What it Means to Grow Up

I remember it from eighth period on; I was in ninth grade, 15 years old, and I had math class. I refused to share my book with Ainslee, one of my more temperamental friends, and she called me a bitch. I didn’t care, it was Friday, and I knew it would blow over by Monday. Except Monday never came for me, not that one. I went home, excited, because it was my mother’s birthday. Birthdays in my house meant pizza or Chinese for dinner, the choice of the birthday boy or girl, with a Carvel ice cream cake for dessert, and of course, presents. After all of that, we were going to Upton Lake’s “Spring Fling,” the annual spring concert at the school where my little brother was in second grade.

Mom came home from work, ordered the pizza, and was out getting it when the police came. I hated answering the door when no one else was home, but it was the police; I was not about to pretend to not be home. I answered the door, and the policeman asked if my mom was home. “She’s out getting dinner,” I replied, hating the sound of it, as if my mother couldn’t cook when she was actually a great cook, always making things like turkey soup or Hungarian goulash. “Okay, thank you,” he said, and walked back out to his car. He didn’t leave. It seemed an eternity until Mom got home. She came in just long enough to hand me the pizza; I put it in the oven on the lowest setting, just enough to keep it warm. She went back out to the cop, and talked to him for
a few minutes, and then started pacing back and forth, back and forth. A million thoughts ran through my head, none of them anywhere near right. “It’s her birthday, how dare you come here on her birthday…what did she do, we need our mother, she can’t go to jail…I don’t care what she was involved in, she can’t go to jail, and you should not be here on her birthday…what the fuck is taking so long…why is she looking at the ground, and pacing…what is going on?”

She came back in as the police car drove down the driveway half an hour later. I ran from my perch in the playroom in front of the window to the kitchen, where mom was standing between the table and the fridge. I looked at her questioningly; she had to tell me what was wrong, why the cop was there. “Court, I have to tell you something…” there it was, she was involved in some scam, she was going to jail…“Daddy shot himself.”

I stepped back and gasped, my hands rising to cover my face. My eyes filled with tears, numb and excruciating all at the same time, exactly like a year before when he told me that my grandmother had died, but this time, he wasn’t there to hold me while I cried. He was the reason I was crying, and he would never hold me again. I don’t remember the next 15 minutes. I know I cried, I know mom held me, but I can’t actually remember these things happening. There was no way things could get any worse…“we have to go tell Adam.” Oh my god. My little brother, six years old, was upstairs in Wesley’s room playing Nintendo. I felt sick to my stomach; I had a lump in the pit of my stomach unlike any other I had ever felt…the type of thing that cannot be understood by those who have not felt it. We went up and said that we had something to tell him. I sat down on the
mattress on the floor that served as Wes’ bed, and mom followed me. “Hold on while I pause it.” I told him not to bother, to just turn it off. He wouldn’t feel like going back. He took it well for a six year old, no questions, no fits…just tears.

The next half hour is also blank. The next thing I do remember is being downstairs in the playroom, with Adam on my lap. The police hadn’t verified it, meaning no family member had looked at “the body” as they called it, and identified it. It wasn’t a body, it was my fucking father. Adam had hope, the hope only a child can have. No one had seen the body, maybe it wasn’t him. But I knew it was him. Everything added up. The phone was busy when I had called earlier; the phone must have been off the hook at his house. It was my mother’s birthday, he hated her…though I had never realized how much. A month before, he had taken me out specially on one of our trips, to the movies in Newburgh, where we saw Rules of Engagement: a movie about the Marines, which was special because my eldest brother, Marshall, had become a Marine two years before. I hadn’t felt well on the drive over, and I had quietly leaned my
head against the blue leather of his 1989 Cadillac Seville. He looked over at me as he drove, noticing the lack of my usual bubbly chatter. “Do you feel alright?” Hearing the concern in his voice, I told him I was fine, I just had a headache. After the movie, we drove around Poughkeepsie and got sandwiches, which we ate on the shore of the Hudson River. We put a penny on the train track and waited for the train, and then counted the cars as they went by; we couldn’t find the penny afterwards. We went up to Kaal rock, and looked at the old burned down bridge. The cliff was steep, 100 feet above the water. “I’ll remember this in case I ever need to commit suicide,” I said in my wry humor. He was quiet after I said that, but then said “be careful” as he held my arm and pulled me up off the ground; he didn’t want me to fall off. One thing he always said was that the most horrible thing ever is for a parent to bury a child. Looking back, I’m not sure I agree.

