North of Hope (18 page)

I packed up my room. Kathy had redecorated it when she and Dad overhauled the house ten years before. I’d spent the first night home from college at Christmas in tears. My room was no longer
my
room. Life had moved forward without me. Along with her sewing supplies, my varsity letter jacket from swimming and debate hung in the closet. I packed it into a box for Seattle. Kathy had framed and hung a couple of watercolors I’d painted when I was twelve. One was a doll leaning against a shelf of books. The other showed waves breaking against rocks where a lighthouse stood. I packed those too.

Then there was the attic, a plywood, windowless room lit by bare bulbs and filled with boxes from thirty years of my family’s life. It was accessed by a hobbit-sized door off Sam’s room.
I entered with trepidation—no, dread. It was a storage shed of memories, some long forgotten, ready to spring like a jack-in-the-box at any moment. It smelled of old cardboard, plywood, and dust. The bulbs shone like interrogation lights, exposing memories naked and cold.

The process was this: sort and pack in the attic, and then deliver to the garage. Sam had divided things up in the garage depending on where they were to be shipped. I tried not to get too involved in any particular box. It was impossible.

One box opened to a stack of soccer pictures. Me at ten: bobbed brown hair, an orange team T-shirt, and a broad gap-toothed smile. I remembered playing fullback and wilting from the charges downfield from one aggressive forward. Then she scored. Dad asked, Why don’t you just charge back at her? He asked it with a smile. The next game I did. How could I not? I wanted only to make my dad proud. Sprinting toward each other, she and I collided at full speed. We fell flat on the wet grassy field. The screaming parents on the sidelines hushed, stopped moving, before resuming their din. She never charged my side of the field again. I think of that story as defining the person I became.

Were you proud of me, Dad?

Boxes of files—to be read or shredded.

Underneath a pile of papers, I found a plaque with a brassy musical note on it, an eighth note with a flourished tail. I’d won it at a piano competition in junior high. I played Grieg and something else I don’t remember. I tied for first, and back at home after the competition, Dad said, “You didn’t deserve to win. You didn’t practice enough.” I was mad. I knew he was right.

Later I bragged about that story, proud of Dad’s challenge to me. Kathy gasped in disappointment. “Rich! I can’t believe you’d say something like that!” Dad, embarrassed, denied it.

Boxes of paperback books—to Goodwill.

In another box, I found a Farm Bureau Insurance hat and a
couple of magic tricks from Grandpa Huffman from one of our visits to my grandparents in Topeka, Kansas. A small case with a black ball that seemed to disappear and a small wooden replica of an outhouse rigged with a mousetrap so that the walls exploded when you opened the door. I remember learning on those visits to Kansas that in case of tornado, we should go to the basement. The sky would get yellow, I heard. The funnel of a tornado twisted and curved and destroyed everything in its path. The idea terrified me. We didn’t have tornadoes in Alaska. (“We don’t have bears in Kansas is all I know,” said my aunt.) The hat went into the Goodwill box. I kept the magic tricks. At this point I would take any magic I could get.

Boxes of elementary school papers and certificates, labeled with my name and put aside.

One day in the attic, I sat sorting books, my old school notebooks, files. I came across boxes of my diaries and boxes of correspondence. The idea of going through them seemed impossible. I put them in the Keep pile. There would be time later to sort these things.

In one instant the attic walls pressed in on me, the air stuffy, hot, oppressive. I set down the box I was working on and got up so quickly I had to steady myself against the wall, bumping my head on the angled ceiling. Still holding the wall, I walked out to Sam’s room. The world wavered back into focus in the daylight and fresh air. I took a long, deep breath. I couldn’t get enough air. I walked into my room. That little corner room used to make me feel so safe, both enclosing me and connecting me to the outdoors. But even the familiar had moved on. Now soulless brown boxes sat open, vacuous, restless, needing to be filled, needing to be closed, needing to be moved. I swallowed against a throat that had petrified.

I walked across to Ned’s room, where Sam was working. The upstairs loft was open to the first floor on two sides and framed
with windows, looking out at trees. The trees helped me breathe. Ned’s room had few boxes left. Other than the furniture, it sat empty. The walls were bare. The bed was stripped. Sam pulled the last box off the walk-in closet shelf and set it by the bed. The only things left hanging in the closet were Dad’s button-up shirts, a rod full of them. Sam reached for a handful of hangers.

“Can you—can you leave that for now?” I asked. My voice startled me. The question seemed to have come of its own accord. Sam removed his hand wordlessly. “Just leave them,” I said. “I’ll take care of the rest of the closet. Just … let them be.”

“Sure,” Sam said. “I need to take a load down to Goodwill anyway.” He picked up the remaining boxes and walked downstairs. I heard the garage door squeak open and slam shut behind him. A rumble from a diesel engine, fading away as the truck pulled out of the driveway. The house was silent. Through the open sliding glass door blew the scent of pine and the scattered chirps of chickadees on the cool afternoon air. I walked back out to the family room. Boxes of books sat mute in front of empty bookcases. Then I walked back to the closet of shirts.

