Rabbit Hole

Ten years to the day after my sister’s disappearance, my father kills himself. It’s a sleepy Friday night like any other when he drives his car through the rotting barn wall of the most beautiful bridge in town and plunges himself into the shallow waters below. The same shallow waters where divers in seal suits panned for Angie’s remains when all of our better leads ran cold. He doesn’t vanish like she did. He isn’t swept away with the current. His car isn’t even fully submerged. He lands in the rocks, bumper sticking out from the water like a bad joke.

Mom and I stand at the edge of the road in police overcoats, watching as state authorities dredge the car from the riverbank with their big tow trucks. The local cops tape off the entrance to the bridge, which looks like it was hit with a wrecking ball. The sheriff they sent up from Portland tells us there are only nine covered bridges left in the state. Eight now, if they can’t restore this one. It’s the first thing he says. Only after Mom apologizes, only after she assures him that her husband must have been trying to veer off the road sooner, must have been trying to miss the bridge entirely and cut across the steep patch of nothing between the start of the bridge and the end of the guardrail, only after she insists that he must have simply been going too fast, turned a second late, wound up on the bridge—only then does the sheriff volunteer that my dad was killed on impact. He didn’t drown. Small mercies.

My mom thanks the sheriff, and his face softens when he hears her lovely, musical brogue. She turns it up for the occasion, leaning into each lilting syllable.

Mark loved that bridge, she says.

The man pats her shoulder.

I think: I wish it ever stopped raining long enough for me to light this fucking bridge on fire. I wish I could throw a match and engulf the ancient lumber in flames, but I know that it would only self-extinguish in a leftover pile of muddy snow.

For years later, at night, all I will be able to think about is the butt-end of the car sticking up like that and the feeling that, if he wanted to, he could have unbuckled his seatbelt, opened his door, and walked out. From this day forward, Angie will appear in my dreams soaking wet, lips blue. My dad won’t appear in my dreams very much, and I’ll miss him.

Mom closes her eyes and tugs nervously at the streak of white in her auburn hair. She insists on identifying his body alone, and I let her. For now, I am glad, but I will be angry later when I can’t be sure if the bloated, bruised, waterlogged version in my head is more or less grotesque than the real thing. I will grow jealous of her for getting to see him, for the visual proof that convinces even the most stubborn parts of her brain that he is dead.

It will all come later. Things take time.

Before I get a chance to email my boss and ask for Monday sub coverage, he emails me and copies the entire faculty.

Teddy,

We heard. We are all SO sorry for your loss. Take some time to be with your mother. Hank and Wendy have volunteered to cover your classes in the interim. Please let me know when the wake will be held. The school would love to send a spray to Brown’s, and I’m sure members of the community would attend.

Deepest sympathies,

Rick

Principal, Upper School

Other faculty members jump on the thread. Lots of caps lock. Many sad faces.

Teddy, hon! I saw the news. SO SORRY! xoxo Bea

Ted, more bad news for your poor family?! Hang in there, babe. —Wendy

Theodora, I know we don’t know each other very well, but I want you to know that my uncle committed suicide. My prayers are with you and your mother. Let me know if I can help in any way.

Love, Fred (from upstairs)

I send one email to the group before I mute notifications:

My entire St. Aug’s family, I so appreciate your well wishes, and I can’t thank you enough for stepping up to cover my classes. However, we will not be having any public services, and I plan to return to work on Tuesday. I thank you in advance for your discretion with the students over the next few weeks.

Best, Teddy

Before Angie disappeared, she was very focused on the things she didn’t have: a boyfriend, a car, a beach body, good hair, good skin, a tongue piercing, a full sleeve tattoo, a reliable pot dealer, a chance at a half-decent college, a date for senior prom, a sense of direction. I would sit at the end of her bed and paint her toenails a shade of green or red dark enough to look black, and she would list them off.

When she was gone, it felt like we were drowning in her things: Angie’s CD collection, Angie’s ripped jeans, ripped sweaters, ripped everything. Angie’s sketchbooks, Angie’s textbooks, Angie’s yearbooks, signed with inside jokes that Mom tried to crack like spy code.

I inherited none of it. I couldn’t wear her clothes or her earrings or her perfume. I tried once, with the perfume—a saccharine vanilla scent that I had scored rightfully, as a hand-me-down from herself—and it made Mom so upset that she wouldn’t speak to me until I showered.