Next, mom had to call Dad’s family. I don’t think she ever made it past Dad’s little brother, my Uncle Ward. He must have called everyone else: Grandma, Uncle Jeff, Aunt Karen, and Aunt Judith. Someone told AnnMarie, the love of his life; I don’t know who. Wes came home from school after that, while the three of us sat around the kitchen table. He walked in, holding his duffel bag that he used as a backpack. He stopped, and we told him. He kept looking at the floor, then said “okay” as if he had just heard something completely mundane, and walked out. He came back downstairs immediately, and we managed to put on smiles and laugh as we all had pizza and cake and mom opened her presents. Wes and I both went to sleep in the guest room where there were two beds, together again like old times; we had shared a room for about nine of my fifteen years. We needed to be together, and mom stayed with us for a while too, before going to her bed, which had remained empty since he had walked out five and a half years before.

My dad was not perfect, not even close, but he was my everything. He was my best friend, my protector, my confidante; he knew more about me than anyone else. When I danced with Brian Pecchia at a school dance in eighth grade, he was the first to know about it. He also knew what time I was supposed to get home from that dance. “If you’re not through that door by 10:30, I’m calling the cops!” When I got really sick the
summer before seventh grade, he stayed with me and gave me cinnamon life cereal to chew on. We shared a special bond, me being the only girl, a poverty-stricken Daddy’s princess; and we also had very similar tastes. We did things together that he didn’t do with the boys. He drove me to and from dance class, and showed me his latest swing dancing steps; he came with me to figure skating, putting on skates for the first time in 32 years just to make me happy, and then learning how to skate in them. He took me out to the field at Alden to practice softball, just the two of us, and found a winter softball clinic so I could play an extra season. He pulled me out of school so that we could drive through rural Massachusetts, where we counted the types of stores that had been combined in the general store of small towns. The most we found was eleven; it had everything from deli sandwiches to ammunition. We watched the history channel together, learning about everything from the Bubonic Plague to Bonnie and Clyde. We both liked Sarah MacLachlan, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and Metallica. We both had an obsession with the mafia and mobsters. I have a picture of myself and my brothers, labeled with his caption: John Dillinger (Marshall), Pretty Boy Floyd (Wesley), Ma Barker (me) and Baby Face Nelson (Adam), in their Smoky Mountain Hideaway, circa 1939. He took me along on some of his dates with AnnMarie, even allowing us to spray and squirt a range of Bath and Bodyworks lotions, glitters and body sprays on him to test out their scents. There was no doubt that I was closest to him; Marshall had rebelled too much, Wesley was a momma’s boy if there ever was one, and Adam was too young. None of them liked the Doors.

