WHEN LEE WAS THIRTEEN,Charlotte (with the help of a Catholic addiction counselor named Robby) had organized a Sunday afternoon intervention for Winston. Robby had told Lee to lead her father into the dining room, where everyone else was waiting. He explained that an element of surprise was useful: Winston wouldn’t have time to mount defenses and could more easily be convinced to fly to rehab in upstate New York.
Lee knew her father drank too much. He was mean, perhaps abusive. But still, she wanted to win him, loved him mightily, and craved his approval. So as she knocked at the den door, rehearsing Robby’s line (“We have a surprise in the dining room, Dad”), she hated Charlotte for making her betray her father.
“What?” said Winston. They weren’t supposed to disturb him in the den.
“It’s me,” said Lee.
“Ah, Lee Lee,” said Winston. “Come in.”
She turned the knob. The shades were drawn and Winston sat in his leather recliner, a glass of scotch on the Oriental rug, a smoking cigarette in an ashtray. “What is it?” he said.
Her stomach roiled. She always felt revved up around Winston, ready to run. You never knew how he would hurt you. Lee had once written him a note that said,If you love me, you will stop drinking. She’d hidden it in his underwear drawer. It was all she had to threaten, and she’d innocently believed it was enough. It was not enough.
“We have a surprise for you in the dining room,” said Lee.
He stood, sighing. He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. “An intervention, I suppose?” he said.
Lee blanched.
“Even you,” said Winston bitterly, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t have thought even you.”
“Dad, I…”
“Just skip it,” he said. Winston picked up his glass, strode to the dining room, pushed the swinging door open. “Well, what do we have here?” he said.
Lee’s siblings, along with Charlotte and Robby, sat at the dining room table. Lee joined them reluctantly. They addressed Winston as they had been trained: here’s what your drinking has done to me; here’s why you should go to St. Joseph’s right now, after this meeting, it’s all arranged; we love you. As each of them spoke, nine-year-old Regan crying so hard she could barely speak, Lee had thought,Fuck this.She saw the contempt in her father’s eyes, and traitorously, Lee agreed with him: this blubbering, this vulnerability, was a joke.
When it was Lee’s turn, she looked up from the carefully prepared script, a dot-matrix printout describing a litany of Winston’s terrorizing behavior and drunk driving, and she said simply, “I love you, Dad.” Charlotte reached over and took Lee’s hand. Lee shook her off.
Winston looked at his family banded together in the naïve hope that they could change him. Without a word, he walked back to the dining room door, pushed it open, and exited. They heard the den door slam shut. Lee looked around the table at her ashen-faced mother, her young and pathetic siblings, and disappointed Robby. She understood that they were weak. Lee stood, and left the room.
—
WHEN SHE MOVED TOLos Angeles, Lee had thought she was free. But even on the other side of the country, she had felt responsible for Charlotte. And now here she was: surrounded by her family on a cruise ship, watching as the mandatory safety briefing morphed into a dance show.
“There’s no such thing as too much fun!” crowed Cord, approaching and handing her a blue drink. Lee felt tears welling. Cord, her little brother. She wanted to bury her face in his chest and tell him everything. But she didn’t know how to talk about failure. She didn’t know how to ask for help.
“Hey,” said Cord, who must have seen something in her face. “Are you okay?”
There had been a time when Cord would call Lee late at night, drunk and wanting to talk. She’d pour wine, settle herself into a chair by her bay window, and they’d commiserate, chatting for hours about not much at all. When had the calls stopped? Lee had been so caught up in her own life that she couldn’t even remember. He’d told her, during one of the last calls, that his own drinking was scaring him. Lee had written it off—weren’t they all too hard on themselves? “Of course I’m okay,” said Lee. “Why?”
“You look sad,” said Cord.
Lee bristled, immediately on the defensive. “And you look drunk,” she said.
He stepped back as if he’d been slapped. They were always so hard on each other: Lee realized immediately that she’d hurt him. It came naturally—it was the way they’d always interacted. Lee burned a path forward, leaving Cord and Regan to follow in her scorched wake. She was the one with the torch.
Cord swayed on his feet. Lee had thought that by not caring, she would be safe. But what if she had stayed in the dining room, after Winston had left? What if she had squeezed Charlotte’s hand back?
“I’m sorry,” said Lee. “I’m so sorry, Cord.”
Cord looked young, scattered lights from a disco ball illuminating his face. “I am drunk,” he said. “I can’t seem to stop. And you know what else? I’m gay.” He looked down, seemed unable to meet her eyes. Did he really think she’d spurn him? Lee’s insides melted. Her little brother was vulnerable, open in a way that Lee would never allow herself to be. Even now, she wanted to shut this communication down, to walk away.
“I love you,” said Lee. Of course, they all knew he was gay. The only weird part was that he hadn’t told them. They saw each other so rarely, was how Lee had explained it to herself.
“I need to tell Mom,” said Cord.
Here it was—the space to tell someone how lost she felt, how alone. A way to reach back through time and gather him close. Maybe the answer had always been in that dining room—that together, they would be okay.
