I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (28 page)

We wound through the gray, chilly streets of Staten Island, the sides of the course lined with people with signs and noisemakers and streamers, cheering on their loved ones. While I ran, I imagined the white blood cells in Marilyn's body regenerating after chemotherapy—one cell with each footstep. If I could make it, she would make it.

As the miles ticked by, I thought I might be able to finish in under two hours. I hammered the last couple of miles so hard I could feel my heart beating in my eyeballs. I made it in at 1:46:50. I would never win any awards, but that was not bad. Not bad at all.

On the ferry back to Manhattan, I thought about the miles I'd run that day in wonder. Not just further than I'd ever run in my life but more than twice as far as I'd run when I was thirteen, before everything had gone to shit. I thought about all the miles I'd run in preparation for the race. These runners, they were not my people . . . but I was a runner. What's more, I hadn't crawled across the finish line, or walked, or even jogged. I had been
sprinting
. As many miles as I had traveled, I had more miles in me.

Later that month, just days before we were to leave to visit her, Marilyn's condition took a downturn. She had concealed the depth of her illness, something that must run in my family. My father paid through the nose to change his ticket and rushed to her side.
His flight was delayed four hours due to an unseasonable snowstorm. He made it to the bedside of his only sibling—his last living link to his past—minutes after she died.

It fucked with me. Marilyn was the first immediate relative I'd lost. My godmother always made it clear that we had a special connection, that she had a special love for me. Losing her in such a tantalizing manner was hard. I'd spent the bulk of my life not just angry at my father but wishing an ironically cruel fate on him. When his little sister died minutes before he could say good-bye, I didn't feel momentarily bad for wishing him ill; I wanted to cradle him in my arms like a child.

My father suggested that I try to trade my ticket to Saskatchewan in for a trip to California to visit him. I told him I would try, but no guarantees, Dad, airlines being airlines. To my surprise, the airline gave me full credit. I booked a flight out to Sacramento for early December. I couldn't not.

He lived in the tiny town of Sutter Creek in a cute little house surrounded by a garden with his wife, Theresa, and grouchy little Himalayan cat named Rosie. I had named my old van Rosie. They had painted the house the same light, cheery yellow I had painted my bedroom. Jesus, we even had the same model electric toothbrush. None of that prevented me from walking on eggshells in their too quiet, perfectly ordered house. No pictures of Tashina; the only pictures of Tatyana and me were grade school photos from the 1980s—a happy fiction.

I found
How to Make a Bad Situation Worse
on his shelf of CDs, the album I had killed myself trying to make, the album I had pinned so many hopes on. Angry as I was at him, as chaotic as my life was at that time, I'd somehow managed to mail him a copy. I pulled it off the shelf to inspect it, a relic from my old life. The cellophane wrapper was still on.

One day while Theresa was out of the house, we tried to “have a talk.” I cornered my dad about some ancient gripe about the divorce, and he lashed out.

“Every time I see you, you have some bone to pick with me. What are you trying to get out of me? What are you trying to get me to say? That you have been a complete and utter disappointment to me?”

I started welling up.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said. “I've been waiting to hear that from you my entire life.”

Thirty-two years old, crying in front of my old man like a baby.

A couple of days later, he brought out a small shoebox after dinner.

“After Marilyn's funeral, your uncle Dwight and I went through some of her old stuff. He gave me a lot of her pictures. I thought you might want to see some of them.”

“Dad, I know I've said this, but I'll say it again. I'm so sorry she died. And I'm terribly sorry for the way she died. That must have been heartbreaking.”

He took his glasses off and rubbed his face with both hands, then put his glasses back on. This was a trademark Dad move. He had been doing this exact same thing since I was a little boy. I had forgotten about it, and it made me sad.

“Well, she was pretty out of it for the last couple of days anyway. I don't think we would have been able to have much of a conversation. I've made my peace with it.”

Again, trademark Dad. A bloodless, cerebral evaluation of the situation, emotions dealt with briskly, the same way you might hold your breath, pick up an errant cat turd with a paper towel, and quickly dump it in the trash.

Dad opened the box and dumped the pictures on the coffee table. One by one, we turned them over. I was reminded of the first card game I'd played as a small child: Memory.

“The last time I saw Marilyn, I tried to talk to her about your parents, you know, find out a little what they were like. She wouldn't talk about them at all.”

“Well, the thing is . . . my parents were alcoholics. Alcoholics and drug addicts, both of them. All kinds of pills. When I was there, they kept it together. Mostly kept it together. But when I went away to university, things really went to shit.”

“How do you know? I mean, you weren't there.”

