“I don’t know what to say, Dad. I’m in shock. This was the last thing I expected to hear.”
“You don’t have to say anything.” He sighed. “Well, that’s not true. Say you’ll come to the house for dinner tonight. Say we’ll get to spend some time together before I have to start this treatment shit.”
Suddenly, it seemed like the least I could do. “Of course. Yeah.”
My father and I had so much history, but all of that went out the window the second I realized I might lose him. Sure, his odds of survival were good, but I couldn’t escape the reminder that I didn’t have forever to make amends.
* * *
Over the next couple of weeks, I spent a great deal of time with my father. While he insisted we talk some about the past, it was thankfully limited. Mostly, we just worked on getting to know each other better. So some of it was stressful, but there were good moments in the mix, like late-night games of cards and, ironically, Parcheesi.
My mother, Alex, and I took turns taking my dad to his radiation appointments. He’d taken a leave of absence from his coaching job and was now considering early retirement.
During one of the treatment visits, he and I sat together in the waiting room. “Why are you here?” he suddenly asked me.
“What are you talking about? I’m here to support you.”
“I didn’t mean here. I mean, why are you in Minnesota and not back in New York? You loved living there, right? Surely you’re not getting accustomed to a new life as your grandmother’s servant?”
Looking down into my coffee, I chuckled.
“You can talk to me,” he said. “What happened?”
Silence settled over us as I contemplated whether to tell him the truth.
“It’s a long story.”
“Do I look like I have somewhere to go? Talk to me.”
If someone had told me a few months ago that the first person I’d open up to about Carys would be my father, I wouldn’t have believed it. I downed the last of my coffee before crushing the cup and throwing it into a nearby trash can. “I broke up with someone I care about very much. I didn’t know how to face her every day. So I left. It was cowardly, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice. She lived right next door to me.”
Over the next several minutes, I told him all about Carys, Sunny, and the accident. At least by choosing to open up to my father, I didn’t have to explain how my past related to my present. He understood full well where I was coming from and why I’d freaked out.
“You know…” he said, “Fear of failure is a powerful thing. I always feared failing in my career. I definitely failed as a father, but that didn’t seem to matter as much to me a decade ago. I see things in a different light now.”
“I never really looked at my problem as a fear of failure,” I said.
“But it is. Your fear is of failing people, harming people. You have to ask yourself if you really deserve a life sentence for something that happened when you were practically a kid and wasn’t entirely your fault.”
“You know how I feel about that.”
“I know what you’ve made yourself believe, but it’s time to stop blaming yourself.”
“You were angry with me for so many years,” I said. “I’m surprised you’re telling me you don’t think it was my fault.”
“I might have been angry that it happened, but never once did I feel like you were in the wrong. That other car was going too fast, and it was a foggy night. You were momentarily distracted, trying to get where you needed to go. You weren’t drunk. You weren’t being reckless. Even if you hadn’t been using the navigation device and your reflexes had kicked in faster, you don’t know that you could have stopped what happened.”
“If you felt that way, why did you act like you blamed me?”
“Because I was bitter at life. I expressed that through my treatment of you, and I’m very sorry for that, son. It wasn’t fair. I’m sorry I didn’t say all of this sooner.”
Resting my head on the wall behind my seat, I let out a long breath. “The accident with Carys… It felt like the same nightmare all over again.”
“Yes, I’m sure it did. But no one was hurt. So there had to have been more to your decision to flee New York than the accident?”
“It wasn’t so much the accident as it was what the accident represented. It made me feel like I couldn’t be trusted to keep them safe. And the responsibility of a child is just so…huge. Literally, her life was in my hands—not only that day, but it would’ve been every day thereafter. So many opportunities to fuck up.”