I’m looking through a box labeled MOM JUNK, paying my respects in the basement, digging through and finding the old partially melted spatula she used to make me French toast on Saturday mornings. I find the scissors with the blue handles she used to trim my hair between barber visits. I find magazines with pages dog-eared for makeup or dresses she never had the chance to buy. I find her purse, the one she was carrying when she died. It’s a peach-pink color, shiny and warped from age and the sad fate of being stuffed in some basement box. Inside the purse is her wallet, the cash gone—if there ever was any—but it’s still full of change and balled-up cough-drop wrappers. There’s her key chain—her house keys and car key still snugly on the metal spiral. Dangling from the spiral is a little fake-gold locket, oval shaped, about the size of a quarter. It was a gift I’d given her in second grade after my elementary school held a shopping fair. Every parent gave the school a bit of money for their kids to go shopping for Christmas presents for their family and friends. I hold the locket in my hand; it’s cold and smaller than I remember. It has engraved swirling on the front, as if it’s almost someone’s name, and profound scratches on what was once a smooth back, before it was tarnished and scarred by the chaos of Mom’s purse. A tiny clasp opens the locket—empty. There’s no picture of me or lock of my hair. Maybe Mom didn’t even know it opened. But she carried it with love. Inside that empty trinket, the metal shines and I see my reflection on both sides, a man nearly thirty years old, still missing his mom.
“JUNK!” Dad yells, startling me as he kicks a partially used box of bathroom tile at the entrance to the basement. He pauses when he sees me standing at Mom’s shrine, my hands holding her old locket. Dad walks up to me and I shift in my shoes, the young coward still in me, still bracing to absorb whatever tantrum he may throw at me.
Clutching Mom’s locket, I jam my fingernail under the spiral of the key ring. With each step Dad takes toward me, I spin the locket, spinning, spinning, spinning, until it’s free of its binding. I slip it into my pocket as Dad approaches me, my fingertip throbbing under the nail.
Hey, Siri, I want to kill myself with this in my hand.
“I think about your mother every day,” Dad says.
“I’m sure,” I say, putting the rest of the key ring back in Mom’s purse and the purse back in the box, burying it with magazines and kitchen utensils and feelings. I close the box tightly, my little effort to protect her from him. I put pieces of a tractor carburetor on top exactly as I found them.
Hey, Siri, I want out of this basement.
“I think if this kidney cancer kills me,” Dad says, “the only good thing will be that I can be up there in heaven with her.”
“I’m certain she would not want that,” I say coldly, Dad not being one to catch the subtext. We’re quiet for a moment, the house above us feeling so big, sounding so quietly loud. I wonder if Dad is happy he finally got the silence he demanded of me all those years. If, after I moved out, he finally reveled in not hearing my footsteps, not hearing my music, grateful that I’d never dance in that home again.
Kathi Kannon haunts this home I grew up in. The tiny plastic molds of her franchised co-stars still exist—sans her—in a toy box tucked deep in a closet in my old bedroom. They mean nothing to me. It’s her I always treasured, taken from me years ago, gone at Dad’s hands, and now feeling gone from me again, this time at my own hand, my own inadequacies. If only I had been more charming, more prepared to meet her, briefed on how to manage a celebrity. Ugh, Bruce.
I’ve considered telling Dad about my interview with Kathi Kannon, trying to share with him some of my unhappy life, but what’s the point? I don’t need lectures about careers and money and liberal Hollywood. But I do ask him: “Dad, remember that action figure I had? The lady from the movie Nova Quest? Priestess Talara?”
In that basement, all the moisture and memories stick to our skin, leave a taste in our mouths, our warm breath filling in the space left by our few moments of silence. I can’t look at my father. I wonder if he heard me. I wonder if he’s ignoring me. I wonder, if I did look at him, would he see my childhood face, remember my screaming when he took Priestess Talara away?
“Do you remember her?” I ask again, pressing gently. “In Nova Quest she was played by that actress … I think her name was … Kathi Kannon?”
Dad says, “Who?”
* * *
Hey, Siri, I want to kill myself in Dad’s hospital room.
Here I sit, cold, bored, staring at my father’s weathered, sliced, and stitched body, and cursing Kathi Kannon for not hiring me, saving me from this. Cursing her for not picking me, cursing Bruce for giving me hope, cursing myself for accepting it. It has been eight days since I met her. Hey, Siri, why can’t I let it go?
My dad survived surgery, of course. Therapista says it’s normal to want a parent to die, because we know we’ll have that pain eventually—no one lives forever—and sometimes we just want to get it over with. But like smallpox, he persists. He looks so sad in this bed, post-op, his gown askew, his tanned contractor’s skin in stark contrast with the bleached white sheets, his hair unburdened of the hairspray he uses to vainly hide his balding. Whose shirt is untucked now?
I lean in toward his bruised body, hear his shallow breathing. “Mom didn’t like you. You won’t go to heaven with her,” I whisper. I feel bold saying it audibly, a courage tempered by scars—I know what happens when I’m too comfortable around him. Sometimes I still feel those pink socks on my feet and my icy regret that I didn’t just take the fucking socks off before I went downstairs. Sometimes I still feel angry that I wasn’t more careful around his ire, more guarded against him breaking me. There are so many of those moments in my life where he muted me a little at a time. Just like those green metal signposts on the highway leading me home to Perris, I can look back at my life and see the moments building toward my complete cowardice. Two hundred miles, one hundred miles, fifty miles—there are so many childhood moments that are a countdown to my stunted adulthood. There was the episode where he made me wear Mom’s underwear. There was the time he made me play tennis even though I had what we later learned was a hairline fracture in my wrist from tripping at school the day before; he didn’t care. There was the time he made me sleep on the front porch because I lost my house key. There was the time he tore up all seven pages of a book report because I made one spelling error on page 5 and had to rewrite all of it; perfection, he wanted. And now I wish he was dead, and he’s not. And now I wish I was back in L.A., and I’m not. And now I wish I was in a relationship—to have anyone significant in my life other than him—and I’m not.
I lean in again, and now louder I say, “I’m not afraid of you.” I sit back and wonder if he can hear all this. If he’ll wake and think it’s a dream, that some angel spoke to him and his whole worldview will change.
I lean in once more, and even louder I say, “You ruined my life. All we had was each other and you fucked it up. You owe me an apolo—” but a nurse walks in.
I sit back in my chair, blood rushing to my face, blushing, busted.
“Hi, baby,” she says, beelining to Dad’s chart and clicking her ink pen to start making notes. “How’s it going?”