The Ramblers (26 page)

“Why don't we ever talk about her?”

T
he last time.

The three words tumble through her head, over and over, as Clio opens her eyes. She stares up at the ceiling, fixing on those plastic stars that caught Henry's attention, those stars that have lost their glow. This is the last time she will wake up in this bed, in this room, in this part of her life.

Clio stays in bed, her body peaceful and limp, and she feels it: the mournfulness fading, draining from her pores. That she will leave these stars behind, this room behind, this house behind, is nothing but right.

It's finally time.

Last night. Remarkably, Thanksgiving dinner was fine, far better than she expected it would be. She and her father crunched through the snow to
get to Jack's house and it was the two of them and Jack and his wife, Jessica, and their adorable girls, and Jack's parents, whom Clio hadn't seen since last year. She'd worried that the reunion would be awkward, but it wasn't. It relieved her that there was no talk of Eloise. The kids took center stage. Maddy sped around wielding toys and books, and Gabby toddled about, pulling things from shelves. It was chaos, but a joyful, hopeful chaos.

When she and her father came back here, there was this moment when they stood together in the darkened hall outside the bedrooms, this swollen moment when it seemed like he might say something. He had this look on his face, this sheen in his eyes, and he put his hand on Clio's shoulder and looked into her eyes and she felt as if she might burst. She waited for him to say something. Something meaningful.
I love you
maybe. Or
I'm sorry
. But he looked at her and then he looked down and said just two words.
Good night.
And with these two simple, cowardly words, a familiar pulse of disappointment shot through her and she watched him disappear into his room and close the door. She just stood in the hallway and listened to the cadence of her own breath in the silence.

Back in her bedroom, her phone rang. She hoped it was Henry. She wanted to hear his voice, but it wasn't him. They'd agreed not to talk until she returned to the city. This was his idea; it was clear, he said, that she needed some space. But as soon as she had it, this space, all she wanted was to go back, to rewind to those moments before that baby cried in the station, to those moments when they were joking about Christmas presents. Instead of speaking, a string of texts, none of it immensely assuring.

Henry: Enjoy your time with your dad,

Clio: I will try. I miss you though. I'm sorry. All I am is sorry.

Henry: You must stop saying that word.

Clio: I know, Henry.

The phone call was instead from Smith. Clio felt a lifting as her friend spoke; the mere rumble of Smith's voice was soothing and just what she needed. Clio could detect a different texture in this voice, a palpable lightness. Smith rambled on and on about the day she'd enjoyed with Tate, how they'd visited some magical crooked pond to find some sort of poetry plaque, how dinner was surprisingly innocuous, how Tate held his ground with Thatcher, how she thinks she might really like him.

I feel like I've known him forever,
Smith said, a quasi-giddiness coating her words.
I feel like you and I are finally getting our lives together, Clio. Isn't that an exciting thought? Like we've been stumbling along, but now we're finding our footing?

Smith didn't ask how things were at home for Clio and this was an anomaly—Smith was typically dutiful in soliciting such information—but Clio found herself thankful for the lapse. She relished Smith's telling.

And she stayed up late. Packing, going through old things, figuring out what was worth saving. As she tossed things into boxes and garbage bags, she remembered an old, silly television show she and her mother used to watch together from her mother's bed.
Supermarket Sweep,
where a shopper had to fill her basket with the most valuable items in a limited time. In the end, they'd ring up all the contents and see what it added up to. On the show it was a sum of money. Here, now, a childhood. A life.

As Clio did it, this impossible thing that felt easier than she'd imagined it would be, this literal boxing up of her past, words Smith once said echoed in her mind, a balm.
It is just a physical place. Walls and floors and a roof. They are just things. It is your past. Take with you only the parts of it that you want. Create room for your future.

She sits up now, tosses her legs over the side of the bed, buries her toes in the carpet. She lingers, looks around the small space, which
is now almost entirely bare but for the boxes. Boxes for donation. Boxes to store with her father for now. And a box she's marked “Jack's Girls.”

