It takes him a while to open for me. When he does, I can see from his face that he’s been forewarned.
“Daddy, I need to come in.”
He hangs his head. “I know.”10EliseAs it turns out, it’s not something I can talk about. With anybody. It’s…hard to explain. So I decide not to try.
What I do is pack my bags on Thursday night, so after work on Friday, I can head for Saranac Lake. It’s a long drive—between five and six hours, depending. I’m not sure what possessed my parents to buy seven acres with a house and two fishing cabins so far from Manhattan. But nobody asked me. No one asked me about a lot of things.
I’m rolling over the George Washington Bridge by six p.m., firing up one of my favorite fury albums, Jagged Little Pill, as I fly up the Northway. I’m breathing a little easier when I stop to get some matcha tea just outside Albany.
The last two and a half hours of the drive tend to be soothing, reminding me of childhood since I almost never come upstate except to relax at the cabin. The little cabin on the south side of the property is all we own now.
When I was young, my parents had the house, a simple, whitewashed two-story, retrofitted for Becca’s gear. That year after she died, we sold the white house at Saranac and our residence in lower Manhattan. My parents moved into a smaller place, closer to Wall Street. For years, I didn’t even know we still had one of the cabins; for that reason, Saranac is not a place that I associate with fresh grief.
Finally, the summer after my sophomore year of college, I was having migraines, and Dad mentioned it. Each cabin sits on about two acres, and each one has access to Lake Flower. I decided to spend a few weeks. The second week there, Dani and Ree joined me, bringing this ridiculous grocery store bakery cake that was probably intended to feed an entire football team. We stuffed our faces sitting in the Adirondack chairs in the warm grass beside the water, holding fishing poles sometimes and other times just watching them bob.
Fireflies danced all through the woods. One morning, from the screened porch on the front, we saw a deer eating a mushroom. I remember Dani drove the two of us to the hardware store, bought some tools, and fixed the porch swing sitting in a dusty corner of the attic. And there we stayed together for the next two weeks.
In many ways, we were coming back to one another. Ree had been at NYU and Dani at Bard College. The prior year, Dani and I had had a falling out at a bar. I was drunk, and she said she was sorry that she hadn’t seen me in a while. I said something about how when you have a sister and your high school boyfriend, I was sure it was easy to stay busy. Dani cried and I just left, so things were weird for almost all of sophomore year. Until the cabin.
Turned out Dani had found Ty cheating on her with one of her new college friends. I remember she felt sorry for not understanding more how I’d felt after Luca.
The summer after junior year—the summer after the winter where I saw Luca in the elevator and slapped him—we roasted marshmallows and drank box wine almost every night. One morning, Ree decided she would buy a manual mower and tame the overgrown lawn. Instead she twisted her ankle, and we had to drive her to the area hospital, where we dropped her off and didn’t see her for two days, because a pretty nurse took her home.
I’m grinning as I pass Lake George.
I know this time will feel different. Frozen trees and snow on the ground. I brought jackets, boots, and several of my favorite blankets, plus a whole armful of books. Also marshmallows…because Lake Saranac. I feel a little guilty not inviting Dani or Ree, but sometimes you need to be alone. Like when you find out your whole life has been a lie.
Tears fill my eyes. I blink them away, but they keep coming. There’s a blue sign near Pottersville for a “Text Stop,” so I pull over there and give myself a minute. I hate crying. It seems stupid, like a waste of time, but I’m a crier and I always have been. Over time I realized it’s more logical to let it out and then proceed.
This time my tears are over the babies and their ’80s-tastic mothers in the photo from my dad’s library. When I confronted him, I asked randomly—seemingly randomly; nothing is ever really random—if the short-haired woman with the chubby baby boy was Luca’s mother, and Dad’s eyes widened.