He Was My Father by Hannah Levy
When I get the call, I’m sitting cross-legged on a golf course in the redwoods, perched on one of those artificial mounds of grass. It’s the only place where I have reception in this small town. I look up and the evening light moves through the trees like mist. This is a beautiful place to find out that my father is dying. Dying quickly, organs shutting down one by one like traffic lights turning red as the city grows dark.
I watch a woodpecker knock its head against the trunk, relentless in its search. My throat gets hot. A rising fever in the hollow of my neck gathers like a swarm. The sound I make is practically soundless, an intake of breath, barely a gasp. A trapdoor snapping shut. A little girl going step by step down the basement stairs.
My father.
He erupted, yelling, lunging through rooms, slamming every door behind him.
With his bigness, his loudness, his baldness. He called me his problem child and meant it. My father who was cold and cruel, wrathful, vengeful. My father who could also be generous and bright, sunlight, the sun itself. So brilliant he burned. My father who lived and lived and lived was days away from death and no one could tell me why. If there had once been a rope connecting me to him, at this point in my life it had dwindled down to a thread. A single note where an orchestra might have played.
Two days later, I’m walking through a hospital. The hallways are wide, a hushed maze of hidden bodies. I move slowly and try to look at every nurse’s face as I pass—every person might be the last person my father sees before he dies—but no one makes eye contact with me. I cross into his room and before I know it, I’m counting machines: 17 different monitors, each one a yelp suspended in midair. I start counting wires and tubes but stop because I realize I don’t want to know the number.
As a child, I cried so many tears over the things my father said to me or didn’t say to me, or the way he abruptly left the table or the room or the whole house when he got mad—which was often. He erupted, yelling, lunging through rooms, slamming every door behind him. Then he drove away and wouldn’t come back all day or night, or sometimes even a week. He often retreated to his office and pretended I didn’t exist. When I was 12 he didn’t speak to me for a month. I didn’t speak back. I moved around our home like a specter, seething. I only cried when everyone else fell asleep.
I am not crying now. I am just another machine in the room making little machine noises.
Once, I went to the beach with my daughter and spent all morning following her footsteps. Careful, careful, careful, she whispered as she heel-toed her way through the sand. When water spilled over the tracks she turned to me and said, Oh, mama. How will you find me now?
Two hours after I arrive at the hospital, my father is dead.
Later, I wake up and watch him make his way across my bedroom. He’s wearing a suit in the middle of the night, just like I remember. He opens one drawer after another and pulls out shadows in a bundle. What are you doing? I ask. Taking my stuff, he says. Then he leaves the way he came. I try to wake myself up but I am already awake, sitting still in the dark.
Months go by and my father becomes restless. He’s always looking for something, always opening and closing cabinets, always calling and calling and calling my cell phone. One time, he’s sitting at his desk, piles of paper nearly covering his face. Well? he asks. Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to help me? He’s gone before I can answer.
I stare hard into the mirror and say Bloody Mary three times. I wonder who will come for me if she doesn’t.
I start going on hikes around an abandoned military outpost on the Northern California coast, six miles away from the San Andreas Fault. A sign there says This land is in motion. I watch the freight ships crawl across the fog on the horizon. At the top of the hill, the air is cold and the bunkers are slathered in graffiti, rotting in place. I like to climb beside the concrete ruins, alone. Even from way up there, I can hear the buoy bell ringing in the waves.
Exactly nine months after he dies, I wake up to dozens of crows above my house, a raucous symphony. I study them for several long minutes as they move above the trees like black clouds. It’s Mother’s Day. I could not think of a world without you! my daughter writes. Later, I watch a video of an ornithologist describing corvid behavior. A dense flock circling and cawing in a concentrated area signals a crow has died, and the crows are trying to figure out how. They are not mourning. They are trying to figure out how to live. How to keep living.
Before bed, my daughter whispers, I feel sad for no reason.
At the funeral, the rabbi tells me that when a Jewish person dies, you must cover all the mirrors in the house. None of the mirrors are covered here. I walk from room to room and find him wherever I go. I tell lies and summon my father. I scream at my daughter and summon my father. I say you are so selfish to my reflection over and over and summon my father. I write poetry with words like regret, shame, anger, neglect and summon my father. I want to believe I have escaped him by becoming someone else, but his absence is a presence inside of me. The years of emotional violence coil into a poisonous thing I can’t extract. Some days I feel it there, a gritty shadow spiraling beneath my skin. Other days I wake up numb. I squint at my reflection and try to measure the distance between who I am and who I could have been.
The stories begin to unfold like origami. Four months after his funeral, the big reveal: all the secrets, affairs, lies, betrayals, debts. More girlfriends outside of marriage than I can count on two hands, each with their own bank account in his name. It’s almost comedic, the mess of it all. My father is as big in death as he was in life. His endless appetite, a cymbal crashing.
At 2:00 AM, one night, I can’t stop scrolling through a survey titled “Experiences of Grief,” 235 anonymous freeform responses to questions about dead family members, partners, lovers, friends. I pluck at the words on the screen and write a song: my father / he was my father / my brother / my husband / my twin / I feel high / zingy / relief / ecstatic and elated / laughing / I have more energy than I’ve ever had before / I do not feel loss at all / I never even cried / a slow unraveling / reality set in / I am a stranger / outside of my body / reckless / I feel reckless.
