Dad’s Three Laws

It’s the first time I descend the steps as an adult, but my feet remember the way. My hand reaches into the dark, finding the rocker switch on the first try, and three flame-tipped bulbs awaken below the ceiling fan, all of them dim. I cross my arms and stare into the gloom of Dad’s office, tracing the contours of his slumbering laptop, the picture frames angled to face him while he worked, the dark spaces between the shelves of his books. All memories he couldn’t take with him.

“You’re making the face already.” Chloe slips past me, snapping on a stand lamp near the door. She’s careful not to brush against me, but I feel the breeze as she goes by. I smell her shampoo, strawberries and coconut, same as Mom used.

“Only face I’ve got,” I say, and clench my jaw as if to stifle the words already spoken. We’re not here to fight. Chloe just makes it so easy.

“You saw the upstairs,” she says. “I couldn’t keep up the whole house, but the rooms Dad’s been using are fine.” Chloe keeps moving as she speaks, walking a practiced circuit to wake another stand lamp by the shelves, one in the far corner next to the suit of armor, a fourth with its shade positioned above the picture frames. “Ceiling light’s been like that for years. Doesn’t matter what bulbs you use, so it must be something with the wiring. Dad wouldn’t let me call anybody — cheaper to add more lights.”

Now that I can see the office better, I’m less eager to step inside. In the far corner, webs cocoon the helmet of Dad’s prized antique suit of armor, stretching onto the pauldrons and the top of the cuirass. The Knight, as we knew him growing up, is six feet tall and empty except for spiders. I forget to keep the edge out of my voice. “I thought you were taking care of him.”

Chloe is frenetic, powering up Dad’s computer, tightening a dim bulb overhead, stooping to pull a soda from the minifridge under the desk. She tilts the can toward me and I shake my head. “He hasn’t been down here in a while.” She types in his password before cracking open the soda and taking a drink. “And he stayed fussy about me coming down here without him. Not that I had time for sneaking around, with Jake and the kids needing me all the time on top of Dad’s … issues.”

Eagerness to avoid the subject of Chloe’s perfect family gets me across the threshold. She’s stared pointedly at my left ring finger several times since I got back, and I don’t intend to get into arguments over sex or love or the value of a warm hug. I point to the first thing I spot, the dreamcatcher above one bookshelf. Like everything else down here, the wooden ring is rough, the strings, beads, and feathers worn.

Chloe chooses to take the bait; she doesn’t want a fight any more than I do. “He always swore it was real. The Iroquois lady at the flea market convinced him it really worked.”

I smile, a slight curve of the lips that doesn’t reach the edges.

The pause drags out too long for Chloe. She thrusts her palms at the laptop, an explorer warming her hands over a campfire. “All right. You check his computer for any messages he left us. I’m going to pack some extra things from the bedroom and make sure I haven’t overlooked anything up there.”

We pass at the corner of the desk. She faces me with her arms extended, not asking for an embrace but not not asking at the same time. I eye the computer, thinking about how casually she entered Dad’s password, and my hip bumps the edge of his chair. The last time I sat here, I think I was ten years old.

Chloe lingers in the doorway. Her voice is soft, reluctant. “I didn’t like tricking him.”

“We didn’t want a fight,” I say. “Not today.”

“You let him think you were me.”

“I didn’t say anything about it, either way.”

“You asked him if he wanted to go for a ride through our woods, Miranda. That’s what he always said to me when I was little, to get me excited for daycare, or getting groceries, or the long ride to Grandma’s. It was our phrase.”

I sit. Dad was a foot taller than me, so the monitor provides shelter. “I didn’t lie. I don’t lie.”

The warning in my voice gives Chloe pause. I sense her resisting the urge to retreat upstairs.

“Miranda?”

I lean to one side, leveling my sternest big-sister gaze.

She straightens her shoulders, mustering courage. “What did Dad say to you before we left?”

