part. It was fun, I liked that I was helping. But then he finished his sit-ups and sat down on the couch in the basement. He called me over to him, and despite my apprehension, I was not one to disobey, especially not an adult. Especially not a man like Uncle Timmy. As I stood next to him, I felt his hand on the small of my back. It felt weird, being there, so close to him like that. It felt wrong, bad, like I’d get in trouble if someone saw. He never said a word. He unsnapped my corduroys and then I cried. I just stood

95 there, frozen, stuck in time and place, and I cried. Still, his hand crept down the back of my pants, beneath my cotton undies. His big, hairy-knuckled fingers scooched as far as they could until the palm of his hand cupped my tiny, bare bottom. If anything had ever felt wrong in my life it was this; it was now. I couldn’t stop crying, yet I couldn’t pull away, either. What would happen if I tried? Who was I to disobey? I looked up at the staircase and saw my brother come down, and stop short. “I’m telling Mom!” he shouted and bounded back up the stairs. It was shortly thereafter that we packed up our things and moved to East Islip. At the time I never put it together, that my brother had told not on me, but on Uncle Timmy, and that was the reason we moved. No one ever talked to me about it, no one ever asked me about it; I never believed that he told. Sometimes, I can still feel Uncle Timmy’s dry and cracked palm on the small of my back. It would be decades before I’d let anyone touch me there. At least not without reacting, not without jumping away like a scared and nervous puppy. Maybe this is why I need this pink house on Jefferson Street in East Islip to be the house. It was the first place since we left Washington where I felt safe. Maybe this is why I had the panic attack in front of the school before my run. I didn’t want to be reminded of Uncle Timmy, even though the feeling of him is never far. The look on my brother’s face and his accusation as he glared at me, at Uncle Timmy, his angry eyes emblazoned in my memory. He was only eleven when he saw what he saw. If I was only eleven and saw something like what he did, I wouldn’t know what to do at all. Would I tell? I don’t know that I would. I’d be too scared, I think. I’d be too afraid that no one would believe me. Thankfully, I never had to witness a child being molested by her uncle. I only had the misfortune of experiencing it.

96 “I’m telling Mom!” was a battle cry for my brother. They were words I often heard him shout at me. “I’m telling Mom!” meant that I was in trouble. Especially with the way he glared at me. The urgency with which he bounded up the stairs meant I’d be in big trouble, and soon. But no one ever came. I turn down the next street but only a few steps in, I stop short on the sidewalk. I’m compelled to turn around and walk back to that pink house on Jefferson. I pull my phone out of my back pocket and text my sister. 179 Jefferson looks uncannily like the house. Take a pic, she replies. Good idea, I think. Maybe I’ll be able to get a better, longer look or some time to linger on it. (Take a picture, it’ll last longer.) I ready the camera on my phone and turn back around toward the house, which is now on my left. I stop quickly, aim, and click. I jog a few more steps to try for a better or different angle of the house. I do it as quickly as possible; the last thing I want is to look like a stalker, or worse, a Private Investigator, or just someone taking pictures of someone else’s house. I feel like I’m violating some kind of privacy law. I don’t linger to look at the pictures; I’ll have time for that later. I decide to go back the way I came. I run down to the end of the street, to where I had turned off from Connetquot. There is a small convenience store at the end of the street and I wonder if it had once been the Friendly’s where our parents would send us when the sewer backed up. The distance felt right. The footprint and size of the convenience store feels right. The corner of Jefferson and Connetquot feels right. I think about going inside the convenience store to ask the clerk if the store was ever a Friendly’s back in the late 70s. But then I chicken out. I convince myself that the clerk inside would probably have no idea whether the building had once been home to a Friendly’s restaurant. Plus it’s a weird question to ask. I am good at

97 talking myself out of things I don’t want to do, like striking up odd conversations with strangers. I make the excuse that I can always call later if I really want to verify that a Friendly’s had been there before it was a convenience store. In my heart it feels right, though, and it’s what I choose to believe. I head back down Connetquot not quite sure what I’m feeling. Did I accomplish what I set out to do? To find the house I used to live in? I’m not sure. There’s no way for me to be absolutely sure at the moment. The only one who might remember our address when we lived here is my brother. I asked my sister to find out for me, but she hasn’t yet. She knows I can’t ask him myself. He hasn’t acknowledged me since our mother died. I like that I tried though to find our house, though. I like that I came all this way from Pittsburgh to just go for a run in East Islip, around the neighborhood where I lived for only a few months the year I turned seven. Back down Union Boulevard, I decide to stay on the main road instead of running through the neighborhood where I got lost earlier. On this street I pass a Friendly’s and I’m convinced that the little convenience store I saw on the corner of Jefferson and Connetquot had once been the place. I am convinced that the restaurant had grown too small as the population of East Islip had grown larger, and then had moved locations. A left onto Woodland Drive will take me back to the elementary school where I parked my car, and suddenly I’m reminded of the cold wind as it slaps me in the face, and once again tries to steal my cap. Putting my head down forces me to see only the sidewalk in front of me, but it keeps my hat on my head and the wind out of my face. I try to use my peripheral vision to see the buildings and shops and other pedestrians around me. With less than a mile to go, I push through the wind. It takes effort, but my legs and lungs don’t mind. The muscles burn and tingle at the same time, tell me I’m working hard. Despite the cold, my ponytail is sopped with sweat

98 and matted from the wind and back and forth rhythm of my gait. My cap feels cold on my head; the wind has chilled the sweat that the cap has absorbed. The faster I run, I think, the sooner I will be warm. On Woodland Drive, I’m still surprised by the dense evergreen canopies that shade the rooftops on this gorgeous, blustery day. I wonder if I had simply forgotten how beautiful they were, or if I had never even noticed them before.

99 Following His Footsteps

It’s January 2014 and I’m in the final term of my graduate career, pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. I’m almost 42 years old, and I’m tired of wondering what really happened the night my father died. For most of my life I believed that a drunk driver had killed my father. Years later I learned that my father had actually been the drunk driver. I want to know why the facts and details about his death had been hidden for so long, and, so seemingly deliberately. My friend Alysa, a journalist with the curiosity of a thousand cats, and just as many lives, suggests I take a road trip to investigate. There are people I could talk to, questions I need to ask, and I could maybe even try to retrace my father’s final path. I ask her to come with me, to help me ask the right questions. To teach me to be a journalist, like her. An investigator. I can’t do it by myself, I tell her. I need her to come with me. She’ll keep me focused. “If you want me to, I will,” she says. Our first stop on this four-day fact-finding endeavor is my Uncle Roger’s house in Warren, New Jersey. It has been decades since I’d seen him, and more than 15 years since he divorced my father’s youngest sister, my Aunt Kathleen. I knew that Uncle Roger had worked with my dad back in the late 70s; he was actually the reason we had moved from Washington State to New York. Uncle Roger had offered my father a job. While doing research one night for my thesis, I googled “Roger McAteer.” I got a hit for Wilson Industries with an address in Northern New Jersey. The company name, Wilson Industries, sounded vaguely familiar, and I wondered how many Roger McAteers there could be in Northern New Jersey, where he had been living the last time I had seen him. I took a chance and sent an email to the address listed in the contacts.

100 “Hi,” I began. My heart pounded in my chest, but the curiosity in my gut pounded harder. “I’m wondering if the Roger McAteer who works for Wilson Industries is the same Roger McAteer who worked with Terry O’Neill back in 1979. If so, please respond. It’s for research purposes.” I put my maiden name in the signature, just in case. Maybe he’d make the connection. It was a long shot at best, but I figured I didn’t have anything to lose by trying. I hit send. A few days later, I received a response. “This is the same Roger.” And it was that easy to reconnect. The next email I sent was full of “OMGs” and exclamation points, along with an explanation of why I was trying to track him down. I thought Uncle Roger might have some answers or that he might be able to shed some light on what really happened that night. At the very least, maybe he could tell me why my father wanted to work somewhere else. Had there been any bad blood between them, I wondered? Maybe Uncle Roger knew where my father had been going that night, or why my mother had told us that our father had been “coming home from work” at 11:00pm the night he died. That he had been killed by a drunk driver. Had she made it up to protect us, or had she been told this too? Did she believe it the way I had believed it for so long? It never made sense to me that my father was still at work at 11:00pm. Alysa and I arrive at Uncle Roger’s house around noon on January 10th. A black Mercedes-Benz sedan and a brown Porsche 911 Carrera sit on the smooth blacktop of the parking lot sized driveway. The house next to it is enormous. What am I doing here? I think to myself. I must be out of my mind, I think, as I exit my car. Alysa follows behind.

