Questions from Answers

A full year after my father died, I finally came to terms with his death and decided to start cleaning out the house where he lived for nearly every day of his life. It was a small cabin that sat on a lake overlooking the sunrise each morning, often when he did his best work as a novelist, writing questions to other people’s lives and unraveling the answers at inopportune times. He became a minimalist after my mother died when I was young, but one item he’d kept was our lush, olive green couch. He’d sit most nights and read stories aloud to me. It was our way of connecting, of learning about the lives of others while shaping our own, one page at a time.

Since boyhood, I’d known my father to have few hobbies, save for one: writing. He’d published his most popular book years before I was even born, but he continued to write long after the success of that book. Though he rarely spoke of it, no book afterward ever reached the same level of prominence.

The award-winning story was about a man with a secret. That man lived alone in the middle of a mountain range out in the Rockies, talking only to the occasional neighbor who happened to venture out too far on a walk and pass by his house. The man’s secret, he reveals early in the novel, was that he’d fathered a child during his late teenage years, only to then abandon the child because he was born with multiple deformities. He was embarrassed, and he didn’t think he’d be good enough to take care of a child who’d need his undivided attention for the rest of his life. The boy’s mother, unmarried to the man at the time of the birth, died while delivering the child. The only family the child had was his father, who left just a day after he was born.

The story, laid out over the course of several decades, is a slow-drip of an admission of guilt. The man speaks in painstaking detail about the sadness with which he endured for years after leaving his son at the hospital. Sadness that took the form of countless nights at home in bed, often waking up in the middle of the night only to count the rotations of the ceiling fan at each turn. Sadness that moved him from counting those rotations to long, drawn-out walks hours before the sun came up. It was horrifying, reading how this child suffered at his most vulnerable stage, only to be deserted by the one person who was supposed to protect him.

I’d always wondered where those cruel and cold emotions came from in my father to be able to write them into a character. My father was such a generous man, with so few possessions that it occasionally surprised me he hadn’t also given away his house at some point. But he just shrugged the only time I ever asked him about the source of his creativity. “It’s amazing what the subconscious can deliver,” he’d told me.

Looking through the attic of his life-long home, my childhood home, I came across a ragged box sitting in the back of the small closet in his office. When I opened the box a plume of dust burst into the air. It smelled of old age and slight mildew. I recognized the two books sitting on top, both worn from repeated readings and covered in another layer of dust. As I opened the flap of the first one, I noticed a short note scribbled inside, signed by an author my father repeatedly spoke of to me. It was a kind note, and one clearly meant only for his viewing. I set it down and opened a few of the others. Every one of them carried personal inscriptions to my father, phrases like, “Enormously grateful for your writing,” and, “You convey emotion like no one else.”

I finished removing the books and picked up the last item left at the bottom, a small box sealed with gift wrap. Taped to it was an unsealed envelope addressed to me.

My son, enclosed here is the story of my life. It’s the story of my life from before you were born, before so much had changed. My intent was to publish this memoir upon writing it, but the universe had other intentions. Out you came, a smiling ball of perfection. I shelved the manuscript, and told my publisher that I would only submit it upon my death. The words in this book will be painful to read, but I owe it to my readers, and to you the most, to put them into print. Please send this copy to Richie, and he will know what to do. With all my love, Dad.

Richie was my dad’s longtime friend and literary agent. The two became fast friends after Richie was named editor of the high school yearbook and asked my father to write the foreword to their senior edition. When Richie moved to New York City after college and began working in the publishing industry, he reached out to my father about writing a story of his time in high school. “We can call it fiction,” he’d said. “This would make your career.” 

That was the story that became a bestseller.

After I sent Richie the manuscript of my father’s final piece of work, he showed up to my apartment one afternoon unannounced with a look of dread on his face, his eyes drooping, with dark circles sitting beneath them. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. I’d seen that look once before on my father, the lone time I’d asked him about how he came to emote the feelings he conveyed in his first novel. 

“Did your father ever talk to you about his time before meeting your mother?” Richie asked me. The question was off-putting, in the way a teacher questioning whether you were actually the writer of your book report would be off-putting.