She smells bacon. It's a purely happy smell. Growing up, every Sunday morning, her father would get up and make breakfast, and it was always bacon and eggs. His eggs were good, laden with dill, but it was the bacon that was her favorite and his. The crispier, the more blackened and burned, the better. Her mother, if she felt well enough, would make something sweet. But most of the time, Eloise would just sit there, eyes vacant, and drink coffee from a mug Clio made at school for one Mother's Day that said
Best Mom in the World
with a sloppy approximation of a globe.

On the way to the bathroom, Clio stops at the window, presses her palm to the glass, traces her finger around the wooden frame, the frame littered with smudged pencil notations of birds she's seen and the dates.
Baltimore Oriole 4/2/94. House Finch 5/13/95. Mourning Dove 5/27/95.

In the bathroom, she washes her face and brushes her teeth, stares into the mirror for a final time. She eyes the duct tape in the uppermost corner of the mirror, where her mother punched it. She remembers that day with haunting clarity, her mother flying into a rage with no warning, spouting paranoid thoughts, slicing her hand up, leaving blood everywhere and young Clio to pick up the pieces.

She pops open the plastic disc that contains her birth control pills, slips one from its clear cocoon, stares at the tiny white dot in the center of her palm. She tosses it to the back of her throat and washes it down with water from the tap. Will she stop doing this at some point? Soon? The thought excites her and scares her in equal measure.

She zips up her cosmetic kit. Scans the contents of the small white cabinet. It's all junk—ancient deodorants and yellowing lotions—but she pauses when she sees her mother's perfume. She lifts it to her nose and smells. The aroma brings her back. She carries the bottle with her, places it next to her book bag. Gets dressed for the day.

“Clio! Breakfast!” her father calls, his voice robust. It's as if nothing has happened.

Downstairs, the table is set. Heaping plates of food and large cups of coffee wait. Her father sits and Clio sits across from him. The third chair, her mother's chair, sits empty between them.

Clio tries the eggs. They taste just as they always have. Her father is particularly quiet this morning, but there's a peaceful quality to his face. She takes a few more bites, a couple big swigs of coffee, and watches him. Silence shrouds them, as it so often does, but it feels heavier today, dense. She puts her fork down.

“My last meal here,” she hears herself say. The words come from her without her permission. They are hers but less than conscious. Her head feels lighter than it should.

He nods but says nothing. He shovels large forkfuls of food into his mouth. Clio watches his Adam's apple bulge as he swallows. There is a speck of red by his upper lip. Blood. He has cut himself shaving, Clio deduces, and without warning, she's hurtled back to Easter Sunday when she was eleven. She sat in this chair at this table. Eloise was manic, flying around the kitchen in a loosely tied robe. Her father played along with his wife's elaborate breakfast orchestrations, making fried eggs into bunny faces, adding M&M's eyes and bacon ears. Clio fixated on the crimson dot of blood on her father's cheek, how it kept growing before he'd dab it with a square of paper towel. She ate everything they put in front of her even though it didn't taste good and she wasn't hungry. When her father's face stopped actively bleeding, she felt a surprising pang of relief. Somewhere along the way, she'd forgotten that he could hurt too.

“The eggs are good,” Clio says because she can't bring herself to say anything else, because it's an easy and true sentence, because it fills the silence, but adrenaline starts to cruise through her veins and panic builds. There are things she needs to say and ask and she can't keep waiting for the right moment. There will be no right moment.

“I have a talent or two,” he says.

She pushes her plate away from her, takes a deep breath. “We need to talk, Dad,” she says.

He looks up from his plate.

“We never talk about her. Why don't we ever talk about her?”

He stares past her and it's clear he's thinking. “I don't know why, Clio.”

“Our lives were flipped upside down last year and we just sit here carrying on, eating eggs. Isn't there something wrong with this?”

He looks at her again. His glance is sharp. “It seems you think there is. Go ahead. Diagnose what's wrong with this. You're good at that. I don't know what you want from me, Clio.”