101 When I knock on the door, it opens almost immediately. The shock of seeing Uncle Roger for the first time in over 20 years quickly subsides. He still looks exactly the same as he’d always looked - a cross between a svelte Robert Wagner and Roger Moore, albeit somewhat smarmy with the top two buttons of his crisp burgundy shirt undone exposing just a tease of chest hair. A gold chain dangles from his neck adorned with a crucifix. Only his hair has turned from dark brown to gray. He is still the tallest man I’d ever seen, at least 6’6”, maybe taller. He bends himself almost in half to give me a hug. He invites us in, and his wife offers us a glass of wine, which we both decline. Alysa doesn’t drink, and I have a long drive ahead of me, and a lot of work to do. I don’t want alcohol to numb my senses, even if it’s just a glass or two. Truth be told, I don’t want two glasses to turn into four. We all adjourn to the living room and sit on soft leather sofas. At first I don’t know how to start, don’t know what to say. I brought prepared questions, but feel awkward referring to them. I try to remember the questions I’d written down. I ask him to tell me about when he and my father had worked together, what my father used to do for him, why he left. Despite feeling completely overwhelmed and out of place by the lavishness of my uncle’s home, the conversation flows easily. Alysa sits so quietly, I almost forget she is there. “Your father wanted more opportunity,” Uncle Roger says, “which is why he stopped working for me. There were no hard feelings. I just couldn’t give him what he wanted.” Then we get into the meat of the conversation. We talk about how he’d been the one to go clean out my father’s car the morning after the accident. “I had to climb through the back hatch to get everything out of the glove box,” he says. “The car was unrecognizable.” Then he tells me he has something for me. To sit tight. He’ll be right back.

102 When he returns, he hands me a green plastic card case. Inside, it contains an old Corporate American Express card, my father’s card. His signature scrawled on the back reminds me of school papers he’d once signed for me. The J (for John) followed by Terrence O’Neill. My father had been named after my grandfather, but he went by Terry. The plastic case also contains a business card for Minolta Business Systems, where my father went to work after ending his employment with my Uncle Roger at Wilson Industries. 375 North Broadway, Jericho, New York is the address on the card. My father’s name had been typed in with a typewriter, as if his permanent cards hadn’t been printed yet. In the early 80s, those things took time. We talk about the trip he and my Aunt Kathleen took to visit my family when we lived in Washington back in 1978. I tell him that I remember the visit. It was during that visit, he says, that he convinced my dad to move back east, back home to New York. That Uncle Roger had a job for him. We spend much longer than we had planned with Uncle Roger. Over a four-course lunch prepared by his wife complete with homemade soup, hand-carved herbed turkey, a smorgasbord of side dishes, and dessert, we talk about more than just my father. We talk about his family, my cousin Scotty, his new wife, who isn’t really all that new. She’s just new to me; they’ve been married for almost 15 years. They ask Alysa about her involvement with the MFA program, she tells them about her work as a journalist with the Navajo Nation, and it sparks an interesting political debate that she easily diffuses. After several hours, when it’s finally time to leave, we say we’re glad we reconnected. We hope to stay in touch. We drive to Long Island, check into a hotel for the night. The next day, Alysa and I drive to Jericho, New York, to the address on the business card that Uncle Roger gave me the day before. The town is a ubiquitous Anytown, USA — McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, strip malls

103 and generic office buildings line the boulevard. We find 375 North Broadway, and park in the lot next to the squat, three-story building. I sit in my parked car, amazed. This is the building my father had worked in the night he was killed in a drunk driving accident. He’d only been employed here for a few weeks before he died. This is part two of my journey. I’m here to drive the route my father took on his way home that night, to visit the crash site, to see where he actually died. I’m hoping that being inside this building, going in the way he might have gone in, coming out the way he might have come out, and leaving to go home the way he might have gone might bring me a little closer to him. I want to see what he saw. Do the things he did. I just don’t want to die the way he died. I realize that I could be parked in the same exact spot my father had parked in the night he died. This spot could have been just as new to him as it is to me now. As he got out of his car that morning to start his day, as he walked to the entranceway, he couldn’t have known it would be the last time he’d park his car there, the last time he’d walk to the entrance, the last time he’d open the doors to what should have been his future. As I stare up at this building, I feel as if I’m trying to resurrect my father after he’s been buried so far deep in my mind for so many years. This is the first time I’ve tried to acknowledge his life outside of my own, outside of his role of being my father. Every thought of him had always been in a way that related specifically to me. This is the first time I have even tried to think of him as someone other than my father. He was obviously more than a father — he was a husband, a brother, a son, a friend, a lover of Tolkien and Star Trek. He was a member of Eta Kappa Nu Engineering Honor Society and a sales rep for Minolta Business Systems. These are all faces and sides of my father that I knew in my head, but never really acknowledged in my heart. To me, he was always just my dad. To me, being my dad was his most important role.

104 The building is made of light, almost white colored brick and seems like it hasn’t changed in decades. Tall tinted windows between columns of off-white brick, and straight, clean lines; everything symmetrical. Even the landscape out front — a Ficus tree placed every three feet, separated by a hedge — precise, deliberate. No curves, nothing contemporary or modern. We get out of the car, and walk to the rear of the building where I had noticed an entrance when I had pulled in. There’s a smoker’s shelter with a bench twenty or so feet from the doorway, which I find amusing. It wasn’t that long ago when people still smoked inside buildings and offices, restaurants, and on planes, even. When my dad worked in this building back in 1980, I’m sure people smoked where they wanted, whenever they wanted. There were no hard and fast rules back then about where people could smoke. If a nonsmoker wanted fresh air, they’d go outside. Or, he or she likely opened a window. It seemed the smokers had the rights; the nonsmokers were in the minority. As we approach the entryway, a plaque on the marble wall states, “No smoking within 20 feet.” I doubt the sign was there in 1980, and it makes me smile. My dad never lived in a world where smoking was prohibited. But as I pull the glass door open, my chest tightens. I feel disconnected, as if this building should hold some kind of meaning for some reason, but it doesn’t. It’s really just a building that my father happened to work in, and only briefly. I have to remind myself that I’m only here to follow his footsteps; the building is just the starting point. The lobby is comprised of stark, white and gray marble. Modern and contemporary for 1980. The floors match the marble walls, and seem original to the building. It smells a little like the houses I grew up in, like stale smoke — a smell that doesn’t go away, a smell that’s been there for at least 30 or 40 years.

105 The lobby is hardly inviting with only two chairs inside the largely empty space, two old lobby chairs whose padding and fabric is flattened and worn down as if they’d either been picked up from a thrift store, or they’d actually been there since the building’s erection. A rickety wicker table separates them. The three pieces together feel like an afterthought, just thrown there in the corner as a waiting space for what, really? There are no magazines or plants or anything that provides warmth to the atmosphere. No art on the white marble walls. I wonder if this space is meant to be intimidating, because that is how I feel. The directory on the wall doesn’t offer much to what actually goes on in this building now. There are three main floors, a penthouse, and a lower level. Only names and floor numbers are listed, but they give no indication as to who they are or what they do. Minolta Business Systems is not listed. A few offices are located on this floor, and I wonder if one of them could have been my dad’s. I imagine my father in his office, whichever one it was, a cigarette in his left hand or dangling from his lip, a phone held up to his right ear — the large square kind, with pushbuttons and an handset that fit perfectly to your ear, and a round mouthpiece with holes in it. Probably olive green, mustard yellow, or dark brown. I imagine his elbows propped on a metal desk, the sleeves of his button-down shirt rolled up on his forearms as he makes whatever kind of deal he needs to make with the person on the other end of the line. I imagine a metal filing cabinet, and nothing on the walls. I wonder if he had a picture of my mother or any of us kids set up yet. He had only worked there two weeks before the accident, so I imagine he was still getting his office together. Maybe he didn’t like to keep pictures of his family at work. I’d never had the opportunity to see him at work, so I don’t know what kind of person he was in that regard. Did he keep home at home? Did he bring home to the office? My father was very work-minded. I