Staring was a mistake, because now I can’t look at her. Tears well in the corners of my eyes, and I duck away before she notices, pulling open the minifridge where there is nothing I want. Chloe dislikes silence. Seconds later, the steps creak beneath her feet.

* * *

The shine had gone out of Dad’s eyes before we left the development where Chloe and I grew up. Asking him about a ride through the woods had gotten him into the car, but by the time Chloe tried to capitalize on it, asking if he could see the creek through the trees or whether anyone lived up the old dirt road with no street sign — the way he used to when she was little and I rode the bus — Dad had retreated into his congested, misfiring mind. He came back to us once, as we passed the dilapidated barn on the edge of the forest, but that had only made things worse.

I banish the memory of our ride to Dad’s new home at Sunrise Gardens, focusing on the clutter of his desktop. The image behind said clutter shows the four of us at Edge Mountain Hawk Sanctuary. Chloe straddles Mom and Dad’s laps. I stand next to Mom, one arm around her shoulders, painted smile convincing everybody this was a shared moment of joy. I remember Dad thanking the lady who took the picture for us, overdoing it as if she’d saved one of us from falling off the mountain. I was maybe fourteen, around the age Dad and I really started fighting. If there’s another family picture out there, I’m not sure when it was taken.

“What’s this?” I ask the room and double click a folder titled MY THREE LAWS. I imagine Chloe telling me not to snoop. No one wants to see what their father has hidden away on his laptop; no one wants to be reminded how the man who raised them was, after all, a man. My mission is simple: look for a final directive, find any last goodbyes, and wipe the rest before I find the stuff no one wants to know about. The thought of Chloe telling me to slow down gives me the will to keep going. She was always the favorite, and some part of me wants to find proof, even if it hurts. Especially considering what Dad said before we left.

Dad’s Laws.

The thought makes me smile. Dad was never the family lawmaker. He tried to enforce Mom’s laws, and Chloe and I fought him every step of the way, like sharks scenting blood in the water. Then Mom was gone, and Dad decided to leave growing up to us kids.

Inside the folder are a document and — my eyes widen — over seven thousand video and sound files. I scan the column farthest to the right as I scroll. The sizes range from a couple of hundred megabytes to videos weighing in at a few gigabytes.

Don’t do this, I think, and this time it’s my own voice warning me. Odds are, these files contain the ramblings of a man losing himself, recording his slow descent into hell. If there’s anything worse than finding your father’s stash of downloaded porn, it must be listening to a time lapse of his unraveling.

The way Chloe did.

My mind conjures an image of my little sister finishing dinner with Jake and the boys before driving to this house to make sure Dad remembered to eat. Finishing her family’s laundry before washing a load of his. Eventually spending several nights a week here, taking on the role of nurse, and not just in function. Dad came to believe she was his nurse. He bragged about Chloe to Chloe, and sometimes shared his regrets. When she told me, I was horrified. We both know I couldn’t have survived half of what she’s lived through.

“Wait.” I’ve spent most of my life talking myself through tough situations. Right now is little different. The office bulges with so much of what Dad left behind that it’s like talking to him without the complication of having him here. I sort the files by date. Some are over thirty years old, long before Dad’s symptoms began. My mouth goes dry as my calculations lead to a staggering fact. A wave of heat roils behind my eyes, traversing my scalp all the way to the base of my skull. It’s a palpable sensation, so strong the room wavers.

Mom could be in these.

Without direction from my brain, my hand selects a random file from among the larger ones. I pick at my cuticles while the video loads. It’s a habit I got from Mom. Indulging it helped me withstand the grief of losing her.

The window opens, and it’s her. She’s sitting at her computer, so young it reminds me that I’m older than she ever was. Tears flood my eyes. My chest locks up, and I crush myself under crossed forearms, savagely swiping my cheeks. Mom is in front of me but too blurry to make out. It doesn’t matter that I could replay the file; seeing her is a primal need. It will not be denied or even delayed.

