I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (35 page)

It had been a mistake to read the annulment, in part because it was the wrong thing to do, but mostly because it was a waste of time. Our family and the tragedy of our family were unexceptional, mundane, almost impossibly so. Christ, had my father just wanted a younger wife and a convertible sports car? Could he be that shallow, that mercenary? There was nothing in his writing to justify the great tearing apart, no explanation. Then I found it.

My father had been molested by his mother until he was fourteen.

That was the memory, suddenly issuing forth in the middle of the sunlit bridle path, that had buckled my knee. The earliest thing I knew about my father's life was that he had been horribly, horribly betrayed. I hadn't known what to do with the information, had secreted it away in a corner of my brain I never used, concealed it from myself. I'd been searching and searching for a key to understand how my father could abandon us. I couldn't find that key because I'd been carrying it, hidden, in my head for almost ten years.

It explained everything. My father, the most powerful man in my world, a helpless child, stripped of all power, used by the very one charged with his protection. What had it done to him? The sound of my feet in the dirt was suddenly thunderous, my breathing like an approaching hurricane. It was all there. The relentless compulsion to please. The avoidance of confrontation. The unerring conviction that he was both special and persecuted. The poisonous guilt he carried. His emotional alienation. His vacillation
between arrogance and self-loathing. His debilitating resentment. All things I'd intuitively learned from him.

We weren't just from different generations or different experiences. We were from different worlds. Turning his back on us was an appalling thing. There was no justification for it. But here, finally, was an explanation. A way to understand it. And, maybe, a way to finally forgive him.

I crossed the finish line at a dead sprint. The muscles in my legs twitched and protested when I tried to brake. I circled and slowed. Ah, fuck it. I flopped down on the cold, wet grass.

“Heartbreaker,” Rick called out to me. “You came so close to breaking nine hours!” He looked down at his laptop for the exact time.

“Nine hours and twenty seconds. Not too bad. Faster bathroom breaks next time.”

I lay flat on my back, sucking air too hard to even laugh. Rick had no idea who I really was. Or at least who I had been. For Rick, it was twenty seconds too slow. It was also two hours, fifty-nine minutes, and forty seconds faster than I had dared to hope to run it. This was an accomplishment not even I could diminish. There was no denying it. I was one of those top-tier wackjobs. I was an ultrarunner.

Once I caught my breath, I wobbled into the church we were using as our home base. I dug my phone out of my bag and made a call to my old nemesis.

“Well, you can't be finished yet,” my dad said when he picked up.

“Dad. I did it.”

“Congratulations, my son!”

“Nine hours and twenty seconds.”

“
Wow
. That is fast! Jesus, that's like two 4:30 marathons back-to-back. Mishka, that's really incredible.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“I am so proud of you, Mishka. All the changes you've made, and now this . . .”

“Thanks, Dad.”

He hesitated.

“You know, Mishka . . .” and his voice softened, “it's not a competition.”

He was right. The competition was over. We had both lost: lost years and years of our relationship. If there was a competition now, we were competing together—against time, against circumstances, against distance, against the burden of our convoluted history, against the ineffable distance between fathers and sons—to try to love one another.

“I know it's not a competition, Dad.”

I could hear him smiling through the phone before he spoke.

“But
I
never ran fifty miles.”

My legs were crying in pain. My neck was cinched in spasm. My face was chapped and aching from hours of exposure to the winter wind. My right IT band felt like a piece of red-hot wire buried in the side of my leg. I felt absolutely hollowed out, both physically and emotionally drained. But I grinned so hard my cheeks started to cramp and my eyes flooded.

“I know, Dad. I know.”

When I got home, I went to the diner near my house and ate a bacon cheeseburger and fries. Then I ordered a steak and eggs and cleaned those plates too. I crawled into bed, but I was in so much pain I couldn't sleep. After a couple of hours, I got up and ate a quart of yogurt with blueberries. A couple of hours later, I ate another, even licking my bowl clean. I woke up after a full night's sleep, ate four fried eggs with toast, then went back down for another eight hours of sleep.

When I finally dragged myself out of bed, I felt battered but satisfied. I had found something bigger than me, something that scared me. I had worked diligently, and then I had been brave. I had taken my licks, and I had won. I didn't have to explain how difficult it had been to my father, because he understood—we both did—that I had finally done something worthwhile.

Did that race change me, or had I been changing for a while? My whole life, I had been terrified of being alone. It was monsters under the bed as a kid. In my twenties, it was the Snuffleupagus of Despair, an emptiness that threatened to consume me the minute I was left on my own. A night of solitude had felt monstrous toward the end of my drinking days, and I would do anything to evade it—drink, drugs, escapist sex, anything. Shortly after my first fifty-miler, I was suddenly alright when left to my own devices. Sure, I looked forward to band practice with Zack and my old friends in Freshkills, and I missed my buddies at Beauty Bar after a couple of days off. But I wasn't lonely or lost and had no trouble filling my days. It wasn't just that I didn't crave alcohol anymore (though I didn't). I was no longer afraid. It struck me as funny: I had run enough that there was no longer anything to escape.

