He shook his head, then patted my knee as if to absolve me of something.
When we said goodbye outside my dorm, we agreed that these cross-country trips would be our tradition for the remainder of mytime at college. He picked me up that spring, and dropped me off the next fall. But our cadence was interrupted when I dropped out halfway through my sophomore year, certain that whatever debt I was racking up in student loans did not justify whatever I was (or wasn’t) learning.
My mother was incensed that I had left school, but my father was more understanding. “You can always go back,” he said, when I told him over the phone. “But you can learn a lot in the real world, too.”
I returned to New York and to my mother’s apartment, and a few months after that, my father came to town. He still spent the majority of his time in the Adirondacks, but he had occasional business in the city, and we met for lunch. When I arrived at our favorite coffee shop on the Upper West Side, I almost didn’t recognize him, though he sat in our usual booth. He looked older, but it wasn’t so much the physical changes that struck me; it was something more holistic. His energy had flattened. Though Nina had told me he was feeling depressed, I hadn’t expected it to be so manifest. He rose to give me a hug and tousled my hair, which I had recently dyed electric blue, but didn’t pass judgment on the color.
We ordered our usual BLTs and attempted to make small talk. He told me there hadn’t been much snow that year. He had only had to shovel a few times. I told him I was looking for work—waitressing or nannying or something like that. I knew he could see how much I was floundering without my having to say it, just as I could see how he was hurting. But by that point, neither of us wanted to talk directly about Seth’s accident or its aftermath—the divorce, our respective spirals. And despite my intention to apologize to him someday for the terrible things I had said, it felt too late now. There were too many layers of guilt and loss to sift through, and too much distance between us.
“I’d like to see you more often,” said my father. He stayed with friends when he was in the city now, so he usually only spent a few days at a time there. Catwood Pond had been the place where we connected most deeply, where our attachment to each other could flourish in its natural habitat. “Do you think you might come up to Locust this summer? Even just briefly?”
“Maybe,” I said, though I knew the answer was no. It was the place where my life had gone off the rails, and I couldn’t fathom going back until I felt more stable—until I was a new person. But I also didn’t want to deflate his hopes, so I said, “It depends on work. Once I actually find work, that is.”
The truth was: I hadn’t been looking. I’d been waiting for something to findme. In the interim, I’d been lolling about my mother’s apartment, and she’d grown increasingly exasperated with my aimlessness.
“Of course, of course,” my father said, placing a balled-up napkin on his now-empty plate. “You have a whole life to build. Much to look forward to.”
I could tell he was trying to sound upbeat for my sake, but he wasn’t good at hiding his gloom. This wasn’t the father I had known my whole life. His lightheartedness was gone, replaced by something heavier. On my side of the booth, I felt weighed down as well. Seeing each other in this state was painful for both of us.
“You know,” my father said, choosing his words carefully, “most parents say that all they want is for their children to be happy. But that’s not how life works, Cricket. I want you to experience happiness, of course, but sadness is part of the equation, too, as you well know. What I want is for you to have a rich, full life that is uniquely yours. What I want is for you to chart your own course. It’s all I ever wanted, even when you were little. I think every child deserves that—the space to mine her own thoughts, hear her own voice, be her own person.”
“I know, Dad,” I say. While my mother had a tendency to impose her ideas and expectations, my father had always provided an important counterbalance. I knew that, fundamentally, they were both motivated by love for their daughters, but it manifested differently. My mother sought control; my father chose curiosity.
“We’ll spend time together again when the time is right.” My father attempted a reassuring smile. “I just miss you, Cricket.”
My throat clenched. “I miss you, too, Dad.”
“Do you think you might come up to Locust this summer?” he asked again.
“Dad, you already asked me that.”
He looked puzzled, but then nodded. “Right.”
It was the first time I clocked his forgetfulness, but after that, I noticed that he had more and more lapses. I only saw him one more time before the pandemic hit the following spring, and we all became house-bound. As the world slowed to a halt, seismic shifts happened within my life: Nina decided to relocate to Catwood Pond; my father received a formal Alzheimer’s diagnosis; and my mother moved to London to start a new life with George.
It was all too much. The events of the past few years created a cascade of grief: Seth’s death, my parents’ divorce, my father’s diagnosis, the onset of the pandemic. Not to mention that I felt I had lost one home (Catwood Pond) and then another (our New York apartment). It was like getting hit by a wave each time I tried to come up for air. Before long, I left behind the life I had known and began drifting like a tumbleweed—taking random jobs in Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, the Florida Keys. Restless and rootless, I searched for myself.
When the pandemic finally subsided, I returned to New York. Broadway had just reopened and I landed the gig selling merchandise atThe Phantom of the Opera. Not long after, Nina said she was bringing my father to the city for a few specialized cognitive tests, and we agreed to meet for lunch.
I was the first to arrive at our go-to spot on the Upper West Side. I was eager to show them that I was okay, that I had weathered the pandemic and had finally straightened out, that they could stop worrying about me. But when Nina and my father finally walked in, it was clear he hadn’t been worrying over me at all. In fact, he seemed like his old self, except for one thing: he didn’t recognize me.
Nina gave me a hug and gestured for my dad to take a seat beside me in the booth. He hesitated before saying to her, “Wouldn’t you like to sit with your friend here?”
Nina and I both froze. I looked from my father to her, and she looked from me back to him.
“Dad, it’s Cricket,” she said.
He looked at me. “Hello, Cricket.”
It was worse than I could have imagined. It wasn’t that he had mistaken me for someone else, or that he couldn’t pull up my name. He didn’t know me at all. He thought I was simply someone Nina had invited.
In that moment, I had never felt more alone in my life.
We muddled our way through lunch, with Nina scrambling to smooth over my dad’s lapses, but there was no denying what had happened. It’s not that I had lost my father—it’s that he had lost me. I had been erased.
Still stuck in the emotional residue of losing Seth, I now had to face the fact that my relationship with my father would never be repaired. One heartbreak compounded the other, and it was under the weight of these burdens that I drifted into my job at Actualize.
Chapter 28
