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  I couldn’t bring myself to call Meg. I didn’t know if she knew or not, and either way it would be bad news. If she did know, it would mean Dad had already told her or she’d guessed or—even freakier to contemplate—she’d known the whole time. After all, she was nearly nine when we moved away, and, unlike me, she remembered Dad living at home. If she didn’t know, then I would have to be the one to break it to her.

  But it was Mom who blew my mind the most about the whole situation. I’d always known she was tough, raising us alone at first, managing a house, and juggling a job. Optimism was her weapon: We’re the luckiest girls in the world! But knowing about Dad’s betrayal for thirty years without giving anything away? She was a total badass—even Dad could see that. “When I think of Mom, I’ve always felt the admiration first,” he wrote in his letter, “the absolute stand-back, hair-raising recognition of excellence.”

  A few weeks after I got the letter, I called Mom. I thought it would be easier to talk about it with her than with Dad; it wasn’t her shame, after all. But when I explained what I knew, she didn’t sound relieved, only rueful. Her version of events wasn’t so different from Dad’s. She told me that when Meg was born, she’d had a premonition that he wouldn’t be around to raise her. The broken furnace a few years later, she said, felt like the beginning of the end. When he’d run off with his secretary, Mom had stayed silent not to protect him or even herself, but to protect us.

  Now it finally made sense why she and Ron never talked about Dad after we moved to New Jersey. The subject was taboo, because it violated another one of Mom’s favorite sayings: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

  Gratitude would have been the appropriate response, but I couldn’t form the words—not because I didn’t feel them, but because they seemed so flimsy and inadequate under the circumstances. What I needed was a word that said thank you and I’m sorry and holy shit and maybe even what the fuck? all at once.

  * * *

  —

  My communication with Dad tapered off. It happened gradually, over a period of a few months, then a year. We’d go a few weeks between emails and phone calls, maybe longer, and when Dad did write to me, I didn’t always respond right away. It was the closest I’d come to fighting with him, without saying a word.

  I didn’t feel angry. Was I? Should I be? Mostly I was confused. Did his actions change everything or nothing? Did knowing? It had been so long ago, and I couldn’t just go back and rewrite my childhood. I got the impression that Dad had been waiting a long time to write the letter, that he had been composing his answers well before I or anyone else asked the question, and that it was a relief to at last break the silence. That maybe he was answering his own questions.

  Gradually, the shock faded, but I still felt betrayed—for the girl I’d been at three, in my raggedy cardigan, with my raggedy sister, both of us so young and clueless. Mom had since told me that the real reason she cut our hair short was so that strangers would think we were boys and wouldn’t take us. But we were so homely, even Dad had left.

  Every so often, Dad would send a quick email to check in on me. “Hello,” he’d write. “Allow me to introduce myself. Perhaps you remember me? I am your father….” I couldn’t help but smile. I didn’t want to be mad at him, and I knew he wasn’t fishing for forgiveness. He understood that it was more complicated than that. “Ol’ Dad is going to get kicked down the stairs, I’m afraid,” he’d admitted in his letter, “but, well, that’s the way it is.”

  What he wanted, really, was for me to be happy.

  “As for you and your relationship,” Dad wrote on the last page, “talk, talk, talk, don’t hold anything back. Don’t be overly proud. Don’t expect ‘thrill’ to carry you very far or very long. Make sure there’s that bedrock affection and respect. Remember that you’ll get old one day and need help. So will he.”

  I had to hand it to him. It was solid advice. Someday I was going to get married, and probably to Steve. But Dad’s letter didn’t erase my girlhood guilt or reassure me that I wouldn’t repeat his mistakes. If anything, I was more worried now that I would. He and I were similar in so many ways. How did he know that we wouldn’t be the same when it came to marriage?

