I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (38 page)

“If you had it to do over, what would you do differently? Are you able to articulate specifically what you would have wanted? I mean . . . did you ever want to have children?”

“Nope. No. I never saw myself as having children. I never saw myself as being married. I saw myself as a hermit scientist. If I had to do it over again, would I do something differently? Yeah, there's one pivotal thing that I would have done differently. When Elaine showed up at my door and said she was going to move in with me, I would have said no.”

I had to hand it to him. He had picked the right decision to undo. Undoing his marriage to my mother erased her, erased me, erased all of us. One discrete correction, and we all disappeared.

“Letting Elaine move in was a mistake. I should have said no. But I couldn't because I felt guilty. I wasn't ready to get married. I wasn't ready to settle down. It wasn't part of my picture. I'd had it drilled into me that when you get married and have a family, you
don't count anymore. My father would say, ‘You're not better than the rest of them because you're smarter. You're
less
than the rest of them.'”

“Wow. Dad, that's . . . totally counterintuitive.”

“I know. But as far as he was concerned, it was my responsibility to take care of others. Anyone, but especially my family.”

“It strikes me as bizarrely ironic that, from a young age and then very much so as I got older, I told myself, I'm going to be totally different from my dad. I'm not going to do what he did. I'm going to do my own thing. Instead, I'm
very much
like you—the guilt, holing up and tinkering with my guitars late at night like a mad scientist, going on long runs alone . . .”

“And you're doing all the things I wish I had done.”

“All the shit I felt would be a colossal disappointment to you.”

“Mishka, I
always
wanted to be a musician. So many of the good scientists I knew were musicians, whether it was a flute or a piano or a guitar. I wanted to do that! But I chose a different path. No, to be honest, I feel like I had a different path chosen for me. When you grow up in an alcoholic family . . . my mother was a champion at guilt. It took me a long time to realize how easily manipulated I was. And I didn't have the courage or faith in my own convictions to say no.”

“You weren't incredibly supportive.”

“No, I wasn't. You have to understand, I had it drilled into my head from a very young age that you had to support your family. That was job number one, and there was no job number two. I'll say it, Mishka: I was wrong. I wanted you to do something more practical. Or at least have something to fall back on. Because, shit, it's hard to make it as a musician or a writer! And I'll admit it, I didn't think you could do it. And I'll say it again, Mishka: I was wrong.”

His arms were crossed, as they were always crossed. I noticed it, and he noticed me notice it.

“I'm sorry. I know that this is kind of a . . . closed position. But if I let my arms hang down, I just feel like a chimpanzee. So I'm like, fuck it, you know? I'm comfortable this way.”

“It's cool, Dad. I know. That's like the default Dad position. We can leave it here, if you want.”

“No, let's keep going.”

“You sure? I feel like I've dragged you through a lot.”

“It's not fun, but look at it from my point of view. It's important for you to know some of this. For the first time since the divorce, you've asked me for my side of the story.

“It's been tough for you guys. I know that. I remember one time—this was in Pleasanton when I was living with Lis—Tatyana came to the door. She'd been there earlier that day, and she'd gone away to do something, and then she'd come back. I looked out 'cause there was this little side window and . . . I saw her just standing there, frozen, not knowing what to do. She didn't know whether she could just walk in or whether she had to ring the bell. And I thought, How bad are things that she doesn't feel she can just walk into her Dad's house?

“So I know it's been hard for you guys. But—and it's taken me a long time to be able to say this—it's been tough for me too. Very tough. The hardest thing I've been through in my life. All of it has been tough, from long before the divorce up until, oh, maybe a couple of years ago. I'll even say this: thank you for asking me about it. It's a great relief to be able to tell it. And Mishka, even if I remember it wrong, this is how I remember it.

“People misremember things. One thing that bothers me . . . a couple years before Marilyn died, I went up there to visit her, and we went through our old report cards from school.”

“She had
your
report cards? I don't think I have my grade school report cards. Hell, I don't have any of the fancy degrees I haven't paid for.”

“Oh yeah, Marilyn kept all that stuff. It was really curious to go through them. When I was a kid, I was the golden boy. My
parents put a lot of pressure on me. I had to be at the top of the class. There was no question about that. And then the reason I was at the top of the class was because I was their little genius. It wasn't easy pulling down those grades because life on the farm was hard. From the day school let out, I worked from dawn to dark, sometimes later. But I remember being the smart one—getting the grades, getting the awards, getting the praise. And Marilyn hated me for it.

“She remembered being told all through her school career—and she believed all through her life—that I made way better marks than she did. When she found our report cards, her marks were better than mine. Not once or twice or in one subject. Consistently, across the board, Marilyn got higher marks than I did.

“We looked at those report cards, and she said, ‘That can't be! Somebody must have changed them.' She could not accept what she was seeing because she had had it drummed into her that she was second-class. And she wasn't. She was better than I was.”

My father had wound up a rocket scientist. His sister, who was smarter than he was, became a farmer. I didn't doubt that if we compared my report cards to Tatyana's, we would have found that she outpaced me as Marilyn had outpaced my dad.

