LEAVING NEW HAVEN
I
was two days shy of my fourteenth birthday when we arrived at Riddell House in July 1990, but I remember being so sure of things back then. I knew the simple facts. My parents were broke. They’d filed for bankruptcy and lost their house in Connecticut. My father had lost his business—which was part of the reason they went bankrupt in the first place, a cataclysm which caused a great deal of tension in their relationship. I knew that my mother had left my father and me to seek refuge with her family in England. And I knew my father had brought me to a bizarre house in Seattle so I could see my past, my history. I’d never been to Riddell House before; I’d never met my grandfather or my aunt, and my father wanted me to know them. If you’re a chicken, at some point your rooster father shows you an egg and says: “That’s where you came from.” I understood that.
And I also knew that my mother’s flight to England and my father’s flight to Seattle were more than separate summer vacations. It was the beginning of their trial separation. Because things had been difficult between my parents for a while. And a couple can only fight with each other for so long before they cave in each other’s souls and collapse. Even if they once loved each other a lot. Even if they still did.
There were other kids at school in Connecticut whose parents had gotten divorced. I’d seen it. Kids bragged about the two Christmases they got. Double the presents. Double the love. But I could see it in their eyes, even then, when I was a kid. I could see they were bluffing. Hot Wheels only last so long before the axles get bent and they don’t drive straight. RC cars are only fun until you can’t find the controller.
It was a dark time in our lives when the bank foreclosed on our house and put it up at auction. We went to watch—it must have been a life lesson my parents wanted me to see, but I’m not sure it was a good idea. It wasn’t exciting, like selling a painting or an antique car when they show it on TV. It was pretty boring. A guy announced a price, someone else handed him a couple of pieces of paper, and he banged his gavel: our house was sold to a company in Alabama.
I felt let down. Is that an understatement? I thought my father was going to save us. I thought we went there so he could trump everyone with a final bid on our own house. He would raise his hand and the auctioneer would point to him and call for any challengers, of which there would be none, and our life would be back to normal.
But he didn’t save us. We walked away like everyone else did: our hands stuffed into our empty pockets.
It was very warm, an old-fashioned July heat wave, when we retired to our motel near the airport in New Haven. It wasn’t a horrible motel: it was clean and had a large parking lot and a pool surrounded by a tall iron fence. I’d been an only child my whole life, so I knew the drill. I put on my swim trunks and went to the pool, which didn’t entirely suck, even though some German tourist kids were winging a tennis ball back and forth in a weird game of chicken ball—three kids, whizzing a saturated tennis ball around like a missile, skimming it off the water. It was so intense, I was afraid my teeth would get knocked out if the ball hit me. I liked the pool, but I didn’t feel safe with the tennis ball flying around like that, so I got out and wrapped myself in extra towels I had taken from the towel cart, and I lay down on a vinyl lounge chair next to my parents, who were in the middle of a tense conversation and so didn’t notice me.
“Look at our lives,” my mother said to my father. “Everything is gone. You’re bitter and angry all the time.”
My father said nothing.
“I’ve been patient, Jones,” my mother continued. “I really have been. I’ve tried to help you. But you have to help yourself. I love you, Jones. On some level, I will always love you. But you have to understand: the moment has been forced to its crisis.”
There was a long silence. I was buried in my towels; I don’t think they even saw me or knew I was listening. That was how I got most of my information: listening in on conversations not meant for me.
“I feel like an ass when you quote poetry at me,” my father said, finally. “Who was that? Coleridge again?”
“Eliot, actually.”
My mother shook her head sadly.
“You’re not finished with that place,” she said. “You’ve always told me you were finished, but you aren’t. You still carry it with you wherever you go.”
“It’s difficult,” he said.
“No. Splitting an atom is difficult. Confronting your past is just something you’re meant to do. I’ve already agreed to let you take Trevor. So take him to where you grew up, to Riddell House. Show him who you are and show him why you are. And maybe you’ll find yourself there, too. And then . . .”
“And then?”
“And then we’ll be better able to see where we are.”
He nodded, but didn’t meet her eyes. She looked at him for a long time until he looked back.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said as she stood up to leave.
He reached his hand toward her. She hesitated a moment, and then she, too, reached out her hand, but not all the way, just until their fingertips touched. She nodded once, turned, and left.
My father lingered for several minutes, and then he left, too. As he walked away, one of the German kids winged the tennis ball across the pool; it ricocheted off a lounge chair, hit my father in the ribs, and bounced dead at his feet. He paused a moment, then picked up the ball and threw it as hard as he could, harder than I’d ever seen a person throw a ball. It soared out of the pool area, across the parking lot, bounced off a motel balcony railing, and landed in the bushes. And then he walked away.
Later that night, when my mother and I were together in the motel room—my father was in the shower—I asked her again to come with us to Riddell House.
“Oh, Trevor,” she said. “You simply don’t have the life experience to understand what’s going on here.”
Maybe I didn’t, I remember thinking very clearly. But I understood two things: first, somewhere along the way, my father had gone wrong and my mother stopped loving him; second, I could fix him. I could pull him together. And I believed that, by the end of the summer, if I did my job right, I could deliver my father to my mother as if he were a regular, loving person, like when she first met him.
And then? Well, then it would be up to her to decide where her heart lay. A kid can only do so much.
From A Sudden Light
by Garth Stein. Copyright 2014 by Garth Stein. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