In the end, the day my father died was not the worst day of my life. The day after was. I woke up, in a different room, but still in familiarity. It was a morning like
any other, until my first thought: “I don’t have a father anymore.” I had to get up and be in that world for the entire day, and then the rest of my life. Unanswerable questions, unaskable questions popped into my head all day: Why? Could I have prevented it? Did I know, a small part of me, did I know it subconsciously? Did he leave us a note? Who is going to walk me down the aisle at my wedding? These are questions that can never be answered to my satisfaction. Marshall, my oldest brother will walk me down the aisle; if he comes at all. Yes, he left a note, although I’ve never seen it. I can’t ask my mom, I just can’t. I think I did know, but I couldn’t have prevented it. I didn’t know what it was
leading to; I didn’t think he would ever really do it. No one had told me that he had attempted suicide once before; that when he was 19, he had climbed up onto the old burned down bridge that we had looked at together from Kaal rock. Strangely enough, the man who talked him down that day, 33 years before, became a pastor, and gave the funeral service. I did have a premonition of it. The week before, on Saturday, he sold his China blue 1976 British Leland Triumph T-6 for $200. He called me into his white 1985 always-one-month-older-than-me Pontiac Firebird, and gave me the money. I did question why he was giving me the money; I knew he needed it. He said he had found another way. I wish to god I had asked what that way was. Then again, I don’t, because then he would’ve lied to me. He hugged me really tight and said “I love you.” These were not his last words to me. They were “Put that somewhere safe.” I felt an
overwhelming urge to cry, but I didn’t know why, so I turned towards the house and
didn’t look back. I never saw my father again.

I got to the wake, not an open casket, he hated those, and stood there among people, so many people. People I knew. People I didn’t know. I met my aunt for the first time at my father’s wake. I haven’t seen her since. People came up to me and told me how sorry they were. I politely said “thank you” back to them. No smile, no tears. No emotion. I was waiting, waiting for the only person who mattered at that moment. We didn’t know if AnnMarie would come to the funeral, but no one thought she would come to the wake. I sat in a corner, while a family friend cheered us all up a bit, making us laugh by playing jokes on Adam. At one point I looked across the room; she was standing there, looking for me. I stood up, tears forming and ran in her direction. No one else mattered, no one else could be as shattered as we were, the two girls he loved more than anything else in his life. We hugged each other so tightly, and then we pulled back, tears streaming down both of our faces. “I loved him! I loved him so much, you know that!” She mirrored my grief. “I know. He loved you too.” We held on to each other throughout the rest of it, unable to be separated. We supported each other, and we understood each other as no one else could. Only one other person even made an impact in the sea of I’m so sorry’s: Mrs. Evans, a family friend since forever came up to me and told me that her father and her older brother had also committed suicide. She understood. She was sorry. Out of all of them, her I’m sorry was the only one that stuck.

We had the funeral a few days later. It wasn’t very crowded because his death had been so sudden that not everyone knew. All the paper said was that he died in some hospital somewhere. There was no mention of suicide, or Chatham, or the Firebird, in
which he was found. Some woman he had worked for came up and told my mother that she hadn’t even known that he had cancer. My mom didn’t bother to correct her. My ex-boyfriend came, and gave my hand a little extra squeeze as he walked by. AnnMarie was at my side again, the whole time. No one knew who she was except family. My parents had never legally divorced; they couldn’t agree on terms. My mother was the widow, and AnnMarie the mistress to their uncomprehending, stupid eyes. They would never know what we felt, what only we shared. Just the two of us.

AnnMarie and I stayed close, I eventually moved in with her for a summer, and worked in her shop. It is bittersweet, such a painful reminder in such a beautiful, wonderful person so different from me and so much the same. We pulled together, and moved on as best we could. She had a new boyfriend about four years after, but she didn’t love him. She didn’t even always like him. He sure as hell didn’t like me, nor I him. He wasn’t right for AnnMarie, not after my father. He just didn’t have that lively, mischievous spark, that resounding laugh, or a booming voice that was identifiable across any sports venue. I continued growing up, but with new perspective. I went to private school, then back to public. I went to the wrong college, and made bad choices. I finally found the right track almost five years later. He still affects everything I do. I still try to make him proud. He loved Italy, so I came for him. He never lived his dream, so I lived it for him, after having fulfilled my own dream. He would be so proud of me, and everything that I have accomplished, even though I made many mistakes along the way. It’s hard to grow up at fifteen years old, to understand more about life than your friends. To understand mortality, to understand how to live in the present, for the present, because tomorrow might never come. To know what matters and what doesn’t. I didn’t learn the most important lessons in kindergarten. I learned them at 15, the day I grew up. It takes most people years, it took me a day.