Then Came You (7 page)

But that was getting ahead of myself.

I dug deeper, refining my search, typing in his name along with the name of his wife. It didn’t take me long to learn that the ex–Mrs. Croft had taken a lover—her yoga instructor, which was not terribly original—and taken off for an ashram in New Mexico.
All the better to replace you with, my dear,
I’d thought, clicking the link for pictures, which revealed a generic society-woman-of-a-certain-age, in an updo and a satin gown at the Met’s costume ball. I was prettier than she was; thinner, younger, bigger boobs, a higher ass; the winner by technical knockout in the only categories that mattered.

My telephone rang.
PRIVATE NUMBER
, read the display. I put my finger on the button, readying myself, a backup quarterback who’d just been called into the big game. In that moment, I remembered going on the one vacation my grandparents and I ever took, to a cabin on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire that one of their friends had won at a church auction and had, for some reason, been unable to use. One morning my
opa
had woken me up before the sun had risen, and we’d slipped out of the cabin, leaving my grandmother still snoozing in the saggymattressed bed. Sitting in a wooden rowboat, one foot trailing in the shockingly cold water, holding the fishing rod my
opa
had brought up from the basement the night before we’d left, I felt at first a gentle tug, then a sharper one. The tip of my rod bent until
it was almost touching the surface of the lake. I jerked back on it as hard as I could, until my
opa
stopped me.
Easy,
he said, his arms against my shoulders.
Remember. He’s a fish. You’re a big girl. Play him in easy, and remember: you’re smarter than he is.

You’re smarter than he is,
I thought, and arranged my face into a pleasant smile, crossed my legs, shook out my hair, and lifted the receiver to my ear.

I
was in ninth grade when my dad had his accident. Miss Carasick, the guidance counselor, who was known, inevitably, as Miss Carsick, pulled me out of French class and hustled me down the hall into her office, which was decorated with posters from different colleges. “Your father’s in the hospital,” she said.

I’d been slouching in the seat across from her desk—cringing, actually. I was afraid she’d found out that Tricia Barnes and I had been hiding out in the girls’ room after we’d pled menstrual cramps to get out of gym class. I hadn’t seen my parents that morning, but that wasn’t unusual: most days, my father left for school before I even got out of bed and my mom stayed asleep until after I was gone. “What? Why? What happened?”

Miss Carasick sat back. Her glasses shone in the glare from the fluorescent lights overhead, and I could see a sprinkling of white flakes—dandruff, or dried mousse—at her hairline. “All I know is that there’s been an accident.”

“What...” My mouth felt frozen. I wished she had caught me and Tricia; that would have been a million times better than this. “What happened?”

I remembered the way she rolled her lips over each other, her lipstick making a faint smacking sound. Later, I’d found out that my father’d had his midterm performance review the previous
afternoon and gone to a bar directly after. How, at closing time, the bartender had tried to take his keys away and my father had refused. How he’d driven his little VW Rabbit through a stop sign and hit a car with a young woman behind the wheel and her three-year-old in the backseat. How both of them, mother and child, were in the hospital, both of them expected to make a full recovery, although the toddler had been touch-and-go at first. How my father had been drunk at the time of the accident, with a blood alcohol level almost double the legal limit, and how he was in the hospital and under arrest. The police, I learned later, had come by the house first thing in the morning; they’d brought my mother to see him and she’d left without leaving a note.

I thought a lot about it later: why Mrs. Carasick hadn’t been kinder; whether I’d misremembered; or if she’d actually been gloating when she’d given me the news. Years later, I’d imagine looking up her address, knocking on her door, and standing there with my hair loose over my shoulders and telling her what a bitch she’d been, that I was a fourteen-year-old, a girl who had no idea that her father had had a drinking problem.

Afterward, I could see the signs—the way he’d always had a beer as soon as he walked through the door after school, the wine with dinner, the tumbler full of whiskey and ice by his hand when he’d grade papers; the way he’d go out to play poker Friday nights and, how on Saturday mornings, my mother would make me and Greg talk in whispers and walk barefoot.
Shh,
my mother would tell us, shooing us into the kitchen, away from the closed bedroom door.
Your dad’s had a hard week.

