All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir(7)

“The Ghost in You” by Robyn Hitchcock hummed through the speakers.

    Inside you the time moves and she don’t fade

The ghost in you, she don’t fade



He’d sent me the song eleven days before he died when he’d requested my presence at the family home in New Jersey for the Super Bowl. I had spaced and wound up without wheels that day. He told me he would pay for half of a Zipcar, but it was just important that I get there and soon. When I told him we were en route, he’d attached the song to his return email, writing “Great. Please put this on in the car.”

I cursed myself as we made our way to the morgue. As if on cue, a tear leaked out of my eye as we rolled up to East Twenty-sixth Street to what seemed to me to be one of the sadder buildings in New York: a block-long behemoth with a sign out front that reads OFFICE OF CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER.

I crept up to the front desk and saw a clipboard. Instinctively, I knew that I wouldn’t need to talk if I just filled out the attached form. My dad’s body was in this building. I wondered if I’d be looking at an image of him or his actual body. I filled out his date of birth, and felt like screaming when I did the math.

58.

58.

58.

Who dies that young? No one had ever prepared me for his dying that young.

I turned in the clipboard. I sat and stared at my shoes, cheap black boots against the beige linoleum, caked with dirt. I hugged myself with my arms and closed my eyes. When I looked up, I saw people in the same zombified state. The morgue is not a place you want to spend your Saturday.

After five long minutes, they called my name, and I was led by an administrator into a small room with a computer screen. A woman seated behind a wooden desk asked me several questions, and I was completely mystified as to how someone could perform this job day after day. “How are you today?” “How do you know the deceased?” My mind trailed off thinking about it until she asked if I was ready. This is it. I will see him for one last time on this screen. Jasper reached for my hand and squeezed it.

“I guess.” She swiveled the monitor toward me and asked me if this was David Carr, my dad and relative. I cried first and then nodded. He was on a metal gurney with a white sheet draped over the lower half of his body. His face, ever the same, was his, but lifeless. His mouth was still open.

“Yes, that’s him,” I told her, and with that, the business was done.





5


    It All Starts Somewhere



“You are a Carr, and that is a complicated, wondrous inheritance.”



No one gets to choose the traits they inherit from their parents. I was blessed with a semblance of smarts, blue eyes, and giant, man-sized feet. When I was thirteen, a kind, elderly pediatrician remarked that with feet like these, I was sure to grow in height.

At twenty-seven years old I’m still five feet, four inches. But other promised inheritances have come true. Some darker than others, like a fondness for the drink.

When I was growing up, my dad often whispered to us, “Everything good started with you.” I realized the converse truth—that there must’ve been an “everything bad” before there was an everything good.

When I was in third grade, living in Washington, D.C., a friend came over after school one day. Let me preface this by saying this wasn’t a typical event in my life. I was an awkward kid who had no clue as to what was “cool,” and the savvy kids knew to stay the hell away from me. Finally, after many failed attempts, I made a friend. Her name was Alex.

Jill picked us up from school, and I remember Alex gave me a funny look when I called Jill by her first name, instead of “Mom,” and later asked me about it when we were alone in my room. I explained to her what had been explained to me, that my parents used to be drug addicts, but my dad no longer did drugs and was now married to Jill. You know, basic eight-year-old stuff.

A couple of hours later, my dad popped his head in and asked: “Do you girls want to go to McDonald’s?”

“Yesssss,” we screamed automatically. We ambled toward our family’s junky Ford Explorer, and when Alex could see that it would just be my dad, the two of us, and my sister, she crossed her arms and refused to get in.

“Do you need help getting in?” my dad asked patiently.

Alex shook her head, then stated matter-of-factly, “I am not getting in the car with a drug person.”

The words stung my ears, and my heart quickened in a frightening way. Without missing a beat my dad quietly replied, “Well, then, I guess we won’t be going.” Within an hour, Alex was gone, picked up and driven away by her mom, who was not a drug person. I sat in my room, upset that my first real playdate was such a failure.

I heard my dad bellow from downstairs: “Erin, get down here!” He motioned for me to sit down on the maroon couch where Meagan was already seated, looking confused. He told us it was time to discuss our story and how to tell it. First of all, it was not information to be traded for affection. My dad carefully explained what drugs were, and why, in the past, he had used them. He reiterated that he was sober now and would remain so as long as he went to his “meetings.” I asked him why our mom, who had exited our lives years earlier, wasn’t sober. He looked at Jill, unsure what to say.

It was hard for my eight-year-old brain to grasp the true dark story of what had happened, but I eventually learned that my parents’ appetite for cocaine was monstrous, quickly moving from recreational use into freebasing, all on top of their regular abuse of alcohol. A toxic mix. No one celebrated when my mom found out she was pregnant, but the show went on. My mother claims she used only a couple of times while we were in utero, though she is the only one who knows this for sure. After six and a half months of pregnancy, her water broke and she went into labor. It was the spring of 1988, and the math did not look good.