The legacy of my past is a dichotomy of two selves. One half of me wants to be here, the other somewhere else. Wherever I am, it is the wrong place for part of me. I straddle two worlds, not fully comfortable in either. I can live anywhere but am at home nowhere. My roots are shallow but they spread like fingers across the globe, encompassing the world. –Miriam Darvas

***

He limps along, possessions contained in one small, plastic bag.  He wears a backward cap, dirty.  Unwashed, tattered jeans.  I am suddenly aware of all the nicely dressed people around, walking on the same block. I recall the designer sunglasses sitting on my head, keeping hair out of my face. My fingers fly up and touch them tentatively, push them back down over my eyes. I close my eyes for a second and almost forget him. But then he is hobbling forward, facing me. I feel disdain for this pathetic, helpless stranger; rage almost. And then I catch his eye and see an expression both desperate and kind. And in those eyes I am reminded.

Reminded of a disheveled man sitting on a bench, near a bus stop, waiting to be picked up.

My father.

On his way to nowhere.

***

He sits out there so I don’t have to get too close to the shelter he’s been living in for the past few months. But I realize this after the fact. He looks at me as I pull the car up to the bus stop. I’m angry for a moment and stare at him hard, as if to say why the hell are you sitting there? His face is wrinkled deeply now. He stands up, eager, like a puppy delighted by my arrival. Gives me a toothless smile that stabs with both forgiveness and shame. My face softens. “Hi dad,” I say in a gentle voice.

***

In my early twenties, before my dad wound up without a home, I lived at home again. During this time an old hunting rifle rested against the wall of my father’s bedroom for weeks, months. I don’t know how long but long enough that it no longer seemed out of the ordinary. One day when my father was not in the house, I transferred it to the garage. I felt sort of ridiculous, like an actor in a lifetime movie, moving stealthily with rifle in tow. I was nervous that I would accidentally set it off. When my father realized it was missing he became angry with me. “It was my father’s. I don’t want it rusting in the garage,” he said in a stern, no nonsense tone, his face hardening, as if that explained why he wanted a loaded rifle resting, at the ready, against his bedroom wall. A bedroom he barely left anymore.

Since no one else, namely my mother, was taking action I finally did. I was the only one home when the officers arrived. I greeted them warily, distrustfully—Come on in, welcome to our dysfunction—and lead them downstairs to my father’s bedroom. I felt like a traitor as I handed them the small white square of paper (a pad to jot phone-messages on) with his scribbled message: “I’m sorry, I can’t go on like this.”

My father and the rifle were missing that afternoon. The reason I made the decision to phone the police. But I didn’t really believe that my father had harmed himself. Maybe I made the phone call more because I wanted help, wanted someone to do something. Earlier, I’d left a message on Brendan’s cell-phone. A burly Grateful Dead and motorcycle enthusiast and the chef at the restaurant my father used to bartend at. Brendan called back as I was talking to the cops. He said not to worry; they had spent the day together and were on their way home. Relief. Confusion. A sinking feeling. What had I done?

This part is lodged deepest in my memory: Brendan’s car is pulling up the driveway. Butterflies flap in my stomach. My father gets of the car. Time slows to almost a halt. He is walking toward me apprehensively, as though he’s not sure if he should continue or make a run for it. Brendan trails him. The cops and Brendan are not, shall we say, on friendly terms—the local cops often drive slowly by his house.

“No, I wrote that a long time ago, it’s nothing, I didn’t mean it,” my dad is stuttering, attempting a smile. He looses his footing for a moment, tries to balance himself. I have to look away. My father doesn’t show vulnerability, ever, and seeing him lose his footing triggers a heaviness that could smother me. Hands closing around my throat. One of the officers grabs a hold of his arm to steady him. “It’s okay,” the officer is saying, both comforting and commanding. “But you have to come with us now.” My heart is breaking open. Or maybe it is more accurate to say it’s closing. The way I will remain for a long time. Shut off. Withdrawn. Where it is safe. A fragmented person.

I don’t remember where the gun was that afternoon. My father must have hid it somewhere, out of sight, before Brendan picked him up that morning. When my mother came home from work that night she cleaned her house (as in it is mine no thanks to anyone but myself). Scrubbing, polishing, organizing and covering up so many painful truths. She was able to move her neck again now that my father was out of the house. For months she had neck pain so severe she could barely move it to the right or left. She was accustomed to shouldering the pain of others.

A few days after my father was escorted to the psych ward, we met with a social worker. I wondered how they expected a person to get better in a place with heavy pad-locked doors and no sunlight.

The four of us—my parents, my brother, and I—and the social worker sit in a small private room. Every few minutes we hear the desperate, frantic shrieks of a female patient. Like a refrain. We all glance at one another, startled each time. You could never get used to a sound like that. My Mother, after a particularly agonizing cry, remarks, “The poor woman; things could be so much worse.” And the social worker, without pause, responds: “Actually, things are pretty bad.” I want to get up and kiss her for speaking the truth. But I don’t say or do anything; I am frozen. Somehow both there and not there like two versions of myself.

Tears tumble down my brother’s face like they have no beginning or end. My little brother. His head is bent down and he stares at the ground, hiding under his baseball cap. Wipes at his face and half mutters, half pleads: “I don’t know what’s going on.” He says it more than once. He isn’t addressing anyone in particular.

Demons too big to hold. Demons too big for a family to contain.

The social worker asks questions, gives us all a chance to speak. She asks me about the money. I shrug and say that it wasn’t that much or that frequently, that he just took money from me when he was desperate. She tells me, sternly, that it serves no purpose to make excuses for my father in our session. She’s right but I feel like telling her to bite me. Instead I nod and listen, stone faced. Not really there.

***

Where do these memories get filed? Deep within the hippocampus? Is that where the bad memories go? Why those who have experienced early trauma have been found to have larger hippocampuses than those who have not? Where in the body are they stored? In the jaw? The shoulders? The hips?

On my computer, these memories are stored in a folder titled Memoir. Fragmented, unfinished pieces of writing. Memories without a home. I used to say that my essays were “disjointed,” that I was still searching for through-lines, larger themes in my works to tie each piece together neatly and fluidly. I wanted to create cohesive, complete essays. I wanted to be cohesive and complete. But I am realizing that maybe it is not in the nature of such memories to be ordered and contained. As I work my way through this computer file of memories, reshaping and reworking and deleting what is no longer relevant, I have the feeling that I am coming home.

End