Reunion

Up until I think of myself, thinking of the kids is pleasant. I imagine Andy with a beautiful girl on his arm, or Rachel sanding a table she’s made. That girl was always building something. The floor of her room had just enough stray Legos to be perpetually treacherous. Stepping on them hurt badly but my outbursts were excessive, especially around the kids though it’s far from my worst offense.

Memories of their frightened faces rush back too eagerly. As they grew older their responses changed. They’d flick the “dad’s crazy” switch and withdraw into a shell, while what was left of them attempted to reason with me.

The boy was older so we fought more. In meetings, sometimes people say they were too fucked up to bond with their kids and now it’s too late, they’re just strangers. That wasn’t us. We bonded — I just squandered it.

After pestering them online and checking my inbox the way only an addict can, Andy replied. Rachel didn’t. His messages were curt but after two days of silence he agreed to visit.

I drive to meet him at Starbucks. He said he chose that location because it would be easy to reach from the bus station. I pretend it’s only a matter of convenience. Of course when I get there, he isn’t there. I’m ten minutes early despite waiting as long as I could to leave. It’s an older Starbucks. The inside is dark and the furniture is worn out. The rug’s dirty. A blond girl stands behind the register. The overhead light makes her hair and cheeks glow. She smiles and says hello.

I order a large coffee when it should’ve been a venti. It’s more than I usually drink but it’s comforting. I add sugar and cream despite an adolescent urge to drink it black and impress her with fake coffee-expertise. As if that would bridge the forty year gap between us.

I sit and drink. My cup is half empty and he still hasn’t arrived. Two old men, probably my age, play a game of chess. They’re the only other customers. Up until now I haven’t wanted this town to be anything, but while I wait I find myself wishing it were just slightly cool. In the shadow-life that’s unfolded the way my life could’ve, where what I want to happen, happens, my son is impressed by the town and in a few years, moves here to raise his family. His children’s faces never show a hint of fear or knowledge of my other side. They tell me they love me. They cling to me.

A kid in flannel with a droopy hat comes in but leaves with his order. Empty tables crowd around mine, but changing tables now feels weird and forced. The timer from their chess game ticks down.

From this angle it’s impossible to tell what’s happening in their game. My stomach twists and my coffee is cold. Briefly and repeatedly I accept that he isn’t going to come. The newspaper is thin, the art and science sections are missing. The front page offers nothing different from what’s unfolded for the last two months. Potential outbreak in China, trade disagreements, dwindling economic growth. News, depending on the period, either claims everything is fine or that everything is horrible. It’s not so different from how I think. Holding the sticky-soft pages in my hands and reading helps. The sun shifts, its light is warm.

My knee bounces up and down like a sewing machine. I watch the street, waiting for someone who resembles my son’s profile picture to appear. I tell myself that I’m not waiting but it doesn’t change anything.

And then he’s there. He doesn’t smile. Somehow we shake hands. A hug would’ve been too much. I insist on buying him a coffee, which draws out a small smile — for a second his childish features exist in the middle of a stubbled face I don’t recognize. I push down memories of me trying charm away whatever my most recent mistake with him was. Without the ache they’d bore me because of their predictability. I hand him the coffee and we sit.

He doesn’t carry himself like a man. He twists his legs to the side and slouches when he sits. He’s thinner than I expected but he’s here. We both start to speak and stop. I wait. I remember the arrangement of his eyes and the quality of their gaze. Some parts of us last our entire lives.

***

The night before, I practiced telling Andy everything I’d like to say but can’t.

Kelly was out, but I closed the bathroom door anyway and stood in front of the mirror, watching my reflection.

“One of my worst memories is of us together. Mom went to work and Rachel went to school. I always let you kids stay home whenever you wanted. No malady was too small. You were home, reading in the sun room — where mom and I slept. It was always cold but you loved to sit in front of the electric heater with its big orange coils and read. It made the room smell like burning plastic but its heat felt wonderful.

I don’t remember what set me off that day. I often feel helpless and at that time I gave into it easily. I was too honest about it with you. You were eleven or twelve. I asked if you ever felt like giving up, if you ever wanted to curl up in a ball and die.

I said it as if it was an activity that often occurred to people, because for me it did. Some blame could be laid elsewhere. Long-term opiate use changes the reward centers in the brain. I’ve heard it a thousand times, but I don’t blame it on that. At that point in my life, I blew up any difficulty I had into a calamity. With good things I built them up but they always felt more fragile, incapable of outweighing the bad.

