The Rules of Inheritance (17 page)

 

Last night I cried about nothing, about everything. I cried until I went upstairs and woke up my dad. He rubbed my back until I slowly began to calm down. He told me stories after that, ones that took place in the years before I remember—stories about my mom, tiny details and images I'd never heard. He talked until his voice was hoarse, and his eyes closed.

 

I look at him now from my window inside the bus, and realize that I'm going to miss him. I'm going to miss my father, whom I don't think I've ever missed before.

 

The bus ride from Atlanta to San Francisco takes fifty-six hours, straight across the country. I stare at my reflection in the tall, smudged windows. I notice that my hair is getting longer and curling softly around the edges of my face; it actually doesn't look so bad anymore.

 

I change buses in the middle of the night in places like Salina, Kansas, and Stovepipe Wells, California. I smoke cigarettes and tighten my arms around me against the 3:00 a.m. frost. The people who ride the bus are like none I've ever met before. Young, pregnant women toting toddlers and beat-up suitcases, transvestites and weathered young men with prison tattoos.

 

I carry a tiny, silver flask of whiskey and a copy of Milan Kundera's
The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
There's nothing new about this girl I've chosen to be, except the act of choosing itself.

 

Christopher picks me up at a bus station in San Francisco, and I am immediately in love. With him. With the windswept and whitewashed city. We stand across from each other for a long minute before we embrace. I haven't seen him since the night my mother died.

 

Four months ago.

 

Christopher takes me back to an apartment he shares with several other people. It's an old, sprawling place with high ceilings and hardwood floors, just a block off the Haight. We share a bed because there is nowhere else for me to sleep. We are careful with the space between us.

 

During the day, when he goes to work, I wander the streets of San Francisco, enchanted with every inch of it. I pass through clouds of patchouli and marijuana, past homeless kids on the sidewalk and musicians busking for money. The shadows are cool, the sun is scalding.

 

I feel like I can breathe here.

 

At night Christopher and I go out for drinks and I marvel at this new world. The one in which I am a girl without a mother, the one in which I sit in grown-up bars in San Francisco.

 

I almost wish she could see me.

 

All through my visit I throw myself at Christopher. I even tell him that I am in love with him. He smiles mysteriously. Pats my head. Calls me “Clar.”

 

We sleep together one night.

 

It is a detached, ugly thing. We are watching television in bed. He puts his hand between my legs. I scissor them open. I want so badly for him to love me.

 

It is something I regret before it is even over. I am someone I hate before the thing is even done.

 

I take a walk the next morning by myself. I know what I must do.

 

Back at Christopher's apartment I gather my things and find him in the kitchen.

 

I'm leaving, I say.

 

He just nods.

 

With that I walk out the door and into San Francisco. I spend the next three days in the dismal room of a youth hostel, drinking whiskey and reading Italo Calvino. If I have felt alone in my life, it has never been like this.

 

My mother is gone. My father is eighty-seven years old. This is it. I am on my own.

 

I take out my camera and set it up to capture the profundity of the moment. In the grainy black-and-white, I am leaning back against the wall, one knee pulled to my chest, a cigarette between my fingers. My head is turned to one side, my hair is short around my ears, and my tattoo is showing.

 

I'll come across this photo for years to come and it will never cease to give me pause, instantly transporting me to the first time I realized that no one was ever going to save me.

 

I leave for Atlanta the next day, fifty-six hours straight on the bus.

 

Christopher will call once in the new year, late at night, long after I have gotten over it. (Do I ever get over it? I was with him the night my mother died.)

 

I'm sorry, he'll say into the phone.

 

Don't be, I'll say. I asked for it.

2000, I AM TWENTY-TWO YEARS OLD.

I
AM AT WORK when the call comes.

 

I see one of the hostesses walking toward me, an intent look on her face. It's a Monday night, which means it's slow. There are empty tables scattered around the cavernous restaurant, and I've been standing behind the bar, idly surveying my customers, and glancing at the clock on occasion to calculate how many hours until we close.

 

Republic is a chic pan-Asian restaurant on Union Square, and I've worked here as long as I've lived in New York, a total of three years. My little locker downstairs, the other veteran staffers, and the tiresome familiarity of it all make it feel like home.

 

I glance away from the approaching hostess, still not quite realizing that she is headed my way, and gaze out the windows at the end of the bar. It is late January and snow is falling softly on the square. Cars stream by in a blur of lights, and I can hear the wet spray of frozen sludge as they pass.

 

My mother's three-year death anniversary was two days ago and it's stayed with me like an unsettling dream. I curl my arms around myself, and I flinch when the hostess taps my arm.

