Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself (7 page)

Then I’m twenty-one, and a Marine. My becoming a Marine has clearly impressed him. On our way back from six months of deployment overseas, we’re told the ship is going to offer a “Tiger Cruise,” from Hawaii to San Diego, where Marines are allowed to invite family members to join them. I invite my father. When we reach Hawaii, he says, “I’m glad you invited me on this trip. This is one of the highlights of my life so far.” Being on a large troop ship appeals to his mechanical way of thinking, and he is constantly asking questions about how the ship works. Our relationship seems stronger, sturdier.

But then I’m twenty-nine, about the same age he was when he walked out on my mother and me. I try to put myself in his shoes and understand how someone could abandon a kid, but I can’t do it. I ask myself, what would I do if I had a kid? I can’t imagine walking away from my own child. The hurt is too deep to let go of, and when I think of what I went through without a father to step in and protect me, or at least advise me while I struggled with all the fear and insecurity and low self-worth, I get angry. There is a great imbalance, and a great injustice, when I feel him expecting loyalty or love from me, as if he’d earned it, or deserves it, after giving me neither for so long. On a subconscious level, I find the idea of a relationship with him less and less acceptable, because he’s not saying, “I’m truly sorry for not being there all those years. What can I do to make it up to you?” Rather, he’s saying, “Don’t ask me to try to make up for the past because I can’t. Let’s just move forward like things are all rosy.” It’s about what he can get from me, for free, and it has nothing to do with accepting responsibility for his past actions or for the way he treated me, and it has nothing to do with what he wants to give.

One Saturday morning, standing on his front porch, apparently he decides he’s had enough, and he confronts me and says, “What’s the matter, Zak? I thought we had a relationship, but you’re pulling away from me. From me and Robin both. I will not tolerate being treated the way you treat your mother. Either we go back to where we were, or it’s over.”

Really?
I think.
You’re giving me an ultimatum? You dare tell me it doesn’t feel good to have somebody pull away from you? You’re a grown-up. You don’t like it? How do you think it felt to a little kid?

“You want an answer? I’ll give you one when I’m ready,” I say.

A couple nights later, against my better judgment, Michelle and I honor a dinner invitation made before the falling out. I feel like it’s not going to go well, but Michelle is a peacemaker and argues that we should all try to get along. For the first two hours, we do. We make small talk and eat, ignoring the proverbial “elephant in the room,” and then we move to the living room. The elephant follows us.

“So, Zachary, we need to talk about something,” Robin says. This is a challenge on two levels: first, that she knows I hate being called Zachary, and second, that she has decided to confront me on the issue. Her tone is nasty and condescending, while at the same time making a gesture I’m sure she thinks is magnanimous—she’s putting on a show again, a public display. She has decided she is calling the shots and has authority over me, and she thinks she can intimidate me, the way she did for years. Not anymore. “I thought things were going well between you and your father.”

I’ve had it with her, and realize I don’t have to sit here and listen to her scold me.

“Are you kidding me?” I say. “You’re acting like I’m supposed to owe you something. As far as I’m concerned, you were nothing but a shit to me my whole life. You were abusive to me, and you terrified me, and you knew you were doing it.”

I spell out for her the things she did. She starts crying.

“Maybe I could have treated you differently,” she says, “but lots of kids have been through much worse. Why can’t you learn from the past and be stronger for it? Why can’t you get over it?”

Get over it? Who is she to tell me to get over it? She wants me to learn from the past, as if I’d made mistakes that could teach me something. I did learn one thing from my past—I learned, when I became a Marine, to stand up for myself and hold my ground.

“You’re not entitled to tell me to get over it, Robin,” I say. “You’re not entitled to do anything other than apologize and ask for my forgiveness. You’re completely full of shit. You might be able to fool everybody else, but you can’t fool me. As long as I’m alive, I’ll know what you did, and who you really are.”

For the first time in my life, I see her break down. I don’t feel good about it, but I don’t feel bad either. There’s no lasting gratification. She made me feel bad for years. If she feels bad for a few minutes, it’s not like now we’re even.