  My chest was tight, and I couldn’t take deep breaths in the natural way you breathe, when the air loops from your belly all the way to your throat and circles back the way it came. That stopped happening; I couldn’t make the loop. Running was the only thing that helped. When I ran up my mountain, I felt the knot in my throat unstick and my breath loosen. Endorphins flushed my worries away, replacing them with practical matters, like not tripping over roots and getting down by dark.

  The fear came back while I slept. In the morning, my teeth hurt from clenching them all night, and I rode my bike to work, full of anguish, as if I were seeing the world, and the way people lived in it, for the first time. The lament that looped on repeat through my brain had many different, piteous versions but mostly went like this: Someday soon, I will be married with kids, and I will no longer get to have fun or ride bikes or run up mountains. My carefree days are dwindling.

  “You want to know what happens when you get married?” I announced to Steve one night at dinner. “You get boring and drive a minivan.” I knew this to be true because Meg, who was now married with two young children, had recently bought one. The thing she liked most about it, she’d explained, was that she no longer had to stick her butt into the street when she was buckling her kids into their car seats. That this was the pinnacle of maternal contentment depressed me beyond words.

  Steve chewed his chicken and stared at me deliberately for a long time, as though trying to process the absurdity of what I’d just uttered.

  Then his face split open into a full-lipped, dimpled grin. “Minivans are rad,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t need to tell you what happened next. Steve and I got married at Stony Lake. After the ceremony, in a wooden pavilion overlooking the water, Dad toasted our happiness. “I don’t know a whole lot about love—ask anybody!” He paused meaningfully, smiling at his inside joke. The guests chuckled; his self-effacing humor always went over well with a crowd. “But for a long time I’ve been thinking, Whoa, Katie, don’t look now, but THIS IS IT!”

  I glanced around the room, with its worn pine floors and shutters thrown open to the fresh air. I could hear waves sloshing under the dock below, a sound as consoling as my mother’s voice, as old maybe as the sound of water in the womb. Everybody I most loved was there: Steve; my siblings; my four parents: Mom, Ron, Dad, and Lesley. Even Uncle Phil. It didn’t matter how we fit together. There was strength in numbers, in all that love. You could never have too much.

  The DJ put on “Thunder Road” and Steve swung me around in my bare feet. So you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore. Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night…It was easy to love Steve if I let myself, to realize that, even if we didn’t have all the answers or know with certainty that we would stay together, we could live as though we would.

  It was dark by the time Dad and I danced slowly to the song he’d chosen, Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now.” It was the song I’d heard him play on the stereo many times, the one he’d quoted at the end of his letter to me:

  I’ve looked at love from both sides now

  From give and take, and still somehow

  It’s love’s illusions that I recall.

  I really don’t know love at all…

  Now I knew why he loved this song. The lyrics captured all of his contradictions—his ambivalence and regrets, his lights and his darks, his desire to see and his instincts to suppress.

  Below the song lyrics, he’d given his own take on the song:

  Illusions are fine, and they can certainly excite the brain, but it’s on the ground w
here it really counts.

  Then he signed it by hand, in thick, black ink across the bottom of the page:

  9

  The Things We Threw Away

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Dad framing his barn, 1984

  On a gloomy Saturday in early November, we clean out Dad’s barn. He designed and built it by himself in the early eighties. On long summer evenings after his commute home from D.C., he’d climb onto the roof and pound nails until it got dark. Months passed, and then a year, but Dad just kept plugging away, board by board. He prized stamina and preparation over speed, and he built the barn as he lived his life, from a place of deep patience and exacting, sometimes exasperating deliberation. The barn was his own improbable midlife achievement.

  It’s stood there ever since, tall and proud, solid as a drum, with plain lines and wide wood planks, weathering from chestnut to distinguished gray. Downstairs in his workshop, he stores his tools, each hanging in its proper place outlined in felt-tip marker, nails and screws organized by size in plastic boxes. Bicycles with rusty chains, his yellow sea kayak, and dozens of signs he found, bought, or otherwise procured over the years. A week before we arrived, Dad called the local NPR station in Washington to arrange for them to cart off his green VW bus for donation.