106 can’t imagine there being the distraction of a family photo on his desk. His purpose at work was to work. I’m curious to see the rest of the building, although I feel like an intruder, as if I’m trespassing, even though the doors to the building had been unlocked when I entered. Back in the lobby, I push the elevator button, and the doors eventually open. An automated female voice tells us to “Have a nice day!” Alysa and I both laugh, finding this greeting ironic in the stark, empty, uninviting, and intimidating marble lobby. We get off on the first floor, and once again, we’re told to have a nice day. It appears a law firm is housed on this floor, and down a short corridor is a “nursing service station,” whatever that means. A woman comes through one door, and into another. She’s the only other person we’ve seen; it’s a Sunday after all. I don’t think she sees us, and I don’t feel right about approaching her, since we really have no business being here. We take the stairs to the second floor, instead of using the elevator. The stairwell smells of mildew, corroding metal, dirty concrete, and a hint of urine. Someone has tagged the walls here and there with graffiti, and the railings are thick with bright yellow paint as if they’ve been painted over and over and over again, once a year maybe for 30 years with the same color. I wonder if my dad took these stairs at one point or another, his leather loafers making that “sskssk-ssk” noise as he trotted up or down the steps. The second floor feels just as lonely as the first. It doesn’t seem like any businesses reside on this floor. Framed photographs of black and white landscapes and seascapes adorn the walls, though. I find it curious that this floor has no tenants, yet art hangs on these walls. The third floor is much of the same, except at the end of the corridor is the Social Security Administration. A sign on the glass door alerts us that “guns and weapons are not permitted.” The lights are off inside this office; it seems to be asleep like the rest of them.

107 We go back to the stairwell and find that we can’t climb to the penthouse. The door is locked, and so we go back to the third floor and call the elevator again (“Have a nice day!”) to see if we can reach it that way. Alas, a key is required; we cannot access the floor. I suggest we check out the lower level, instead. Down below on the lower level, everything is brand new, so new it still smells like wet paint; some doors don’t even have knobs and some walls are still just drywall. This entire level had probably been flooded when Hurricane Sandy hit the year before. It appears the building owners are only now getting around to fixing it. There is nothing of interest to me on this floor, well, not specific to my father, anyway, so we retreat back up to the main floor, ready to start the next leg of the journey. Before we leave, though, I walk to the front entrance first, just to see what it would feel like if I were a potential client coming into this building. The front entrance seems regal, with its giant 3 7 5 bronze colored numbers that hang just above the large double-door glass entryway, denoting the building’s address on North Broadway in Jericho. At closer inspection, the numbers are covered in scratches, scarred, likely from the torment of Hurricane Sandy the previous year, her winds blowing and bending the tall trees, whipping them into the building as if they were medieval cat-o-nine tails. This building, as I ponder it from the front, is rich with history. The walk-through has helped me to reconnect with my father, to imagine him in a way I’d never thought of him before, makes me understand him just a little bit better. My sister tells me that our father died at the intersection of Titus Path and Route 106 in Jericho, about six miles north of the office on North Broadway. Route 106 is also known as Jericho Oyster Bay Road and connects Hicksville to Syosset, which are some of the more affluent neighborhoods on Long Island. If you keep heading north on Route 106, you’ll

108 eventually end up in Oyster Bay Cove, the last town before hitting Oyster Bay Harbor on Long Island’s North Shore. I’ve never been there. My cousin, who lived in Syosset for most of his life, says that my father died at the intersection of Route 106 and Muttontown Road. It was this same cousin who years prior planted the suspicion that my father had been drunk that night. “Your father wasn’t exactly sober,” he had said one Thanksgiving, as we sat in a dimly lit bar. I was 19, underage, but I still got served. My cousin, only 21 at the time, was already a regular. “How do you know?” I’d asked. It was the first I’d heard about my father’s drinking. I had always known he liked to have a beer or two, but I never really put it together, or even thought that my father could have been the one who was drunk. It was unfathomable. “Trust me,” he said. “Your father was drunk.” His voice was thick with whisky and his “Lawn Guyland” accent. As I sat there, and drank my beer, I denied in my own mind what Jeff told me. I looked into my cousin’s bleary eyes, listened to his words slur over his lips. He had to be lying, I thought. But now, 23 years later, I think about that conversation with Jeff, and appreciate that he may have actually been trying to tell me the truth. But I still wonder, how had he known? Who had told him? Who had his source been, all those years ago? I wish I could get my hands on the accident report. Unfortunately, the police stations I contacted in Jericho and Hicksville shred all documents that are older than seven years. My sister thinks she has it somewhere, but just can’t find it. “It might be in one of the boxes at the workshop,” she said when I had asked her about the report a few weeks prior. Her husband is a general contractor, and rents space for his large equipment. My sister keeps boxes upon boxes of our mother’s things there.

109 “The next time I come up to visit,” I said, “we should go through those boxes. Maybe it’ll turn up.” She wants to help me find it, wants to learn what I learn. She needs closure, answers, the truth, just as much as I do. These are the facts: April 25, 1980 was a Friday. Minolta had an “after work party” according to my Uncle Gerry, my father’s youngest brother. It may have been what many of us now refer to as a happy hour, or maybe just a few guys who wanted to get together for a few beers at the end of the workweek. No one is sure where this “after work party” happened, whether it was held inside the office building at Minolta, or if everyone had just headed out to a bar. Back in 1980, I can imagine it being an office party, the boss’s way of congratulating a job well done, maybe, or to celebrate closing a large account, or to celebrate an increase in sales or revenue. Uncle Gerry says that my father had been taking someone home afterward, and ended up driving on the wrong side of the road, but I’m not sure how he knows this, or why he never told me the truth in the first place, why he continued to let me believe until now that my father been killed by a drunk driver, not that he had been the drunk driver. “Was he drunk?” I’d asked him recently. The truth finally seemed to be surfacing after all these years. “I’d say yes.” Uncle Gerry’s snarky tone and curt response made it seem obvious that my father had been drunk the night he died. Maybe it was to him. Maybe he didn’t know that my siblings and I had all been lied to all these years. Another fact: my father died alone, so this person he dropped off must have made it home safely. That person was the last person ever to see my father alive, the only one who knows what really happened. I don’t know how to find this person; I don’t know whether this person still remembers that night, remembers my father, or is even still alive at this point.

110 I wonder what this passenger felt when he or she found out the next morning that my father had been killed shortly after dropping him or her off. I wonder what that kind of knowledge does to a person. I didn’t know any of his co-workers. My father, I’m told, was an outgoing, gregarious person. Since he was still so new to the company, maybe he offered to drive someone home as a way to make a new connection, a friend maybe or an ally. It’s interesting, I think, how laws have cracked down on drunk driving. Back in 1980, drunk driving wasn’t necessarily illegal, at least not in New York. It may have been illegal on paper, but little was done to deter drunk driving, or “driving while intoxicated.” Prior to 1981, if caught, most drunk drivers would plead guilty to a non-alcohol related charge, and maybe be given a fine of $1, according to the history of drunk driving laws in Warren County, New York. It was with the help of grass-roots efforts such as MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) and later SADD (Students Against Drunk Driving) that New York finally enacted the STOP-DWI legislation in 1981. But by the time this legislation had passed, it was too late for my father. He had already been dead by then. I pull out of the parking lot at 375 North Broadway, heading north. I’m vaguely familiar with the area, but Alysa still navigates for me. Using the GPS on my iPhone, she will tell me when I get to Titus Path. The businesses, restaurants, retail stores, and strip malls eventually fade away and morph into tall trees, much like the Escher painting of the birds and the fish. You don’t really notice when it happens. Evergreens and bare, deciduous maples, elm, and oak trees shiver in the chilly breeze. The road eventually turns into State Route 106. I know it was on this road that my father died. I just don’t know the exact location. More facts: The weather had been damp and foggy that night with low visibility. Route 106 is a four-lane road with a grass divider. There are no streetlights at all on this road. Drivers

111 must rely only on their headlights. When my father dropped off his friend, and headed back toward the Long Island Expressway, he probably couldn’t see the grass divider, which is maybe how he ended up driving on the wrong side of the road. On April 25th, 1980, the tall trees were probably in full bloom, their broad leaves blocking any kind of light that may have come from a clouded and fogged over moon. My sister says she remembers seeing the picture of the mangled car years ago in the police report, the same report she cannot seem to locate now. “If the other guy was the drunk driver,” she had said, “then why is dad’s car in the wrong lane, like he was going the wrong way?” The impact that killed him meant that he had been travelling a fairly high rate of speed, probably hadn’t even realized that he’d been driving on the wrong side of the road. Route 106 is not a heavily traveled road, especially at 10:30 or 11:00 at night; he probably hadn’t encountered any other cars, until the white van. My father wasn’t necessarily speeding, but he was driving fast enough that when he collided head-on with the van, the steering wheel crushed his chest, and blood had collected between his chest cavity and the linings of his lungs. Pressure quickly built around his lungs, and he was unable to breathe, his heart unable to beat. Would it have mattered if he had worn his seat belt? I’d never seen him put one on. The useless strap hung like a decoration when he drove. As I child, my mother told me that he was thrown through the windshield, that a piece of glass had pierced his heart, which is what had killed him. Either way, a pierced heart, or a crushed chest would have caused a Hemothorax. I just hadn’t known its name until now. Alysa tells me to slow down, that Titus Path is just up ahead on the left. I turn onto the small dirt road and make a U-turn to pull back around so I’m facing the main intersection at

