My dad was released from prison eighteen months before I was born, but I never knew him as a free man. As a child I used to marvel watching him eat beetroot straight from the tin, standing over the sink and picking up slices gently with his fingers. He’d drop them into his mouth, head turned up to catch any drips, his caution leaving his clothes spot free but his fingertips stained pink. I wish now a piece had fallen one day, the deep red juice landing and spreading across his T-shirt, so I could have laughed. So he could have seen it didn’t matter to anyone if it left a mark, at least not anyone who mattered to him.
. . . . . .
“What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” I fire back.
I am at my grandparents’ door, which my dad has just opened. Neither of us should be here. If my dad is here, it means he is homeless again, drinking again, useless again. He notices Julia behind me and recalibrates. A good-looking man who knows it, appearance first, always. He pulls himself taller. “And you are?”
“Julia,” she says.
“Well, you both better come in, I guess.” Something is off. It’s not just the slurred voice, which has been constant for a few years now; his hair isn’t dyed, his clothes are wrinkled. He doesn’t have his moustache. He looks old. Worse, he looks ugly, a faux pas in his family, crammed with models and photographers. Years later, my grandma, lying in bed in a nursing home, will pull me close like she is going to whisper me a secret, but instead she says, “I wish your dad had married someone better-looking than your mum.” His ugliness shocks me but also gives me a little feeling of pleasure. Ugly face for ugly behavior, I think.
I am seventeen now, almost an adult legally but technically still a ward of the state, and I have run away, girlfriend in tow, and crossed state lines. The police were going to come and grab me, but my mum convinces them she will get us both the next morning instead and drop me back at the group home where I have just been placed. When she tells me this over the phone, because my grandparents have of course called her, she explains it as though it is a huge inconvenience for her and a massive favor to me. At the time it feels like a punishment, but as an adult I recognize the feeling as fear.
My dad tries to engage me in conversation, but I am uninterested. It’s been almost two years since we have seen each other, and I let his questions float in the air and not find me.
In the morning, I get up and see him and Julia sat at the kitchen counter, where he is drawing balloons in various stages of deflation. He is telling her something about self-esteem and how this fills us. I think to myself that all he is filled with is years of twelve-step messaging and self-help books.
“Your dad is so clever,” she says.
“Stay away from him,” I snap in response.
He stands up and lightly touches my shoulders. “You’re so much like me,” he says. “You need to be careful, or you’re going to get stuck in here.” He lifts one hand from my shoulder and gently taps my forehead with his knuckle. “Like where I’m stuck,” he reiterates, and then leaves the kitchen.
When is it socially OK for me to respond to someone who tells me they are sorry my dad is dead with “Look, I just don’t fucking care anymore. It’s been a really long time. But thanks.” Is it after five years? Twenty? Is it now that he has been dead longer than I knew him? Not that I knew him that well in life, but in death he is crystallized, always the same person I replay in memories, never changing, never aging. In ten years I will be older than he ever was. It feels awkward now if I am sad about him. I tell this to a friend who also has a dead dad. “Dead dad club,” I always say, and laugh. She is my friend because she laughs too. “I’m just not going to do it anymore,” I say to her one day.
“Do what?” she asks.
“Well, grieve. Mourn. I just think I’m past it. It feels weird now. I don’t want to do it anymore.”
She tilts her head and looks at me. “I don’t think that is a decision you get to make. It’s not a choice, it’s a process.”
“Well, I choose,” I say with a little more edge than I mean.
“OK.” She laughs lightly. “Tell your therapist that.”
I do tell my therapist that, and while she doesn’t say the same thing my friend did, she sort of says the same thing. “But you won’t always feel the same way,” she says. “Nothing we feel is static.”
My dad had strong opinions on women. He absolutely would have called himself a feminist, but I don’t know what his definition of that word would have been. I think he would have said he liked women and he never hit them, and that would have been enough for him. I am eleven the day my stepmother kicks him out of the house, which just so happens to coincide with the one weekend that year he has my sister and me. She enters the lounge screaming at him that he is drunk, and how disgusting is that, in front of his kids. “I know you’re buying drugs too!” she yells. He tells her, loudly, if she doesn’t shut up, he will put her head through the fucking TV. After she leaves I follow him outside to the shed, where he goes to have a smoke and cool down.
“You shouldn’t speak to her like that,” I say.
“I know,” he says, “but she’s such a bitch.”
“But is she right? Are you drunk right now?”
“I have had drinks. I am not drunk.”
I think about this for a minute. “Are you doing drugs?” I ask, using the verb doing like the kid I am, before I get older and learn to say using.
“No,” he says firmly. “Well . . . I mean, I smoke weed sometimes. But that isn’t a drug. Sometimes I buy coke, but I can’t afford that very often. But that’s it.”
“Why don’t you stop though? ’Cos I don’t think she likes it. I don’t like it.”
He is done smoking now, but we have never had a conversation like this, so he stays in the shed with me, humoring me, or perhaps legitimately trying to explain. I feel old enough, tricked by my emerging puberty, for the conversation I am initiating. “I know you don’t like it, but it’s not that easy,” he says.
I push. “But don’t you love me? Don’t you love me enough to stop?”
His shoulders sag a little. He looks right into me. “No.”
It is not cruel, and he does not look happy to say it. But it is the truth, and one I asked for. He explains further, saying he doesn’t love himself enough to stop, that it doesn’t have anything to do with me, and those words will be what I remember when I am older, but in the moment the no winds me, and I suddenly feel very tired and very young, and I want my mum. He asks me if I have any more questions.
“Why do you do it?” I ask.
“Jessie,” he says, “I just feel so bored.”
. . . . . .
My mum will arrive to pick up Julia and me soon, and I am preparing, brushing my hair in front of the mirror in the bathroom. My dad comes and stands awkwardly at the door, holding a dog lead.
“I’m going to take Mia out.”
“You don’t want to see Mum?” I talk to his reflection, not bothering to turn around.
“Nah.” He shuffles a bit. “OK, then. I love you.”
I don’t remember what I say. Sometimes my memory tells me I say OK and keep brushing my hair. Sometimes my memory tells me I say I love you too. In neither memory do I turn around. I speak to him only through the mirror. Six weeks later he is dead. I never looked at him to say goodbye. Sometimes it is as though he just disappeared into the mirror, and that is where he is stuck, in his mind, in my memory, and if I could reach through and get him back and ask him what I said, then it would free both of us.
I know it doesn’t matter which memory is true. The true part is that the last thing my dad told me was that he loved me. I remind myself this is what he left me with, and for one of the only times in our joint lives, it was something good. I pick up this memory gently with my fingertips, tilt my head back, and drop it lightly into my mouth. It stains my fingertips pink. He leaves a mark.