“I want you to look at me for once,” she says. “
Look at me.
”

He looks up, fear and rage in his eyes. He says nothing. Anger rises like steam inside her. She grips the edge of the table. The shell cracks. The armor is gone. She is just a daughter. “What do I want? I want us to take a moment from the lives we are so intent on piecing back together and talk about what the hell happened to both of us a year ago. She hanged herself, Dad, on my swing set, the swing set you built. She's gone. She left us. I want us to
talk
.”

His face reddens and he looks down. Shreds his paper napkin. “You've made it hard to talk, Clio.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

He hesitates. “Are we really doing this?”

“Yes,” she says emphatically, her spine stiffening. “We are.”

“Me too.”

S
he feels dizzy, impossibly nauseated, but wills herself to focus. What if she's having a panic attack? She feels some relief when she remembers the bottle of pills stashed upstairs.

“Do you know how sad and angry I've been for all of these years? All I wanted was for you to be there for me for one minute, for you to look at me.”

“I've gotten the distinct impression that you do not need me,” he says. “You've made that pretty clear.”

“Are you kidding me, Dad? I've needed for you for more than thirty years. I've taught myself not to need you, I've convinced myself that I don't need you, but it's all bullshit. I've always needed you.”

“Well, I'm sorry I've been an awful, absentee father. That was never my plan. I did my best, Clio,” he says, resignation in his voice. “But let me tell you something: we—and that includes me—must have done an okay job because look at you, right? You are successful and strong, tough as nails, feisty as all get-out with your poor old man. I think you turned out just fine, Clio, and I'm going to claim an ounce of credit for that. Maybe most of it was
despite
our bungled efforts, but let me believe I had a small something to do with this.”

“Believe what you want to believe,” she says. “But, tell me, is it outlandish that I actually want to talk about what happened? Is it that crazy that I want to have a conversation?”

“It's a two-way street, Clio,” he says, looking down. “I'll be the first to admit I've messed plenty of things up, that I haven't been the best father, but I'm not so sure you've given me a chance to be. You come home when she dies and then you run away. You promise to visit, but you don't. And shit, Clio, I get it. I'd do the same thing in your shoes. I don't blame you, but you can't have it both ways. You can't fault me for shutting down and avoiding everything when you've done the exact same thing.”

She listens. There is something painfully true about what he says, something that slices her. “But this is not just about her, Dad. It's always been about her, yes, but what about me? I was the kid, the daughter, and you never even saw me. All I wanted was for you to see me, to notice me, to ask me questions. I felt invisible, Dad. I just wanted you to come to my plays and my games and take me for a walk or a meal at the diner or take me to college. Shit, Dad, you could have taken an hour.
Something.
”

He nods. Looks down at the floor. “I'm just saying it's a two-way street,” he says again. “You call for a few minutes each week and we talk about bullshit and I'm the one not noticing you? How about asking me how I'm doing? I lost my wife, Clio, and maybe this is impossible for you to understand, but I loved her.”

He stands abruptly and yanks their dishes away. A fork falls to the
floor. He escapes to the sink, drops everything inside. Braces himself against the counter. She hears something. He's crying.

“Dad,” she says, walking up behind him, guilt pulsing under her skin. She puts her hand on his shoulder. “
Dad.
”

He turns slowly to face her. There's a familiar quality to his eyes, a gloss of fear, of shame, of regret. “Look,” he says, his voice calm. “I have no idea how to do any of this.”

A lone tear snakes down her cheek. “Neither do I.”

He throws his arm around Clio and pulls her into his chest. Hugs her tightly. She weeps into his shirt. They stand there like this for several minutes before separating and wiping their eyes dry.

“Can we sit and talk for a minute?” Clio says. Much of the anger and anxiety has washed away; something has shaken loose.

He nods. Takes her hand and walks her through the door into the living room.

“Let's talk,” he says, lowering to sit on the big tattered beige sofa. Her parents found it at the Salvation Army.