112 Route 106. I decide to park on the side of the road. I want to go out to the spot. To see what is there, to stand in the same spot where my father may have taken his last breath. I stand in the middle of this four-lane road, Route 106, on the grass divider, foolishly hoping to find something, some kind of evidence that my father had died here. But there is nothing on the ground other than muddy grass, a few cigarette butts likely tossed from the windows of passing cars, a plastic bottle or beer can strewn alongside the road. It’s been 34 years, I think. What evidence am I actually expecting to find? Coming here was stupid, I think. A waste of time. I try to visualize my father’s accident, his mangled Pontiac Sunbird, his lifeless body slunk over the steering wheel. I can see the flashing lights, the wet road, fire trucks and ambulances. The white van that my father had collided with. My mother had always told us that a drunk driver killed our father. That it was the van driver who was drunk. The van driver had suffered only a broken nose, so it was an easy lie to believe. The van driver’s body would have been less rigid had he been drunk, less reactive. I wonder if he is still alive today, if there is a way I can find him, to contact him. To ask him what really happened. Even as I try to imagine the car crash as it happened, I’m disappointed that it doesn’t help me feel anything. Maybe it’s because what happens in my imagination isn’t real. It’s all supposition. But still, I am mad at myself for not feeling anything that resembles grief or sadness. My sister had cried when I told her I was coming here, to see this spot. Why is it that she is so in tune with her emotions, that she allows herself to experience them for what they are, yet mine seem simply not to exist? How is it that we are so different, emotionally? That we have experienced so many of the same things, yet we both respond differently to them? I hate that I can’t feel

113 anything. Perhaps I just want to make up for not crying when I was eight, when my mother told me my father was dead. I want to cry now; I want to feel something, anything. But still, just like when I was eight, the tears won’t come, the emotions aren’t there. I don’t want to force them, the tears, the emotions — I want them to come naturally. But I already know they won’t, and I wonder if it’s because I don’t care enough, not as much as I want to. I wonder if the real reason I’m here is to find out whether or not I actually loved him. I’m finding that it’s hard to love someone who’s only been a figment of my imagination for the last 30 odd years. Knowing that actually makes me a little sad. I cross back over to my car, where Alysa waits in the warmth. The temperature is still warm for January but the wind is starting to rip and neither of us have gloves. Behind us, the asphalt street turns into an unpaved lane where a few houses sit on tiny patches of yard. While I had been out on Route 106, pondering my father’s accident, Alysa had wandered down the path on foot. She suggests I take a look, so I turn the car back around. At the very end of the road is a brand new apartment complex, condominiums, or townhouses maybe. Piles of mud and dirt and a bulldozer indicate they’ve yet to do any landscaping. Further down, back behind a thick screen of tall trees and brush that create a barrier to Route 106, four or five houses line the unpaved gravel street. Most of these homes look newer, as if they’d been built within the last ten or twenty years. But one on the opposite end of this tiny street seems much older, and I wonder who lives there. I wonder if there is someone I could talk to who might remember anything about the accident that killed my father. I pull up to the driveway, but don’t pull in. The mailbox shows the address as 1 Titus Path. I can see people in a large window. I let the car idle as I try to decide what I want to do. Alysa sits quietly, patiently, lets me think.

114 “Should I go in?” I ask. She looks at me as if to say, “You already know the answer. You just need to let yourself hear it.” “If I don’t go in,” I say, “if I don’t at least try, I’ll regret it, won’t I?” She’s right. I already know the answer. She has been my strength and my backbone. She gives me the courage I need to get out of the car. Slowly, together, we approach the house. Two small bulldogs rush at us and we both stand stock-still, letting the dogs sniff us, letting them know we mean no harm. A man comes to the door, looking to be in his mid-forties, strong, well built. Handsome. His blue t-shirt has an emblem on it for a local fire company. “Hi,” I say, timidly. “I’m wondering if you can help me.” “Depends on what it is,” he says, arms folded across his chest. His reply is guarded. Protective. On the porch of this man’s home, I tell him my name, tell him who I am. I tell him that there was an accident that happened in front of this house about 30 years ago. I pause. He looks at me, curious, as if wondering why I’d be interested in something that happened so long ago. I start to shake a little because I’m not very good at talking to strangers, not very good at asking questions. I don’t want to give away too much information, don’t want to come off as crazy or weird. I don’t want to scare him away. “This accident killed my father,” I said, “and I’m wondering if anyone around here remembers, saw anything, heard anything, or can give me any information about it.” “Come inside,” he says. I’m nervous, but excited. I am not sure what to expect. What does he know, I wonder? We step through the front door into the kitchen, where chaos ensues. The two dogs are still

115 sniffing the cuffs of our pants; a pregnant woman sits and chats with two girls in their teens who are making lunch. A toddler bounces up and down on the floor yelling “Ribbit! Ribbit!” like she’s a frog. “I’m just looking for some answers,” I tell him, trying to ignore the commotion and chatter around me. He tells me his name is Joe Grillo, and I remember the name for some reason. I ask if he knows a Matt Grillo, a boy I had gone to junior high with when I lived on Long Island. He shakes his head no. “Thirty years ago, you say?” he asks, getting us back on track. “About that,” I say. “Huh,” he says. “I wonder if I could have actually responded to that accident.” Tears come to my eyes as I realize this entire trip has suddenly become real. This trip is no longer about history, no longer an exploration about something that happened to some little girl in the past. It is about me — that little girl all grown up now and wanting to know my father. “Oh my God, you can’t be serious,” I say. I make my eyes wide so the tears will retreat and not fall. I need to keep myself together, remember that I need answers, remember that I’m trying to behave like a journalist, like Alysa has taught me. But I left my notebook behind. Thankfully, Alysa remembered it for me. And she begins taking notes, writing things down for me while I talk to Joe about my father. “I’ve been with the Jericho Fire Department for 29 years,” Joe says, and this disappoints me a little. He wasn’t there after all. The accident was 34 years ago, several years before he joined the company. He tells me to “hang on a sec” while he makes a phone call to his fire department.

116 He asks the person on the other end if he knows who would have responded to the scene back then, who might have been on call, who might have worked for the department that long ago. “It definitely would have been Jericho,” he tells me after he hangs up the phone. “Your father would have been taken to Nassau County Hospital.” “I thought he was killed instantly; they say he died of a hemo…” I struggle to find the word. “Hemo..thorax or something?” Joe explains that they don’t “declare death at the scene unless a person is obviously and visibly dead.” They do everything they can to help the person, he says, that way they can actually say, “We did everything we could.” I ask him what he means by “obviously or visibly dead.” “If someone were decapitated, for instance,” he says, “or had external injuries, like a severely broken neck — things like that,” he says. “But if your dad died of a hemothorax, that’s internal. He didn’t necessarily appear dead, even if he likely was, so they took him to Nassau County Hospital, where they have a trauma unit. Syosset Hospital is closer, but they don’t have a trauma unit.” I am overwhelmed at the amount of information I have gathered from Joe. Overwhelmed at the possibility of finding answers that I hadn’t had the courage to search for, or even the forethought to try to find any answers by asking real people. Joe has given me phone numbers and addresses of police stations, other fire departments and hospitals. Names of people to ask for. “Tell them Joe Grillo sent you,” he says. “They all know me.” He gives us directions to the Muttontown Police Department. “That’s the police department that likely would have responded because they’re closer than the Jericho Police Department. If nothing pans out at Muttontown, try Jericho,” he says. One of them might still have an accident report.

117 I write down my name and phone number, along with my dad’s name and the date of the accident. “If you hear anything, please let me know,” I say, and thank him profusely, almost gushing. Joe has been more than helpful. He gives me his phone number in case I have more questions. I also write down his address for the thank you card I intend to send later. So far he’s the only one who’s been able to give me any kind of concrete information.