The only thing I got was Angie’s dog, an Irish wolfhound—only a puppy then, all legs and wiry, slate-gray fur—that year’s birthday present from my dad, purchased without Mom’s knowledge, a month before Angie went missing. For Angie to take with her when she moved out and started her classes at the community college. A security system.

Wolf was small then. Now he is large and blind. Ten is old for an Irish wolfhound.

Come on, Wolf, I say, hauling his gaunt frame into the trunk of my car for another doctor’s appointment, only hours after the bridge. Help me help you, buddy.

Does he need more pillows? Mom asks.

I look at Wolfie. He lies on his side, long limbs extended toward the back of the car. He is surrounded by pillows.

Come on, I say. The rest are boxed up.

I regret it instantly, bringing up the move, but Mom doesn’t notice. She kisses Wolfie’s wet nose and shuts the trunk. Since she let her license expire a few years ago, she only leaves the house for doctor’s appointments—Wolf ’s and her own.

Mom hated Wolfie when he first arrived. She had a strict no-animals policy, and his habits of barking when the house creaked in the middle of the night and peeing on her curtains didn’t endear him to her. But Angie trained him quickly and well in a few short weeks. He learned commands and he stuck by her side day and night, sleeping on top of her head when he was small.

Sometimes, I think Wolfie understood that she wasn’t coming back before the rest of us did. The one person he would let touch him was me. He was bereft.

Only when the cops announced that they were giving up did Mom express an interest in Wolfie. She didn’t want to be his primary caregiver. She just wanted to make sure that he was well cared-for since Angie loved him, and he loved Angie, and Angie was gone.

Sometimes, it seems like part of Angie is inside of him. Or he relays messages to her. Or she can hear me when I talk to him. I know it’s only magical thinking. I can only really acknowledge that I believe this when I’m drunk. When I’m drunk, it’s very easy to mistake Wolfie’s calm presence for listening. It’s very easy to understand that if I bury my face in the side of his neck and whisper something into the space where his ear falls against the wavy fur, it will travel to Angie like a message into a tin can telephone.

USUALLY, WE TAKE THE long way to the vet, because the roads are smoother, but today we can’t because of the road closure. Because of Dad. So we take the short, potholed way, and Wolfie cries the whole time in the back as his bones and tumors bounce around. I think of the bumper sticker on the back of Dad’s car. We couldn’t see it last night in the dark, but it was there: In America, we drive on the right side of the road. In Maine we drive on what’s LEFT of the roads. Every divot fills me with more rage, until I’m clutching the wheel so hard my knuckles go white. This is your fault, I think. All your fault.

Take it easy, Mom says. We don’t need another accident.

As we’re walking into the vet’s office on Main, I spot a clear recycling bag near the door. Inside is a striped lump matted through with bits of gravel and crushed seashells—the kind they use to make rustic driveways for the beach houses.

What the fuck is that?

Mom bends down and reads. It’s a cat, she says.

What?

Someone hit a cat with their car. Big one.

I bend down: Please dispose accordingly.

Oh, for fuck’s sake, I say. Wolfie is blindly sniffing at the bag. He lifts a paw to prod at it. Wolf, get away from there.

Looks like a Maine coon. They probably didn’t want the turkey vultures coming, Mom says.

Let’s go. I open the door and usher her in before me.

Tourists, she spits, despite the fact that we both know there won’t be any tourists for at least two more months.

Wolfie digs in his heels with what little strength he has and forces me to drag him over the threshold with his leash. He hates the vet.

Jen at the reception desk is reading a Nancy Drew. Oh my goodness. Wolfie. We didn’t think you’d make your appointment today.

Well, we’re here, I say.

We didn’t want to call, Jen continues. We heard what happened.

There’s a dead cat outside, Mom says.

What?

It’s in a bag, I say. Hit-and-run.

You hit a cat?

Not us, I say. Someone else.

They left a note. Mom gets close enough to see what Jen is reading. Those books are for children.

I wanted to see if it was appropriate for my daughter before—

Mom. I take her elbow. Sit.

Mom lets me guide her into one of the hard plastic chairs. Wolfie’s having a hard time breathing, she says, to no one in particular.

I smile at Jen, but she’s already pushing through the swinging door to retrieve the doctor. Before she disappears, I think I see a flash of something quizzical and accusatory on her face.

Dr. Miller seems equally confused by our presence. She knew my dad from some early visits, and she liked him. He was a nice man, she says. He played with all the dogs in the waiting room.

Sounds like him, I say.

Wolfie trembles for the full duration of his visit. We weigh him on the floor scale. All three of us dance around the metal rectangle trying to steady him without altering the reading. Seventy-nine pounds. A lot for most dogs, but not much for Wolf.

