Gone

1968 was the last full year you lived with us. Those are woeful words to write, but by that time, you’d basically lost all resemblance to the father I had loved so well, so long. The imposter who’d taken your place was tearing us all apart and I heard myself praying to God to please, make it end. Make him leave.

But that was my second prayer. My first and most fervent prayer was that this angry man would turn back into my original father—my real, true dad.

That was also Mom’s first prayer. Because once upon a time, she had loved you with her whole heart, too.

“You’re everything in the world to me,” she wrote after you were married. “You are part of me and yet you can’t be—because you are so much better than me. You are a strange mixture of strength and sweetness. Guess what I am trying to say is that you are just plain wonderful, and I love you with all my heart.

Yet twenty-five years later, Mom asked me to sit down and pray with her, reminding me how Jesus said, “When two or more of you are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of you.” We had never done this before. At Aunt Kathie’s house, devotions preceded every bedtime, always closing with the nerve-wracking need to individually pray aloud, even if you were only six. But Mom and I settled into the chairs in the front window, the one with the golden draperies. We bowed our heads and she spoke to God. I know she said more, but this is what I remember:

“Dear God, we gather in Jesus’ name. Please hear our prayer. Please return Ed to the way he used to be, to the man, the husband, and father, he was. Please. In Jesus Name. Amen.”

Well, it was too late. I do not doubt that Jesus was there in the midst of us, and I wouldn’t even say that God ignored us. In truth, Verna’s husband eventually did become much more like the man she had married, it was just … somewhere else.

Because a few weeks later, on a snowy Sunday night in January, God answered my second prayer.

I am coming home from the Oak Brook Movie Theater with my friend, Gary. I climb out of his car, wave goodbye, then crunch up the driveway, heading for the warmth of our house. I open the door, thinking what should I wear to school tomorrow? I decide on my striped sweater dress, step inside, shake the snow from my boots and in that instant the kitchen door flies open. Mom marches out, her ashen face a death mask.

“Tell Val what you just told me!” She is addressing you but looking at me.

It’s a dare. She is hoping you won’t have the guts to say the words aloud.

But no. You storm right in behind her and roar, “I am leaving tonight and I’m not coming back!”

I stand there in my parka and stocking cap, in the same little hallway where we used to hug you when you walked through the door after work. Now you grab your hat, coat, and briefcase out of the closet and leave through that door. Gone.

I remember not one more moment of that night. I hung up my jacket, and then? Mom walked back into the kitchen? Dear God, and did what? Did I go to my room and get ready for bed? Eight-year-old Audrey should have already been asleep, in the midst, I hope, of some sweet dream. Only how could she sleep through the ferocious climax that surely preceded that finale? All I know is that’s how it happened, and you didn’t mean maybe; you never came back.

Well, a few days later you slipped in for your clothes when no one was home, but that cold night is the last time I ever saw you in our house, the house you and Mom built the year I was born, the house in which you’d raised me.

I was relieved that the monster who had terrorized our nights was gone. But I wept for you, the father who had been there all our lives — reading to us, singing to us, calming us, adoring us. I wept for my old dad, my real dad.

We were lucky; you didn’t die. You didn’t disappear from our lives. Even so, after you left, it didn’t matter if we lit every light in the house—no room ever felt completely bright again.

Dad. There is a certain memory of you I hold almost sacred. It was the last time I remember us being alone together before you left. It is a dark winter’s night. You have offered to drive me to LaGrange to pick up a pair of gloves I left at MacDonald’s. Bundled in coats and scarves we ride in silence. You don’t look at me: your eyes are locked on the icy road, and your hands in your brown, fur-lined gloves grip the wheel, but out of the cold silence I hear a voice I recognize from my childhood, from the life we’ve left behind.

In the tender voice of my original, loving father you say, “Val, in the play “Hamlet,” an old man named Polonius said some wise words to his son, Laertes. I say them to you now and ask that you please remember them.” You take your eyes off the road briefly to look fully into my face, as you say, firmly, finally, “This above all: to thine own self be true."

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