It’s been thirteen years since my father’s death. It was so long ago, and it happened yesterday. Sometimes when I am scrolling through headlines or brushing my teeth, time collapses. My eyes go out of focus. The years break open like a window, and I am again standing in the narrow galley kitchen of a Denver apartment, drinking black coffee. 

It was midmorning, and I had a headache because I had been up all night—writing a poem—about my father and something imminent: My father left a letter for my sister on the counter / among other artifacts and shadows. At dawn, I printed a copy and pressed send to my graduate workshop. I lay down but couldn’t sleep. I was still intoning the poem: a spindle, a thimble, the bowl of her hands. My eyelids jittered. My chest was tight. I looked out the window and was dazed by the morning sun. The heart is a pot / of violets, withered / in the corner where she read it. I was trying to force down some toast when the phone rang. I can still hear it echoing. My ringtone was a haunting sound called sayonara. I can see the phone in my hand: a metallic green flip phone, the word “DAD” on the screen, the time: 10:10 am in Denver, which meant it was just past noon in Philadelphia. 

My father’s voice sounded groggy and flat when I answered the phone. “Hey, Neine.” Neine rhymes with scene, queen, Christine. That’s what he called me. That’s how he always began. “Just calling to check up on you.”

I asked how he was feeling. 

He said he had finally gotten the correct dosage for his medication and was feeling better. He asked about my summer plans. 

I told him I had a summer teaching appointment at Brown University and was going to spend the summer in Providence with my long-distance boyfriend, Burkan. I told him I was thinking of flying home and leaving the car in Denver for the summer, but he didn’t think that was a good idea. “Better to drive,” he said as if the matter were decided. 

I asked about the status of his ongoing legal trouble. “What does your lawyer say?”

He was silent a moment. “Some bull crap,” he finally mumbled. His pale, inarticulate light. “Everything’s fine,” 

But everything wasn’t fine. I’d been reading the news, and the news wasn’t good. One of his associates had been caught destroying evidence. The FBI was involved, and $700,000 was missing from a school account. I knew my father better than anyone, and everyone knew the indictments were coming. 

My father said he was in the car on his way to meet with his lawyer in Center City, but he was really on the way to the train station. I imagine he pulled up close to the tracks. I can almost see his hand, reaching to open the glove compartment. 

“Love you, Neine.” I can still hear his voice. Shivering, bereft of depth. He sounded small and far away as if he had lost command of the world—as if he had resigned himself to whatever was coming—as if he had just one thing left to do. The truth stretched between us, echoing between the lines. A sentiment, tardily expressed of regret. I knew what was coming—but I did not expect it to happen today.

“Love you too, Daddy.”

“Goodbye, Neine.”

“Goodbye, Daddy.”

Goodbye.

 

It was a radiant Wednesday in May. I had parked my car in a residential neighborhood that surrounded the University of Denver and was hurrying for my afternoon shift in the library. As always, I was running late and shouldering a big bag of books. I was very much distracted and very much in my head, still working my way through the poem: It may seem that I know what stories to tell. Back then, I did much of my writing on foot. I would walk and walk, experimenting with lines until I knew the poem by heart. I knew a poem was finished when I could recite it from memory, every word balanced against my voice, measured by my breath. 

When my phone rang, I cursed and stumbled and dug through my bag. 

It was my younger brother, Michael, and he sounded worried. “Dad called me today,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “I talked to him too.”

“He didn’t sound good.”

At that moment, I was breathless, running late, and lost in the poem—and, at the same time, I wasn’t conscious of immediate concern. Disaster had been circling for months, years, decades. It was always imminent, but it never came today. My brother and I were tapped into the same current of energy, but we were speaking at each other at different frequencies. I probably said something vague and honest and reassuring like, “He’s under a lot of stress.”  Something like, “I hope he’s okay.” 

In my head, The poem was stuck in a loop. It may seem that I know what stories to tell. It may seem that I know what stories to tell. I don’t remember exactly what I said to my brother, but I can still see the color of the sky: a deep crystalline blue, clear and far away. 

 

I was working in the Writing Center in the library and had just finished a session with a student when I got the call from my mother. 

My phone was tucked away in my bag on the other side of a glass wall, and I swear the ringer was off, but I heard it ring.  I had been hearing the call for weeks before it came. The phone would call out like a phantom, but when I picked it up, no one was there. 

Then, finally, it came. I grabbed the phone and hid into the stacks.

“Mom,” I whispered.

My mother’s voice was electric. “Darlene just called me.”