The Muttontown Police Barracks is a tiny little house that could pass for a New England Bed and Breakfast. I make sure to park in one of the three visitor spots, not the spots intended for police cruisers. Cops make me nervous, and I wouldn’t want to cause trouble. Alysa and I step through the door, and we’re hit in the face by the smell of old mildew. An officer sits behind a counter encased in what is probably bulletproof glass. I’m not sure how to ask the questions I need to ask, so Alysa takes over for me. Being a journalist, she’s good at asking questions. Once again, I am grateful for her presence. She asks the officer if they might still have the accident report by chance. I watch the volley of conversation, but it doesn’t really consciously register. I am still focused on the smell. It reminds me of the cabana we had in our backyard when I was a kid. The changing room just behind the diving board at the house on Andover, the one we moved into after dad died. My brother used to climb onto the roof of the cabana and then onto the roof of the house, and then he’d jump into the pool from the roof when jumping from the top of the 12-foot slide wasn’t enough for him anymore. My mother hated when he did that. I was always too scared to try. “OK, thanks a lot,” I hear Alysa say, and I’m brought back to the present. I’m not sure what information she’s gathered, but once we get back to the car, I’m sure she’ll let me know.

118 “The Muttontown Police don’t have the police report,” she tells me, but then she looks up a name on her phone – Charles M. Capobianco. He was Muttontown’s Chief of Police between 1956 and 1987. He’d have known about the accident. When Alysa googles his name, we find out that he died in 2011. We’ve hit another dead end, but it still feels like progress, and we still have other leads and sources to try. Investigative Journalism is exhausting, I decide. Disappointed, excited, emotionally drained and hungry, I’m still hopeful. Sooner or later, whether on this trip or another, I’ll find the answers I need.

119 Return to Ficus Street

It is day three of our journey to Long Island, and Alysa and I are sitting in my car outside the home I lived in when I was eight years old. It’s been 34 years since my father’s accident, and I want to see the inside of the house I lived in briefly before he was killed. The neighborhood looks the same — mostly two story colonials, all with the same basic interior layout — the front door opens to a foyer, a staircase on the left or right, a living room and family room opposite the stairs, and a dining room on the same side. Kitchen in back. Each house was pretty much a cutout of the other. On their lawns, one or two bare trees with thick, meaty trunks cover their rooftops, even the tallest ones. In the summer, these trees will shade the yards and the street. They’ve have been here for ages, long before I was ever here, and they’ll be here long after I’m gone. I point out to my friend Alysa, the opulent white colonial where the Lopez’s lived, the Love’s modest blue two-story split level just across the way on Oakwood Avenue, and where the school bus stop was just in front of their house. I showed her my sister’s friend Lisa’s house and the Berwin’s next door. The Campolo’s house is the only house that ever stood out as being different from the others with its olive green exterior, pointy roof, and the front of the windowless house facing sideways. I always thought this house looked strange compared to the other front-facing cookiecutter homes on the street. “How long did you live here?” Alysa asks. “A year, maybe? A little less?” I’m not entirely sure, but it was no more than that. Alysa says she is surprised that I have such a clear recollection of all these names and places, since I

120 only lived there a short while. I explain that even if it had only been a year or so, it was still 1/7th or 1/8th of my life at the time. To an eight year old, that’s a long time. My mother’s cousin Nelson owned this house when we lived here 34 years ago. He had been renting it to another cousin, Marie and her husband Matty, when my family and I had moved in back in the summer of 1979. We lived there briefly with Matty and Marie and their two kids. Then, suddenly they all disappeared and it was just us — just my father, mother, brother and sister. Nelson still owns this house. I called him a few weeks prior to my trip to alert him to my visit, and to forewarn his current tenant that I’d be coming. I was anxious to make the call, though. I hemmed and hawed, concerned that he wouldn’t want to talk about my father’s death, how it had affected my mother, what he remembers about it, or the things my mother went through. I wanted to know what I hadn’t seen or noticed at the time, but I was afraid to ask. I had trouble finding a way to bring these things up, let alone discussing them with a distant second cousin who I hadn’t spoken to in years. I had finally mustered the courage to call, due in large part to nudging by my sister. “Stop making excuses!” she said. “They love us and miss us! They’re very sweet and funny as heck,” she continued, referring to both our cousin and his wife Judy. I had this nagging feeling that my reasons for calling and wanting to talk to him were purely selfish. Everything’s always about Jean my brother’s voice echoed in my head. “Just keep your focus,” Heather said. “I’m sure you’ll be happy you contacted them, no matter what the reason. And what’s selfish about what you’re doing? You’re being way too selfconscious about this!”

121 “Bothering them, and asking them for information about things they probably don’t want to think about,” I replied. “Why worry about what you think they might think? Because that’s silly.” And so I called. Much to my relief, Nelson didn’t answer. I left a message, and explained that I was working on my MFA thesis, and wondered if he could provide me with some information about my father’s accident, and how much he’d helped my mother back then. I knew he had something to do with cleaning up the mess after my father died. I left my phone number for a return call. When he called back a few days later, a Saturday morning, I was still in bed with my boyfriend. I needed to have that conversation alone, so I let it go to voicemail. We listened to the message he left, which sounded icy and businesslike. He didn’t seem to be returning a call to a family member who he loved and missed and hadn’t heard from in ages. It sounded more like I’d been someone he’d had an appointment with to do his taxes. He’d call me back on Monday, he said. He was a little “jammed up” at the moment, he said. Did that mean I should just wait until Monday to hear from him? Should I call him back to let him know I’d gotten his message? I decided to wait. The following Monday, Nelson called while I was at work. When my cell phone rang, I dashed out of my office to find a more private place to talk and began to explain my purpose in more detail. “I have to tell you, I was very angry with you,” he said. “You hurt a lot of people.” My ears and face grew hot, the blood rushed to my cheeks in much the same way it rushes to the sting of a slap. Did he mean when I was little? It didn’t make sense. Who could I have hurt? I had only been a child when my father died. I needed him to elaborate.

122 “What do you mean?” I asked. This was not how I had hoped the conversation would go, but if I’d been a brat back then, maybe it would give me some insight into my other family relationships. “Can you tell me what I did?” “You drove your mother crazy,” he said. But that’s all he said. Perhaps he meant as an adult, after I had gotten older, after I had graduated college. I had distanced myself from my mother as I became more aware of her antics. My mother liked to tell stories, embellish. Flat out make stuff up. Like when she told me that Joe Cocker had Cerebral Palsy — that’s why he sang the way he did. Or that Bono from U2 was an “Irish Jew.” Was there such a thing? That’s why I never really believed the story she told about Cousin Matty. About him taking five shots to the back of the head at close range for stealing from the mafia. I had heard this story shortly after my father died and always thought it was bullshit. Whenever we’d talk on the phone, we’d argue. It didn’t matter what the conversation was about. She’d take offense to something, anything I’d say, and then I’d find out later that she’d spun my words and repeated her new version of the story back to my siblings. Once, she told my brother I was a heroin addict because I worked at a radio station. I received a letter from him telling me that I “needed to get off the hard drugs.” I’d only ever seen the stuff in movies. The letter came as a total shock. I’d been working three part time jobs just to make rent, food and pay what bills I could afford to pay. “I figured you must be living the glamorous life,” my mother said when I confronted her about the letter I’d received. I couldn’t understand why she thought of me like this, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I learned to keep my distance from her, learned that we couldn’t fight

123 or argue if we didn’t talk. I thought it would be better this way, but maybe this is what had hurt her. But still, Nelson wouldn’t elaborate. He wouldn’t tell me what I had done, exactly. I wanted to cry, to tell my sister, “I told you so.” But instead, I tried to remain the adult. Tried to glean from him what I could, tried to understand my own behavior from this new, adult perspective. I continued to ask for specifics, repeat the question in different ways. “But how did I hurt her? What did I do? Was this just after dad died? When did this happen?” He’d just give me the same answer, just that I “drove my mother crazy” and then he’d change the subject, start giving me our family tree, who was married to whom, and how many kids this person had, what this cousin was up to. I didn’t care about any of that, and my time was limited. My boss had no idea I’d left and I needed to get back to my desk before she noticed my absence. I was pressed for time. “What about the house on Ficus Street?” I asked, giving up on the other line of questions. “I know you had something to do with that. You helped her out. I remember you were a big part of her life.” “Matty, our cousin,” he said, “was married to Marie.” He told me this like I didn’t know who they were. He told me this like I hadn’t been there on Ficus Street when we lived with Matty and Marie and their two kids. Danny, the younger one, was my age, and Robby, the older one, was about my sister’s age. He told me this like I hadn’t been there when my father died. But what did this have to do with anything, I wondered? “Matty got in trouble with the Mafia,” he said. “He’d been stealing from them, and it caught up with him.” So it wasn’t bullshit after all, I thought. But that’s not why I called, not