The weekend after I’d met Jared Baker of the Princeton Fertility Clinic, I made my monthly trip home. I left at four, after my last class on Friday, stopping at the Wawa, the convenience store at the edge of campus where students could buy cheap hot dogs and hoagies after a night of drinking. I filled my thermos
with hot coffee and bought a ticket for the Dinky, the little train that ran from campus to Princeton Junction. At Princeton Junction I’d catch a New Jersey Transit train to Philadelphia. In Philly, I’d walk from Suburban Station to the bus terminal and buy a bottle of water and a roast pork sandwich at the Reading Terminal Market, standing in line with rough-handed construction workers and puffy-faced nurses on their way to work, and catch the Greyhound home.

When I got to Pittsburgh early the next morning, my mother was waiting for me at the station, the sounds of NPR filling the car. NPR was my father’s station—my mother favored country music and AM call-in shows. All those years later, after his hospitalization, his trips through detox and rehab, his trial for driving under the influence and attempted vehicular manslaughter and the six months he’d eventually spent in jail, she still listened to his radio stations, still kept one of his coats in the closet and cooked his favorite things for dinner, as if, someday, he’d walk back through the door, the same man she’d fallen in love with.

It would never happen. My father had lived at home briefly after he’d been paroled. Then the drinking had started again. My mother had given him a version of the speech it was rumored Laura Bush once delivered to her not-yet-presidential husband—“It’s me or Jack Daniel’s”—and kicked him out. My father had rented a studio apartment and, once that lease ran out, he’d moved in with another woman.

My mom could have forgiven my father for what he’d done, for driving drunk, for hitting an innocent woman and child, but she couldn’t forgive him for Rita Devine. It had soured my mother, who’d always been so sweet, delighted by the smallest things: a trip to the shore, a bouquet of sunflowers, a mug of mulled cider in the backyard while my brother and I raked leaves.

I dropped my backpack in the trunk, kissed my mom’s cheek,
and buckled myself into the front seat. My mother drove with a light hand on the wheel, steering the car through the morning sunshine, along the familiar streets, until we merged onto the freeway that would take us from downtown to Squirrel Hill. “Classes okay?” she asked.

“Classes are fine,” I told her.

“And how is Dan?”

“Dan’s great.” Dan and I had been a couple for four months, but sometimes I thought I didn’t know him any better than I had the first night we’d hooked up. He was good-looking, well-mannered, a rower with formidable shoulders, and had a fondness for 1990s-era grunge rock ...and that was it. “Well, you look great,” said my mom and I nodded.

My mother and I have the same fair skin and pale eyes, and I know, from pictures, that her hair was once like mine. But now her skin was etched with hundreds of tiny lines, blotched and splotched with souvenirs of the summers when she used to gild herself in Johnson’s Baby Oil and lie in a bikini on a beach towel in her backyard. The pink of her lips had faded to beige, her hair was a too-bright lemony color, her fingertips were permanently stained from hair dye and cigarettes, and her body was slack and soft beneath her clothes.

“I hope you’re hungry. I made a chicken pot pie for dinner.” She gave me a quick once-over when traffic slowed. “You look great.”

“I’ve been running a lot. Five miles yesterday.”

“Five miles. Wow. Good for you.” She looked at herself ruefully. “I bet I couldn’t run a mile. Not even if someone was chasing me.”

“You just start slow. Run for thirty seconds, walk for two minutes. Start with twenty minutes a day...”

She shook her head, smiling. She’d heard this before, my prescriptions for healthy living, advice about diet and exercise, and
she’d listen with a smile, then ignore whatever I’d suggested. As far as I knew, she’d never been on a date since my father had left. “I’m just not interested,” she’d told me the one time I’d asked.

My father and his girlfriend lived in an apartment complex, a place called Oakwood Towers that boasted no oak trees and where the buildings topped out at three stories. The three-building complex, shaped like an H, was Section 8 housing, with a parking lot full of secondhand cars held together with Bondo and tape and baling wire, and apartments full of new immigrants and newly single men, families who’d cram eight or ten people into a one-bedroom unit, tired-eyed grandparents with babies and toddlers. My mother would drive into the parking lot, but no farther.

