I felt myself to be sophisticated and hip. I knew everything there was to know about the fruit of the vine, and I found my people in those dark rooms, others like me who found solace in the flow of wine blotting out discomfort, sorrow, pain.
How many days, weeks, months—years—did I waste that way? So many. Time I will never get back. This sense of loss layers into the tangle of PTSD and unfelt emotions I’ve stuffed down over and over, and now have no way to shove back down again. I long for obliteration, something to kill that pain. It seems wildly unfair that I am no longer allowed the drug of peace.
Better to feel, my counselor said, over and over. Since there is no alternative, I stand there in the sun and stop trying to shove the pain away. I let it be whatever it wants to be, let memories spin around my mind. My father, in that picture on his desk, was the age he was when he left me. Seeing his face from that time staggered me, an entirely visceral reaction in my body, not my head. I felt it in my chest and belly, stabbing me so hard that I almost doubled over.
I close my eyes, feel the sunshine, let the memory rise.
He came to me in the bedroom in the apartment we lived in with my mother, Shanti, who was deadly silent in the other room. Never a good sign. He said, “Maya-mine, I need to talk to you.”
I knew it was bad, so I just sat there.
“I’m not going to live here anymore, but you’re still going to come visit me all the time, and you’re going to be part of my world forever, okay? And you’re going to have a sister. Rory.”
“Rory is going to be my sister?” This was excellent news. I loved Rory. We’d played together sometimes. “I’ve always wanted a sister.”
He stroked my hair. “I know, baby.” He had tears in his eyes. It terrified me.
“Are you crying?”
“Only because I’m going to miss you so much.”
“Why can’t I go with you?”
Actual tears spilled down his face, into his beard. They nearly stopped my heart. “Because your mommy needs you, baby.”
My big-eyed mother, who rarely spoke, only drank and smoked. The thought of being alone with her all the time made my body hurt. I bent my head and started to cry myself. “It’s not fair.”
He held me and we cried together, and all I wanted was to stay right there in the moment and never move forward.
But of course, eventually he stood and kissed my head and walked out.
Walked out.
On the beach outside his restaurant almost thirty years later, I want to go back in time and grab that little girl, protect her from the awful things that were about to befall her.
I want to shake my dad until he sees the truth. How could he have left me with my mother? For any reason? What was he thinking? My mother was so unstable even before he left that it was not a big jump to realize she couldn’t take care of me, and I was not equipped to take care of myself.
Furious to the point of shaking, I drive to the Brewed Bean even though it’s too early for work, and park in the tiny lot that belongs to employees. In the car, I bend over and press my forehead against the wheel to get myself together. I need this job and I need to do it well to keep it. Everything else will wait. Meadow, my dad, my anger, which seems to be bottomless. I start thinking I see an end to it, and something else rises through the gloom and fires it up again.
You are not alone.
I take out my phone and tell Siri to call Rory. She picks up instantly. “Hey!”
“Hey.”
“You sound a little depressed or something.”
In the safe space created by my sister, my emotions spill out as tears. “Yeah. Maybe. I was just at the restaurant with Meadow and it was hard. Dad’s just so present there. I’m mad at him for dying before I could really talk to him, before we could work things out, and I’m really mad that I didn’t get to tell him how mad I am. And it was one thing to be mad at him when he was still in the world,” I say, finding a weird sense of calm as truth emerges, “but it really sucks now that he’s dead.”
“I know. I miss him so much.”
I watch a woman stride by the opening to the street with a dog on a leash, both of them tall and athletic. “Do you remember when you guys started living together?”
She’s quiet for a minute. “Honestly, no. I remember him being there, and other things, like the wedding, I remember really well, and when you came to Belle l’été.”
“I remember that, too.” A tarry pit of emotions bubbles in my gut. “Ugh. I have to go get something to eat and get to work, but I’ll talk to you soon.”