“Marilyn told me a little of what was going on. And I could tell, a little. But on one of my trips home, I went out for a walk. Can't remember exactly why, maybe I was going fishing or something. But I stumbled upon this pile of bottles. Bottles and broken bottles. A mountain of them. They weren't just drinking more, they were drinking
a lot
more.

“I avoided going home after that. I really don't know exactly what they put Marilyn through. I didn't want to know. I guess I'll never find out. But I know that she never forgave them.”

He thumbed through the pictures on the coffee table. One leapt out at me: my father, maybe nineteen or twenty, shirtless, with a broad, charming grin. Slung effortlessly over one shoulder was a man with gray hair and black-framed glasses: my father's father.

“Holy shit, Dad. I've never seen a picture of your father before. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you weren't incredibly close.”

He raised an eyebrow at me.

“After I got my PhD, your mother and I drove out to the farm. I showed it to my father. I mean, I was proud. I had worked damn hard for that. You know what he said? ‘Don't let that make you think you're any better than us.' That was the last time I saw him alive.”

“Sounds like it's a Shubaly family tradition, not talking to your dad for years.”

“My father wasn't a particularly easy man to get along with.”

I laughed.

“Dad, I think I've said those exact same words.”

He looked at me. Was he going to get angry again? He gave me a half smile and shook his head.

“I'm going to let that one slide. I will say this: I'm glad that we are in closer touch now. When I don't hear from you for a long time . . . well, it sucks.”

“Sucks for me too, Dad.”

We went through more pictures: my dad and his sister as little kids in their Sunday clothes; my father with a string of fish he'd caught; fields and hay bales and tractors and hand tools and barns; adults I didn't know socializing together at the table or on the couch or in the yard, every single one of them with a drink in hand, empties scattered around the frame.

“Jesus, I haven't thought about this stuff in forever,” my dad said. “It was not an easy start, you know, growing up on a farm. Even now, approaching seventy, I can still hear my dad's voice in my head like he is in the room.”

“I don't know, Dad, I feel like you made it through okay. Nice little house in California. Hot tub. Woodstove. Grumpy old cat. Your wife is amazing. I really think Theresa has done more to get you and me, you know, talking again than either one of us has. And all just by being her normal, generous, patient self. I envy your life, Dad.”

“And I envy yours, my son.”

I snorted.

“How can you say that, Dad? I mean, yeah, things are decent right now. Or at least better than they've been. Izgi's great. But I have $167 in my bank account right now. I owe $90,000 in student loans now with the interest. I own, like . . . a couple guitars and a frying pan. What's to envy?”

He shook his head.

“You don't see it the way I do. Okay, you don't have a lot of security, but you have complete freedom. You aren't beholden to anyone. Your whole life, it didn't matter what your mother or I said; no one could tell you what to do. You had to do it your way. And you did it your way. Sure, you don't have a Lexus and a townhouse and a 401(k), but what little you have . . . it's
yours
.”

We were drying the dishes after dinner on my last night when my dad started.

“Oh! Before you leave and I forget.”

“What?”

“That story that you sent me. I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed it.”

“Which one?”

“Well, maybe ‘enjoy' is the wrong word. I'll say that it had a profound effect on me. The story about you pumping gas in Saskatchewan when you were sixteen. With the young Indian mother, or Native American, I should say, who passes out with her baby in the junked car.”

“You liked that?”

“You got it exactly right. Every detail. The Indians hanging out at the store, the boredom of a Saskatchewan summer. And the sort of overarching hopelessness of the whole thing. Even the dust! It brought me right back there. Not an entirely pleasant journey. But it moved me. That you can do that in just a couple of pages . . . well, it's really good. I'm glad to see you're writing again.”

I put the plate I had been drying down on the counter.

“Dad, my life, since I got my stupid, stupid master's degree, has been characterized by a near total lack of writing. I wrote that when I was nineteen. You remember that winter, when I mailed you a bunch of writing? And then I kept calling you to see if you had read it? I mailed it to you twice.”

It was a depressing memory—folding up the computer paper with the string of holes along the sides and mailing it off to him a second time, fearing that he would continue to ignore me but still unable to not send it.

“That story was in there?”

“Yeah, Dad. I mean, thanks, I'm glad you liked it. But . . . goddamn. For you to just ignore me like that, that was incredibly painful. You couldn't have read it then?”

He gave me a look.

“You know . . . I was a real bastard back then.”

That week, we'd talked about his dead sister, his alcoholic parents, and his disappointing son. But when I brought to light that connection he'd missed, well, that look on my father's face, it was the saddest I'd seen him the entire time.