Bandit (10 page)

W
hen Dad was arrested I had been camping grumpily with Mom, but afterward, everything was different. Suddenly I liked camping. I wanted to go every chance I could. With Mom, with boyfriends, alone sometimes. It was Mom’s coping mechanism, and I took it up too. As a teenager, I rode my bike across the top half of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, alone, sleeping in cheap campgrounds and stopping in small towns to eat. I just wanted the air to push clear through me across farmland and mines of old glacial plains, land that was still rising, bouncing back a few centimeters every year from the pressure of long-gone ice sheets six thousand feet high. Gentle moraines ended in dunes on Lake Michigan, which I reached in a week, then unceremoniously turned to circle back.

Having stopped on a very empty stretch for a drink and a rest, I watched a pickup truck slow on the shoulder in front of me and stop. I felt a sick cringe in my gut. Not a person or house for miles. The door popped open and I climbed onto my bike. A man with dead eyes, in overalls and a trucker hat, moved toward me with some mumbled questions: “You OK out here … you need a lift? I’ll putcher bike in the back …” I was already pushing off on my heavily loaded bike. I passed him wide but still he made a weird grab for my arm. With no weapon, I’d thought to at least pull my camera out and snap a photo of his license plate, just to scare him, I guess. He didn’t follow me.

It was robustly unsafe alone out there, but I didn’t think about it. I loved the Great Lakes and I wanted to be near them. Their spans were calmer and colder than the ocean, fresh-feeling, but dizzyingly wide against the horizon. Unlike anywhere else in the world. Lake Superior was my favorite: deep and clear down to the rocks, too cold to grow the regular lake muck I’d felt in the smaller interior lakes dotting Michigan, chilly a few steps out of the shallows, even in summer. Shipwrecks and petrified forests were preserved below. You could just look down and see them in the deep, still as tombs. Michigan was my body, surrounded by small, secret oceans that pulled on me, from the inside out.

On that bike trip I camped illegally on a small cove on Huron’s shore, a plot in the middle of nowhere, circled by thick pines. There was nothing to do those nights, and I loved it. Before dark I’d lie on the dune grass and watch the pine
tops sway in the darkening patch of sky. I would lie still for so long. I imagined my body collapsing, sinking in, the grass creeping over, these tall trees pinioning it, the rusty needle bed that’d blanket me, the leathery dead cottonwood leaves in drifts, then snow pack, the particular blue hush of it in northern pine stands, the mud of a bog encroaching, my body thinning its parts and trickling down, lake water washing its particles out, down among billion-year-old minerals, into the compressed coals of ancient plants, ancient places, down to the basalt, where it belongs, part of the dirt and sand, safe, in an honest home; how happy that made me to imagine.

T
he intensity of the event faded and Dad faded in my life. I let him fade. For my sister, his presence seemed to become even more intense, now disembodied, like a ghost following her everywhere, reaching her through letters and phone calls. He tried to parent her through his letters; I found some of them in the basement of my sister’s house when I was looking for the scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings she’d kept. “It’s all yours,” she said, gesturing to the basement, when I had asked her if I could look at any “Dad stuff” she had kept. “But, I don’t want to talk about it.” The scrapbooks were gone but manila folders full of his letters had been kept alongside bank statements in her filing cabinets.

In the letters it’s clear that her behavior was wild now; she was a party girl, checked out at school, dating a trashy older guy who was into drag racing. Dad hated this guy and tried, in
his letters, to forbid her from seeing him. Most of the letters admonished her for the trouble she was getting herself into, which she must have been confessing to in her letters to him, oddly. She was being honest with him about her life at a time when she didn’t
have
to be. She moved in with her scuzzy boyfriend, for a while at least, until he started hitting her and stealing from her. It was that story anyone would expect—an insecure girl acting out at her daddy, exactly that. Dad threatened her with all he had left: their relationship. He told her he’d never speak to her again unless she did what he wanted.

It went on like this for years. Invisible, he loomed huge in her life; he was all around her, emotionally, psychologically.