Still, I had a few things to confront. Turning a person into your drug, that was a low, evil thing, and I couldn't just let it slip by unaddressed. I tracked down some of the women who'd had the misfortune to be involved with me during my lazy, years-long spiral down. Apologizing to them was even less satisfying than apologizing to my band mates—they were even more generous than my pals.

“Mishka, I forgave you even in the moment. You told me the first night we met that you were a mess. And, boy, you delivered on that! But you were never unkind.”

“You were fun, and that's all I was looking for at that time. I mean, not a whole lot going on at the end of the night. But you were snuggly, and you usually made up for it in the morning.”

“Um. Did we ever actually . . . you know? I can't remember, I was so drunk that night.”

“Mishka, you were so drunk that you probably don't remember this . . . but I picked
you
up, not the other way around. It's sweet of you to think of me, but there's no apology necessary. I got what I wanted out of it, you know?”

“Dude, shut up. I should apologize
to you
.”

More than one woman sat and listened to my entire apology . . . and then not only refused the apology itself but rejected the entire narrative I'd dwelt on of how I had traumatized her, made her hate me, ruined her life. I had been a blip on the radar, or my sins had been eclipsed by those of the men before and after me, or they even had fond memories of me as this sad, funny whirlwind of cheap liquor and shitty coke. It was maddening.

I brought it up with Aaron over lunch one day. He listened patiently, a smile playing over his lips.

“What?” I finally said. “I can see you thinking, and that makes me nervous. Spit it out, man.”

Aaron grinned.

“I'm sorry, man, I don't mean to make light of it. But it's been really interesting to watch it play out.”

“Glad you're entertained. I should have brought a tip bucket.”

“See, that's just it. You probably get all kinds of props for the big life change you've gone through.”

“Manopause has been very good to me.”

“I don't intend to diminish your accomplishment. It's a big deal. Kudos.”

“Yes, golf clap. Cut to the mind-blowing epiphany.”

“Well, that's just it. There is none. You haven't changed.”

I snorted.

“Okay, you've changed a little bit. Coherent longer, unconscious less. Less of a liability, but also less fun. But you're the same person. Intelligent. Abrasive. Loyal to the death. The same asshole we've come to know and love. The biggest difference is probably . . .
there were days when we had band practice where you were so depressed, you couldn't even lift your head. Couldn't make eye contact. I haven't seen that happen once since you quit.”

“This is such bullshit! What about that time I punched you in the neck in Dayton?”

He shrugged.

“I had that coming to me. And that night is memorable not because it was typical but because it was atypical.”

“But all the drunken bullshit, I mean, passing out on the street . . .”

Aaron waved a hand.

“Sure, it was a hassle sometimes. But you were far from the worst person in our crew. It was just part of the package with you. And you made up for it—if you said you were going to help me move furniture at 9 a.m., you were there and ready to work at 8:59, if stinking of whiskey. We didn't hate you, you did. The day after you'd had a big night, we'd always get these self-lacerating apologies, apologies incommensurate with the sins of the night before.”

“Thanks, I guess. But I'm pretty sure it was rougher for the women.”

“What makes you so sure? You were convinced that you were a scourge on your friends, and that's been credibly debunked. Not to be too reductive here . . . but women are people, too, man. They have needs and desires and issues and personal agency. If they were unhappy with how you were treating them, they were free to leave. And many of them did! The one-night stands and hookups . . . hey, women have been fighting for forty years for the right to act as sleazy as men. Who's to say they didn't get exactly what they wanted?

“All of your trespasses fall neatly under the umbrella of ‘normal human shittiness.' You never hit a woman. You never menaced a woman. I've never even known you to lie to a chick to get her into bed. You were always just like ‘Yo! I'm a train wreck!' and sometimes it worked. Cheating on Allie, well, that sucks, but here's news for you: you're not the first guy to cheat, drunk or sober.

“I understand your desire to apologize. It's as noble as it is misguided. You need to realize that the drunk you were in your head and the drunk you were in the world . . . well, there's a wild disparity there. Hate to break it to you, but you're not a monster. And you never were.”

Nearly twenty years of cravenness, trouble, and woe. I'd been sure it had all been my fault. Now I could find no one to agree with me. Shannon had forgiven me quickly and admitted that her instability had rivaled my own. Riley and I had each torn at the other. Speck I certainly owed a real apology to, but both she and Riley had gotten married and moved on with their lives—to contact them now would just dredge up unhappy memories. Though I had apologized to Oksana during our entire fling, I did it once more, sober. She confessed to fabricating her entire tragic history—the dead father, the dead brother, the dead lover, the cancer-stricken mother—then tried to lure me back into bed. Shilpa would agree enthusiastically with every bad thing I might say about myself, but she'd lied and manipulated and made false accusations the entire time I'd known her, to say nothing of the physical abuse I'd endured. When she'd tried to file a spurious lawsuit for over $1 million, well, that had dried up any desire to make things right with her. Allison . . . God, I owed her a long, elegiac apology, a litany of apologies, a never-ending stream of them. She deserved not a letter or a phone call or a painful, awkward lunch but something epic—a monument of apology. Somehow, I couldn't bring myself to make even the smallest gesture toward her, not because she wouldn't forgive me but because she would.