My father had discussed with me, briefly, about his former life and how he’d made his fair share of “mistakes,” he’d called them. Whether he was referencing my father’s occasional habit of drunk driving after high school or something else entirely, I wasn’t sure. 

“But did he ever talk to you about his indiscretions?” Richie asked.

Indiscretions are not something I’d ever accuse my father of committing. He was loyal to my mother, from their few years together until she died. But then I remembered Richie started this conversation in the period before my father and mother met.

“Your father’s memoir that you sent me, it’s a detailed account of his biggest regret,” Richie said. “Your father struggled a lot back then. He struggled a lot every day of his life.”

I watched Richie’s face turn from talking about a book to discussing the details of my father’s life before he became the man I knew him to be. Richie started telling me about Julia, a woman my father met during his junior year of high school. 

“The two were inseparable,” he said, “to the point where one never showed up without the other. From football games to church on Sundays, they were always together. And then one morning a few weeks after a party, she told him that she was pregnant. He was devastated. He wasn’t ready for a child, he had a whole plan for his life.”

“Wait, I have a half-brother?” I asked. Richie didn’t answer. He just motioned awkwardly with his hands that he had more to say.

“When the baby was born,” Richie continued, “he had many problems, or rather, setbacks. He was blind, and both of his feet were conjoined. His spine was also shaped in a way that prevented him from standing up straight. Your father was distraught. Remember, he wasn’t even eighteen yet.”

This story Richie was telling, it was similar to the novel. But I couldn’t imagine my father abandoning a child. He and I were so close growing up. 

“When the doctors took the baby to see what they could do to help him,” Richie said, “his mother’s heart suddenly stopped. It was like without the baby, she couldn’t survive. The doctors did everything they could, but she died in the same spot where she gave birth.”

This was the novel. My father didn’t write a work of fiction, he wrote his own life story and called it fiction. I looked at Richie like I’d never seen him before, a man I practically called an uncle. Now he seemed a stranger to me. My father had another child, and my father abandoned him. I had a half-brother. And all this time, no one said anything to me. My father lied to me, Richie lied to me.

Richie watched as I processed what he had just told me. I had so many questions, about the baby, about Julia, about where her parents were and why they weren’t involved. Richie could sense that I was spiraling.

“You don’t have a half-brother,” he said.

My mind stopped, like Richie had reached over and hit pause on my temple.

“I didn’t know this until I read what you sent me, but your father discovered the child wasn’t his. Some years after the baby was born, DNA samples taken for a genealogy website matched results in some national database of adopted children. The child belonged to someone else, but your father never discovered who,” Richie said.

He started to cry. Though I was still stuck in my cloud of confusion, Richie was visibly upset that my father spent the better part of his life feeling guilty for abandoning a child that wasn’t even his. Richie was such a good friend to my father, and he’d apparently consoled him over the years, helping him channel the sadness and frustration into his novels.

Through tears now streaming down his face, Richie looked directly into my eyes and admitted what he’d bottled up for decades.

“The baby was mine,” he said.

Richie started to explain, but I couldn’t hear him. I was trying to wrap my mind around the lie that had stretched a lifetime. I tried piecing together this puzzle, this undying question that had plagued my father for so many years, but all I could think about was how my father’s best friend, the man he trusted most in his life, had lied to him for all of it.

Through his garbled explanation Richie mentioned a night at a party, a mistake, a one-time thing; an excuse about finding out later and protecting my father. But all I heard was betrayal. The cowardice in his voice, the way he tried to ease his conscience, I didn’t care. The fiction was too real.

I grabbed the book from Richie’s hands and told him to leave. 

He didn’t hesitate, he nearly handed me the book. He attempted to apologize again, but from the look on my face he could see that he’d lost. I didn’t want to hear anything else he had to say.

Richie left, and I locked the door, just staring at the back of it like the answers to all the questions I’d just conceived were written on it, waiting for me to start reading. 

I walked over to my couch, the same couch on which my father and I had shared so many stories, and sat down. I opened his memoir, the only book of his I hadn’t yet read, and started my search for answers.