“It’s because of both of you that I don’t want to have kids,” I tell her.

“Maybe I was hard on you, but I don’t know what you expect me to do about it now,” she says between sobs. How do I feel? I don’t feel sympathetic. I’m surprised, but it’s all too little and too late, and nothing she could say can undo the damage done. Her tears are meaningless.

My dad has been surprisingly quiet throughout our interaction, until now.

“Why don’t you grow up and be a man?” he says to me.

In his mind, it’s my job, my responsibility, to fix what went wrong in the past. He continues throwing stones.

“And what’s this crap about you not wanting kids? Don’t even think about using me and the way I treated you as an excuse to not want to have kids of your own.”

I think,
What the hell is going on here!? Who are these people? These self-centered narcissists?

I’m borderline furious, ready to turn things from verbal to physical. The sheer disrespect directed at me is too much to handle.

“You’re not just a pathetic excuse for a father,” I tell him. “You’re a pathetic excuse for an adult.”

“Right now,” my father says, “you are waving a red flag at a bull.”

But he has no idea which one of us is the bull. Suddenly I know that if the conversation continues, we’ll fight, and if we do, I’ll kill him, or at the very least, put him in the hospital. The irony is not lost on me that I am standing up to him, the way I might have stood up to all the kids who bullied me. He has indeed taught me how to be a man, by serving as a poor example of one.

“Come on,” I tell Michelle, who is in tears, and I feel bad that she has had to see this. “We need to go.”

Then it’s two and a half years later, and I’m thirty-two, living in Southern California. My father and I haven’t spoken in more than two years. It’s 8:30 on a Wednesday night when the phone rings, and my caller ID tells me the call is coming from Wisconsin, but I don’t recognize the number. I know it’s not my father or my mother calling, so I pick up. It’s my Uncle Greg. I’ve managed to stay reasonably close with him over the years. I sit down on the steps that lead into the living room to take the call.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news, Zak,” he says. “I’m heading over to the hospital with Robin. She said your dad went unconscious at home on the living room floor and she called an ambulance. They’re taking him there now. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ll call you with an update.”

“Keep me in the loop,” I say.

I realize I should probably be more affected by the news, but I’m not. I look over at Michelle and tell her what I’ve just learned.

“Oh my God,” she says. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I say, half-laughing. “I wonder what’s going to happen if he dies?”

It’s the first thought that comes to mind, one I’ve never had before. How will I feel? How will it affect the family? Will there be any regrets? My bemused tone is just false bravado, me trying to show I’m above being saddened by the loss—but what am I losing? A man who was never there? A chance to patch things up? But if we were going to patch things up, it was his turn to make the first move, not mine, and in two years, his best effort was an email blaming me for the evening at their house.

Ten minutes later, my uncle calls back. I know what he’s about to say.

“Zak,” he says. “Your dad is gone.”

I’m not shocked or caught off guard. For some reason, I’ve been expecting this. I have not been expecting good news.

“So I guess by the time they got him to the hospital,” my uncle continues, “he’d already—”

“It’s all right,” I say, cutting him off. All I can think is how he just lost a brother, and he must be devastated, but instead of addressing his own grief, he’s trying to help me. He is the conduit between me and my father, even in death, and he wants things to be right between us, so he’s putting his own needs aside and doing what he thinks has to be done, being strong for me. “You shouldn’t be worrying about me. I’m truly grateful for the call, but you should be taking care of yourself. Just be present there. I’m okay.”

After he hangs up, I tell Michelle the news. She looks at me, trying to read me to know what to say or do, but I’m not giving her much information as to my emotional state, probably because I’m not all too clear about it myself. I’m feeling very practical, or maybe numb, or maybe cold-hearted, or some combination of the three. I can’t quite see how the fact that he’s just died is supposed to change my feelings toward him. The facts were the facts, and they spoke for themselves. I can tell that Michelle wants answers from me, but I don’t have any, so rather than stay home, unable to talk to her or answer her questions, I tell her I need to go to the gym. I kiss her goodbye, and I know she understands why I need to be alone. I tell her she should call somebody if she needs to talk, maybe even my mom.