124 why I wanted to talk to Nelson. I wanted to know about my mother. I wanted to tell Nelson that I’m not that little girl anymore, that I’m 42 years old, and my mother was only 34 when my father died. I’m now eight years older than my mother was when she lost her husband, and I’m learning to see her from a different perspective. I want to know what losing him might have been like for her. I want to know about my mother’s relationship with my father before he had died. Had they been happy? She loved him; I knew that, I’d said. But I was too young to know things, to notice or understand the adult things that happened before he died. I wanted to know what had been hidden from me, what they had all thought I had been too young to understand. Nelson gave me information like I was an outsider. Like I hadn’t known my mother at all in her later years. Like I hadn’t known she’d died only seven years earlier. “Yes, I know,” I’d say, referring to the health issues she’d battle with. “But I need to know what she was like with my father, what their relationship was like. Can you tell me about that? I know you were close.” He wouldn’t give me details of her younger life, just that she had health problems. Maybe he just didn’t understand me, or what I needed to know. He mentioned arbitrary details, like my sister’s wedding, as if I hadn’t been there, as if I hadn’t been her Maid of Honor. He didn’t remember that I had gotten married, nor did he know that I had been recently divorced. I didn’t mention the invitation to my wedding that he’d declined 8 years prior. My mother had insisted on inviting him. Had he been angry with me then, which is why he declined the invitation? He’d apparently forgotten. “I’m coming to Long Island next weekend,” I said. “I would love it if we could get together to talk some more, maybe have dinner. I’d like to see the house on Ficus Street.”

125 “The house is completely different,” he insisted. I got the feeling he didn’t want me to see it. That my digging and questions were a terrible inconvenience, as I’d feared. I tried to squash my insecurity, tried to remember what my sister had said. They love us and miss us. I’d also hoped to be able to stay with Nelson and Judy while I was out there. It would give us a chance to catch up, and save me a few bucks in the meantime. I couldn’t allow myself to impose, though, couldn’t bring myself to ask if my friend and I could stay with him that weekend. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll have to see if I’m available.” Another slap. “Usually I go to visit Judy’s mother, and we go out for dinner.” It made me sad that he wasn’t willing to break his routine to talk with me, to spend time with me. I couldn’t bear to ask him if I could stay with him. “I’ll call you when I’m in town, and hopefully we can get together,” I said. “Love you!” I said, just before he hung up. The conversation lolls around in my head as I contemplate this house that had once been my home. Sitting in my car, in front of this white, two-story colonial, which is in desperate need of a paint job and some TLC, memories come back to me in bits and pieces like shards of broken mirrors. I can only see parts of them — they flash and then they’re gone. But others have stuck with me for a lifetime. Like the day I met the girl who lived down the street in the ugly, funny shaped olive green house. Cynthia Campolo was the first person I met when we moved to Ficus Street after leaving East Islip. It was summer; school wouldn’t start for another a month or two. Another new school where I’d be the new kid again. I hated being the new kid. My mother’s cousin, Marie, introduced me to Cynthia. She rode her bike in the street and Marie raked the grass in the front yard. I followed Marie everywhere, clung to her like plastic

126 wrap. I wonder if she felt suffocated by my constant need to be with her in this new place. My family had only lived in this house for a week or so, while Marie and her husband Matty were preparing to move out. I was still getting my bearings, and learning my surroundings – again. Being in this new place after East Islip, after Uncle Timmy’s House, after leaving my beloved Washington State, I needed time to get used to it all. Again. Marie didn’t shoo me away; she didn’t make me feel unwanted. But when she called Cynthia over to help me make a new friend, I was terrified. Maybe I was just shy, and I hated myself for that. Maybe I hated how uncomfortable I felt, being around other people, unable to start conversations. I never knew what to say. I was always so stricken with fear that my mind would go blank — I’d have a million thoughts and then I’d have no thoughts at all, except Idon’tknowwhattosaywhatshouldIsayIdon’tknow, and was often preceded by what if she doesn’t like me? My brother and sister never wanted to play with me, and I seemed to exasperate my mother who constantly asked me to “go find something to do.” An uncle once told me to “go play in traffic.” At the time I didn’t know what he had meant, and the confused look on my face had made him howl with laughter. When Marie had called Cynthia over into the yard where she was raking, I figured she just wanted keep me from being underfoot, wanted to pass me off onto someone else so I would stay out of her way. Was she tired of me now, too? I wondered. If my own family doesn’t like me, then why would Cynthia? The sun beat down from the summer sky, but my insides stung with the cold of loneliness. When Marie introduced me to Cynthia, I simply burst into tears. I couldn’t help it. Fear and loneliness overtook my thoughts — I already assumed Cynthia wouldn’t want anything to do with me either.

127 “She doesn’t like me,” I insisted between sobs. “She doesn’t want to be friends with me!” Cynthia burst into laughter at the sight of my tears. She laughed so hard that she tilted her head back and her straight blond hair spilled down her back, exposing her throaty neck. Cynthia seemed to tower over me, seemed to be so much older than me. At the time I thought she had to be at least a fifth grader, being as tall as she was. The more she laughed the more I cried, and the more I hated her for it. It turned out that we were the same age, and we would end up in the same second grade class with Ms. Mones. When I said, “She doesn’t want to be friends with me” I probably meant that I didn’t want to be friends with her. I didn’t like being laughed at; I didn’t like being made fun of, teased. I hated that Marie had forced me to talk to Cynthia. I didn’t like talking to new people; I never knew what to say and I didn’t think anyone liked me. I didn’t even like me. I just stood there and cried hot steamy tears while Cynthia laughed. I hated that I couldn’t run and hide. That I couldn’t be by myself, hiding under my covers or inside the pages of a Beverly Cleary book where I could pretend to be Ramona Quimby. No one could make fun of me, tease me or laugh at me when I hid in those pages. I loved that I could hide from the world and pretend to be someone else, pretend to be anyone else other than me. My face hot, I stood on the front lawn and continued to cry, embarrassed that this woman, my mother’s cousin, to whom I’d practically fused myself, had tried to make my friends for me. Making my own friends should have been my choice, I thought. I’d do it when I was ready, and I wanted to choose who they would be. Cynthia and I never really became friends, even after we’d gone from second grade through sixth in all the same classes. I often wonder if we would have been friends if I hadn’t

128 stood on the lawn and bawled at her the day we met. Maybe she would have liked me if I had given her a chance.

The yard in front of Eighteen Ficus Street is bleak, now. The grass is dead and the hedges are gone. There used to be forsythia bushes that lined the front of the house underneath the large first floor windows, and a giant oak tree that spilled its branches into the sky above the street. A cat we owned got stuck in that tree once, and my father had tried to rescue her. She was probably scared as hell and didn’t want anyone to come near her. My father had climbed up the tree, grabbed the cat by the nape of its neck and held her inside his shirt. His hand came away bloody and raw. Both the cat and the tree are gone now. A car in the driveway indicates that whoever lives in this house now is probably home. “I’m going in,” I grab my notebook and pen, and open the car door. Alysa raises her eyebrows and says, “Okay!” She seems just as excited as me to see what the inside of this house looks like. I seem to have no difficulty getting out of the car to approach the house. My walk is determined, my shoulders are back, and my back is straight. Is this what confidence feels like? It feels nothing like the day I met Cynthia. I was unsure about everything that day. I am unsure about everything this day as well, but I am older now, and that makes it easier. Having my friend by my side also makes it easier. “If you weren’t with me,” I say to Alysa as we stand on the front stoop, “I probably wouldn’t have the balls to get out of the car. I’d still be sitting there, and I’d look at the house and just wonder.” Alysa simply looks back at me and smiles, understanding. It’s what friends do for each other. “Thank you for giving me the strength I need to do this,” I say.