You tried to argue. You listed the good things in life: reading, playing frisbee, sitting in the sun, throwing snowballs, sledding, spending time with friends. Through you I sometimes grazed that joy again, but I didn’t say that. I said your whole list was helpless against real suffering. I omitted that some of my friends had stopped talking to me. The ones I stole from, or let down enough times for them to stop trying to convince me to change because they stopped believing I could.

Maybe that day doesn’t even register for you. There were other, worse days. Days where I already had a bag and you and your sister and everything else warped into barriers between me and it.

“You helped me. If not — ” I said to my reflection and broke down and stopped. Sometimes the sun is too bright.

***

He’s still staring mutely so I say, “Sometimes the sun is too bright.”

“It’s sky, not sun.”

I want to ask if he remembers but it’s obvious he does. I don’t remember the poem properly anyway. “Was the ride okay?”

“Busses are always a bit horrible.”
“Yeah, they suck.”

I start to say something but it’s too quiet and everyone seems to be watching so I stop. “Want to take a walk?”

He nods almost imperceptibly.

It’s late winter so it isn’t as cold, each year seems warmer than the last. The snow has melted down to just a few dirty inches, dotted with black specks of dust or ashphalt. It will stay that way until spring. Walking is easier. I’m not so focused on him, or his reaction to what I say. I lead him up the hill, past the police station. There’s a little park with a too-modern, metal sculpture and a few pine trees and rocks. The park is a third of the size of the police parking lot, wedged in like an afterthought, which somehow makes me admire it more.

“You’re not too cold?” I ask.

Irritation flickers across his face. “No.”

“How’s life?” I strain to make the question sound casual.

“I’m not sure I can do this.”

I reach toward him, I try to stop before he notices but it’s too late.

“Please don’t.”

I apologize and we walk down the hill. The town is a long sequence of hills and plains which drain into an almost perpetually shallow river, which manages to flood nearly every summer. I’m lucky not to live on the ground floor. I’m lucky my son is here with me. I’m lucky he cares enough to be angry. Mending takes time.

“Maybe it’s easier if I tell you about me. My life is pretty boring,” I say and try not to smile. There’s a hard to pinpoint edge between us. If I push too hard or stray past it, things will fall apart. I need to find some space. My hands are damp and the cold makes it worse. “I’ve got a place. I work at a fancy fruit stand, oh and I have — ” I hesitate but pull out the coin anyways, “I got this.” I feel like a kid at show-and-tell (if they even still have those) who realizes they’ve brought something no one else wants to see.

“Good for you,” he says haltingly. “Sorry, I mean it, it’s good to see.” In my imagined version of this moment, he looked hopeful, maybe even impressed. His face teetered between that and guardedness. Now he just looks bored.

“Yeah. It’s a lot of work. You graduated? That’s great,” I stop short of calling him buddy. I’m talking too fast but noticing only makes it worse. Maybe he doesn’t even believe the coin is mine. “What did you study?”

“I studied Math but changed majors. For awhile I wanted to study medicine, but it’s too much school. I’m not sure it matters, but I got a degree.” His eyes cut past me, they have that same defiant look he’d get as a boy when he was in the middle of a particularly hard level in a video game. I push the memory away, worried it will trick me into another infraction. He keeps talking but I come away not knowing what he studied but I know it will only annoy him if I ask.

“That’s great,” I say instead of, ‘I’m proud.’ With enough of these substitutions, we may finally reach a point where I don’t have to make them, or at least where they come more naturally.

There’s not much to do here in the winter. Stores keep closing, some replaced by businesses I don’t understand — axe throwing, infrared saunas, cat cafes. Places I don’t belong — prices I can’t afford. We walk up the hill, past the sign for the college and through campus. This used to feel like trespassing, but not anymore. Nothing actually changed, I just kept coming and the feeling faded.

“It must be between classes,” I say. I point out the buildings I like, mostly older, Grecian-looking ones. I never know the right words to describe them but I still enjoy them. Bringing him here makes me feel like a guide giving an especially irrelevant campus tour. I want to stop talking but can’t. When he was a boy Andy used to reassure me, now he watches my nervousness drip into what I say and how I move. I ask if he wants to go to the library and he says yes.

It’s hot inside. Each year the students look younger. The fact that they’re college-aged seems more and more unbelievable. Each trip deepens my awareness of the gulf between my real age and the age I picture myself, but at least here, life seems to be happening. The line for the cafe snakes into the library lobby. Students laugh. Foolishly, I ask if he wants more coffee. He doesn’t. The urge to give him things impresses and annoys me.