At the gym, I do thirty minutes of circuit training, not focusing on any one thing. I felt strange, thinking,
I’m the same guy I was when I was here yesterday, except now I don’t have a father.
But something always happens when I work out. Something about keeping my body occupied and challenging it to perform always clears my mind. It’s not that while I work out, I try consciously to think of the things I need to do or the answers to my question, but rather, when I’m working out, the answers just come to me.

I realize my family will be coming together, physically and emotionally. They all live in the Milwaukee/Racine area and will probably be getting together at someone’s house. I should be there with them. My resentment toward my father has not diminished, but it’s time to put it on the shelf for a while.

As I finished my dinner at McDonald’s, I briefly wished I had a gym I could go to, even though I was certain I’d be getting all the exercise I needed tomorrow. The gym is probably one of the few places on Earth where I feel at home and at ease. I remembered my father’s funeral, how so many people came, a line forming outside the funeral home that went back to the street and around the corner at the end of the block, and how highly respected he was as an X-ray technician by the people who worked with him. People kept telling me how intelligent and organized he was, and I thought that if I’m intelligent or orderly, perhaps I inherited those genes from him. I wondered how many of the people at the funeral knew he’d left my mother with a sixteen-week-old baby to marry the woman he was having an affair with, but I said nothing.

The boy and his dad left. I realized eating at McDonald’s and seeing the two of them had afforded me this insight—I understood why I was unable to abandon the dog. I would not do to him, or to anyone, what my father did to me. I would not become like him. I wasn’t proving it to him, as if I had some sort of magical or mystical idea that he was looking down from heaven, watching me. I wasn’t proving anything to myself, either, because I felt no need. It was simple. I knew what the right thing to do was, so I had to do it.

The question was, how?

On my way back to the motel, I called Michelle to fill her in since our last conversation from the general store. She heard the outrage in my voice when I told her I thought somebody had intentionally abandoned the dog. I told her how I’d left him with food and water, and how it looked like I’d be on my own, trying to get him out.

“How are you doing?” she said. “You don’t sound so good.”

I told her about the kittens in the sofa, and that the whole day had been enormously upsetting, a lot of emotional ups and downs.

“You’re taking a lot on,” she said. “You do that.”

“It’ll be all right.”

“I’m sure it will be.”

“You know me. I overthink everything.”

“I know I don’t have to say this,” she said, “but be careful. Come home safe.”

We both knew there was no talking me out of it now.

“I’ll call you in the morning with the details and the drop-dead time,” I told her. “Once I get out of town, there’s no cell coverage.”

“Okay. Love you.”

“Love you. Sleep well.”

“You, too. Do your best.”

She meant do my best to get some sleep, because she knows how I obsess over the details when I’m planning something.

The parking lot at the Motel 6 was already filling up with semi-tractor-trailers, but the vacancy sign was still lit. I checked in and parked as close to the room as I could, hauling in all of my climbing equipment. The room was dark and stuffy, so I turned on all the lights and cranked the air conditioner to maximum. The fan was strong enough to billow out the curtains. I used the extra bed to lay out my gear.

You can’t make any mistakes
, I told myself. I recalled learning a certain kind of logical focus as a Marine. Once, when our platoon came under “friendly fire” during a training exercise where live rounds were accidentally fired at us, I had the presence of mind to stand up and give the cease-fire sign, my arms crossed over my head, even though the lieutenant in charge told me to get down. If I’d listened to him, it might have gotten someone killed.

I found myself recalling acronyms I’d been taught as a Marine as a way to make sure nothing got overlooked. SAFESOC stood for Security, Avenues of Approach, Fields of Fire, Entrenchments, Supplementary and Alternate Positions, Obstacles and Camouflage. SMEAC stood for Situation, Mission, Execution, Admin and Logistics, Command/Signal. BAMCIS meant Begin Planning, Arrange Reconnaissance, Make Reconnaissance, Complete Planning, Issue Order, Supervise.