Toward the end of his term, my sister started to straighten up. She was hyperaware of his impending release and prepared for it, I think, with honest hope and incredible forgiveness. He is instructive in his letters, involved, advising my sister to transfer from a community college to the local university, telling her to take out student loans he promises to pay back when he gets out, instructing her on how to cheat on her taxes. My sister must have asked him about some family history, because in a few of the letters he gives a very different account of our parents’ marriage. I know not to believe his version. But after all this time it is sort of nice just to hear him address it at all, the irony of his attitude toward our mom, surely, unfathomably, lost on him. He wrote:

I
tried, but often forgot to send him birthday cards during that period. Now I am much better about it, although it’s a strange thing to shop for a birthday card for a dad in jail. The general sentiments of the dad birthday cards just don’t apply but I sort through them anyway—
you were always there for me, dad
(no),
you taught me so much, dad
(no),
enjoy your cake and beer today, dad
(no),
another year of happy memories, dad
(no). I usually give up on the dad cards and settle on one that just says
Happy Birthday
inside.

August 2015 and Dad turned seventy in prison. I realized a week or so before his birthday. It would be a stretch to say we are close now, but we correspond. I remembered to buy a card with a gentle but distanced greeting. Then, I forgot.

The unsent card caught my eye on the kitchen table where I’d left it as I rushed out the door and it was too late: today was his birthday, I’d forgotten and now it was too late.

At my office I logged into CorrLinks, the federal prison bureau’s email system, and wrote him a friendly message, hoping he would have a nice day, gently teasing him about being the big seven zero.

That night I checked CorrLinks again just to make sure the email went through this clunky prehistoric email service, and he’d already written back:

I don’t know what to do with Dad’s sentiments now. I don’t know if they are real. And if they are real, I’m afraid of the new universe this would put me in: one in which I have a good dad, and this dad has a good daughter, and that’s all there is—goodness.

I
went through a phase where I would punch my mom in the stomach. Below the stomach, just under her belly button. Not hard. Mostly it would just surprise her. Even done very lightly she’d always buckle a little and make an “oof” noise. Sometime she’d laugh, but mostly she’d be annoyed, sometimes very angry. Whenever I saw her I’d do this, which wasn’t very often.

Through high school I lived alone. Mom lived alone too, but in the same place. She was a therapist with a private practice now, specializing in addiction counseling, and she had clients all day, then group sessions at night. She existed in the contradictory space between doctor and patient, surviving with her own mental disorders to bear, holding me above water while she just barely kept afloat. I woke up before her to walk myself to school, then almost always went to bed before she
came home. I ate cereal and canned soup or frozen vegetables with microwaved hot dogs. I brought in the mail, cleaned the condo, did laundry, played Nintendo, kept things going. I’d finish my homework diligently and go to sleep looking forward to school the next day. I loved school—the structure, the calm. I liked the bells and the facts and the tiny locker and the libraries, where I’d spend any time I had free. At home, food appeared in the fridge on weekends while I was out with my friends or hiking on the Paint Creek Trail.

Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for a week or more. When I did see her it was in passing; she was always busy, in the middle of going somewhere, or dealing with some emotional story inside of her I didn’t have access to. She had boyfriends who came and went, medication to start or stop. At the time I think I meant the stomach punching in a joking way. I feel sick thinking about this now. I don’t think I knew I was angry about anything until recently.

“Manic bipolar,” she told me one day when I asked her why the pansies had all been torn out of the pots in back. She explained the illness to me with clinical detachment. I thought about the unplanned camping trips she used to whisk me out of bed for on school days, the half-painted wall in one of my childhood bedrooms, never finished, the inexplicable shaking and crying, the days she spent locked in her bedroom. My life with her as a teenager was precarious—I never knew when she’d tilt and send our quiet, orderly life off the rails.

I saw my mom in hospital beds so many times, pulled back from a death she thought she wanted over and over—I
can’t say how many times she attempted suicide while I was in high school. She used to joke about it, say at night she hoped maybe this time she’d “wake up dead,” and I would laugh with her, a little.

I remember the feeling in the hospital room when we’d visit her after another overdose attempt, her in the bed, zoned out and slow. I sat with her once, alone somehow, while she dozed, an old woman in a wheelchair in the next room saying, “Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me.”