In every photograph of me and my father, I am smiling.
The memories come and go. In one, I’m 10 years old and standing in my father’s closet, brushing my hand over dozens of ties suspended from a wooden hanger. His only collection. A pattern for every occasion, he says, tightening the silk around his neck. A knot just below his Adam’s apple. I take the fabric embroidered with sharks and wrap it around my wrist until my hand goes numb. That night at a sleepover, I stare hard into the mirror and say Bloody Mary three times. I wonder who will come for me if she doesn’t.
I am 16 years old and on vacation with my father. His annual, sometimes biannual, pilgrimage: Las Vegas, rising from dust. This time, one very bad night at cards followed by luck upon luck. Flush with a pocketful of 20 dollar bills, I walk through the heat to The Mirage hotel. It’s late afternoon and my father is gambling somewhere—Blackjack or Texas Hold ‘Em. I search for the shine of his bald head above the crowd but don’t see it. Everywhere, bells and electronic music and cigarettes. Finally, I arrive at the white tigers pacing in their enclosure. I stand there until my hair smells like smoke, until I am dizzy with hunger. I am waiting for them to notice me.
My daughter comes home from school with a scarlet runner bean plant in a plastic cup. She has been waiting and watering for weeks. She cradles it in her hands like a soft animal. We dig a hole in the backyard and she pats the soil with her palm. A few days later, she checks on it and the plant is in shreds, pulled up by the roots and strewn across the vegetable bed. The way her body curls in anguish, the way she wails. She is every sound I want to sing.
On Thursdays, I go horseback riding. My father paid for lessons when I was growing up, until one day he stopped. Twenty years later, I found my way back. I brush the horse’s body gently, run my fingers through his mane. I remember how to do everything. Lift each hoof to remove stones and dirt. Saddle pad, saddle, cinch. Untangle the reins and slip on the bridle. This boy does not use a bit. When I’m on his back, I squeeze my thighs and square my shoulders and tell him exactly where I want to go. He’s a good horse. He listens.
I take my daughter to a science museum one afternoon in early winter. She’s obsessed with an exhibit titled “Energy from Death.” Rats in various states of decay—carcasses from two, four, six weeks ago. Tiny scavenger bugs eating skin and flesh. She looks at me and asks if my father’s body is breaking down in the earth. I explain that he is embalmed, so it’ll be 10 to 15 years before he’s a skeleton. This upsets her. She wants bones to put in her pocket, something to sprinkle like seeds over the earth. Is Papa stuck? she wants to know.
A year after his death, I’m standing on his grave. There’s no good word in the English language for this. Anniversary feels wrong and memorial feels wrong. In Yiddish, it’s called Yahrzeit, meaning “year’s time,” which feels right but I can’t pronounce that so I say nothing. I am thinking about tree rings when it’s suddenly time to leave. I crouch down in the grass by the headstone and grab a fistful of dirt. It’s warmer than I expected and clings to my skin. I unzip my bag and let it fall inside. I’m closer to my father now than I ever have been.
When we finally get to Vegas, I can’t see the stars or the moon, can’t hear my own voice above the racket.
When I was very small, my father bought a black Porsche after making partner at his law firm. The seats were upholstered in buttery tan leather that blistered in the Southern California heat. They were hardly seats at all, and I had to fold myself to sit inside them, knees against my chest. No car seat, no booster. Just my father weaving through traffic while singing Counting Crows, the 405 freeway rearranging itself around him. Once, he told me I was in charge of shifting gears. He placed my left hand over his right and together we accelerated, pushing the stick forward, then down, then back. The car surging and settling beneath us, making a low animal sound. Reckless and magical. For one impossible moment, I believed I was the one making us go.
Years after he sold the Porsche, he drove me to the airport in a car with automatic transmission that made virtually no noise as we stalled at the curb. I was flying back east for a spring semester of college. Need money? he asked. I said no. I had a job, I was good, I was great actually. He nodded, opened his wallet, pulled out a stack of bills. I’m good, I said again. But thanks. I opened the car door just as he threw the cash at me. Some fell onto my lap, some in between the center console. Take it, he said. I don’t want it.
In a dream that is not a dream, I’m driving through the desert on an endless road. I look out the window, bite my nails, think about how many people had to die for it to be called Death Valley. When we finally get to Vegas, I can’t see the stars or the moon, can’t hear my own voice above the racket. There is no night. There is no time. I am 10, 12, 16, 39, finding my way through a labyrinth of slot machines, going up and down the elevator. Sometimes, unexpectedly: joy. Like money slipped under the hotel door. Sometimes, only rage. Six hours of silence on the drive home. A car full of ghosts, as if we were never really there at all.
I sit in the bathtub at my father’s house for the first and last time. The water never reaches past my thighs because I am unknowingly pressing my body against the drain. I struggle with the faucet and jets turn on from below and the water begins to bubble and suddenly, I’m boiling. For the rest of my life, every time I climb into a bath I will think of this sinking and simmering. This moment when I realize I will never feel clean.
