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Roderick sighs, taking off his glasses, and pinches the bridge of his nose. “You have to understand that I'm only just now learning a lot of this myself,” he explains. “Your father apparently kept a lot hidden from me –”
“What? What did he keep hidden from you?”
Roderick shifts in his seat and slips his glasses back on. He opens up a file that's sitting on his desk and shuffles through the top few pages. I'm sitting on the edge of my seat, the anticipation killing me. I keep hoping this is some sort of a sick prank. My dad had a warped sense of humor and liked pranking me for fun. He was always pulling stupid pranks just to get a rise out of me.
That is what this has to be, right? A stupid prank?
“Apparently, your father tried to diversify his portfolio by helping fund several small start-up businesses,” Roderick is reading off the page in his hand. “Everything he invested in failed – or, he was just swindled out of the cash, I can't be sure.”
My heart sinks into my stomach, and a wave of nausea rolls over me as he speaks. This can't be happening. This can't be real. There is no way in hell my dad would do something so reckless and irresponsible. No goddamn way. Not when he raised me to be so fastidious in my duties and education. He taught me to always be responsible and to always plan for the future, since nothing is ever guaranteed.
“There's more,” Roderick goes on.
“More?”
He nods solemnly, his face grave. “Your father has some quite extensive gambling debts,” he goes on. “He was in quite a deep hole of debt, actually. Which – explains things.”
I bury my face in my hands, doing my level best to hold back the tears that are welling in my eyes, and to keep Roderick from realizing that I'm crying tears of absolute rage. How could my father have done this to me? How in the hell could he have left me with nothing?
“Anyway,” he continues, “after all of his assets are liquidated and all of his creditors paid, there's not going to be anything left, Emily. I'm sorry. But other than the condo he had put in your name, he has nothing else.”
I bite back the bitter and angry reply hovering on my lips and sit back in my seat. This isn't Roderick's fault. It's not his doing. He didn't know anything about what my dad was doing any more than I did. But then, that thought turns inward – how could I have not known? How could I have not seen it? How was I so fucking blind to it?
I lived with him in the house I was raised in. I know that after my mother died a few years ago, he sort of went off the rails for a little while. I did, too – that’s why I spent two years traveling after college. But I thought he was getting better. He seemed so much happier and more optimistic about life and living – so how did I miss the signs that he was coming apart?
Roderick puts the pages down and takes off his glasses, setting them on top of the folder. He fixes me with an almost grandfatherly smile, the sympathy in his eyes more than clear.
“Don't you blame yourself for this. Don’t try to carry it all on your own shoulders,” he warns.
“I don't know where else to put it.”
And that's the truth. It's not like I can light my father up right now. He's dead. Gone. He can't be held accountable. All I can do is look at myself and wonder how in the hell I missed the fact that he was deteriorating right before my very eyes.
“I feel like I should have known,” I say, scrubbing away the tears rolling down my cheeks. “I should have seen it.”
The older man shakes his head. “Emily, I didn't see it and I've known your dad longer than you've been alive,” he sighs. “It kills me to say it, but he fucked up. Huge. And he made the decision to do what he did. This isn't on anybody other than him. This is his fault. Not yours. Do not take this on your shoulders. Do you understand me?”
It feels like there are ten thousand different thoughts and emotions swirling through my head all at once. It's like standing in the middle of a packed football stadium, listening to sixty thousand different and competing voices in my head, each one striving to be the loudest.
But the only things I know I'm genuinely feeling are frustration, hurt, fear – and rage.
I'm angry at my father – not just for leaving me broke, but for taking his own life. He chose to end his own suffering and inflict it onto me instead. He killed himself, leaving me behind to pick up all of the pieces and try to put them all back together on my own somehow.
“I truly am sorry, Emily. For everything,” Roderick's voice is soft, gentle. “I wish...”
His voice trails off, but he doesn't need to finish the statement. I wish for a lot of things too and it's more than clear that my wishes aren't going to be answered anytime soon. I don't know what I'm going to do – but even if I did, I don't know where to start.
Everything is screwed up and my life has been turned on its head. Nothing will ever be the same again. This is my new normal – I’m a woman, with a father who killed himself rather than talk to me and figure a way out of the mess he created, with nothing but a small condo to her name.
I realize having the condo is far more than many people have, but there are a lot of things I still relied on my dad for – school being the primary one. I decided back in high school to follow in his footsteps and become a lawyer in my own right.
It's a dream that I now know I have to hit the pause button on, if not cancel altogether. There's no way I'm going to be able to attend law school and hold down a job. Forget about a loan, because now with all of this, my credit is completely shot. Even if I did get a loan, it’d never be enough to cover New York rent and tuition, too. And since I barely have two nickels to rub together right now, getting a job has got to be my number one priority. There's nothing that can be done about it. I need a job. Period.
But hey, at least I'll have a roof over my head, right?
Thanks, Dad. Thanks a hell of a lot.
* * * * *