She felt awful about it, and about me and my sister seeing her, but she’d smile. Charcoal pumped into her stomach after an overdose attempt would catch in her teeth; I’d see it when she smiled and talked. Many times I saw this. Or the amnesia and total weakness after multiple sessions of electroshock. It was supposed to jolt old patterns out of her brain, but it jolted everything out. Over the weeks all of it came creeping back.

In a way her bipolar disorder made me distrustful of her emotions. I learned that her bursts of positive energy were short-lived, like sugar highs followed by a crash, however much she’d insist it was a new phase or better path. Like when she decided she was going to sell candles to make extra money and spent hundreds of dollars on boxes full of them that sat in boxes in a closet. She just didn’t have the social life or network of friends required for that kind of endeavor, and hadn’t thought that through. I grew suspicious of her good moods, and sad at my own suspicions. I wanted her to be happy and I wanted her happiness to stick. But it didn’t.

Feelings moved across her dramatically like sharp weather. Happiness was keyed always a little too high, the colors too bright, almost painful or frightening, her cheery energy. Despair was so severe it transformed her physically—she’d wander through our small place, tired, in a rumpled nightgown, as if moving through mud. I left the house a lot, hung out with friends in a park nearby, or stayed with them when I could. I kept quiet about it.

Weeks of relative calm were interrupted by strange visitors—clients of hers who were temporarily homeless. She’d invited them to stay in our basement, violating all guidelines of professional practice.

Once after school I heard crying in the basement. A note on the counter explained that Janet would be staying with us for a few days, just until she gets back on her feet. Janet was a bony alcoholic woman whose sole possession seemed to be an enormous carton of tampons she’d hug as she traipsed up and down the stairs. I had no interactions with Janet except for when she’d set off the fire alarm by smoking menthols in the basement and I’d have to come down to tell her to stop. She would respond by smearing the cigarette out on the bottom of her tennis shoe and gently crying.

Just a week or so after Janet disappeared I came home to find a faded yellow seventies-era Impala parked in Mom’s spot. I stopped. Beethoven was blasting from our condo, rattling the windows. I entered and saw a note on the counter; “Jonas” was all it said. I moved to the living room to see a loopy Norwegian with a lazy eye lying on his back, howling
along with the tune, a vodka bottle raised in each hand above him.

“Hi,” I said in a loud and disappointed way.

He saw me and raised up to turn the volume knob down on the tuner, still holding a bottle in each hand. “Hi, leettle geirl! I’m Yonas, your mom freend.” I smiled at him, terrified.

“I have to stay here a leetle while. My house, burned down, my house. I burned it down accident.” Jonas swayed back and forth on the floor, not quite looking at me while he talked. He had stringy blond hair and smelled filthy. I politely excused myself and turned to leave, off to the park or to a friend’s house, anywhere. Jonas lasted a month or so at our place until he took Mom’s stereo to a pawnshop so he could buy booze. Then, visitors rarely stayed overnight.

Even in the worst lows, when she would mess up her meds or mix liquor with them and be out of it or end up in the hospital, I wasn’t ashamed of my mom. She was brave and strong and wild, and lived beyond me, which I accepted. And no matter what, she always went to work. She was good at her job. She helped people.

I liked to ask her about her clients, because they always seemed so much worse off than us. I remember the story of the kleptomaniac who’d steal paperback books from the Meijer store and dump them in a trash can as soon as he left the store. The anorexic who’d serve herself only the small gelled egg of chicken broth that came in the package of Mrs. Grass powdered soup, my sister’s favorite. She ate it whole, uncooked, like a gummy salt gem.

One woman I still think about to this day. She was an only child of two parents who were also only children, and both were dead. The woman, then, had no family at all. No sisters, brothers, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, nephews, nothing. She was working as a secretary, no friends, having an affair with her boss, seeing my mom for depression. Not a single family member. Mom said she felt sorry for her, and as bad as things ever got with family life, she was glad to have one at least. I always liked that she said this, but I think I secretly felt differently. I imagined myself as this woman, completely untethered by blood to other humans, without obligation to bonds of family customs, or the roles of sister, cousin, aunt, niece, daughter. How different her holidays must have been, how tidy, and how single-minded her aspirations could be. No one would say they want that. Still, I’d catch myself daydreaming about her life, how peaceful it must have been.