Walking into the closet, I tried to sneak past any threatening memories. My hand reached out of its own accord. I felt the soft cotton. The rows of shirts were silent. Blue, white, and blue-and-white-striped shirts. The quietness seemed to echo, muffled in those shirts, murmuring memories.

I put my face in among them. I breathed in as deeply as I could, embarrassed, even though alone. I suppose they smelled like shirts. Laundered. Or dry-cleaned. Perhaps worn once or twice. They were memories. They were casings. They were shrouds. They were straightjackets. They were vestments. They were relics. They were the certitude of each day of my life before June 25. They had housed expectations. They were embraces. How many of those shirts had hugged me after I’d come home? How many of those long sleeves had circled me at five years old after playing the piano,
at twelve after a swim meet, at nineteen coming home from college, at twenty-four coming home from the army? I grabbed the cloth in my hands, and it crumpled softly in my fists. Silence surrounded and scared me. This touching, this smelling of shirts. I did this for a half hour, maybe more.

Then with some resolve born of need and necessity, from some place deeper than I knew, I took an armful of shirts. A huge armful, too many to handle. I wiggled the hangers off of the rod with my body against them. I walked slowly out of the room.

The vortex started. I was nowhere close to a basement. There was nowhere to take shelter.

I made it two steps. Stumbling, I leaned against the balcony trying to breathe, my throat constricting. I held onto those shirts with both arms, tightly, and closed my eyes, and breathed, deeply, slowly. I opened my eyes and focused on the birch tree just outside the window, on the white papery bark peeling back in a graceful curve. The leaves were darkening to their summer greens. The sky was a blue so gentle it might have been a comfort. I took another breath and walked down the first flight of stairs. Just to where they turned to finish the journey to the first floor. And then my legs gave way and I slid, hard and slow, down the corner where the walls met. With the armful of shirts in my lap, I sat and cried. I cried like I cried when I watched the coffins descend. I cried like I can’t remember ever crying since. My arms lost their strength, and I leaned into those shirts. I screamed, again and again and again until my voice stopped and the shirts took each of those screams into their softness.

I graduated college around the time of the advent of email, so letters and the occasional phone call still served as primary forms of communication. I am grateful for this now, the physical substance and weight of letters, even if the physicality of cards is a
sad surrogate for touching a hand. I think of how our atoms must intermingle, the sender and receiver, how there is an intimacy in this paper, and then I think how I put too much on things. The birthday cards included notes and greetings from both Dad and Kathy; letters came mostly from Dad. Each show early attempts at connecting with a child in evolving stages of life and increasing independence, attempts that even then sometimes felt awkward and yet which I appreciated and stored for the earnest and loving gestures they were. Some of these efforts seem silly now: “Are you following the NBA playoffs at all?” (I never had.) Mention of work he and Kathy were doing around the house or at church. (“We cleaned the windows at church yesterday. They were really nice. You can help this summer.”) Several included cautionary comments on finances (“Our resources are low”), and all included some praise and admonition and sometimes points of edification. Most were followed by a P.S. (“What do you think about the Wellesley women protesting the invitation to Barbara Bush to speak? I’ll be interested in your thoughts.”)

On my first trip away from home to a music camp in Colorado when I was twelve, Dad wrote with concern that he’d forgotten to tell me how to get my bags from baggage claim. College letters ranged from three sides of a notecard to ten pages of yellow legal paper. On one he left a pink Post-it Note “P.S. word of the day: efficacious. Look it up! Or … (over)” and he included the definition on the back. On another he drew out the settings on the table and described table etiquette.

While I was in the army’s Airborne School in Fort Benning, Georgia, after my freshman year of college, he wrote, “Don’t worry about the screamers—that’s what they get paid to do. But you’d better respond smartly—that’s what you get paid to do!”

One letter he began on a Friday and finished on Monday morning: “I just started a new book by William Dean Howell … I am quite taken by his writing.” He updated me on the boys and the
weekend’s plans, then finished his letter Monday morning from a table at Kaladi Brothers Coffee, where he’d driven to pay for Kathy’s coffee because she had forgotten her purse. He described all he had to do at the office, then reflected:

He continued for another page. Like most of his letters, it felt like conversation. Those conversations were sometimes easy, other times difficult.

“I am very excited for you and your opportunity to climb Mount McKinley,” he wrote in a note he handed to me to take on the mountain.

There were the hard times too, as I mentioned. In one letter when I was at college, Dad wrote, “I’ve been worrying that I haven’t been telling you how proud I am of you … I worry about the fact that you and I always seem to get in a shouting match … I suppose it’s partly to do with the fact that we’re both strong personalities, partly my reluctance to let go, as a parent, and partly your natural tendency to become more independent. Whatever, it does not reflect on my basic trust and respect for you.”

After our Christmas argument about the photo on the counter:

Each letter was written with an abiding awareness of things he’d wished he’d known, but hadn’t, of life’s fragility, of his desire to spare me the worst of it, as though he was suddenly, fiercely aware of the passage of time and how much more he wanted to impart. As though he hadn’t been ready to let go, even while he encouraged me to fly.

This was my foundation. This was my guidance. This was my light. And now it was gone.

Return, return to your chalice of snow, bitter river,
return, return to your chalice of spacious frost …!

—Pablo Neruda,
Canto General