What to Say Next(15)

I do the only thing I can. I split. I throw away almost three whole years of work on the newspaper and my one shot at editor in chief.

I sprint down the hall.

When I finally get to my car, which I realize as soon as I get in is the last place in the world I want to be, I crank the windows wide open and blast the air conditioner. I turn up the radio. The tears don’t come.

I’m too shaken to put the car into drive. Instead I sit and stare at the clock on the dashboard, marvel at how the numbers stay still.

“Please, please, please,” I whisper again and again and again, an empty chant, because I still don’t know what I’m begging for.

—

The landline—which has an actual spiral cord and is attached to the wall, like this is the eighteenth century or something—rings. Our just in case of an emergency phone that my dad insisted we install even though we each have our own cell. That’s how he was. Every year, in celebration of his birthday, he’d change the batteries in our fire alarm and carbon monoxide detector. In the event of a Category 6 hurricane or a zombie apocalypse, we have a kit in our basement full of dried meats and canned foods and gallons of water. And on the fridge, there’s a laminated card with the number for poison control, even though I’m sixteen and unlikely to accidentally swallow a dishwashing gel pack.

“You never know,” he used to say. “You just never know. Unimaginably bad stuff happens.”

My dad was orphaned in his early twenties. Both of my paternal grandparents died of cancer within a year of each other. Bone for my grandfather, breast for my grandmother Katherine, my namesake.

“Alliterative cancers,” my dad would joke. “A freak thing.”

It never occurred to me to think about what losing both of his parents must have been like. What it cost him to be forced to speak so casually about it to me, who was so stupid, who had never before weighed the magnitude of forever. Who laughed at the juxtaposition of the words alliterative and cancer like that was such a clever thing for him to say.

My mom told me that my father totally changed after his parents died. He stopped drinking beer with his buddies, put away his electric guitar, and cut his nineties-grunge hair. He started taking their relationship, which they’d both assumed was just a college fling, more seriously. He applied to dental school, despite having no particular passion for teeth or gums or the diagnosis of gingivitis. Practically overnight, he graduated to adulthood. He picked stability and practicality over passion.

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.