I am an infant, wearing white, at my own baptism. We’re in a brightly-lit Catholic church, and Dad just slammed a few beers in the parking lot because he hates religion and maybe hates dressing up in his elbow-patch blazer even more. We’re both here against our will. He is holding me while I struggle against him, while I struggle to breathe, while I struggle to scream because the ceiling is too high, and I was only recently acquainted with the world through the low, clear dome of an incubator upon which Dad used to tap his heavy index finger to the rhythm of “You’re. Gonna. Live. You’re Gonna Live.”
We are in Santa Cruz, living up the street from Blacks Beach. I am about to turn three. Dad is building my uncle’s mansion into the side of a mountain. I have seen the bones and guts of this glass-and-stucco giant, lying sideways on the hill, not yet alive or living, and I understand it won’t be until my cousins move in. “This will be your cousin Lindsey’s room,” Dad says into the hollow cave, where I will one day climb through the window to smoke cigarettes on the balcony, then hide the pack in a plastic Ziploc that I will toss down the ravine. I will retrieve it later by wrapping the cable cord from the enormous satellite dish around my waste to scale the steep incline, slipping on rotting mulch and shuddering against spiderwebs. We will shower off the scent and spritz ourselves with perfume to a soundtrack of Beastie Boys and R.E.M. We will do everything right and wrong to avoid getting caught. But right now Cousin Lindsey’s room looks burned out and hollow, without electricity or drywall.
Dad is at work when our TV bursts into flame in the living room. The corner behind the TV glows orange, and Mom stands in the open doorway across the room, screaming at me to get my shoes on. I struggle with the velcro across my tiny feet, scolding myself for my lack of dexterity. I am a beach baby. Why do I need shoes for this? The sirens are approaching with an awful foreboding.
This is the sound of an emergency, and it won’t be our last.
“Hurry up, get your shoes on, there’s a fire!” Mom yells, frantic, framed by the tall trees beyond the balcony.
I toss my hands in the air and in my most authoritative, exasperated voice, I shout, “I’m two-and-a-half,” as though this should end all disputes going forward. I stand and run across the room as fast as I can, propelled by a sense of danger that will linger long after the flames are doused.
The firefighters arrive, bulky and slow-moving, lethargic and unperturbed. They toss the flaming TV off the balcony into the green, overgrown yard. Mom blushes, bats her eyelashes. They see that we are fine, they tip their helmets, and maneuver their engine out of our one-lane beach street just as Dad turns in from a long day’s work.
They can’t possibly be coming from my house, he thinks.
“Fire truck, Daddy, fire truck!” My twin sister and I chant when he climbs the steps and sees the old TV steaming in the grass below. “Rice! Uh-Roni! The San Francisco Treat!” We chant, our favorite commercial, now melted into the dented gray box lying mortally wounded in the thicket. Dad just stares at it, as if trying to work out a mathematical equation.
It’s time to buy me some new shoes, and this is not my dad’s favorite errand. He takes me to Payless Shoes and helps me find a pair of Jem and the Holograms sneakers, but as usual he makes me try on a pair in my size, and then purchases the next size up because he’s not doing this every six months, goddammit. He jams the sneakers onto my feet and I wince as he tightens the laces like he’s battening down the hatches on a naval ship headed towards weather. He puts my old outgrown shoes in the box and hands them to the cashier to toss away.
At home, I hobble around the house and sigh heavily while mom cooks dinner. I finally sit at the kitchen table and let out a soft whimper and tears gather. Mom turns to me and asks what’s the matter, so I tell her my shoes hurt my feet. A lot.
“Why didn’t you tell your dad while you were at the store?” She says, exasperated.
“I didn’t want to hurt his feelings,” I say, and burst into tears.
Mom whips a tea towel over her shoulder and crouches in front of me to wrench the tight laces apart and pull my shoes off. Inside both shoes is the wadded up factory paper stuffed deep into the toe box, now hot and sweaty and a little shredded. She puts her hand to her forehead and laughs so hard tears squeeze out. “Well, no wonder,” she says when she composes herself. Later I overhear her tell this story to one of her girlfriends over the kitchen wall phone while she cleans up and completes her master’s program in Library Science.
When we turn four, Mom and Dad throw an enormous birthday party, with a clown entertainer and a rented camcorder and everything. All our pre-school friends come over with their parents and we sit in the shady spot to watch the clown perform. Halfway through the performance, I stand up and walk inside the house.
