I decide to check out the basement. When Mom told me I’d have the basement here to myself, I warmed up to the idea of having an entire floor of a house just for me. It was actually one of the only things I was looking forward to.
That’s before I walk down the rickety stairs and sniff. The air is dank. Like bitter seaweed. Like how I imagine a dry lake would smell. The walls are concrete, and the room feels ten degrees colder than it was upstairs. My mother has set up an air mattress for me on the carpeted floor. In the far corner of the room, next to the door to a bathroom with a little shower, a mess of storage boxes are piled high. They look like they’ve been there since the dawn of time. I walk over to a dark corner and find a billiard table, the kind with mesh pockets to catch the balls. The felt on the table is peeling off in places. Under it is a plastic garbage bag. I peer in, and it’s filled with empty whiskey bottles. It is nice to have my own space, but it’s … I don’t know. Like a remote bunker where people store their afterthoughts.
When I can’t stall anymore, I head upstairs and check out the rest of the house. The living room has a charcoal-colored, scratchy flannel couch and love seat, naked white walls, and, where a television might be, a big old radio. Way to update this place, Dad. I check out the green-carpeted guest room, where my mother’s unpacked suitcase sits empty on the made bed. And then I see the closed door across the hall, and I know it’s my dad’s room.
I stare at the door until it looks and feels a million miles away. Then I close my eyes, breathe deeply, and take the short, long walk down the hall.
I knock. After a few moments, I hear him lumbering slowly toward me.
My dad opens the door, and my impression when I see his face for the first time in fourteen years is that he looks like me if I were put through a meat grinder. His face is raw yet colorless. His hair is ratty. He’s bloated yet skinny. I have to look away, because seeing my dad look so sick is way more intense than I even expected it to be, and I feel bile rise into my throat.
“Carson,” he says, his voice not exactly as I remember it from our annual birthday phone conversations. Softer yet rustier. “Death warmed over. I know.”
He opens his arms and I stand there, frozen. He looks so pathetic, a scrawny death triangle with his arms out to the side and slightly pointed down. A Christmas tree the following April. Finally, I stutter-step over to him and we do a side hug. My chin juts into his bony shoulder. He smells like a mixture of baby powder and pee.
“Good to see you,” I say to his shoulder blade.
“You look wonderful,” he says, though he can’t see me either. “Your mom did a good job with you.”
How do you know? I want to ask. Can you somehow tell just by side-hugging me?
He lets me go and motions me into his room. His bed is a beaten-up gray pullout couch, and it faces a small, old, chubby television with two silver antennae in the shape of a V on top of it. There are no bedside tables, nothing else in the room, except a few old photos on the far wall and, in one dark corner, a maroon chair with holes in the fabric. It feels like the room itself needs antidepressants. He’s lived here alone for seven years, and this is where he sleeps? Not even in a real bed?
I ease into the maroon chair as he sits on the corner of his bed, facing me. The chair farts. “Wow, nice place you have here,” I say.
He laughs. “Bullshit. It’s awful, I know. Needs a woman’s touch.”
“No,” I say, “seriously. You should rent it out as a bed and breakfast.”
He laughs again, and I crack a smile. My face heats up. It’s funny how you can hate someone and wish them dead, and at the same time you just want to curl up in their lap like a baby. Is that deranged? I mean, I’m seventeen. That’s a little deranged, probably.
“I may do that. You have my sense of humor,” Dad says.
“Well, take it back,” I answer. “No one likes it.”
We laugh together for the first time, and the room lightens up a little, which is necessary because it was about to commit suicide. But then there is no follow-up joke. We sit across from each other and stare.
What do you say to your dad whom you haven’t seen in fourteen years? On the phone, our typical conversation went like this:
“Happy birthday, Carson.”
“Thanks.”
“How are you?”
“Fine.”
“How’s school?”
“Fine.”
“Okay then. We’ll talk again soon, okay?”
“Okay.”
I’d get off the phone, and Mom would say to me, “You know, it’s okay to be angry with your father,” and I’d say, “Sure.” And she’d say, “What I want you to hear me say is that it’s okay to own those feelings.” And I’d say back, “Great idea.”
I don’t know if I was angry at my dad so much as done with him. When someone disappears from your life when you’re three, you don’t really appreciate his yearly reappearances.
And now he’d reappeared, only this time in the flesh. And maybe Mom would like me to own certain feelings, and locate them like we’re playing a game of feelings hide-and-seek. But frankly, I’m not that sure I want to play. Or maybe I do. I don’t even know anymore.
“So,” he says.
“So,” I say back. “What’s going on?”
“Well, I’m dying. So that’s something,” he says, and even though we do probably share the same sense of humor, him just blurting this out makes me feel like I’m choking. I lean back on the raggedy recliner for support.
“Sorry,” he says, seeing that his words have had an impact on me. “Why am I such an asshole?”
I shake my head. Part of me wants to say, You’re not an asshole, but I can’t say those — or any — words. I count to twenty-five, and then to eighty-four by sevens. It brings me back. One of the good things about having a mom who doesn’t do a lot of mom-ing is that you learn to take care of yourself.
“So Billings is a city,” I say to change the subject.
“Yes,” he says. “It’s a city in Montana.”
“You live here. I used to live here.”
He coughs into his hands. “Yes, I do. You did.”
Why did you stay here? I want to say. This place has such bad family memories for him. His dad disappeared when he was my age; his mom had cancer for seven years and then died. And even though we left because he wouldn’t stop drinking, I guess I still don’t understand why he couldn’t stop drinking and leave himself behind too. Come with us to New York and start a new life.
“Mom said you stopped working.”
“Yup.”
“I don’t even know what you did for work.”
“I was a bartender.”
“Terrific,” I say. He shrugs, and I can tell there’s a part of him that is also looking at this situation and realizing how insane it all is. That he is just as horrified as I am that he allowed himself to become a drunk and then went to work as a bartender. When I was a baby, he was a carpenter. What happened to that? I wonder.
“People do different things,” he says, his voice defensive. “Not everyone’s a school psychologist. Your mom did well for herself.”
I cross my legs, and then I uncross them, as if there’s some weird inborn part of me that wants to make sure my dad knows I’m manly. His eyes keep wandering around the room. There’s not much to look at. A blue-green vase on the floor to the left of his bed, some sort of food basket next to his feet, the old photos on the wall. And yet he doesn’t spend much time looking at me. It’s like he can’t.