 

Phone's for you, she says.

 

I walk out from behind the bar, nodding at a waiter to watch over things, and I cross the room to the granite hostess stand where the phones are located. I won't have a cell phone for another year, but even so, I'm not used to getting calls at work and something about this call tugs at me ominously.

 

I pick up the receiver and hold it to my ear.

 

Hello?

 

Colin's voice is tight, not like I've ever heard before.

 

He's dead. He fucking killed himself.

 

Who's dead? Panic floods my sternum.

 

Darren. He fucking hung himself in jail.

 

I'm on my way, I say.

I TAKE THE STAIRS down to the locker room two at a time and spin the combination on my lock until I hear a subtle click. I pop open the metal door and grab my coat. I share the locker with a waitress named Angel, and in a throwback to our middle school years we have decorated the inside of the door with pictures of Patrick Swayze, Johnny Depp, and Kirk Cameron. The photos ruffle as I slam the door closed again.

 

My heart is racing. My fingers fumble with the lock as I try to replace it and eventually I give up, dropping it to the floor, turning on my heel to jog back upstairs.

 

I can't tamp the panic I'm feeling. A torrent of thoughts plunges through my head. I need to get home to Colin. I don't know how he is going to react to Darren's death.

 

On Fourteenth Street a cab skids to a stop in front of me, and I clamber awkwardly into the backseat, lugging my heavy bag with me. I was at school before work, and haven't been home since this morning.

 

Avenue B and Fifth Street, I say to the driver, flopping back against the seat and biting my lip. We fly down Fourteenth, swerving onto Second Avenue.

 

The tires sing on the wet asphalt and Manhattan flashes by in a stream of twinkling lights outside the window.

 

When I open the door of our apartment, Colin is sitting at the table, a cigarette in his hand, his face like stone.

 

I drop my bag on the hardwood floor and cross the room to him, then snake my arms around his torso, burying my face in his neck. I stay there waiting.

 

Darren fucking killed himself, Colin mumbles into my hair.

 

I don't know what to say. My gut reaction is that this is a good thing.

 

Darren is a thirty-year-old prisoner in Atlanta, awaiting trial for the murder of several people, including Colin's sister.

I TURNED TWENTY the week I moved to New York City. I wore a pale blue dress on my birthday and I was young and skinny and much more beautiful than I realized.

 

New York was instantly everything.

 

It was sudden and disarming and utterly consuming. Before a week had passed I couldn't imagine ever leaving.

 

In those early days I swayed under the weight of the buildings towering above me. The ribbons of people on the sidewalk pulled me to and fro, and I learned quickly to just give myself over to it all.

 

Colin had been living here for two months when I arrived. I told myself that it would just be for the summer, that I'd go back to Vermont and college in September, but even then I knew I wasn't going anywhere. The second I stepped foot in Manhattan I had no intentions of ever leaving. In the fall I applied at the last minute to the New School, the university where I would finish my last few years of college.

 

I had insomnia that first summer and stayed up watching as dawn rose lazily outside the window, quietly extinguishing the city lights until the skyline was something solid and dusky. Right away I knew I shouldn't have moved in with Colin, that we were too young and too damaged to see the thing through.

 

On those nights I thought about my mother, about her living here for all those years, and I wondered what she would think about me being here. Each street I walked down I wondered if she had done the same. Every bar or shop I went into I tried to picture her there too. I imagined my timid footsteps leaving dusty prints on top of hers.

 

My mother wouldn't have approved of me being here, that much I knew. New York was too big, too gritty for the daughter she had known.

 

The night I moved to New York I drove down FDR Drive, alongside the rushing brown river, past the high-rises and the Domino Sugar factory. My cat mewled quietly in her carrier in the passenger seat beside me and the Lower East Side loomed in the foreground. I couldn't shake the sinking feeling that this was not the girl I was supposed to be.

 

No, the girl I was supposed to be would still be at college in Vermont. I would have some sweet and apologetic hippie boyfriend who I would spend the summer with before starting my sophomore year. We would drink coffee all the time and take walks in the woods. He'd have those stupid poetry magnets on his fridge and would write me little messages that would make me blush with both gratitude and embarrassment.

 

But, gripping the steering wheel as I made my way into the East Village that night, I knew that girl was lost forever.

 

She disappeared the night my mother died, and I was never going to see her again.

 

Three years passed. Three years without a mother. Now I am irrevocably this girl: the one who has tattoos and drinks too much, the girl who rushes from her noontime writing classes in Greenwich Village to her bartending job in Union Square, the one who is sometimes afraid of her alcoholic boyfriend.