Holding

When my father died he left me a ratty black Moleskine notebook, the kind he’d carried with him at all times in the last twenty-seven years of his life. The notebook had a letter addressed to me on each page. In the back was a wad of checks totaling $20,000.

“It’s so like him to leave his inheritance in checks,” my mother said to me through tears. I didn’t answer.

“I know it was complicated with him,” she went on. “But the relatives will wonder if you don’t show up to the funeral.”

“I’m not going to the funeral,” I said.

My mother doesn’t know much about my father and me. She knows that at the age of twenty-two, during my senior year of college, I had a panic attack at the Denver airport and tried to convince her to let me stay at school for the holidays. The pleading in her voice carried me, against the will of my body, onto the plane and back into my childhood bedroom, where my secret hung in the air, discordant and stale, like an unanswered question.

***

I was taught early that everything comes with strings attached. I have a recurring dream of being caught in a spiderweb the size of my childhood apartment, its thread catching at my wrists and ankles.

So when I came into the money I didn’t know what to do. I handled the checks with a glove, as though they were cursed or unclean.

I never read the Moleskine worth of letters. I could imagine their style–– precise, formal. Confessional, but never flowery. Occasionally I skimmed the pages to look at his handwriting with my eyes blurred so as not to catch any words. Maybe this was my revenge. He gave me a secret, and now, unwittingly, he has eighty pages worth of his own.

I had split from the family as soon as I graduated school. I was born in the northeast and went as far west as I could as soon as I had the chance. The Pacific Ocean barred me from moving even further. The country feels like a box to me, bound by sea.

I lived without help, but this did not mean I didn’t live well. I spent a couple years living in my car and a couple working on a farm in exchange for food and board. Last year I came across a hippie commune in Oregon and lived there until they lost their land. From there I went up to Washington and slept in a parking lot.

There is an undercurrent of longing that accompanies being broke, a continuous hum you can never fully drown out. I entered the lottery once a month. I wrote my ass off. Freelanced for blogs, entered contests. Occasionally I did sex work through an online platform a friend from college introduced me to. When the jobs were trying or the money was bad, I bore it until it passed.

***

When my mom got pregnant with my brother, my dad took care of me. There are photos of him holding my hand on the streets of my neighborhood, of us eating in tandem. Our elbows lifted at the same angle as we clutched our forks. I was right-handed but I ate with my left hand because that’s how he taught me. I revered him. My mom says the first noise I made when I came out of the womb was an imitation of his cough.

My mother says my dad is the best thing that ever happened to her side of the family. She waited thirty-five years to have kids because she wanted to make sure they had a good father. “Good” meant the opposite of what her father had been: reckless, unpredictable, selfish. It was her dad who led her sister, who died of a heart attack when I was twenty-five, to run away from home as a teenager.

My father, a quiet, serious friend of a colleague, found his way into her life at the last minute, as she was starting to think she was too old to bear children. My grandmother adored him. He was generous, devoted, and upstanding. Restrained. My whole life she told me how lucky we were to have him.

So when I stopped talking to my father at the age of twenty-two, she did not ask why.

***

When I came into the money I went into a crisis of sorts. The first night, I spent $150 on a hotel room with a kitchenette and an outdoor hot tub. I ordered a twenty-five dollar meal. A few hours into my stay I vomited up the meal and checked out early. I slept in the trunk of my car in the hotel parking lot.

People tell me I have a tough exterior, though my stature is delicate and my voice soft. I chew vengefully, with my whole jaw. My muscles are perpetually clenched; I’m too tight for penetrative sex. I was diagnosed with vaginismus at age twenty-three, with the suspected cause being early life sexual trauma.

You’d think vaginismus would a problem for sex work, but it turns out there are countless other things old men are willing to do to you. One jacked off while he watched me dust his bookshelves. He had me wear the clothes of his wife, who’d died the year before. After he came, he cried, and he asked me to hold him. The holding part was more difficult than turning my back to him while he played with himself. I looked out his window as I wrapped my arm around his shoulder. It was winter in Oregon: snowflakes danced towards each other, clung to each other for a nearly-imperceptible moment, and then flew apart again.

