When we get back to the house, when we say goodbye on the gravel path at the bottom of the six wooden stairs that lead up to the porch, he kneels down to give me a hug, his face right in mine, bushy and black and turtle-like. He has a tear in his eye that he wipes from behind his thick glasses while Mom stands over us. When he gets in his truck, the one Tony and I slept in on the way home from the Oregon coast, the one he drinks in alone and probably lives in now that he’s “too sick to function,” when he heads up Breys Avenue with his hand out of the window holding a wave to the street and turns right on D, Mom says he got sober just to come see me for the day.
I never see him again. The calls stop coming and so does his truck and later Mom tells me he’s dead. He drank himself to death. There is no catch in her voice and no tears and no funeral to attend. It’s not even a Big Talk. She says it matter-of-factly, like she’s describing a tragedy that happened to people in another part of the world. A natural disaster that could not be avoided.
“How? What happened?”
“It’s just something I heard,” she says. “He was really sick.”
The vagueness of the information, the sense that he is both alive and not alive, both a living father, a friend, a man in our house and someone who disappears to drink alone in the woods like some kind of sad ghost, always existed with him.
It seems there are ghosts everywhere. People who are both present and not present. They’re real then gone until I see them in a dream, sitting up in bed in the dark thinking, Did I imagine him? Where did he go?
I can’t stand the thought. Did he die holding a bottle in his hand in the back of his truck? Or in a car crash? Is he lying frozen right now in a riverbed under a bridge somewhere in Portland? Did he miss me? Did he think we wanted him to leave?
Did he even die at all? Why don’t we ever talk about it?
But Mom never says a word about him and I don’t know where to put all the things I know I’m not supposed to talk about anymore, the things I’m supposed to pretend never happened because they never happened in the World According to Mom. The list of things that don’t exist is growing: there’s the School, the bad men from Synanon with their clubs, the long depressions when she can’t be moved from her bed, Dad and now Paul.
“It’s just something I heard. He might just be drunk in a gutter somewhere. I don’t know.” That’s all she ever tells me and now there is another ghost.
Our parents were like ghosts in Synanon, haunting us then disappearing again, leaving us to wonder what their connection to us was supposed to mean. What is a mom and what is a dad and what is a family and if it’s so special then why did you leave me?
How long can you live with ghosts before deciding to become one? How long until the walls become clouds and the floor opens up like a clear blue sky and there’s nowhere to go but your stone tower where you are the one who chooses who to haunt and how to haunt and when to haunt? You learn to act, to pretend, to inhabit different forms in your mind, different faces to the world, some of them terrifying, some charming, some cunning, some innocent, some a hundred feet tall, godlike and invincible, others tiny and frail, beseeching and ironic. Five, ten, ten thousand different ghosts of your creation, one for every person you meet, one for every occasion, so many that they crowd the hallways of your castle in the sky.
But somewhere within those imaginary walls, sitting alone in the dark above the clouds, you are aware that you are none of these things. Only sad.
CHAPTER 22
THE MEN WHO LEAVE
Mom still goes to Al-Anon meetings even though Paul is gone. She tells me about an Al-Anon conference where there is a dance and she stood against the wall watching the men, noticing that she was attracted to the loners, the ones standing off by themselves, leaning against the wall. I wonder why she thinks this is something I need to know.
The twelve steps in Al-Anon are basically the same twelve steps as Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s not clear why but it’s something like once you build a ladder to the moon, you don’t ask questions about why it works. You just climb it. There’s a philosophy: don’t look down and don’t question. Which was the precise philosophy of Synanon before it went bad.
Step four is “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Maybe that’s what Mom is doing leaning against that wall at that dance and maybe that’s why she tells me because I’m supposed to be following the steps too, taking inventory and admitting the nature of my wrongs to people.
When I say I miss Paul, she says, “It was really hard for me to let him go. All of this has been very difficult for me. Sitting at home waiting and wondering if he’s going to come back is not easy stuff, kid. It was hard but it’s better that he’s gone and you guys were never that close anyway.” I tell her about Minto-Brown Park and fishing and the long walks and watching cartoons with him and she says, “I just remember him leaving all the time and how hard that was because you stayed awake thinking about him.”
“That was you, Mom. We were cold because there wasn’t any firewood. I had to get up early to change the water in the frozen rabbit cages.”
Her eyes wander away somewhere and when they return, she squints and lowers her brow like she’s overwhelmed, rubbing her temples, confused as if staring into a mirror, surprised to find something other than her own reflection.
“No. You weren’t cold. Were you? Stop exaggerating. What are you saying, sweetie?” She tilts her head as if searching for a word, scanning her mind for it. Then a calmness settles over her again. “No. It’s better now. He was too sick and you’re happier now that he’s gone. This has been hard. This has been so hard on me. I need to lie down.”
When I sit down to watch TV, she sits next to me and puts her hand out like I’m supposed to hold it. I don’t know what to say so I hold her hand for a minute then try to make up some excuse to leave the room. I don’t know how to tell her I don’t want to sit on a couch with our fingers interlocked like those couples on TV and I know that if I did, it would hurt her feelings and I’m not allowed to do that.
She tells me a man approached her at the conference. “A nice man,” she says. They talked for a long time. His name is Doug. He asked her to dinner. He’s the vice president of sales for a local company that sells jams. He’s “a normal guy. For once.” He has a job and isn’t a functional drunk or even a recovering drunk, a drunk that tries to be something else before doing the things drunks do again. “He’s not an alcoholic. So that’ll be new.” He went through a divorce from a “very religious” wife. They have two kids.
“But why was he at a program conference?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean if he’s not using drugs or whatever, why was he even there?”
“Oh. Well, he’s, um, dealt with some addiction issues.”
“What does that mean?”
“There are different types of addiction and they all follow similar patterns and alcohol is just one of them but families can get sick from them anyway.” I know she doesn’t want me to ask what his addiction is.
He pulls up to the house on Breys Avenue on a Saturday morning in a blue Pontiac sedan and walks across the street holding a bouquet of flowers. I see him from the front window. He looks so formal, so out of place on this street of gravel driveways and broken-down cars where we live. He’s wearing a brown tweed jacket with patches at the elbows and baggy jeans. His brown hair is parted neatly on the side above a face that seems to have no defining characteristics, like it isn’t so much a face as an average of other faces blended together to create a person. He looks like one of those 1950s dads on Leave It to Beaver, swimming in his blazer as he peers around nervously walking up the front steps to knock on our door.