“See you at two?”

I nodded, leaving my backpack in the car, taking the plastic bag full of stuff I’d brought for my father. On the scraggly lawn in front of his building, two boys in corduroy pants and T-shirts kicked a soccer ball back and forth and chattered to each other in a language I didn’t recognize.

I pressed the buzzer, waited until the door opened, and then walked past the empty fountain in the lobby (sometimes there was a girl in a football helmet sitting on the lip of that fountain, rocking and drooling), down a disinfectant-scented, green-carpeted hallway to apartment 211.

Rita wasn’t there—she worked on weekends, a part-time job at a sporting-goods store. My dad was waiting for me at the door. He’d gained weight since his time in jail, and now his face was red, his fingers thick, his hands and cheeks swollen as he hugged me and said my name in his hoarse, raspy voice. He smelled like cigarette smoke, but nothing worse: sometimes when I’d hug him I could catch a whiff of whiskey or the strange, chemical odor I could only guess was drugs, but not today.

“Come in,” he said, leading me through the cluttered living
room. Coffee mugs and sections of newspaper and DVD cases sat on every table; clothes were piled on the couch and the chairs. The windows were streaked with dirt; the pillows on the sofa were squashed; the knickknack shelf where Rita kept a few framed family photographs and some china plates and crystal glasses was dusty. My dad walked to the little kitchen, where there was a frying pan on the stove and three teacups beside it, one with cut-up onions, one with green peppers, and one with grated cheese. “I’m making a Denver omelet.”

“That sounds good.” I watched as he scooped a spoonful of margarine from a tub and put it in the pan to melt. His hands were shaking, but this could have meant almost anything: some of the drugs he’d been prescribed had tremors as a side effect, or he could have been going through withdrawal, or he could have been high, right at that moment, for all I knew. After all the years, I’d never gotten any good at telling.

I found forks and knives in a drawer, plates in a cabinet, and two juice glasses in the dishwasher. My father was concentrating hard on the pan. He’d dumped in the onions, which were cut in large, ragged chunks. He shook his head, then picked up a spatula, the end still crusted with melted cheese. I poured us small glasses of generic orange juice—as part of his disability payments, my father got food stamps, although they weren’t stamps anymore, just what looked like a regular debit card to use at the grocery store—and found paper napkins and a loaf of wheat bread for toast. I was starting to straighten up the living room when he called me in for breakfast. Feeling uncomfortable and out of place, the way I always did in his apartment, I took the seat across from him at the table. The eggs were burnt dark-brown in places, and he’d forgotten the peppers.

“It’s really good,” I told him.

My father sighed. “Ah, I’m no cook. That was your mother.”

I didn’t answer, watching as he maneuvered a bite into his
mouth. If he missed us, this was as close as he’d come to saying so. An onion fell off and got stuck in his beard. “Dad,” I said quietly, pointing, and waiting until he’d used his napkin to get it out.

If you saw my father on the street, walking or sitting on the bench outside the duck pond behind his building, you wouldn’t cross the street to avoid him. Maybe you’d think that he was just a regular guy enjoying the sunshine, a man with a job and a family and a house to come home to. If you looked a little closer you’d see the thumbprints smeared on his glasses, the way one of the earpieces was mended with duct tape, the way his skin was unnaturally red and his eyes filmy. If you noticed that, maybe you would pick up your pace and try to put the sight of him out of your mind. You wouldn’t want to think about how many people like him there were out in the world, unsupervised, untethered, unloved. At least you’d want to believe they were untethered and unloved, that they didn’t have wives, or sons, or daughters, because you certainly wouldn’t want to think about that.

I put my fork down on my plate. “Hey, Dad,” I said, “if I could pay for you to go to rehab, would you go?”

He didn’t answer right away. I looked at him, his swollen face, his greasy hair. He used to be handsome. He used to wear suits on the first day of school, no matter how hot it was. He used to kiss my mother in the kitchen when he came home from work, grabbing her around the waist and lifting her briefly into the air as she laughed. He used to live in a house with three bedrooms and an above-ground swimming pool . . . but I stopped those thoughts before they got too far.