What’s the situation? Mom asks.

The cancer has spread again, the doctor says. She illuminates the X-rays, and even I can tell that Wolfie’s organs are marred with tumors. There is nothing left to do for him.

I expect Mom to ask for a second opinion, to insist that someone must be able to operate. Instead, she says, Probably better that he enjoys the time he has left.

I agree, the vet says, with relief. She’s used to Mom’s internet research on the effectiveness of infrared heat and B16 and doggie yoga and other things that people in Boston or New York might do, but that don’t really exist here, where dogs are still treated like animals.

What can we do to make him comfortable?

Dr. Miller drones on about organic food and the power of touch, as if we don’t already spend all our time and money spoiling Wolfie. It’s only after Mom has paid the exorbitant visit fee and we’re back in the car that I realize I didn’t ask how much time he had left.

Shit, I say. That would have been good to know.

Mom disagrees. They tell you one thing, but you never really know.

The car lurches, and Wolfie yelps. It can’t be long.

A MEMORY COMES BACK in bits and pieces as Mom and I fail to fill the silence in the car. I was young—five or six maybe. Mom left us outside Shaw’s with some quarters for the ride-on ponies. It was summer, and we were in shorts. The parking lot—practically empty in the off-season—was filled up with out-of-state plates and Hertz rentals. The painted plastic of the horse stayed cool in the shade, and it felt good under the skin of my thighs.

Angie stood behind me, feet resting on the base of the machine. I sat in the saddle with my feet in the stirrups.

Ya-hoo! Angie shouted. Yee-haw.

An expensively dressed woman entering the store shot her a dirty look.

Well, howdy there, missus, Angie said, and she pretended to tip her cap. The woman shook her head, and Angie whistled after her as the automatic doors shut. I burned with embarrassment.

Stop, Ange, I said. You’re ruining it.

Fine, Angie said. She kicked the horse, and the machine stopped moving. Giddup, loser. She hopped off and wandered toward the parking lot.

Hey, I said. I need another quarter.

Sucks to be you, Angie said. In the first empty parking spot, there was a pile near the white line—something wet and sinister. She squatted in front of the pile, and all I could see was her back.

Angie! I hopped off the horse and ran toward her. What is that?

I could tell it was meat of some kind—pink and slimy. Rivets of red blood ran through it. Gray fuzz covered the pile—fungus, moss, mold.

Angie, I repeated. What is that?

She extended her hand toward it.

No, I said. Don’t—

She touched the pile gently, hooking her pinky finger around something small. She lifted it up. It was a paw. Four tiny, fleshy pads clustered together. Then, suddenly, the mass took shape. I saw the outline of two little heads, the slits of closed eyes. One skull crushed, the other intact. Both bodies flattened and printed with tire tracks.

Kittens.

Mom came up behind us, silently, multiple bags in each hand. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Angie, she said. Put that down.

In the car, Angie was not allowed to touch anything—not her seatbelt, not her face, not me. Mom was mad at her for letting me see.

Theodora’s going to have nightmares now, Mom said. And I suppose I’ll send her to your room, will I?

I won’t, I said.

How, though? Angie said.

I don’t know, Mom said. Probably their ma left them under a tire, to be in the shade. And the car didn’t know they were there, sleeping, so wee.

From my booster seat, I studied Angie the whole way home. She looked down at the hands in her lap, still sticky with blood. Occasionally a tear would fall, and she’d rub it together with the blood on her fingers. I stretched my hand across the middle seat. I didn’t know what I expected her to do with it. She looked at me and smiled, leaned her cheek into my palm, and closed her eyes for a moment before sitting back upright.

For the first time now, it occurs to me that the mother cat returned to find her babies ground into the asphalt. I wonder if she ever recovered. I wonder if she nestled herself under a car tire, too.

We return home, and I unbox only my work clothes. I put them back in the closet downstairs, underneath the carved MONEY PIT house sign I rescued from the trash last Christmas. Dad got it for Mom as a gag gift because she was always complaining about the summer people who thought their tacky new developments deserve cutesy names: The Egg, Bungalow, Hunters’ Lodge. Mom didn’t find the sign funny. She pretends not to see it on the rare occasions that she comes down here.

The house is beautiful; the house is a money pit. Historic, charming, damp, it’s Mom’s most prized possession, and she is a woman who likes possessions. It’s painted robin’s egg blue with gray shutters that used to be white and a shingled roof that is going bald in more than a few places. The floors are original, wide-plank, and loud. The windows are all different shapes. My favorite—and Angie’s—was a bay window off of the kitchen where we could sit and watch Mom and the deer at the same time.