“It’s like you don’t realize this is my office,” Mom says, and I cannot breathe. “I’m working. It’s like you don’t respect me enough to let me do my job.”

I gasp a lungful of dusty air. From the angle of the camera, Dad is looking up from the floor near her office door, upstairs. For a moment he looks down, then up again, and I realize what I’m seeing. Daddy’s Camera Glasses. Different companies keep trying to sell glasses with built-in cameras, but they always fail for the same reason: they’re skeevy. And yet, for a short while, my dad owned a pair.

Dad’s voice rises from a throat not yet plagued by the rigor of seventy harsh winters. I struggle to accept that the guy who raised me ever had a voice so smooth. “I was thinking of us as coworkers. If we were in an office again, those are the conversations we’d be having.” He looks away. “But I hated the people who interrupted my work like that.”

When Mom speaks, the words come slowly, a careful construction erected one syllable at a time. “But you have to realize I’m working—at my job—and I’m having all those conversations with my team. You wouldn’t call me at the office to talk to me about this.”

Dad’s voice shrinks further. “I was thinking this was our office, but I see what you mean. I hadn’t thought of it — of them.” A long pause. “You’re right.”

I realize a caption hovers across the bottom of the window. I glance away from Mom’s face long enough to read: FIRST LAW: DOCUMENT WHAT INTERESTS YOU.

First law? I think, but Mom speaks again.

She grasps her coffee mug in both hands. A stranger might mistake the way she holds it for warming them, but I know better. If those Irish hands start to move, the temper breaks loose. She’s fighting it hard. Watching her hands shake reminds me of that old movie, The Big Lebowski, when the Chief of Police of Malibu throws his coffee mug at the Dude’s head.

“Even that first night,” she says, her voice strained beneath the weight of her words. “I was sitting there, looking out over the waves. The sky went on forever, and there were so many constellations. … It was beautiful. You asked what I was thinking, and all those thoughts that had been forming just … went away. I lost all of them.”

Mom’s office jerks at such a sharp angle that, for a moment, I think she threw the mug.

I hear Dad breathing, deep and barely restrained. “That was the night I fell in love with you.” He sounds far away beneath the glasses. “It was one of my fondest memories.”

“I know,” Mom says.

I blink and notice the caption has changed. Now it reads: SECOND LAW: NEVER SPEAK OF WHAT YOU DOCUMENT.

“I think you’re trying to feel a connection,” Mom says. “And maybe it’s just me, but when you do that, it completely shuts me down. And you do it over … and over … and over.”

She isn’t loud, but the repetition and emphasis shake Dad’s head. The glasses had built-in motion stabilizers, but his grief overwhelms them. For a moment I think she’s going to keep saying it, over and over … but she stops.

Dad waits. Mom grows with each passing second, filling the screen and the whole world.

“I think it’s the same for Miranda, too,” she says. “A lot of the fights you guys get into are because she needs her downtime to process everything going on around her. Between school and field hockey and boys. If you try to start up a conversation with her first thing in the morning — ”

My mouth hangs open, but I can’t speak. Can’t breathe. She’s not wrong, but why is she saying this?

“I say good morning.” Dad’s interrupted her, but it’s a whisper. He’s thinking out loud. Mom could have spoken over him, but she’s so intent on delivering her message without breaking him that even such a tiny sound makes her stop.

I wonder about the maximum file size for these glasses, but excruciating conversations have a way of stretching time.

“But it always leads to more,” she says. “And she uses that time to prepare for the day.”

Mom moves down and up as Dad nods, and I pause the video. My tears don’t come easily most days — unlike Chloe, who spent her childhood winning consolation prizes with ragged sobs — and I intend to keep them at bay. I hear a sharp intake of breath and raise my eyes to find Chloe staring back. White shows all around her irises.

“Was that Mom?”