That’s enough socializing for one day.
As I pass my dad behind the tripod he whispers, “Where are you going? Where’s she going?” You can hear this in the audio recording of the video. I hope all our friends appreciated that clown lady, with the Raggedy-Ann yarn wig.
I am five and I am dozing flat-faced on a scratchy bedspread in a cheap motel in Elko, Nevada, where Dad lives while he is building something. There is a communal kitchen across the hall with sticky floors and that’s where Dad keeps the milk for my tiny box of Fruity Pebbles I eat every morning. In our room, the Thunderkittens are on the VHS player he rented last night, and this is where I first learn my fashion sense, which is one sleeve off the shoulder or under my armpit. I’m WilyKit and I’m here to fight vague crime.
Dad brought us here by train from the Boise Train Depot. When Dad went to the bathroom car during the journey, my sister poked me and we sat up straight to belt out, “Iiiiiii wanna DANCE with someBODY! Yeah I wanna feel the HEAT with somebodayyy…YEAH I wanna dance with somebody…With somebody who loves meeee!”
By the time Dad returned from the restroom we were silent. My head rested in a stranger lady’s lap. When other passengers disembarked they waved at us and said, “Bye, ladies! We loved your singing!”
Dad turned to us both and asked, “What singing? What are they talking about?”
I am seven, and my mom bought a house in the Boise Highlands on her reference librarian salary at the Boise Public Library and a loan from Dad. Remember when that was possible? At night I lay awake gazing into my night light across my first very own bedroom. And I cry because someday my parents will die. I’ll never know a carefree childhood.
It’s Thanksgiving, and Dad is living in a tiny trailer. The kind on wheels that drags behind a car. He parks it in a trailer trash dump in Meridian, Idaho and it’s the only time he ever tells me not to talk to any of the male neighbors while I ride around on my bike. He collects a paycheck in a construction office with a boss he hates but who gives him benefits to pay for me and my sister to get a public education in the North End of Boise. He has a La-Z-Boy® taking up the entire living space, and a broken Garfield telephone that he keeps just for me because he knows I’ll only wake up on Saturday mornings for that one cartoon cat. It’s the only toy in the trailer, except his old mended teddy bear from when he was a toddler. It smells weird.
For Thanksgiving dinner, Dad asks me what I want to eat because he is not a traditionalist and he knows I’m picky, so getting any food in me is a triumph. I tell him I want a TV chicken dinner, so he takes us to the local grocer and lets me point at the the frozen box I want. My sister is scandalized because right now our mom is rightfully dining with friends on a real turkey dinner without us, but I’ll never complain because Dad rents Dirty Rotten Scoundrels from a video store, and I’m eating my microwaved fried chicken leg, happy as a clam, when he produces a plate stacked with Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies baked in his easy-bake oven right by the tiny shower stall that is too small even for me. When I swell with glee he says, “You can have ONE.”
I don’t care, because thanks to Steve Martin and Michael Caine and the criminally uncelebrated Glenne Headly, now I know it’s okay to laugh at hardship, and that every adult is just faking it all.
I am eight, and Dad has a blonde, sway-backed horse named Ted. He keeps Ted on a friend’s farm. While I brush Ted’s hair and hook a canvas bag of oats over his ears and sneak him carrots and apples and sugar cubes, I try to commune with him like a magical horse whisperer. And Ted whispers back, alright. “I don’t really like you at all,” he says to me, and then jostles me a little too roughly while I ride him around the corral. Giddy up, giddy up, hey.
I am ten when I deliver a comedic presentation to my fifth grade class on the dangers of Emphysema and the addiction of smoking nicotine products. I even fashion a diseased lung out of clay and use a black marker to crosshatch soot haphazardly around the surface.
Later that year I step out our front door to see Dad hastily whip a cigarette from his mouth and hide it behind his back. A thin wisp of smoke unfurls behind his shoulder. Immediately I turn and run to my bedroom to hide in my closet and silently weep. I’ve always known he would die one day, but now I know exactly how. This is my first heartbreak.
It’s that same year when my sister and I finally outgrow the passenger seat of Dad’s blue Chevy work van. He pulled the bench seats from the back for all his tools, so we’ve been squished together under a lap belt in the passenger bucket seat up front for years. Our hips are just wide enough now that one of us (me) is forced to sit a little crooked, using an elbow to brace against the seat for every pot hole and speed bump. Dad notices and comes up with a plan.