Mom looks at this house and sees it for what it could be. She doesn’t see the crumbling chimney or the peeling wallpaper or the cracked kitchen tiles; she doesn’t like to talk about the stair we skip over or the way the rug downstairs squishes a bit in the winter because it’s so damp; and she won’t call anyone to inspect the water heater that’s rusting or the furnace that bangs in the night. She sees character. And anything can be character.

My new place is small, but it’s clean. That was important. New appliances, new drywall, new fixtures. Mom called it sterile when I showed her the online listing. She wouldn’t come to the open house to see it in person.

I fold up my boxes and tuck them into the back of the closet. The new apartment will have to sit empty for a bit longer.

The next morning is spent on the logistics of death, and we are exhausted by lunchtime.

Almost everyone outlives one husband. Some, two, Mom says, after we both collapse on the couch, unwilling to muster the effort required to make a sandwich. But no one buries three of these bastards. Not unless they’re cursed.

Don’t get spooky on me now, I say. I rub her back and her bones quake, sending a tremor through my palm.

I’m going to have a cry in bed, she says, pushing down on my thigh to stand. I’ll close the door, but you join if you want.

Mom became a widow for the first time when she was still a teenager, before she was even done growing breasts and hips. This fact seems central to my understanding of her. The way I figure it, the melancholy must have soaked into her marrow. Because by the time we met—she and I—years later, it was present in every cell, every wrinkle and crease. Like a fingerprint. Like a perfume I know her by. It feels like home.

Once, at thirteen, after my first little heartbreak, I got the story out of her: how her first husband was so young he could barely grow a mustache, how they made it official at City Hall after the draft notice came in, how he was lost to the jungle, his body blown to a dozen wet chunks that couldn’t be recovered for his mother. Mom told me about the officer that greeted her in her dorm room. About her roommate, Caroline, seated on the floor, pale against the pale cinderblocks. Mom sobbed so hard that she retched bright yellow gastric acid. She strained muscles in her low back and clawed at Caroline’s bare arms until she drew blood. She wondered why she ever came to this country.

Made my eighth-grade dance angst seem pretty silly.

Mom didn’t meet my uncle Oliver until 1985. At thirty-three, she was hung up writing bad protest poems about the Troubles and the war, decades too late. She enrolled in grad school hoping someone might help her find the exact right words, but it turned out everyone else was there to get drunk so that they could get laid.

Mom still dressed like it was the ’60s, with her hair plaited down her spine. She volunteered at a women’s center, because she liked helping mothers and babies, but she didn’t have any babies of her own.

One day at the center, she met a man in local politics. He was older than her. He was there to make promises and take pictures. He had nice things, and he seemed nice, too. He liked Mom. He had a thing for Irish girls.

By 1986, they were engaged, but before they could marry, Oliver found out some bad news. The problems he had swallowing, the way he sated so quickly—he had chalked them up to turning forty, to heartburn, to general wear and tear. But it was stomach cancer.

The first thing that Oliver did was quit politics. The second was marry Mom. (Another courthouse, another slip of paper.) The third thing was get her pregnant.

And so, when Mom’s second husband died, he died whole and in her arms. He died with his head resting on the small mound where Angie—technically my half-sister—was forming, claiming he could hear her heartbeat, whispering that he was going to meet her in passing, that he would slip by her in the ether.

Mom tells me that Dad’s car was filled with brown paper bags from McDonald’s. She’d like some for dinner, if I wouldn’t mind picking it up.

There’s only one near here, off the highway. It’s better if we go together and eat it in the car, I tell her. By the time it gets home, it will be cold and only half as good.

As long as we bring Wolfie, that’s fine, she says. We can eat in the car, like Dad used to.

When I roll the window down, a shock of cold air penetrates the car. Mom leans over me to ask the girl in the speaker for a Big MacDonald.

I can’t remember the last time I had a hamburger, she says. Years.

She orders Wolfie a double hamburger without the bun as a reward for the vet. We drive down to the beach, but without the moon tonight, everything looks black. With the interior lights on, all I can see is our reflections and the heat from our breath fogging up the glass.

I don’t understand this, Mom says, biting into one of the stale, oversalted fries before putting it back in the container. When you have all these nice chippies around.