* * *

“Do you want to say hi to the animals, Chloe?” Dad asked, the way he did when he drove her past the old barn as a toddler. He had convinced Little Chloe the barn was full of cats, who watched them drive past each morning. She would meow to them, and they — Dad — meowed back.

Adult Chloe’s breath caught, but she worked through her surprise to give her best housecat impression.

Instead of responding in kind, Dad fell silent. His head began to shake in a series of taut jerks. He snapped, “That was Chloe’s chance to talk to the animals. Maybe her last chance!”

He turned to the window, eyes glistening, refusing to look at her for the remainder of the drive. I turned on the radio to stifle the sounds of her tears.

I had told myself his voice in the video was different from the one I heard in the car this morning. Smoother, unimpeded by vocal cords desiccated by years of black coffee breakfasts, lunches, and dinners — and midnight snacks. But the desperation, that was the same.

As Chloe comes around the desk, I ask, “Do you remember Dad ever making … laws?”

She scrunches up her face. “He used to yell at me when I wouldn’t go to bed.”

“Me, too.” Dad used to go straight to red. Hands waving, vein throbbing on his forehead. When I was young, it frightened me. Then one of my friends said it sounded like a dick vein, and it was so funny I had to force myself not to laugh every time he threw a tantrum. The old man who asked Chloe to say hi to the animals for the last time has changed so much that it’s like remembering another person.

Chloe stands by my side, reading the caption across the bottom of the screen. “Laws for who?”

My thoughts are too far away to respond. How old was I when we stopped fighting because I withdrew completely? The smiling faces peeking around the open folder on Dad’s desktop offer a clue. High school, then. Ninth grade? Not tenth.

Chloe reaches past me and clicks the mouse. I almost grab her hand, but Mom moves. A faint moan escapes my sister’s throat. Or maybe it comes from mine.

“I have to get back to work,” Mom says, and Chloe’s hands tremble against quivering lips.

The camera angle shifts to peer down on Mom as Dad stands. I want him to leave, to take his lesson and go, but this is my father, a man who never recognized the end of a conversation before it became an argument. “Thank you for talking with me,” he says. “I know you’re busy, and I know I was interrupting. But I could tell you were mad about something, and I didn’t want it to get worse.”

Mom stares into my eyes. “Can I give you a hug?”

“You never have to ask.”

I’m not imagining the emphasis on you, and in that instant he justifies all our years of estrangement. Over Mom’s shoulder, Dad whispers, “I’m so sorry I did that to you all those years ago.”

“I didn’t want to tell you.”

A few seconds later, Dad hunches over the bathroom sink, soaking a washcloth to wipe his tears. I glimpse him in the mirror before the recording ends: round, scruffy, wearing a horror tee from a con he’d attended. At some point the caption has changed again: THIRD LAW: THEY WILL SHARE WHAT INTERESTS THEM.

Chloe exhales a shuddering breath. I feel her eyes on me, seeking comfort, but I hug as well as I cry. Sometimes I think we were one kid, divided into halves, separated by half a dozen years. When she can wait no longer, she hustles upstairs, leaving me to shrink into Dad’s chair, guilt-ridden, as always.

I scroll to the Word document; I’d almost forgotten. The old computer works to open the massive file, and after the first paragraph I know that a porn collection — even one built around fetishes and kink — would have been better.

* * *

Single-spaced, eight-point, Times New Roman.

There’s a new Deep Blue Sea movie coming next summer. You’ve always loved shark movies. Maybe we could go see it?

I glance at the bottom left. Page 1 of 846.

I scroll, spinning the wheel into the abyss. It’s not just pages, it’s years.

There will be a new release for Coraline! I still remember going to the two-dollar theater with you to see it the first time.

I try to whisper something, probably Jesus, but my throat won’t work. I cough instead, breaking the paralysis.

The statements continue, all pertaining to something Mom or I would have loved, but which we didn’t have the energy to endure on top of everything else happening in our lives. There’s nothing here directed at Chloe, of course. She received the firehose of Dad’s attention without flinching, and returned it in kind.