129 I knock on the door, and we wait. I’m not sure what awaits us behind this door, or what I expect to find. I find myself looking out at the neighborhood, taking everything in. I’m not even sure if anyone is home, even though a car is parked in the driveway. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t seem weird to me at all, to be asking a complete stranger if I can come inside his house. I’ve committed myself to it. I don’t want any regrets, regardless of what lies beyond the battered front door. I’ve only known Alysa for a short while, maybe a little over a year, if that. Our friendship is still new, but we help each other up, support each other, and listen. It’s like neither of us had known friendship before, and now we know what it means. There is something about her that inspires me, something that makes me feel like I can accomplish anything. I am glad she is with me, and I tell her so. Finally, a man of Hispanic or Italian descent opens the door, inquisitive and unsure as to why there are two grown women standing on his front stoop. “Hi,” I say. “My name is Jean Hopkins. I believe you know my cousin, Nelson Antinori.” I hope that this will give me credibility. “He owns this house, right?” The man looks back at me, sizes me up, but doesn’t respond. “I lived here thirty years ago,” I continue. “I’m doing some research for a book I’m writing.” I pause. I don’t want to finish the sentence; it carries too much weight. “About my father. He was killed in a car accident when I lived here.” This gets his attention. He steps outside, carefully closes the door behind him. “I told Nelson I was coming. Didn’t he call you?” I ask. “He was supposed to let you know. I was hoping you’d let me see the inside, to see if it could jog some memories for me?”

130 The man seems apprehensive at best as he paces back and forth, unsure of what he should do. In his black Champion sweatshirt, gold chains, and sagging jeans, he seems just as unsavory to me as I might be to him. His demeanor and style are a stereotype, like he could be some kind of drug dealer or something along those lines, but I push that thought out of my head. He might hold the keys to what is still locked up and hidden inside the vault of my memories. He tries to open a pack of cigarettes, fumbles with it. I can tell he is nervous. “Look,” I say. I just need five minutes.” “I don’t know, man,” he says. “My house, it’s a mess. I don’t know.” “I swear, I’m not here to see what you’ve got going on inside your house,” I say. “Really, I promise, I am just a grad student looking for some answers about something that happened here about thirty years ago,” I say. “Please,” I say. I hope he can see the earnestness in my eyes. All I want is to see the inside of this house, to see if I remember it right. “You know Nelson?” he says. “Yes, he’s my cousin.” “Let me call him,” he says. “You know, I just gotta be sure, you know,” he says. “I don’t know if you girls are gonna come in and rape me, so I just gotta be sure you know?” Alysa and I share a sideways glance and an inward smirk. Rape him? He’s kidding, right? “Sure, absolutely,” I say. He’ll let me in; I’m sure of it now. Albert returns from his phone call with my cousin and says, “Give me five minutes.” I can’t believe I’ll be going inside. In only moments, I’ll be inside the house I lived in when two policemen stood on this very stoop and told my mother that my father had been killed in a car accident. I’ll be able to see things as an adult, with an adult perspective. I’ll be able to

131 stand in the very spot I stood in when I watched my mother fall apart in our foyer the night her husband had been killed. The night our lives completely changed forever. Alysa says she is proud of me for the way I’m handling myself, for putting my fears aside and talking to people to get the information I need. I’m proud of myself, too. After what seems like much longer than five minutes, the door opens, and we step inside. Immediately, I realize something is terribly wrong. The foyer and the landing is not at all how I remembered them. The night my father died, I remember coming out to the bannister in the upstairs hallway, where I stood in front of the bathroom on the second floor. The wrought iron railing is still there, but a solid plaster wall blocks the view. There is no way I could have witnessed the conversation, witnessed the two police officers, or witnessed my mother’s obliterating meltdown in the foyer upon hearing the news that my father had died in that car crash. The carpeted stairs are tight and wind up and around to the second floor. My bedroom, or what had once been my bedroom, is set up the same exact same way I had it when I was a kid. There is a twin bed on the left side of the room, a window that looks out onto the street out front, and a small closet ninety degrees to the right. This was my room, I think, and I look at the twin bed that’s in the same spot where my bed used to be, my bed with my Holly Hobby blanket and Raggedy Ann and Andy sheets. I think, this is where I sat when my mother passed in front of my door to go to her room that night, where I sat and waited for her to come to me, waited for her to tell me what I already knew. This was the room I left, and wandered to the top of the stairs and over to the railing in the hallway. And that’s where the memory stops being accurate. There is a wall blocking the view. In my memory, I watched my mother from the second floor hallway, holding onto the wrought iron railing with tight-clenched fists.

132 “Maybe I crept down the stairs to the middle landing?” I say to Alysa. She nods in agreement. It makes sense. There is a wrought iron railing attached to the first flight of stairs. “Maybe this is the railing I remember holding onto.” I crouch down to get a child’s perspective. “Maybe this is the spot where I saw everything.” If I had been in that spot, it would have been very easy for my mother to have spotted me and then urged me to go to back to bed that night. I would have been able to see the police officers clearly, would have been able to see everything from this vantage point. My sister told me once that she too awoke that night and watched from the bannister upstairs. I didn’t see her that night. I didn’t know she had woken up, too. “Maybe you came out after I went back to bed,” I had suggested. But now, seeing the true structure of the house, not just from my memory, it makes sense. My sister could have crept out of her bedroom to the railing, unbeknownst to me, and crept back to her room when she heard my mother tell me to go back to bed. I never would have seen her. It amazes me how my memory had changed. Some researchers say that memories can change over time because the original memory mixes with new knowledge. Every time you try to retrieve a memory, a new memory is actually created. I wonder what my brain protecting me from by changing my location? Was it trying to put physical distance between the front door, the news, and myself? By adjusting my physical distance in my memory, I wonder if it also gave me emotional distance. “It’s interesting,” Alysa says, “how tight the space is upstairs. You all lived so close to one another, practically on top of one another, yet there is so much distance between all of you.” She makes a good point, and one that I probably would not have noticed had I been there by myself. Once again, I’m grateful she is with me. I’m sure I would have noticed that the space was smaller than I remember — I’m a little bit bigger now than I was 34 years ago, but I never

133 would have made the connection between the physical space and the emotional distance that my mother and my siblings and I had all once shared. I turn and go back up the stairs, this time to the end of the hallway, to where my sister’s room would have been, and then I point out my brother’s room across the hall. If I hold my arms out I can touch both doors without stretching. I turn about, and face my mother’s bedroom door at the end of the narrow hallway. I am hesitant to go inside. This space seems much more private. Someone else lives here now, and I feel like I am invading his space. Albert has been very patient and gracious; he has given me the space I need and has allowed me to poke around his house, his life, to resurrect the life of my childhood. I open the bedroom door and step down into the “sunken” room. His bed is in the wrong place, not where my mother and father slept. It feels wrong being in this room, like I’ve crossed a line, invaded too much privacy — Albert’s, my mother’s, my fathers. I can’t bear to be in there, and quickly turn away and retreat. As I walk back down the stairs, I feel like I’m in a museum. I touch the walls as if they hold some kind of secret past that I’m unaware of, but hope my touch will unlock or release it. These walls are cold, almost clammy, and thick with heavy, white paint. The house no longer smells of stale and acrid smoke, but of paint. Perhaps this is why the house seems so small. Maybe each year, a new coat or three gets painted on, covering up decades of fingerprints and memories as it closes in on itself. To the right of the foyer is the dining room. It’s different than I remember, lighter, and brighter. The floor is linoleum, a white brick and black mortar pattern. But something about it feels familiar. I remember dark wood paneling and dark blue carpeting. Maybe the linoleum was under the carpet. It doesn’t look new. My mother’s chestnut dining table, china cabinet, and my father’s upright piano filled the space, making it almost claustrophobic. This is where we ate

134 dinner every night when we lived there. We didn’t eat at the kitchen table. My father sat at the head of the table, in front of the window, and I sat to his right. I ate with my left hand, (still do) so I had to be on an end (still do.) Snippets of conversations come to mind as I remember eating in this room. Something about a coffee can, a brand called “Savarin,” and a town on Long Island named Sayville. I remember how I thought they were related somehow and had trouble pronouncing them. I remember having dirty hands one night when I came to the dinner table after playing. They were black with dirt, and I was told to wash my hands. I don’t know why this memory is significant, or why it has stuck with me, but I’m an avid hand-washer now, to the point where my skin is often dry and my knuckles are often cracked. It was in this room where my sister played “Heart and Soul” on the piano the morning after my father died. She wanted to cheer everyone up, she said. It was also the room where she sat on my father’s lap and asked him to stop drinking five days before he died. This is the room where I first tried asparagus and liked it. Where I first had spinach and liked it. I remember the table being decorated for Christmas, with my mother’s turquoise blue Christmas tablecloth that was made of knitted yarn. A table runner with angels playing horns weaved into it completed the table like it was a package wrapped in ribbon. Her German candle carousel made the centerpiece. When the candles were lit, the heat from the flames would rise and move the flat wooden paddles and the carousel of figurines would spin. I remember how much I loved playing with it, and how much my mother hated that I loved playing with it. On the other side of the dining room is the eat-in kitchen. It is bright and sunny, and full of windows. A round kitchen table sits under a hanging chandelier with a few chairs neatly tucked around it. The same linoleum flooring is in the kitchen, and that’s why it’s familiar. Suddenly I am transported back to early 1980. Just after the Christmas holiday season. My father

