All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir(52)

We left the roses to set and I headed upstairs and looked at his desk in the dining room. It wasn’t really a desk, just a repository for things he was supposed to look at next. He preferred to be mobile, drifting from one room to the next with his laptop in hand. I picked up his leather wallet with his driver’s license. He was carrying it in his pocket when he collapsed. I opened it, feeling cautious, as if he might yell at me. In the ID photo he was unsmiling but looking darn handsome. His New York Times business cards were stuffed in little slits, and there was cash in the billfold. I brought it up to my face and smelled it. The leather mixed with the stale tobacco and I was taken back to his presence, to that last hug outside on the sidewalk. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to feel it.

I was startled when Meagan walked in on me, her hands still in gloves. I stammered nervously. “Oh, ya know, just smelling his belongings.”

She stifled a chortle. “I get it.”

She left the room, and I placed the wallet on the desk exactly where I’d found it. I saw a series of reporter’s notebooks, filled to the brim with his trademark scrawls. I grabbed one and took it upstairs to my childhood bedroom and sat down on the edge of the quilt-covered bed.

This room, my room, felt empty now. The notebook housed clues, but I couldn’t make complete sense of it. Just one mystery after another as my brain fogged with gut-rotting sadness.



* * *



—

As weeks passed I couldn’t help but text him. Because we’d been so digitally tethered, it felt only normal, albeit a bit morbid.

One night I wrote, “I’m sorry I didn’t act more grateful when you gave me that sweater at Christmas.” The message felt like the panicked act of a kid who has forgotten her algebra assignment. I wanted him to know that I was appreciative and that I loved that he got me a sweater that reminded me of his own sweaters.

I sometimes feel like an inferior version of his doppelg?nger. I have his DNA, but am not him. Our text history is short. I deleted a majority of them to free up space on my phone and I curse myself for it. But I still have his emails. I typed in C A R R 2 N @ G M A I L . C O M again and clicked through page after page of our back-and-forth.

I created a Google document and start copying and pasting my favorite lines:


“Find myself thinking about you a lot. Wondering what kind of adventures you’re living, learning you are doing, tasks you are on.”

“i’d be working every angle.”



When I closed my eyes I could hear him saying those things out loud. Whenever I would send him a flare email, his response was always relentlessly positive and made me feel like I was part of a tribe, a team. That someone was taking care of me. I knew, then and now, that this was a rare relationship for a child to have with a parent.

For the most part, parents love and want to protect their children, but how many of us really know one another? I wondered what caused this sense of closeness, and I realized I’d never even asked him this. My educated guess was that there was some guilt about our unseemly origin story involving cocaine and later crack. We were premature babies born to our mother while the two of them battled their demons. My mother fled back into her disease while my dad sought treatment. He wanted to ensure that nothing like that ever happened again. That his story would protect our own; we would be the successful women he knew us to be.

The words were there, archived. But he was not an active part of the conversation anymore. I had so many questions for him. How on earth could I find the answers?

         How do I have a career without you?



     What else did you want to do?



     Was my moderate success because of you?



     How do I live sober?



     How can we remain a family without you?



     Why were you so hard on me?



     Why were you so hard on yourself?



     Did part of you know you were going to die?



     What do you wish you had told me before you died?





The information exists within his digital sphere. I move toward the emails, the Gchats, texts, and tweets. Data for me to mine. Possible answers to my many, many questions.





28


    The Upside of Getting Fired



“My, you just keep turning out. You are full of surprises.”



My first HBO film, Thought Crimes, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2015. Any novice filmmaker would be nervous, but I also felt tremendous gratitude. I had finished something I set out to do, a feat I was unsure I was capable of after my firing. And I had reason other than delusion to be confident about the film.

Five months before, I had screened the movie for my family. The perfect ending to a nice Thanksgiving meal. With our bellies full of turkey and stuffing we headed upstairs to Dad and Jill’s bedroom to see what these blood relatives of mine had to say about the documentary I had made. The room, decorated many moons ago, always made me feel comfortable. The walls and comforter were a deep textured green; a Picasso print hung above their California king bed. A coin dish sat on the bureau, filled to the brim with AA coins, pens, and a shamrock bowtie. I asked if I could use a pen.