“You look like you're fading so we can wrap it up. But there's one last thing I want to share with you on the subject of misremembering. You talk a lot about the foreclosure.”

“Yeah. I mean, Dad, that was probably the biggest thing in my life. Bigger than the shooting, bigger than the divorce. To have the bank trick you guys into missing a payment and then take our home away from us, kick us when we were down . . . it's so fucked up. It made me hate everything: you, Mom, myself, banks, money, capitalism, America, God. Yeah, it was big then, and it's only gotten bigger.”

Dad shook his head.

“Mishka, there was no foreclosure.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I'm not sure if it's something your mother told you or just something you pieced together in your head. Yes, they advised us to run late on a payment. Yes, they formally initiated foreclosure proceedings, but that was something they had to do in order to get us out of the mortgage. Think about it, Mishka. I was in Vancouver. Tatyana was in Colorado. You were at Simon's Rock. And you all hated New Hampshire. We had to get rid of the house.

“The bank didn't steal our home away from us, Mishka. They were very fair to us. In fact, they did us a favor. They took it off our hands.”

I felt physically exhausted when I finally turned off the recorder on my phone. We had gone deeper than I would have ever hoped, deeper than I had been prepared for. He had volunteered answers to questions I would never have dared ask him. Because he wanted to work things out.

I lay around the house in a stupor for the rest of the day, my mind unable to parse what had just taken place. Shortly after dinner, my dad and Theresa retired, so I went into my room and crawled into bed. Instantly, I was wired, my mind working furiously, like I was on acid. After a while, I got out of bed, put in my earbuds, and listened to the interview with my father.

It was no big deal, just my father and me talking. Then I noticed we had the same vocal tics—“I mean” and “you know.” Then my skin crawled like I was hearing some soothsayer's prophecy about my life, recorded long before I was born.

Like me, he had resented his father's attempts to steer his life. Like me, he had been terrified of failure. Like me, he had lied to himself, assured himself that the truth wasn't true. Like me, he had woken up, halfway through his life, trapped in a nightmare borne out of his weakness. Like me, it had taken him a long time to work up the courage to surrender. Like me, when he finally accepted he had failed, he had brutally excoriated himself.

And his revelations . . . yes, we had petitioned at great length to leave New Hampshire. I had forgotten that entirely, but it rapidly filtered back to me. Yes, he had cared about us. I remembered hugs and pony rides on his knee and games in the public pool and my dad screaming his fool head off for us at our soccer games. In telling my dad to fuck off, that I was going to do my own thing, I hadn't disappointed him at all. Rather, I had done exactly what I needed to do, exactly what he wished he had done, and I had given him every reason to be proud of me.

The Letter that I'd clung to as proof of my father's infidelity, the unaddressed, unsigned one my mother had found in the back of a book he'd been reading, was probably a love letter he had forced himself to write
to her
because he couldn't deal with the reality that his marriage had failed. The foreclosure—lasting proof that we were persecuted and doomed and that the world was out to destroy us, the betrayal around which I'd built my entire persona—not only had it never taken place, but the bank had been fair, generous even, in helping my parents dispose of a property neither of them wanted. Even the trivial detail of Princess comforting him when he broke the news to my mother . . . I'd imagined that Princess had hated him, and I'd even conscripted her death into my war against him. But Princess had loved him, and reluctantly but genuinely, he had allowed himself to love her. She had probably crawled into his La-Z-Boy recliner to die because she missed him.

I'd built a life in response to my father's infidelity, to the evil in his heart, and to the bank's bloodthirsty theft of our home. I had been wrong, and I had been wrong, and I had been wrong.

Luis enlisted my help to tackle the Vermont 100, one of the original hundred-milers, a race more than twenty years old. It was a hardcore race in every respect: hillier, hotter, and much more psychologically demanding. His goal was to “buckle”: to complete the race in less than twenty-four hours, thereby earning a silver belt
buckle. It was only his second hundred-miler, and he'd run his first in 27:33. Buckling meant knocking almost four hours off his flat-course hundred-mile time . . . and doing so on a mountainous course with over 28,000 feet of elevation change. My job was to run the last thirty miles through the night with him and get him in on time.

Luis rolled into the Camp Ten Bear aid station at mile seventy shortly before 8 p.m. He was shirtless and slick with sweat, but he looked great. He was some kind of specific female fantasy—voluptuously chiseled physique, broad, easy smile, just poetry in motion. He was grinning and moving well and howled my name when he saw me. He gave me a quick high five, then yelled over his shoulder as he passed, “You ready? I want to be out of here in ten minutes.”

He got weighed by a volunteer and briefly inspected by a medic. He was on time, but just barely. No way was he going to buckle. I was already prepping my consolation speech to him: in a race this long, a finish is a win, and so on. My goal was just to get him across the finish line, no matter how long it took. That would have to be enough.

Having passed his physical, Luis flopped down on a cot while I tended to his needs. His hydration pack had to be filled with ice; he wanted some peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and some Coke and some of the big Medjool dates I had brought for us. His feet were bothering him in several places, and I could see blisters deep under his calluses. Not good. A volunteer fumbled with moleskin and a damp roll of thin tape.