Mom doesn’t recall Ireland fondly, and she never goes back. She’ll tell you that she grew up in a Catholic ghetto. She harps on the black mold and the constant barking of the neighbor’s dog and the sound of her cousins polishing their guns in the dark, keeping her awake with the friction of steel wool. But she gravitated here because of the rocky coast and the rain and the greasy smell of the fish shacks. Homesick in her bones.

So quiet tonight, she says. If she remembers that my lease starts today, she doesn’t mention it.

Always quiet.

I think back on all the secret McDonald’s stops that we used to make—me and Dad and Angie. A few times a year. On the way home from somewhere—a field hockey game or a guitar lesson—whenever it was the three of us. He’d buy one hamburger for himself and one for me and Angie to split. We’d all share the same order of fries and throw the garbage in one of the neighbor’s bins to keep Mom from finding us out. Angie would pass out Dad’s glove-compartment Altoids before we stepped in the house.

I look out the windshield. We should have gone down to the other beach, where at least we could watch the lighthouse circle, and I wouldn’t be listening so closely to the sound of my breath, wondering why it’s gotten harder to talk to Mom lately, even before all of this.

What happened with your obituary? I ask.

I reread it, Mom says. Terrible. I can’t write anymore.

What about a poem?

No, she says. I’m done with all that. She picks up one of my last chicken nuggets and puts it back down. She wipes her hands on her slacks. I wrote a sonnet last year. This one magazine wanted to run it.

You never told me.

I pulled it.

Why?

The editor sent me back a note going on about the symbolism. About how the deciduous leaves represented Angie and I was the oak or something daft. I’m not doing that anymore.

On the drive back home, it occurs to me that Mom’s lost someone nearly every kind of way that you can lose someone.

She nods. That’s true.

What was the worst—Angie? Because she was your kid?

Mom says nothing.

It’s okay to be angry with him, I say.

I’m not angry.

It’s normal.

That’s enough, Mom says, leaning her head against the passenger’s seat window, fogging up the glass with her breath. Please. I’m knackered.

I read somewhere that after 9/11, dozens of women widowed by the attacks took up with the responding firemen, many of whom left their own families behind to be with their new lovers. When I read that, I thought—there are others. I had never known any others like us, families united in tragedy and then broken by love. It made me want to move to New York, where we’d at least have some anonymity working in our favor.

By 1987, Mom’s parents were dead, but her in-laws—Oliver’s parents—were alive and local. Her father-in-law was a well-known, well-liked, retired Maine congressman. They had money to spare, and they helped her with the baby—Angie, Angelina, the little angel—born three months after Oliver died.

The most helpful was Oliver’s younger brother, Mark. Mark had a wife and a kid, and seeing Mom broke his heart. He had been close to his brother, idolized him, and he wanted to be a part of Angie’s life in any way he could. He had sworn to Oliver on his deathbed that he would be there for Mom and Angie, and he intended to keep that promise.

Mark looked so much like Oliver. His hair was a bit darker, he had a bit more meat on his bones, and he had a mischievous glint in his eye that Oliver, the golden boy, never had. Otherwise, they were identical.

Mom liked having him around. Mark came by after work to fix the leaky sink, to build Angie’s crib, to take out the garbage twice a week. Mom would make him a plate, and they’d stay up late with a nightcap, talking about Oliver, remembering him, sharing stories.

Somewhere along the way, Mom, with her bluntness and gap-toothed smile and way of closing her eyes when she was listening, started to feel like home to Mark. Somewhere along the way, his wife started to seem like a stranger, like another person who couldn’t understand his pain, until, one day, he came home and she had transformed into an impostor completely. His son, spoiled and somber, felt like a changeling. He looked at the boy and thought of little Angie, so innocent and alone, and his patience ran thin. Mark couldn’t tolerate his son’s temper tantrums or his wife’s childish way of screaming back at him.

So, he left. And I was born six months later. To my sister’s uncle, to my mother’s brother-in-law, and to the man who would drive clear through a covered bridge in some twenty-six years. My dad.

Angie was the only person excited to see me. To the rest of my family—my grandparents and cousins, my aunt and extended relations—I was dead before I was born. We were all dead. My father for his betrayal, my mother for her ingratitude, and Angie because she was stuck with us. They would have liked to keep Angie, but they couldn’t.

This is how Mom tells it. But she elides the part where she first slept with Dad. She glosses over the infidelity, the time-line, Dad leaving his family. In her first version, he didn’t even have a kid. I found out about my half-brother much later, after someone teased Angie about it at school, and it started a big fight. I told him that I didn’t care as long as he didn’t love him and he only loved us. Deal, he told me,