40. She Is Here #2
“A man’s got to walk his own road, Julian. Make his own mistakes. Learn his own lessons. Nobody can do that part for him.” He said it to the water, not to me. “Tre will find his way better than I ever did. He doesn’t need me.”
“That’s easy to say from a lake,” I said.
He didn’t flinch. “Tell him I’m proud of him.”
“You tell him, Pop.”
He looked at me and tears fell down his face. “I can’t. I love y’all too much to—”
“Pops, please. If you love us, you’ll come home.
We’ll get you help. There are people, doctors, that know about these things.
Simone’s been seeing somebody and it’s helped her.
There’s help for what’s happening with you.
I’ll take you myself. Every week if that’s what it takes.
I’ll set the whole thing up. Just come back. Please.”
He was crying more, not with any sound, just water moving down a face that hadn’t reacted to itself in a long time.
“Son.”
“Pop.”
“I can’t leave.”
“Why?”
He looked at the water and took a long breath in, and out.
“Because she’s here.”
“What?”
“She’s here. My Niecy. In this house. On this land. I sit on this porch with her every evening. Talk to her every day. I can’t leave her again. She’s here, Julian. Do you understand? Your mama is here.”
I opened my mouth to argue because I’d come up here ready for a man being stubborn and licking his wounds. A man I could reason back into his life. I had not come ready for this. This was beyond grief and regret. This was something that had grown on top of it.
“She’s in Lennox Falls too, Pops,” I tried.
“No, Julian. She’s not. I tried. For months I tried. I sat in our bedroom and waited to feel her and she wasn’t there. This is where she was most herself. This is where she is now. This is where she talks to me.”
I sat there with him on the porch and I understood that the man I had driven hours to retrieve was not retrievable. He was not on a path back to himself. He was somewhere in his mind, with my mother. And he was not coming home.
I tried again anyway. “I came to bring you home.”
“Julian. Listen to me.”
“I’m sorry I’m not the man I was supposed to be.
Who y’all need me to be. I failed your mama, and I failed y’all.
I cannot come home, son. I love you all too much to come home not the man you need me to be.
I love you too much to walk back into that house not the man your mama married. I cannot do that to you.”
“That is not your call, Pop. That is ours. We are saying come home. We are.”
“I know you are.”
“Then come.”
“I am asking you. Don’t come back here.”
“What?”
“Don’t come back, Julian. Driving up here. Don’t do this again. This is not good for you. Let me be.”
I shook my head.
“I died the day your mother left. What you see is just the box. There is nothing left inside. If I come home, what you get isn’t your father.
What you get is a man leaving you in more pieces, over years.
You and your brothers and your sister already grieved me once, four years ago.
I’m asking you to let that be the only time. ”
“No, Pop.”
“I don’t want y’all mourning me every day for the rest of your lives. Across the table from a man who isn’t your father, remembering every night that you used to have one. Let the grief you already did be enough. So that when I go, it isn’t a thing you have to do a second time.”
I couldn’t speak.
“Leave me here. I came here to be where she is. I came to wait. Let me wait here. Not in front of all of you. I’ve lived a long life.”
“You’re not old, Pops, there’s more life to live.”
“I lived the only life I was meant to. I had your mother. Over thirty years with her. Four children. A business together. I loved her with everything in me. Once she was gone my life was done too. I’ve done what I was put here to do. Now I wait.”
“For what?”
He turned to me, and his eyes were the only part of his face that still belonged to the man I grew up with.
“For God to take me home to her. That’s what I’m waiting for, Julian. It’s the only thing I want.”
I couldn’t speak. He sat with me a few minutes more. Then he stood, slowly, like a man whose body hurt him. “Come here, son.”
I went. He held me the way he used to when I was a kid.
One hand flat against the back of my head, and I let him, because I had not been held by anyone in over four years.
I was the one who did the holding now, and some part of me that’d shut down came up out of the dark and shook.
I stood in my father’s arms and did not cry, because I had forgotten how. But everything under my ribs did.
“I’m proud of you,” he said into the top of my head. “The man you’ve become. The man I couldn’t be.” His hand tightened. “Your mama knew. Before she went. We used to say it to each other: Julian’s going to be the one. And you are. I’m proud of you, son.”
His words sank in me like proof the room had been warm the whole time I was locked out of it. He let go of me, then he stepped back.
“Go home, Julian. Take care of yourself. And don’t come back here. Don’t.”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
He went back inside and the door closed quiet behind him. The guitar didn’t start again.
I walked to the car, got in, started the engine, and drove. I made it about eight miles before I had to pull over. I sat in a gravel turnout above the lake with my forehead on the wheel, taking deep breaths, trying to hold it together. After a while I sat up, and drove home.
I’d gone there with hope. For four years I’d made a level of peace with it. Then I’d let myself think that I could change it. That I could drive up here and bring my father home.
Now I was driving back down that mountain with more than I went there with. I’d traded a loss I’d made livable for one that was fresh and specific and I was going to have to learn how to live with it all over again.
I decided then that neither Zion, Tre, nor Simone would ever make this drive. I would not set them up to carry what I was holding. Hope on the ride up; worse than before on the ride down.
Reggie called two days later. Patterson, Yale Law. Eventually worked out a plea deal that ended with zero jail time for Zion.
I never told them I’d gone. I never told them our father was never coming home.
And I never went back.