Echoes

I do remember this: when it came time for a bedtime story, he was my first choice. It wasn’t meant to be a barb to my mother. I picked a book as my dad laid on his stomach, and I settled my soft child-belly on his back, my nose peeking over his shoulder to read along as my toes tickled the backs of his knees. It was impractical for conversation, sure, but I wanted to see what he saw. 

I don’t want this to become another story about my mother. 

What a shame my dad is relegated to the outskirts for lack of hurting me. My mother is the martyr of my writing, a testament to the self-destructive tendencies of art. I couldn’t sum myself up without mentioning either parent, but my dad is the part of myself I want to talk about. On the rare occasion that my friends have the opportunity to sit across a table from us, they wave a bewildered hand and smile. You make so much more sense now, Emma. 

In fairness, this was not always a point of pride. To this day, I cannot stand in the presence of an angry man without shaking. He never raised a hand against me, but there were holes in the wall of my childhood bedroom—one of the many reasons I never had friends over, I’m sure. I don’t even want to write that for fear of its reception. I tell this to others with a shrug. He went to therapy. It’s not meant to be dismissive. My memories of the early years are too murky to say much else with certainty. 

I learned how to read with the cadence of my dad’s voice rumbling in my chest. Of course I am his echo. And as sleep lulled me down into his warm skin, I rested my head across his shoulders, and in doing so, made an Atlas of him. 

A daughter is a heavy burden. My mother never lets me forget. Yet my dad bears the weight of me with such grace, it slips my mind until the moment I brace myself to leave. I never make it out of the house on time. Wasted hours drain from the living room clock while he watches football, and I can almost conjure my mother’s bitterness at the redirection of his attention. But those last minutes drip to the ground, and my journey north becomes inevitable. The dogs know the moment they see my upright suitcase; I rise to say goodbye to them. His gaze bores into my back. I allow him his grief in private as I kiss their soft heads, my skin alive with the grief that I cannot be more than a visitor. Emma has to go to school, he tells them, and they sigh at the sound of his voice. Children, calmed. I hug my grandmother as she tells me to hurry back home—here—the moment I’m able. Neither of us acknowledge how hard it’s becoming to keep that promise. She distracts the dogs inside while my dad walks me to my beloved egg-shaped Honda, my cherry red ticket to freedom secured by his financial stamp. 

It was the winter of 2020 when I came home for our late second Christmas. There were clues those past few months that he was up to something big, but I couldn’t call it with any confidence due to the sheer absurdity of the decision. But it was there in the garage: used and scratched and mine. His 2012 sat in the same model in orange, behind my grandmother’s 2018 in cool gray. Echoes. 

He walks me to the garage each time, offering to take my heaviest bag without implying my weakness, and it is at this moment I remember the weight of my existence. He tells me drive safe, be good, love you, text me when you get back, and all that good stuff. We hug, cross-armed and solid, and the burden of me slips back into place. It’s all I can manage to repeat the sentiment: will do, no promises, love you, I’ll try, and all that good stuff. I get in my car, my ticket to freedom, and it feels like anything but as I pull away. 

I never met my dad’s father, only felt his absence in story. He was never grandpa, never papou. I know he was an angry man. His name was George—earthworker, in the original Greek—and I don’t know enough about him to mythologize him. 

Our family is Greek and proud, with my dad and I learning the language later than most. I knew the prayers from church growing up—non-negotiable attendance every single Sunday, though tardiness in the name of 7-11 donuts was acceptable. He wiped frosting off my mouth in the parking lot, and I used the lack of fasting as an excuse to dodge communion for at least five years. 

I never read the Bible over his back. This was one footstep I couldn’t follow in. I remember crying to him at some tender age, pitching a fit worthy of a much younger child. I don’t believe in God anymore, I told him, terrified. I don’t remember what he said. I remember feeling dismissed. We went to church after I cleaned myself up, donuts forsaken. I still refused communion. My dad led the youth group with my mother. The wedge the church drove between them is an essay on its own. But this was where I sided with her: it was not a place I could stay. 