  Upstairs, the hayloft is a repository for everything he doesn’t know what to do with. Dad is a collector by nature but a minimalist at heart, a contradiction that seemed to encompass fatherhood, too. Just as Meg and I were mementos from an earlier life, so, too, were the chunks of driftwood he brought back from Canada and his glass fishing floats from the South Pacific. Now that he’s sick, though, the clutter has become a mental weight threatening to drag him down.

  We don rubber gloves and face masks and climb the ladder in the barn. The hayloft holds it all: his whole life encapsulated in cardboard, everything coated in dust and dead stinkbugs. Dad wheezes up behind us, wearing a scarf and two coats, and lies down in a plastic lawn chaise we drag out from under the eaves. He is much thinner now, and very weak. The embolization procedure hasn’t slowed the tumor’s growth, and the cancer has spread to his lungs and bones. The doctors think they’ve found specks of it in his brain, and he spends most of his days buffered in a groggy opioid haze.

  Dad is the arbiter of what stays and what goes. Thumbs-up means keep; thumbs-down, chuck. We discover a striped wool afghan blanket his mother, Mary, knit decades ago, and he presses it to his face, inhaling its stuffy scent. We paw through boxes, holding up their contents to the light, like indecipherable artifacts from a forgotten civilization: cracked vinyl suitcases; the instruction manual to Dad’s first computer, a TRS-80 from Radio Shack; one badly scratched Cat Stevens album; a ceramic chicken wearing a sombrero. Meg reaches bravely into a plastic container and fishes out the cracked antiquarian scuba mask and regulator from his dive trip to Jamaica when he first met Lesley. Dad is efficient, good-humored, and unattached. Almost everything gets the thumbs-down.

  Dad’s best friend, Philip, rented a dumpster for the day, and we fling everything out the loft door and straight into the giant bin with reckless abandon and great peals of laughter. It’s satisfying to purge the place of junk and foul stinkbug carcasses, but beneath our productive zeal, we all know that saying goodbye to Dad’s stuff is merely a precursor to the much harder goodbye to come.

  Dad’s snoozing in the chaise when I pull a wooden frame from a grimy box. It’s a needlepoint rendering of a National Geographic cover. In the picture, a man is riding an antique bicycle with a giant front wheel. He wears a brown velvet jacket and matching dapper cap; behind him is a blur of crimson-and-orange foliage. I recognize the photograph right away: Dad took it.

  “Hey, Dad,” I whisper, touching his hand. “Look what I found.”

  He opens his eyes and reaches for the picture. “Nana made it for me,” he says softly, turning it over in his hands. The frame is warped and waterlogged, the thread faded, but the date below the National Geographic logo was still legible: September 1972. I wasn’t even one yet when he traveled to the Connecticut River Valley to shoot the story. In the years after this photograph appeared on the cover, Dad continued to take pictures on assignment. He was invited to Wyoming twice to participate in the Lakota Sioux’s traditional Sun Dance ceremony. He went to Alaska, where he hung off the side of a glacier. He won Picture of the Year awards. But at some point the scale tipped from photographer to editor. He was at his desk more than he was away from it. He published less and didn’t show or sell his work.

  “Oh, he had such potential,” Mom used to say, long after they’d divorced, always with a twinge of disappointment. “I think he could have been quite recognized for his pictures.” This was the one bit of commentary about Dad she allowed herself. She had helped him hang his first, and only, photography exhibit, in Essex, Connecticut, in 1963. The black-and-white pictures captured everyday life in the sixties—high school football players in a huddle, college students in cat-eye glasses, a dingy train chugging through an empty rail yard—but beneath the surface, you could see the loneliness and yearning of being alive—his subjects’ and his own, too.