She sits beside him. Looks at him and then down at her lap. This is her chance. All those years and they never really discussed things. They reacted to Eloise, weathered her brutal storms, but there was a dearth of actual conversation about what was going on. Clio felt shut out of most of what was happening, relegated to the proverbial sidelines, a mere bystander. She worked to absorb what she could, to glean clues from her parents' cryptic, anger-laced exchanges. She scribbled the names of the swarm of doctors they visited, worried about the arguments she witnessed on a daily basis. She was left to piece together what she could, to guess when her mother was taking her medicine and when she'd stopped.

“I've been really lonely, Dad,” she says, biting her lower lip, willing herself to keep breathing.
Lonely.
The word catches in her throat. “When she was alive, I felt peripheral, like I was getting in your way, maybe even making everything worse. I just wanted you guys. I wanted you to see me and notice me. I'm dredging all this up now
because I want so badly to move on, Dad, to have a normal life, but there's so much I haven't processed and we haven't talked about and I think it's been getting in the way.”

He nods. “I know.”

She looks at him. Braces herself. Swallows. Takes a deep breath. Asks the question she's been wanting to ask, the question she knows is terrible to ask, the question she's vowed never to ask anyone who has been through what she's been through. “Did you see it coming?”

He pauses for a beat and then looks at her. “Yes and no. She was terribly depressed, but you and I both know there were plenty of times when she was that way. I keep going over it in my head, wondering if I missed something, a clue, if there was something I could've done.”

Clio nods. “Me too. Maybe if I had come home for Thanksgiving instead of going to Costa Rica? Maybe if I had called that day . . .”

Her father puts his hand on her knee. “We can't do this to ourselves. She was sick, Clio. She was so incredibly sick. This wasn't our doing, but I am sorry that I was so focused on her, on how she was doing, on keeping her alive, that I wasn't there for you like I should have been. I can see that now. And I'm sorry. I was trying to protect you and then I couldn't anymore. All of a sudden you knew everything and there was nothing I could do to give you your innocence back.”

Innocence.
What a foolish, quaint word. Is this something she ever had?

“I want you to have them,” he says, pointing at the boxes of books in the center of the room. “But only if you'd like to have them. I can store them for a while. You can think about it,” he says, backpedaling.

“I think I'd like them,” she says, picturing that big empty shelf at Henry's hotel.

“She'd want you to have them.”

“What's in the little box?” she says, pointing to the one smaller box by the larger ones.

He stands, walks over to it and picks it up and carries it back to Clio. Hands it to her. “I found this while I was packing up our closet a few
days ago. It was shoved way back on the upper shelf of her side. Take a look inside.”

Clio peers inside. It's a jumble of unfamiliar items. She pulls a small plastic circle from it. There are words. Her name.
Clio Marsh. Baby Girl.

“Your hospital bracelet,” her father says.

Something in her comes alive. She pulls a larger bracelet from the box.

“Hers,” he says. Her name—
Eloise Marsh, Mother
—is printed in matching type.

Clio reaches in again. Pulls out a Ziploc bag with her first lock of hair. She was almost white blond. Then a photograph of Clio and her mother on her first Easter. Clio wears a frilly white bonnet and is barefoot. There are papers at the bottom, and Clio lifts them out and studies them. They are her school reports from each year since kindergarten. Her Yale acceptance letter. Printouts of some e-mails Clio sent her mother.

“I can't believe she kept all this,” Clio says.

“You were her pride and joy,” he says. “She loved you more than anything in the world, Clio. She talked about you all the time.”

This is a different story than the one Clio has told herself all these years. In Clio's version, she's the Mistake, the fruit of an accidental pregnancy that caused an unwanted marriage and an unwanted life.

Clio closes the box, sees that her hands are shaking as she places the lid back on top. She will have plenty of time to sift through the rest of the contents. This is her time with her father. This is a morning she will not get back, this last morning in her childhood home. She looks up at him, smiles.