This was unthinkable. My mother and my stepmother Darlene were not on speaking terms. They were two slender green-eyed women, who lived at opposite ends of the same small, Philadelphia suburb—each deliberately pretending the other did not exist. This was, to my knowledge, the first time they had ever spoken. 

“What did she say?” 

“I can’t believe it.”

“Can’t believe what? What’s going on?”

“I can’t believe your father would do something like that.” 

“Something like what? What did he do”

“Darlene said he killed himself.” Her voice was hard, and the words hung in the air. “But that can’t be true.” 

“You know it’s true, Mom.”  

“Darlene said that he shot himself—at the train station—but he wouldn’t do that. There are children at the train station. What if the children saw?”

Only now, as I write this, do I hear what she was saying, do I understand that she was not worried about the imagined children who might have been passing by the train station on their way home from school. She was thinking of her own children. She was saying, How could he do this to my children? How could he do this to us?

But I knew. I knew him better than anyone else in the world. I did not wonder how. My question was where. Where did he get a gun? But I didn’t ask. I knew better than to ask real questions. 

“Mom,” I said. “At least he didn’t do it at home.”

 

When I hung up the phone, I stood in the stacks for a long time, examining the cracked spines on the shelves. I felt empty and featherlight. I could hear muted footsteps over the carpet, hushed voices, the buzz of fluorescent lights. I was the eye of the storm: eerily silent and perfectly still. 

I walked back into the tutoring center, and picked up my bag.“I have to go,” I said quietly and to no one in particular.

“What do you mean?” my supervisor said.

“I have to go now.”

“What’s wrong?” she looked worried and gestured to a chair. “Sit down. Tell me what’s going on.”I looked over her shoulder. On the wall by the coffee pot, there was a poster of an atomic blast, a mushroom cloud over Bikini Atoll. I had looked at that poster a hundred times, but until that moment I had never really seen it, never truly registered its total and casual violence. “I have to go,” I said. I was looking at her, but I couldn’t see her. The blast was the only thing in focus.

I walked out of the library and onto the green. It was spring. The sky was a deep blue vacancy, and cherry blossoms rained down on the lawn. The sun seemed very, very bright. Students hurried by, their hair and limbs gleaming with youth in the daylight. I sat very still by a fountain and studied the movement of fish below the surface of the water. It may seem that I know what stories to tell. 

I sat there a long time. 

I don’t remember walking to the coffee shop, but do recall being startled by my face in the glass window. I looked like a shadow. I studied my reflection until the door opened with the laughter of girls and the sound of bells. I did not go in. My father left a letter for my sister. I walked under a tree and watched the shifting patches of sky through the leaves. I walked back to my car and put my books in the trunk. I sat behind the wheel but did not turn the key in the ignition. Artifacts and shadows. I sat perfectly still and watched the stellar jays bicker. They were different from the bluejays back home; they were bigger, more luminous in their coloration, and more dramatic with their dark crests. It may seem that I know what stories to tell. I wasn’t thinking about it, wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but now I see that I was trying to remember, trying to make my way to the end of the poem as if by finding “the best words” and placing them “in the best order,” I could make things right or exert some semblance of control over the terror of the world. 

 

Eventually, I got out of the car and started walking again along the well-ordered streets of Denver, where rows of meticulous mid-century houses are laid out in a grid. The sidewalks were adorned with lavender and succulents. I didn’t know where I was going until I found myself at my advisor’s door. We were scheduled to have class that evening. We were supposed to discuss my poem. I remember thinking, I should tell him I won’t be there. I should tell him I won’t be back for the rest of the term.

My advisor came to the door. I can see his face, half cast in shadow. He was holding a single sheet of white paper in one hand.

“Oh hello,” he said. “I just read your poem!”

“My father is dead,” I said.

He took a step towards me and into the light. 

“He shot himself,” I said, and as I said it, the poem coalesced, and I remembered the words that had been evading me:

 

It may seem that I know what stories to tell but

the truth is like a seam of light that retreats from approach 

down the tiled floor in the hall, a sense of foreboding

 

or molar—yellow and eaten with holes—

Lost under the deathbed, found as a pearl.

from My Sister’s Father, Black Lawrence Press, 2017

 

I have always been a belabored writer. The words don’t flow; I have to riddle them out of my body. Sometimes, the process is as exacting as surgery; other times, it’s exorcism. Rarely do I write a finished poem—or paragraph—in a single sitting, but the night before my father died, I wrote until the work was complete and, at dawn, I pressed send. 

 

It’s just that, later, I couldn’t find the words for the truth.