Further inside, it’s quieter. Andy marvels at the desktop computers as if he hadn’t spent hundreds of hours in front of an even older model feverishly clicking the heads of pixelated demons.

“I haven’t been to a library in a while,” he says.

“You can use my card if you want to take something out.”

He looks like he smelled something spoiled but says thank you.

“They have e-books and streaming movies too.” Streaming movies is probably the wrong term but correcting it now will only draw attention to my mistake.

We turn to the new-arrival bookcase. I try not to look at him or any books that might annoy him. I particularly avoid one about the CIA. I pick up a thinner book, fiction, with an award medallion on its cover. I look over the synopsis on the back cover, too amped up to read it, but the book thankfully covers my face.

Many of the theories I had when he was a kid have now been confirmed, but he’ll get mad if I mention them. Even as young as eight, he hated my willingness to believe. I used to call him my little cynic. He acted like I was on the verge of making us wear tin-foil hats.

He picks up the CIA book. “Not interested in this one?” He says and smiles that awful, condescending smile that he certainly got from me.

I want to drag him into the stacks and rub his nose in proof of MK-Ultra, or the long list of puppet governments that the CIA installed and overthrew, or their failed attempts on Castro, but I count the objects in the room and smile at the waifish girl behind the counter. It’s what I’ve been taught to do when I need to ride an urge out. Sometimes it helps. It works if you work it.

As we pass among them, students watch Andy. Girls notice him, another detail I can’t point out to him. But he is my son and the fact that he is alive, admired to a degree, fills me with pride. We separate and walk through the stacks. If the visit were less strained, he’d be bored out of his mind. I spent too much time worrying that he wouldn’t come and not enough planning what to do if he did.

It’s too early to see a movie, but maybe he’s hungry and we can eat. At least then, when people ask how it went I can avoid the question by listing the activities we did. Those sorts of bland details reassure people.

He agrees to lunch and we walk back to my car. For a moment it feels how it felt when he was a boy and I’d drive him to the store or to school. As if the time and incidents between then and now never happened. If it were a paper with our lives drawn across it, I’d fold the bad part down into the spine of a paper airplane. But the bad part is also how I got here. I repeat that to myself and focus on the road. The sky is gray and the car blasts stale, warm air into our faces. The car is fourteen years old but it’s the nicest one I’ve ever had. Andy doesn’t say anything about it. When he was a boy we had a Chevy whose passenger floor rusted out. We called it the Flintstone car. I turn the music way down so it murmurs in the background — this way I’m sure to hear if he says something.

For a town this small, traffic is remarkably bad. We sit stopped on Main Street. He says he doesn’t care what we eat but I offer options anyway. He mentions the bus schedule and panic over how little we’ve said surges in me. I squeeze and release the steering wheel until it passes or I acclimate enough to ignore it. The nicer places I’d like to take him only open for dinner so we go to one of the bars.

I watch him for some flicker of judgment. I only second guess my choice because he’s here. Until his visit a bar in the middle of the day felt harmless. At this hour, it’s practically a family restaurant but he and I both remember how awful a drunk I was. Maybe he’ll say something. Maybe I can apologize.

He orders a burger and a Guinness. When the beer arrives I look away from the foam’s cascade. The way it moves is beautiful. When he was a boy he refused to eat meat. Occasionally I opt for vegetarian meals and this whole time I’ve thought those tiny sacrifices would have pleased him.

The dark grain of the table is smooth — the waitress scans the room with the sort of authority that belies expertise. She has tight pants, so I try to catch Andy noticing her. Not because I’ll comment, there’s nothing more embarrassing than that, but he doesn’t, or I miss it. He watches the window behind me, tapping his knee nervously, something I also do. Once in 2nd grade they kicked me out of class because I couldn’t stop.

In the sea of what I can’t or shouldn’t do I search for some option. I may not get another chance. We’ve ordered. He sips his beer. I think about checking the bus schedule but that’s too forced. I know it anyways.

“I’m really glad you came,” I say. He glues his eyes to the rim of his glass, “It means a lot to me.” My voice cracks.

He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move.

In my head I keep going — I force myself to forget the countless other apologies, the promise I made to him and broke again and again until I trapped us in a loop where all I could do was disappoint him and all he could do was wait and try not to hope.