135 had gotten a “Star Trek” board game for the family for Christmas, and he wanted to play one night. We all knew how much he loved Star Trek, knew that he had really bought the game for himself. The board was huge — instead of one simple board folded in half, this board had several folds and took up the entire kitchen table. The game made no sense to me, but I just remember how excited my dad was to play. My mother humored him, as she sat patiently and tried to help us all understand the game’s objective. There were translucent blue and red chips that I think we were supposed to collect in order to win, but I had no idea how to accomplish that. We each had a different colored Starship Enterprise piece to move around the board. Nights like this didn’t happen often for our family, and maybe that’s why this one night sticks out for me the way it does, and why I hold onto it. It was a night that you thought, maybe this is what it means to be a family. Even if I didn’t understand the game, and was probably frustrated and didn’t want to play anymore, it’s one of the last times I remember seeing my dad happy and laughing, and being goofy and intense and competitive all at once. I stand in this room remembering this night, this one last time that I remember all of us together as a family. I see myself in him, see how he’s shaped my personality, and I feel like we’re connected in a way that’s different from my brother and sister. Not only do I have his cleft chin, uni-brow, and dark hair, but I’ve inherited his love for books and fantasy, thirst for knowledge, and perfection. I’ve also inherited his penchant for drinking, and wish I had also inherited his quick wit and sense of humor. “Stewed farts and onions,” he’d say when we asked what we were having for dinner. On road trips, his response to “where are we?” was usually, “Right here. Not too far from right there.” One day, I’ll use these lines and think of my father, and I’ll giggle a little on the inside.

136 Through the kitchen and to the right, is the basement door. Albert brushes past us, and goes down. I peer down the steps and I laugh out loud. “My sister and I used to play down in the basement,” I say. “She would strap on roller skates, and I had these cheap plastic skis. She’d tie a jump rope around her waist, and I’d hold onto the handles like she was the lead dog on a dog sled. She’d skate laps around and around and pull me along behind her as I held onto the jump-rope handles.” Alysa laughs and says, “Yeah, we did that kind of thing, too, when we were kids.” It’s nice to be able to share these things with her. I like explaining all of these details to her; it helps me to remember what I’m seeing now, and it reminds that there were good times, too. On the other side of the kitchen, opposite the basement door, there is a family room, the room where we watched TV at night and where my dad liked to watch college football and creepy sci-fi shows on the weekends. Albert’s couch is in the same place as ours was. The room hasn’t changed much at all. The sliding glass door is still there, and the small powder room is still just off to the left. The only thing that’s changed about this room is the color of it. The dark wood paneling is gone, replaced by a light shade of blue. I wonder if this is why Nelson told me that the house was completely different, that I wouldn’t recognize it. The rooms may have been updated, and had facelifts, but much of it is exactly what I needed to see. The important things are still here. “This is the room where my mother told us that my father had died,” I say to Alysa. “I stood over there, by the sliding glass door, and my mother sat on the couch with my brother, right there.” I stand there for a moment, and simply remember. Simply confirm. But no, it’s more than just that. Maybe I needed to come here for forgiveness. To forgive my father for abandoning us, but mostly I think I needed to come here to let it all go. I try to see the room as I saw it then

137 — the dark paneling, the tattered couch, my father’s orange crushed velvet chair. I close my eyes for a moment and imagine a weighted balloon, full of bad feelings and ugliness. I make the balloon disintegrate, watch its black smoke float away in my mind’s sky. Is this what forgiveness looks like, I wonder? But I still don’t know what to feel. Or how to feel. I’m not sure what I am supposed to get from this whole experience. Maybe it’s brought me a little closer to closure. At least it’s a step in the right direction, I think. And that makes me feel better. Alysa is patient and quiet. She stands next to me, close enough so that I know she is there, but not too close to overwhelm or suffocate me. She does nothing at all like what I did to Marie thirty four years ago, and she does nothing at all like what Cynthia did all those years ago. She doesn’t laugh at me, or make me cry. She simply waits and seems to take it all in the same way I do. “OK.” I say after a few moments. “You ready?” she says. “Yeah,” I say. And I am.

138 Epilogue

On our way back to Pittsburgh, we meet up with Aunt Kathleen, my father’s youngest sister. We’re in a quiet restaurant, in a tiny suburb in New Jersey. It’s quaint, there’s a fireplace and the plates are made of pewter. The server brings a glass of red wine for me and water for Alysa. Aunt Kath knows why I wanted to meet her for dinner; I had mentioned to her previously that I had questions about my dad that maybe she could help me answer. We both take a sip from our glasses, and she beams at me, she seems so happy to see me; it’s been way too long. Many years have passed since we’ve seen each other, and in this moment, I know I am loved. And I love her back. I know she will tell me the truth. “You don’t know the truth, do you?” she asks. “What, that dad was an alcoholic?” I say. “So you knew! How did you know?” “My cousin Jeff told me when I was 19,” I said. “He told me at a bar on Thanksgiving, said that my father ‘wasn’t exactly sober.’” “How did he know?” she asked, utterly surprised. “I guess he must have overheard his mother talking about it when it happened.” Jeff’s mother was my mother’s sister, my aunt. “Why did everyone lie about it?” I asked. It made no sense to me to keep everything hidden, that everyone kept secrets. I hated being lied to. I’ve always hated being lied to. “To protect your mother,” she said.

139 “Protect her from what? She already knew he was an alcoholic.” I was in my mid-thirties when my mother finally told me the truth about my father’s drinking. I just hated finding out after the fact. “Really?” Aunt Kathleen asks, once again, surprised, as if she was certain my mother hadn’t a clue that my father was a drinker. But my mother knew that my father liked to drink, how could she not, living in the same house with him? Then again, I never knew. But I was also a child back then, and oblivious to the things grown-ups did. What I still don’t understand is why this lie perpetuated for so many years, and why was it so important to hide the truth from all of us? Maybe my mother really did believe that a drunk driver killed him. Maybe everyone just wanted my mother to remember my father in a favorable light. She loved him harder than she had loved anyone. Maybe she loved him so much that she had turned a blind eye, and truly believed he was sober the night he died. It’s baffling. And Aunt Kathleen is baffled, too. “I swore on my life to your Uncle Timmy that I wouldn’t say a word,” she says. Uncle Timmy had been married to my dad’s sister Maureen at the time, and was a New York City police officer, and Aunt Kathleen says he pulled strings with the medical examiner, and whoever wrote the accident report to keep my father’s death clean — to leave off any information referring to his blood alcohol content or the fact that alcohol was involved. Uncle Timmy owed my father that much, I supposed, after he had been caught molesting his two youngest daughters. I told Aunt Kathleen what I thought of Uncle Timmy, told her what he had done to my sister and me. This time tears came to her eyes. “I could have sworn I told your mother to keep you girls away from Uncle Timmy.” Aunt Kathleen had also once been a victim of Uncle Timmy’s sexual advances. She had only been eleven when her older sister Maureen had gotten married to him.

140 Still it doesn’t make sense, and it seems too far-fetched to be true, the stuff of movies, I think. A low-level New York City cop manages to keep vital information off of a medical examiner’s report. I am skeptical. Skeptical that my Uncle Timmy would have that kind of pull. Now, I’m determined to find out what really happened. I’m determined to find the accident report. I need to know what it really says. “I kept that secret until just now,” Aunt Kathleen says, taking another sip of her wine spritzer. She seems earnest, seems to believe what she tells me. I believe that she believes what she has been told. She kept this secret to honor her brother — my father, and to protect my mother and her mother. And us kids. I’m glad it’s out, and glad that she can let go of it now. And soon enough, I think, I will too. I’ve made progress, and for now, I’m OK with that.

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