Now I think about the box that my dad so carefully created for me—not just the one in the basement, but this safe town, this house with an alarm system, this family of three—and how it did nothing to protect us after all. Those were just things my dad did to make himself feel better. I realize we all walk around pretending we have some control over our fate, because to recognize the truth—that no matter what we do, the bottom will fall out when we least expect it—is just too unbearable to live with.
The phone rings again, and I jump, like I’m in a horror movie. I’m equally scared to answer and not answer.
“Kitty?” It’s Uncle Jack, my dad’s best friend and my godfather. He was my dad’s freshman-year college roommate, the best man at my parents’ wedding, and a frequent houseguest over the past year since his wife left him. Last month he added the job of executor of my father’s estate.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, because this is the in case of emergency phone. It is used to report emergencies.
“Nothing. Everything’s fine. Well, not fine, but you know. Is your mom around, by any chance? I called her office and they said she wasn’t in.” My mom left for work as usual this morning, looking even better than yesterday.
“Sorry. Not home.”
I’ve known Uncle Jack my entire life—the “uncle” being an Indian honorific we use out of respect even though he’s not technically family (or Indian, for that matter). He used to pull pennies out from behind my ear, bend his thumb so it looked like it split in two. He came to my eighth-grade graduation ceremony just because he wanted to see me cross the stage. He has been saying the same thing in different ways for the past month, and I don’t want to hear it again. It was just a freak thing.
I think about how the police told us about the malfunctioning traffic light (there was a work order to fix it later in the week), that when they administered a Breathalyzer about two hours after the accident the other driver was under the legal limit. That there was no crime here. Nothing to prosecute. I think of the way the other car plowed through the intersection into my dad. Literally. Into my dad. That’s what killed him: the impact.
My mom doesn’t know that the day after he died, when she was taking a Xanax nap, I took a cab to the junkyard to see for myself what was left of the car. I needed to make it feel real. To have evidence that my father was in fact dead. Not lost, like the doctor said, not just waiting somewhere else for us to find him.
There was nothing to see but Volvo origami. I took a picture, but it felt no more real than before. The accident was a blank. A story that was told to us about characters we did not know, lives we did not care about. But there was the car and my father was dead and I was not.
I was not.
I never got to meet my father’s parents, my other grandparents, and if I ever have kids they will not get to know my dad. If I one day walk down an aisle, my dad will not be standing next to me. At graduation, it will be just my mom in the audience watching. Every happy moment from now on will have the lingering, bitter, heartbreaking aftertaste of loss.
“It was just a freak thing,” Jack says, right on cue.
It’s wrong that his words so precisely echo my father’s. He uses the same empty refrain. For the first time I hear the lie implicit in them. Realize how the freakishness does nothing to lessen the reality. It’s a misdirection. It’s a verbal sleight of hand.
Not the truth. Not truth at all.
—
That night, my mom comes into my room to tuck me in, something she hasn’t done in a long time, maybe years. These days we’ve been falling asleep mid-activity, stuffed with too much takeout. We just keep going until our bodies shut off.
“Sweetie?” My mom sits next to me on my bed, which makes the covers too tight across my neck. I don’t ask her to shift over. I’ve taken four Advil to get rid of this unidentifiable feeling, a shaky emptiness, but Advil doesn’t treat whatever this is. “I ran into Violet’s mom today on the train.”
“Yeah? She mention curry?” I ask, as if I have no idea what’s coming next. Of course it was only a matter of time before one of my friends said something to their mom and their mom said something to my mom. Like how we used to play the game telephone as kids and whisper secrets from ear to ear.
My mom laughs at my nonjoke.
“Not this time. But she said that Violet told her you haven’t been sitting with the girls at lunch.” My mom smoothes down my hair, which is two shades lighter than hers. I’ve always wanted to color mine dark brown so we could match.
When I was little, I was convinced that my mom was actually a superhero. That Mandip Lowell was just a secret identity; that every night, after I went to sleep, she’d spend her evenings fighting crime, kicking bad guys with a loud hi-yah! Now I think she could totally play one of those too-pretty cops on a network television drama. The kind that sprint down dead-end alleys on a studio set. Prop gun raised and pointed: Stop or I’ll shoot.
She’s tough, my mother. And she can run in heels.
Though let’s be honest. She’s much more likely to be cast as a terrorist or a head-wagging taxi driver or a convenience store clerk. We don’t often get to see people who look and sound like her on television.
“It’s no big deal, Mom. I just needed a little space.” She nods like she gets it. And maybe she does.
“I can’t stand the thought of you sitting alone.”
“I’ve been sitting with this guy, David Drucker? He’s okay.”
“David Drucker? Amy’s son? He used to be an odd duck.” She tugs at my hair with her finger and it springs right back into a wave. No doubt my mother is disappointed when she looks at me, her only child. Beautiful women are supposed to have beautiful daughters. At the very least, I bet she thought I’d turn out “exotic,” an obnoxious word that every biracial person has heard like a million times. Though in my case, it’s never really applied. My parents’ features have come together to form someone easily forgettable. My skin is just brown enough that in this superwhite suburb, people sometimes are rude enough to ask me, “What are you?” They seem disappointed when I don’t say Latina, which is everyone’s first guess. Like figuring out my ethnicity is some sort of fun game.
“You used to go to David’s birthday parties when you were little,” my mom says.
“He’s still totally weird, but it turns out he might be good-weird, you know?” I look at my mom and think about how there are no brown superheroes and about the fact that I’m probably too chubby to be on television. Maybe I should straighten my hair. Darken it too. Spend a little bit more time in the sun. That way my mom and I could look more alike. Without my father standing next to us, we don’t make that much sense together.
I want to tell her David was Dad’s patient, but I can’t say that word out loud: Dad.
“Really? So you want to start playing with David again?” My mom raises her eyebrows.
“It’s not like that.”
“Is he still cute?”
I find myself smiling up at the ceiling in the dark. And I almost laugh out loud, because of all the guys in my school, of all the guys in the whole wide world, I’m thinking about David Drucker. The oddest of ducks.
He is cute.
Sort of.
But he’s still David Drucker.
“Any port in a storm, my love. Any port in a storm,” my mom says, and laughs.