sad, then, in a way it hadn’t been when I imagined how it would be from the conversation before: the shock. It was possible that he did not want me to leave, that he helped cause the very losses he didn’t want, that he wasn’t able to keep in his life the kind of people who might explain this pattern to him. Had he kept them, he wouldn’t have listened to them anyway.
It was only much later that I had the audacious idea that with my departure for my mother’s house for the second six months before I left home, and then for college far away, he had felt abandoned, and even betrayed. It wasn’t fair, but may have been true nonetheless: he had been negligent about spending time with me and caring for me, but now that it was time for me to go, he was angry at my departure. At the time, I would have told you that he hated me and that he must have hardly noticed my presence, that it could not possibly be missing me that had stirred him to such a fury. I was not enough to miss. It wasn’t until my early thirties that I realized that the loss of me might be what he was mad about. Many parents spent time with their children for years, and had learned to abide loss in smaller increments—but he was new at it.
My father had come to visit me in London when I was in my mid-twenties, and we had walked to Green Park, found a bench, and sat side by side. “If I was an old man, I’d be out here all the time, sitting on one of these benches,” he said, looking around, but there were no old men out that morning and the other benches were empty.
“You know,” he’d said then, “those years you lived with us—those were the best years, for me.” This was news—I didn’t know what to say—for me they’d been difficult, and I’d thought for him they were some of the worst.
“Take just what you need,” Kevin said. “And leave a note.”
I wrote, “Dear Steve, I’ve moved out, as you said I should if I didn’t go to the circus. I hope you will call me tomorrow.” Write where you’re staying, Kevin said. “I’m staying at Kevin and Dorothy’s house,” and I wrote their phone number, and “I love you.” It seemed less real now that we were doing it than it had seemed talking about it this afternoon. I kept on hoping to relax, but not to relax so much that I gave Kevin the notion I was accustomed to my salvation.
Why did the neighbors choose to help me? For years they were aware of how my father treated me and they were profoundly uncomfortable with it. Dorothy’s father, also a prominent, charismatic man, had been cruel to her. They had enough money to help me. They didn’t like the idea that because my father had money and was surrounded by people who pandered to him, he could get away with being cruel to a child. When I asked many times over the next few years how I could possibly repay them, they said I should pay it forward, when I could. Help some other kid.
“Let’s keep it moving,” Kevin said.
On my bed at their house that night, Dorothy had left a tray with Russian tea cookies dusted in sugar and wrapped in plastic, a thermos of herbal tea, and a welcome note. In the morning, before work at the farm, I cracked my neck, pulling the tendon across the bone, and gave myself a crick. I couldn’t move out of the contorted position all day.
My father did not call or return my calls.
The rest of the summer continued in a similar way, living with the neighbors, working at the farm, seeing my mother, speculating about my father and what he was thinking. Dorothy cooked for me. I decided not to take drugs for depression, as my therapist had recommended at the beginning of the summer, but kept telling myself positive things for all the negative ones that seemed to pop into my mind, at first very frequently and then less frequently, and by the end of the summer most of the cruel and knifing voices had gone away, and I was not depressed anymore, or too thin.
“I’m going to ask Steve to buy me a house,” my mother said on the phone, during my sophomore year