My dad’s name means Christ-bearer. He was born a man of many burdens. 

On Greek Easter, my mother received the lucky coin in the Tsoureki bread. I don’t know what year it was. As a writer, I want it to be the year that she left him. As a daughter, I’m never sure about the details. 

Greek Easter is a labyrinth of traditions and calendric technicalities, the most prominent of which to me was the tsougrisma, where we took eggs—dyed red to symbolize Christ’s sacrifice—and clacked them together to see whose was stronger. A game of chance, but one I seemed to lack skill at. Our own wishbone. Tsougrisma means clinking together or clashing, and the tradition symbolizes resurrection and eternal life. 

All I remember is my egg cracking upon my mother’s. 

When she left my dad, she fled to the apartment complex they first stayed in as a couple, back when it was just them and a dog. For my last two years of high school, they traded me in the parking lot after community choir practice, which took place in a church. Sometimes laying out the facts is more effective than a metaphor.

I was a teenager determined to leave my life. I don’t know how I made it out without dying, but I got to college with the realization that I could leave my life without leaving life altogether. I left Naples, my hometown named for a promised paradise it didn’t deliver me to. I delivered myself to Jacksonville, to my mother’s right hand, an Isaac poised for sacrifice but not yet dead. 

That first year of college, I was heavier than the whole sky. I needed to be known. My dad was willing to scale the edge of the earth to meet me. It wasn’t a punishment. It was a reckoning. My sentences all fit the format of I’m the kind of person who ____ now, and I don’t know if you know this, but ____. He wanted honesty. But I have my mother’s mouth and his voice: I always find it difficult to sound like myself. 

The pandemic gave me the sole gift of knowing that the time I spent at my dad’s house would be the longest I ever spent there again. Months of stir-craze and fear, silence and trying to digest the news. My grandmother and I hardly spoke. We discovered The Great British Bake Off. We got ready for the grocery store like we prepared for imminent death rather than an invisible one. My dad drove me back to Jacksonville. We said our goodbyes. I felt my own weight. And as the garage door closed between us, I stopped to sob. He left in his car, a shade off from mine, and headed south as I stayed with my mother. But we both knew I had to leave Naples. It’s what I was born for. 

This Thanksgiving, we all stayed at my aunt’s as my dad waited for news on the closing of his new house. The last hurricane tore through the electrical grid, meaning they had to reconnect the existing homes before adding new, unoccupied ones. I spent my few days talking to my grandmother about all I could get out of her. One of her hearing aids has gone out, leaving her off-kilter. She frowns and says it's the price she paid for her memory, which rarely falters. I’m not much like her. 

She remembers my youngest years. I was a quiet child, yes, but there was a fire to me. She nods to my hair. Says it suits you, the red. I pay attention to my mouth as I tell her thank you. I don’t want her to feign understanding and nod along. How cruel, to remember your past in exchange for a muted present. My past is a record playing in a faraway room, but my present is the bass in my chest at a concert. My grandmother tells me my dad and I are primed for hearing loss, like her. She tells me of the clubs and concerts of her youth. I tell her of mine in present tense. I will pay for experiencing the world so deeply, I fear. What she does not hear, she asks me to repeat. Our table is set with patience, and we eat. 

I am neither the kinkeeper nor the kin who is kept. My cousin’s son is two, and I haven’t seen him since he was a baby I refused to hold. I know the weight of a child; I’ve carried it my whole life. I could not take his soft head into my hands. Now he is a little monster asking me to read to him. I almost lay my stomach on his bed. I almost prop myself up on my elbows. Instead my dad comes in, and together we play garbage truck. The toddler fixates on the word rubbish for half an hour. I wish I could be anything more than a visitor to him. My grandmother pats his head as we leave. Emma has to go to school. He clings to his mother, unwilling to say goodbye. He says don’t go like it’s an easy promise to keep. 

The reason I don’t write about my father is that he is a place I cannot stay. I lost the language of having a home to return to. I live in my liminality, my gray, wishing for family I leave at every opportunity. There is nothing to revisit. 

Only echoes.