Page 60 of Earthly Ties

Angel blinks. “Was that in her notes, too?”

Esther shakes her head, and for a moment, I worry she’s about to tell him I’m haunting her. “No, her friend Cash, her advisor when she was an undergrad, told me. He used to tell me about how much he admired Lucy, and how creative and relentless she was. Everything she had, all of her success, was from sheer force of will, he’d say.” Esther looks down at her lap, wringing her hands.

At the risk of Mom noticing me, I ground myself and place my hands over hers. Esther laces our fingers together under the table. I’m hesitant to speak, in case Mom hears me, but our fingers twined together say all I need to say.

I’m still not sure what I want to say to them, if anything.

“Mom used to say she was a storm cloud. Quiet, tense, foreboding, you never knew when she’d unleash destruction. Which, again—she was a child!” Angel shakes his head. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. I wish I could tell her that I don’t see her that way.”

“She knows,” Esther says simply.

“How?”

I look at her, to see how she can explain away her confidence.

“From her journal.” There’s no trace of upspeak in Esther’s voice. It’s the way she gets in the rare moments when she’s at her most assertive, when she has something important she needs to get across. “She understood you were a kid, too. That you were cruel to her, but your mom brainwashed you. Lucy was the scapegoat, and how were you supposed to question it when you’re a kid?”

That phrasing gets Mom’s attention. “He wasn’t brainwashed! It was the truth! Lucy was evil! I was protecting him!”

I sigh. Should have known Mom would take issue with that. Angel is free to call her out, but the second someone else does, all bets are off.

“How could Lucy be evil? She was a damn kid!” Oh good, Dad’s still here, too. “It’s about time Angel understood that. It’s about time he started listening to me, instead of your lies!”

“Can either of you just listen to Angel?” I snap. Esther looks over at me, but quickly returns to listening to Angel process his feelings, before he notices her attention is on the empty chair next to her. “This emotional crisis he’s in isn’t about you—it’s about him! You both are part of the reason he’s crying in a bar on a Thursday afternoon, so if you truly love him, listen to him!”

“You think you know him better than I do? I’m his mother! You abandoned him!” Mom shouts, and I don’t bother to hide the roll of my eyes.

When Mom gets going on a tirade, she doesn’t let up. I blink a few times to tune her out—a skill I haven’t forgotten in the dozen years since I’ve seen her. Esther squeezes my hand, still in her lap. I squeeze back to tell her I’m okay. At least, as okay as I can be, given the circumstances. I can barely hear her and Angel speaking over Mom’s shrill voice.

“Lucy, I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to tell you, I’m sorry.” Dad's veiled figure floats closer to me. “I’ve thought so much about what you said. Just seeing you shocked me—I thought you had just gotten Tied to Angel, too. But then you left with someone I’d never heard of before, and I realized just how distant you and Angel are, how long it’s been since he’d heard from you.”

Dad reaches out, as if to take my hand, but pulls away when I don’t reach back. “I did care. I hope you know that. I hope you can believe me. You always just seemed so independent and focused when Angel was young, that I didn’t realize how hurt you were. Everything seemed to just roll off your back. Like you didn’t care about him, or anything your mom said.”

I sit quietly, trying to accept the excuses Dad’s making for himself. We’re both ignoring Mom at this point. We both had years of practice tuning her out. I don’t know if she’ll ever learn to listen.

“Not that that’s an excuse,” Dad adds, when I don’t answer. “You were my daughter, a child, and I should have tried to be there for both of you, not just Angel. I was so focused on trying to counteract everything your mom was telling him, instead of seeing what was truly important.” Dad sighs. “I didn’t drink myself to death, you know. I know that’s what your mom told you, but I chose this.”

“You killed yourself?” I ask, curiosity getting the better of my anger.

“No!” His veil shakes firmly. “Not on purpose. I got stuck here. I was trying this meditation shit to help me sober up, and I got really into this one book…damn, I lost what it was called. Long story short, I was reading some long ass Hindu epic, and in it there’s this guy who separated his soul from his body, so he could see his son while he was imprisoned. Did my best to figure out how to do that myself, since there was no one waiting to stab me.”

My face screws up in confusion, because I know this story. This story is under the butterfly doodle in my course notes for the Phil of Death. “The Mahabharata?”

“Yeah! That’s the one!” His hand flicks under his shroud, as if he’s snapping his fingers, but of course, there’s no sound. “I wasn’t patient enough for it, but I got pretty decent at lucid dreaming. Enough to see you kids anyway.”

“Instead of filing for custody, you astral projected yourself into your toddler son’s dreams and what, got stuck?” I ask, with a snort. “Because that sounds more plausible than you drinking yourself to death. You were hitting more than just the bottle at the end, huh?”

Dad cocks his head, and my heart lurches. Behind his veil, I can picture so clearly the deadpan, skeptical look on his face. It’s how he looked at Mom all the time when I was young, when she said something that rubbed him the wrong way; I can tell he’s giving me that same look just from how he tilts his head. “Yeah, I know how it sounds. How it must have felt. But your mom and I—neither of us were perfect. No court would have awarded me custody.” His tone is softer than I remember, when he wore that look on his face for Mom. Behind his shroud, his doubtful expression must be softened with that same crooked smile that Angel inherited. “So I fucked around with shit I didn’t understand, didn’t respect, and I went too far. I couldn’t find my way back to my body. But I did dream of you, too. All the time. You were easier to find then, because you were looking for me, too. It’d be just us on the ol’ porch swing, or driving nowhere and making up stories about the shapes in the clouds.”

“In the Cadillac,” I murmur, my heart in my throat. I want so badly to believe that his dreams were real and not an alcohol-induced delusion. Because I loved those dreams, and those dreams being real would mean he loved me. If Esther and I shared dreams, why couldn’t my father share dreams with his children?

“That’s right, in the back of the Cadillac, top down. Just like the old Sunday drives I’d take with my parents,” he says, just as softly, his voice barely audible over Mom. “I didn’t intentionally choose Angel over you. You always found me in the dreams when you wanted to see me. Angel…Angel never knew me. I tried to find him, to bring him to the dream plane so he could get to know me, too. So he could ride in the Caddy with us. Only I went too far and couldn’t get back.”

He shakes his head again, regret palpable in his voice. “My options were to stay Tied to Angel, or move on. And how could I move on when my son still needed me? When I could still watch you both grow up? If I could have somehow Tied myself to both of you, I would have. It probably doesn’t mean much because the end result was the same, but I swear I didn’t intentionally abandon you.”

“I forgive you, if that’s what you need.” I wish I could see his eyes through his shroud, the same eyes I used to see in the mirror, to know if he’s telling the truth or simply trying to assuage his guilt. But the wisp of a white veil over his head is milky and opaque wherever my eyes can catch it.

Maybe he’s been dead so long that he’s rationalized everything to himself. Or he’s invented a story based on the dreams I told him about when I was a kid, to make himself feel less guilty. Not that he should feel guilty. He died and found something worth hanging onto, even if I wish it had been me.