All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir(54)

I headed toward the bathroom, praying that my roommates weren’t home. I didn’t want to be accountable to anyone. I walked past the front door and glanced at my dad’s obituary taped to the back of it. Yunna had taped it there, just like we did at our house in Montclair. “David Carr, Times Critic and Champion of Media, Dies at 58.” It’s my dad’s face in a black-and-white photo, his chin propped up in his hand. He looks youthful, charming, curious. It was a picture I had never seen before. I stared at it. I wondered if it was healthy to have this exposed, so readily available. But the alternative—taking it down—seemed like sacrilege. I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked like shit. But again, I kind of liked it. My outsides matched my insides.

But I couldn’t stay there all day. I raced to get to the bus on time at the Port Authority. Jill had asked us to come back to Montclair for a family dinner. The sweat was dripping down my face despite the brisk air. I was hungover from the night before, and there was a deep pulse in my head that kept vibrating every thirty seconds or so. I checked my phone and the glow hurt my eyes. I closed them while I waited at the terminal. The sheer number of drug addicts and New York commuters tend to make for a combustible atmosphere at the Port Authority.

It was 4:56 when I got on the bus. I remembered that my headphones weren’t working. This was like the fifth set in a row that I’d broken. I was forced to be alone with my thoughts. I stared out the dirty window of DeCamp 66, the bus I would take home to see him. “Hello, Dolly,” he’d say. “How was the trip out?” I was on the bus fantasizing about having that moment again. My ears pricked up when I heard my dad’s name. I wondered if I was having a hallucination.

“Yeah, David Carr, he rode this bus all the time. He actually died at the New York Times building.” I felt like I could hear her shuddering. I glanced behind me to see who was speaking. She was a nondescript woman in her mid-fifties with brown hair. I guessed my family had now become a sort of urban legend. A bit of news for someone to talk about on their ride home from work. I considered shouting at her: “Maybe you shouldn’t say things like that when his kid is sitting next to you on this bus.” But instead, I kept my mouth shut.

The woman got off at her stop, and I did the same a few minutes later. I felt anxious as I exited but I made sure to mumble a thank-you to the driver. My headache would not relent and I wondered how useful that bottle of white wine the night before really was. I thought about the house. For my sisters, it represented a place of goodness and memories. To me? It was full of ghosts. I walked to the back porch and found it locked. I searched for the key in the cupboard on the porch. Nothing. I called Madeline, who was upstairs. I heard her tumble toward the door and felt irrationally full of rage. Why do I have to call to be let in?

We were sitting at dinner later when I asked my stepmom about the key situation. “The key was missing from the cupboard,” I said softly.

Jill put down her silverware and stared at me. “I am a woman who lives alone. I can’t have keys left out anymore.”

From a rational point of view, I knew she was right. She was undergoing this seismic change, and it was her house, not mine. I heard her continue on about the possibility of being assaulted while she was alone at night, but I closed my eyes, unsure of what to say next. “Okay, well, is it possible to get a key to use when I come home then?”

She looked down but stated clearly, “I don’t think so.” She said something about too many sets of keys being available for the house. My head started buzzing and I realized this was how it happens, this was how you get locked out of your own family home. I thought about starting an altercation, screaming at her that her child—my baby sister, Madeline—had a set of keys, so why should it be any different for her other daughters? Me and my twin. Just like on the bus, I kept my mouth shut.

That’s how families break apart after a death. Quiet, startling moments that define how you treat one another. I am my father’s daughter. I have a mother and a stepmom.

Meagan talked to Madeline and they made a secret plan to make house key copies to fix the problem. My baby sister handed me a silver key on a green ring to add to my keychain. I never got around to using it.





30


    The Castle Without Its El Rey



“Times like this, it’s great to belong to a family like ours.”



Eventually, Jill asked us to come to New Jersey and clean out the house. It was time to sell. A five-bedroom colonial no longer made sense for a widow. I often wondered what Jill was doing at any given moment after my dad’s death. What was it like to wake up with someone for twenty years and then have them gone, almost as if they’d evaporated? I don’t ask her about these things. We’re not close enough for me to pose such an intimate question.

I dreaded every day leading up to that weekend. I tried to distract myself with work, but even there, tension was rising. I worked with a small team of dedicated and smart people with Andrew as our leader. The week before the move he gently asked how I was doing. “Terrible, the thought of it makes me want to gouge my eyeballs out.” I didn’t know what else to say. I knew many people had moved belongings out of their deceased parents’ houses. I was not a special snowflake and yet. The pain felt unique as ever.

I drove out there on a Sunday morning, a gnawing pain surfacing every few minutes in the pit of my stomach. It was one of those beautiful sunny days that seem to make a mockery of your grief. The whole world keeps moving and whirling while you stand still, unable to enjoy anything for even a minute. I was frightened at the prospect of doing something so final, taking away the last remaining pieces of the puzzle, dismantling the family we used to be.