***

In the morning I leave the hotel parking lot and buy a Milky Way at a rest stop. This time I keep my father’s money in the glove compartment and use my own earnings so that I don’t puke. The lady at the register tells me I look like a woman in need of holding. I press my lips together and get back into my car.

There’s something funny about money. It’s a trick mirror. A doorway you walk through only to find yourself in the same room. You want it only so that you don’t have to worry about it. You want to depend on it so that you don’t have to depend on anyone else. You spend years dreaming of the point when you finally have enough. And then one day you wake up and you do have enough, and the sun looks the same, and the car still runs out of gas, and you still dream of the spiderweb, only now its threads creep towards you from the sun-faded numbers on a check. And that stone that sits at the very center of your chest, the one that you’ve had for as long as you can remember, still whispers to you all the things it’s seen, things your mind told it to forget. The heart is a heavy, stubborn thing. No matter how much you offer it in comfort, in cash, in sweetness, it refuses to forget.

At a gas station, a trio of men lean up against the wall, smoking, and ogle at me. One of them asks if I’m cold. I don’t answer, and he asks if I want to be held. I pull my receipt from the machine and leave without wiping my windows.

My father taught me early on how to save. At the age of nine, when I started getting allowance, he would take me into his room to give me lessons in finance. Arithmetic, credit, responsible spending. And then he would do other things. The lessons continued until I left the house at eighteen. He would try to resume them when I was back over the holidays, offering to teach me about stocks over lunch, but I always refused.

My father was also the one who taught me how to write. He told me fewer words were better, in speech and in text. I learned to mimic his stark style. He would read over my grade school essays, crossing out words in each sentence that he deemed redundant. He told me efficiency is key to communication. That what you don’t say is as important as what you do.

I inherited a host of other things from my dad, including poor vision and my tight muscles. Through him, I learned that a rigid body always has something to hide.

***

Back on the road, the pines drop dustings of snow and stand up a little straighter as they relieve themselves of the weight of winter.

The stone in my chest feels like an anvil.

In my favorite poem, a man is carried into a hospital for heart surgery. The doctor takes a tweezer and pulls a tiny blue star from his chest. As soon as he extracts the star, he finds another equally beautiful one underneath it. I wonder if this stone is self-replenishing like that. If an operation would do me any good.

I picture myself sliding down my throat and into my ribcage, wrapping my arms around it, stroking its walls. I swaddle it like a newborn. I show it the $20,000 in the glove compartment. Nothing changes. It’s like I said. No cash or sweetness can relieve a heart of what it hides.

This will always be my holding.

What my father didn’t tell me, when he gave me my secret, is that when you spend years of your life maintaining the absence of a thing, you eventually become that absence. And somehow, that absence carries far more weight than the presence of you, of anything, ever could. Absence is unbearably heavy. So heavy there is no room inside you for yourself. And at the point when nothingness becomes you, there’s nothing you can do or say to separate it. Even telling the truth.

What you don’t say is as important as what you do.

I think about Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a hill for eternity. He was given his load as punishment. I wonder what crime I committed at age nine, or if it was just fate. The road slopes upward over a hill, a rare occurrence along this part of the Oregonian coast.

I envision my father writing letters at his desk, hands shaking. To my daughter, he recites under his breath. And then again on the next page. To my daughter. His fingers press into the paper, unloading. His face is at once strained and full of hope for the lightness that accompanies death and confession. In my vision I stand behind him, gazing over his shoulder. Holding.

He turns toward me suddenly, and I’m surprised he can see me. Take it, he pleads. His eyes are desperate and hopeful, like a dog asking to be let outside to relieve itself. In spite of myself, I feel a twinge of guilt. I ignore it and shake my head. I back away from his desk.

He pleads again. Take it. He holds out the papers, his arms reaching. His ordinarily rigid body sags as though it is about to come apart.

Keep it all, I whisper. I step back through the doorway and shut the door.