“Hey, it’s okay, dad,” he says.

I nod and swallow. He looks alarmed. “Don’t worry, I know,” I say without feeling any certainty. He means how I feel is okay. When he was younger he would’ve clarified and told me that what I did wasn’t okay.

Our food comes and the waitress smiles with the kind of staged benevolence that I prefer to believe in.

Blood drips down his hands as he eats. “Wow, this is really good.” He chews loudly — I can’t remember if he always ate so messily. “You’ve found yourself a pretty good place to live, huh?”

I nod. I know better than to think he can’t surprise me, but it’s eerie to see him turn on the charm that he so obviously thinks is his own.

My dad didn’t try to charm anyone. He just did as much as he could to keep his family happy. At the time I thought he was small minded, but maybe what he did was right.

I watch Andy eat. Something shifts and a current pulls me out of myself. What follows is a period where I’m free from the weight of wanting his approval or forgiveness, from urging myself to say something when I don’t know what to say or how to say it.

“You want some fries?” he asks. I already have waffle fries but I accept a handful of his.

I try to return to that space but all I can do is search the room and my thoughts for what might have triggered the shift.

As he eats I remember how I used to marvel over these moments and later how I took them for granted. The unavoidable tasks that compose life, each time he mastered one I felt a surge of hope. Each confirmed that he was fine — there was no reason to think he wasn’t other than my own anxieties. They were proof he could live as good a life as he wanted. I want to ask him about school again or what he’s reading or a movie — in order to stumble onto something he loves.

My unfounded fear is that there’s nothing. That my addiction and I distracted him and troubled him just as he entered the period where life pushes us to make ourselves and our wants narrower and narrower, until by our own simplifying, sober choices we thin our lives into a manageable slice that neither scares or feeds the vital parts of ourselves. Eventually that part will revolt, but we find our own ways to silence or ignore it.

One thing relieves me though — he doesn’t want to impress me or seemingly anyone. I spent a lot of my life on that — telling myself that if I reached this next level, in either my music, or with money, that life could begin. How much time did I spend like that before I noticed? And noticing once only emboldens you, blinds you to the next time it comes, because you mistakenly believe this is something that happens once and that you’re the sort of person who can see it coming. So you miss it and fall back into the pit.

“Can I bring you anything else?”

Andy’s mouth is full. He shakes his head.

“No thank you,” I say.

When she brings the check I pay and Andy lets me. I’m relieved not to go through some charade over it. At least he thinks I can afford lunch, though I’m not so stable that I can ignore purchases like these.

He follows me out of the bar. I try not to estimate how many of these meals we could’ve shared. Once comparisons like that crop up, they poison the good that can come out of this. Life can’t be corrected in a single act — games exist to let us feel what it would be like to suddenly win, but even those don’t usually go that way.

He follows me to the car. He checks his phone for awhile and I know it before he says it. The next bus is in fifteen minutes. There won’t be another for four hours. I bring him to the station and we sit in the car. The plumes of exhaust from sitting cars and busses mark the sky. It and the landscape are as gray as they can get and the sun is setting. Not in the drawn out way where it seems like nature is reminding us to notice but in the abrupt way that renders the rest of the day empty and hopeless.

I look at him. He smiles as strongly as I suspect he can under the circumstances. Maybe via email I can learn more about him. I vacillate between two lies about him: I know everything I can because after a certain point people don’t change or I know nothing and by now he could’ve become anyone.

He gets on the bus. The windows are tinted but he turns to put his bag overhead, I can’t tell if he looks at me. The bus pulls out. The sky darkens. My hands are cold and despite having just eaten my stomach feels empty.
I loop down Main street and up a side road. At the intersection I watch a bus pull onto the thruway. I feel guilty. I was just driving, I wasn’t trying to catch his bus or see him again. It might not even be his. I go home and sit in the driveway with the car off. I have never felt happy at the end of winter. The season makes me sink. Kelly will be inside, probably making dinner. She will want to know how it went and what I said. I sit in the car and wait to feel differently.

There is no one to blame for any of this but myself. Unhelpful thoughts like these swarm around me and I wish it would snow — or do something to pull me back out of myself. If a deer could daintily walk by I might be okay. My headlights light up our apartment’s side paneling — it strikes me as such a temporary, wasteful way of building things. I go back to listing: Gravel, trees (I cannot really see them but they’re there), an old wreath on our door, the kitchen light catches Kelly washing dishes. In a few minutes I will go inside.