“You know something?” he says, standing, walking toward the far end of the room, gesturing toward some green crayon marks on the wall. “She loved it when you did this.”

“She did?” Clio says, surprised, standing to join him.

“Yes,” he says. “She was proud of you. Decided that you were a
little visionary. A note taker like she was. For your first birthday, she gave you a package of index cards and a box of crayons. She wrapped them in newspaper and I remember thinking how odd it all was, but that's it, I just thought she was odd and eccentric and I loved that about her.”

Clio imagines herself as a toddler, taking to the wall with a crayon, scribbling on the wall, her mother different than many others would be. Most mothers would race over and grab a wrist and chide their child. Instead, she had the wild and offbeat mom, lingering in the background, a portrait of shifting smiles. Maybe for her mother, Clio's young scrawls were tiny bits of genius, hieroglyphics, budding shreds of communication. That she didn't try to scrub them away, but instead rearranged the furniture—what little there was of it—to afford a better view of these mini masterpieces, offers some ineffable solace in this moment so many years later.

“What was she like when you guys were young?”

At this question, her father's face lightens. He smiles. “She was gorgeous. Wild. Lit up every room. When things got bad later on, I would imagine this version of her and that would help. I'd remind myself that I landed Eloise Marsh. She was quite the catch, you know. I would have never imagined the turn things took.”

“I guess that's what scares me,” Clio says.

“What does?”

She meets her father's eye. “I love Henry, Dad. I want to be with him.”

“That's great,” her father says.

“Yes,” she says, “but what will things look like a year from now, or five or ten? You and I know better than most how everything can change on a dime.”

He nods, grows pensive. “True, but you know something, Clio? Even after everything, even after her diagnosis and all the nightmares and heartache, I wouldn't change a thing. I'd do it all over again because I have you.”

I'd do it all over again because I have you.
The words stun her and she feels an internal shift, a shaking loose, a thawing. She looks over at him and smiles. “You don't need to say that, Dad.”

“I know I don't need to, but it's true and I apparently need to get better at saying these things,” he says. “I loved her to her last day, Clio. I loved that woman. I still love her. And she's not here anymore and I'm still making sense of that, but you are here. And so am I. And now it's my turn to figure out how to be a better dad to you. And you're going to have to help me.”

Clio nods, thinks about this. “And you're going to have to help me figure out how to be a better daughter.”

He smiles. “Sounds like a plan. So, are you going to give Henry a chance?”

“I want to,” she says, suddenly feeling a drifty, almost pleasant light-headedness. There's something surreal about these moments, the finality of them, the symbolism. She looks around and around, a dizziness descending, and throws her arm around her father. He clutches it and they stand together in silence.

“He wants us to live together,” Clio says. “He's even mentioned having a family.”

“Is that what you want?” he asks.

“I don't know,” Clio says. “I think so maybe. Do you think Mom would've liked him? He's a lot older than I am.”

He laughs. “Mom would have loved him. A smart, successful, suave Irishman courting her little princess. She would have called him delightful. She would have swooned over the slight accent and flirted up a storm. She'd want this for you, Clio. She was always enormously proud of you and wanted you to have a happy life.”

Clio wants nothing more than to believe everything her father's saying, and though her doubts rise quickly and her cynicism stings from within, though this sounds nothing like Eloise, she looks over at her father, the openness in his cerulean eyes, and she decides to believe him. Maybe because she wants to, because she needs to, because she's
exhausted from questioning every little thing, because believing him will make moving forward easier, but it really doesn't matter.

There is a freedom in this. In deciding to believe. In deciding to take a chance and move on.

Clio looks around the room, the room that will soon bear witness to another imperfect family, and she feels something, a twinkling of gems that have long eluded her, that have seemed fictive: peace, progress, closure.

“I'm so sorry, Clio,” her father says, pulling her to him. When her head meets his chest, she hears the refrain of his tears once more.

And through fresh tears of her own, she mouths words.
Me too.