He opens the sliding door to the van one day to reveal a large vintage Coleman cooler filled with river rocks, and there is a lap belt looped under the lid. As with all things, my sister gets the front passenger seat to herself while I sit on the cooler between her and my Dad while he drives. Again, with every pot hole or speed bump, I bounce just a little on the hard cooler lid, the lap belt cutting across my legs. After a long car ride, Dad notices me walking stiffly and digs out a seat cushion from his river raft that is filled with what feels like dry concrete powder. This is my new car seat. We will drive many hours across the Nevada desert for custody hand-offs to and from Santa Cruz, and this will be my seat every year, all the way through high school as I blare Tori Amos and Beck albums through my headphones.
Dad always prides himself on being Mr. Safety, but as I sit on that cooler filled with river rocks, flinching every time we hit a minor bump in the road, I brace my hands on the backs of his and my sister’s chairs. I cringe with the mortification of possibly being thrown from the vehicle in an accident, only to be found nearby with a cooler full of rocks strapped to my ass.
“You’re only eleven,” my dad says, as I crouch in a frog squat next to his wood burning stove and describe my dream wedding in alarming detail. I’m plagiarizing from scenes from Father of the Bride (1991). There’s Steve Martin again. It’s spring break, but McCall, Idaho hasn’t gotten the message yet so the logs are ablaze and the windows are dark.
“How about instead of fantasizing about something that might not happen, we switch to what will actually happen,” he says. “Someday I’ll die. But I don’t want to be kept on life support, you hear me? I want you to memorize three important letters: D N R”.
I nod sagely. “I’m eleven,” I say.
“I will remind you of this conversation every two years until I die.”
I am all grown up. I’ve had my dream wedding and I have premature white hair like Steve Martin. But now I’m weeping outside the chemo lab at St. Luke’s in Boise, where my dad is suffering an acute reaction to the chemo drug. His face is turning gray and his eyes are wide. Suddenly the three letters he drilled into me since I was eleven evaporate when we make wide-eye contact, and I read his gray face : “Resuscitate. Resuscitate. Resuscitate”, he begs.
I’ve already been plunging nutrient-dense formula through a hole in his stomach because the radiation stole his swallow reflex. I crush medicine tablets under a spoon, dissolve them in warm water, add the liquid meds that I know won’t interact with each other because I had to learn in under 24 hours how not to poison my dad while keeping him alive. I swab the feeding tube site just under his belly button with alcohol at least once a day to prevent infection or tissue decay. I smear lidocaine over his chemo port that bulges from his right breast bone every morning because it must be numbed at least one hour before an infusion, but that is the least of our worries by now. I drive him through rush hour traffic morning and afternoon to and from the cancer center, and I look so haggard every day the parking attendant mistakes my twin sister for my daughter.
On the worst days and nights, or on the side of the road, I wrap my fists in paper towels or old linens and coax a two-foot long cobra of ropy phlegm from his throat, careful not to break it because he could choke on it, while I choke on the smell of it. At night I curl under the covers and shudder because, even though I have scrubbed his diarrhea from the baseboards multiple times and I have lowered him onto a toilet while I gazed at the ceiling, I hate snot most of all.
I’ll attempt to treat my dad’s severe radiation burns that weep across his charred throat while the world spins on an indifferent axis, totally apathetic to the lifeline I cling to. When he sleeps, I’ll set an alarm for myself to rouse long enough to sneak an extra hundred calories, a douse of olive oil for fat intake, or a little water through his tube, because getting any food in him is a triumph.
And then I’ll stay up another hour to watch him breathe, just in case. We have come full circle. We have roll-reversed and we’ll never again course-correct.
But today, it’s his first infusion of chemo, and my chin wobbles as we walk in to the clinic. I hate that we’re here. I hate Theresa, the nurse who used to be a computer scientist at Quantico, who yells at me and my sister to choose which one of us gets to sit with our dad during his three-hour infusion, like a bad fucking lottery. It’s Covid protocol. I am Wilykit again, fighting Theresa, a fictional foe who I need to push all the right buttons on my dad’s infusion machine. After a few months she’ll grow on me.
Dad is transported to the emergency room through the bowels of St. Luke’s, and he wheezes and struggles for air while nurses surround him and the doctor shrugs, and a respiratory therapist tries every tool in her box to get air into his nicotine-diseased lungs, and I leave a sweaty handprint on the window as I rhythmically command, “You’re gonna live. You’re. Gonna. Live.”
[2019, revised 2024]