I scroll a few dozen pages but don’t reach the end of my high school years. Sitting there, surrounded by the ephemera of an old man’s life, I stare at nothing. My brain turns over my final question, which I’m sure I don’t want answered but can’t live the rest of my life asking.

I sort the folder by size and stare at thousands of tiny audio files. Recordings measured in seconds.

Get it over with.

The mouse click is a whipcrack. Dad’s voice, somewhere in his fifties by the weathering and weariness: “Good night, Miranda. I love you.”

That’s it. The entire file.

I click on another. A different day. A different year.

“Good night, Miranda. Sweet dreams.”

“What the hell?” Bile rises at the back of my throat. I sort the files by date and scroll to the top, seeking the video file I’d found earlier. The first audio clip is timestamped two minutes to midnight the same evening. I lean forward, applying bodyweight to a numb finger incapable of clicking.

“I love you, Sweetheart. Good night.”

A frenzy overtakes me. I click again and again, opening dozens of sound files, none longer than four seconds, all delivering a version of the same message. Each recorded around midnight, day after day, year after year. It hadn’t made a difference — the divide between us only got worse as I grew older — but he kept wishing me good night, pleasant dreams, a great tomorrow.

A cramp works its way into the back of my hand. I stop, staring at the open files, listening to my own breathing, and I realize Chloe has been watching. Tears shine in her eyes, but not from sorrow.

“It’s not fair.”

At first I don’t understand. I taste salt and my cheeks are wet, but I don’t know why I would be crying.

“Chloe.”

“You can keep those. You can hear him say good night to you every night for the rest of your life. But you won’t. You won’t.”

I glare at the rows of audio files and one bloated Word document. Is there even one mention of my little sister? Dad’s favorite? His life was replete with her. They shared every day. Her triumphs and defeats. Her perfect family, and all the imperfections I never heard about.

She stares at me, shaking, and I want her to leave. Run upstairs the way she did when we were kids. She would scratch me, and I would kick her, and she would run, sobbing. She would grab something I held, and I would shove her, and she would run, screaming. But today, the adult version of that kid stands before me, refusing to engage. Waiting me out.

And it works.

“Chloe, I didn’t know.”

“Obviously.”

“I don’t know what else I can say.” The anger surges in my chest, and we’re kids again. She won’t stop pestering, and it’s not fair that I should feel guilty about something I didn’t do.

“Just tell me, Miranda.”

The flame of my rage gutters as quickly as it kindled, because I know, but I ask anyway. Just in case. “What?”

“Tell me what he said.”

I’m back at the door to Dad’s room at Sunrise Gardens. Chloe is down the hall, talking to the nurses, and Dad is resting in his new chair. I think he might try to take my hand, but some part of him remembers that I don’t like to be touched. That’s what I’m thinking as I look down and find his faded blue-gray eyes peering back. Seeing me. And he says, “Sweetheart, why are you the one who always has to say goodbye?”

Wiping away tears — I seem to be drowning in them today — I shake my head. “We’ll visit him. Tomorrow. We’ll get him to say good night to you, I love you—”

I meant, Get him to say, “I love you,” and Chloe knows it, but hearing me speak those three words causes her to stiffen. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to say. She knows damn well I do love her. She’s all the family I’ve got. Of course I do.

She shakes her head. “He thinks I’m his nurse.”

I force myself to meet her eyes. “And he thinks I’m you. He’ll say it, to you, and you’ll hear it.”

It takes her a minute to process what I’m saying. “You mean it? You’ll do it?”

I nod, and she knows it’s a fact.

Chloe hugs me. It’s a long hug, and I suppose a good one, because when it’s over she leaves, padding upstairs to rifle through the closet and dresser. I exhale and slump into Dad’s chair, staring at the glowing screen. I click on the folder dedicated to my father’s laws. My finger hovers over the Delete key, waiting for the desire to press it.