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Dad, Hamilton, New York, 1964

  These photographs became part of his portfolio that got him noticed by National Geographic. But once he’d been hired, and even after he left us to pursue his photography without distractions, he backed off. Maybe he found photography too exposing. Maybe it was safer being the person behind the person behind the lens. I didn’t understand it, really, but I could feel his longing for photography, the kind of nostalgia you feel for something that you no longer desire in a definitive way but miss abstractly. The thing you’ve outgrown but wish you hadn’t.

  Like marriage, photography was a loss Dad had backed himself into, even as he continued to make pictures constantly, for himself if not for publication. Of Meg and me, staged in a million different ways, of Lesley and the animals, of Huntly Stage in all seasons and his road trips and his friends. He carried the loss well below the surface. You wouldn’t know it from looking at him—he had the prized career, a good marriage with plenty of independence, their beautiful farm—but you could feel it, the unfulfilled promise, like his bass violin, a subtle, steady backbeat to the rest of his life.

  In a strange way, this seemed to suit Dad. He had never been flashy. He didn’t need the spotlight. He didn’t like show-offs or fakery. Maybe he was happy with the choice he’d made. Maybe the disappointment was mine.

  * * *

  —

  I was on the opposite trajectory. I’d started out an editor and was becoming a writer. It was the thing I’d always wanted and had been too afraid to say outright. For months after my assignment to Yosemite, I’d been trying to get up my courage and quit my job to write full-time. Outside was like family to me. I’d grown up there, but I was about to turn thirty-five and the magazine’s masculinity had begun to feel confining.

  The trip had changed me. Clinging to Half Dome with a crazed and petrified glee, I knew I wanted to write stories in my own voice, in my own way—by living in them. Not to impress my father or my colleagues or anyone else, not because Meg had let her English degree languish and got her MBA, not because writing was fair game now. But for me.

  In 2006, a few months after Steve and I got married, Outside asked me to write a profile of professional ultrarunner Dean Karnazes. Karnazes had written the bestselling book Ultramarathon Man, about his unlikely journey from a mildly depressed marketing professional to an endurance phenom, literally overnight. One night in 1992, Karnazes was partying at a San Francisco nightclub. It was his thirtieth birthday, and he was feeling old and disillusioned. He left the bar after midnight, walked home, snuck into the garage so as not to wake his family, took off his pants, changed into a pair of old sneakers, shoved a twenty-dollar bill into one shoe, and set off runnin
g in his boxer shorts. It had been fifteen years since he last went for a jog, but for seven hours through the night, he ran. When he got to Half Moon Bay, the sun was rising, his feet were mangled, and he could barely stand. He found a phone booth and called his wife collect to come pick him up. He’d run thirty miles, straight out of one life and into another.

  In the years that followed, Dean almost single-handedly transformed ultrarunning from an obscure, quasi-psychotic cult of extreme athletes into a respectable pastime. There were many other ultra-distance runners who were faster than Dean, but it was Dean who brought ultrarunning to the masses. He was living, breathing, running proof that average runners could run above-average distances. Way above average. You just had to have the heart, and the willpower.

  Now Dean was coming through Albuquerque as part of his bid to run fifty marathons in fifty states in fifty days. New Mexico was number 22—not a race but an informal 26.2-mile route through Albuquerque. I wanted to interview him while he ran, and when I called him to suggest this, he said, “Meet me at the starting line!” The longest I’d ever run was the half marathon, a year earlier. I had no business contemplating 26.2 miles. At most, I might run six or seven miles with him. Maybe—if the interview was going well—halfway. But I would definitely peel off early, I told him. Definitely.

  Dean was short and compact and unexpectedly muscly, with a bushy head of coily brown hair and glowing bronzed skin that looked like it came from a bottle but really came from spending almost every waking minute outside. He looked more like a gym rat than a distance runner. He was surrounded by a small entourage of support crew, fellow runners, and fans, but when he saw me, he parted the crowd, pounded me on my back, and shouted, “Let’s get after it!”