I know one truth. That is, I can only believe one thing: the fathers in my family are always slipping away, like water dripping out of my cupped hands. It happened with my mother’s father and his father too. And so, of course, it happened with my own father as well.
According to my mother, he left us the day I was born. It was a hot summer Sunday when my mother drove herself to the hospital in our old Toyota, running her first-ever red light before the entrance to the 101. When she arrived at the hospital, she was already losing her mind from the pain, the doctors rushed to help my mother out of the car. That’s when they discovered my father with his face folded between my mother’s legs. Apparently, he refused to come out, stuck in some wild, hormonal hibernation underneath the steering wheel until the doctors anaesthetized him, alongside my mother. And when she opened her eyes after the C-section, he was gone.
My mother refused to tell me why he left. In retrospect, it feels like I’ve spent my entire life craving the truth, but this is a lie I like to tell myself. The answer to my father’s disappearance must have been like a family heirloom, a piece of buried treasure bulging from mother’s heart like the cancer that eventually metastasized in her chest. Good fortune, she liked to tell me, didn’t run in our family bloodstream.
In my dreams, he was always with her. The night before my mother passed away, I dreamt that he was a shadow stooped low over the horizon, as real as a plastic submarine, and she was the ghost of a conch shell, echoing with ambient noise when you cocked your ear against her stomach. Her breathing was haunting and empty and fizzling away from my imagination when I woke up in the morning. But because dreams never make sense, and because my family has always felt a little make-believe, I grew up thinking nothing of it.
One of the first dreams I remember (in that surreal, tip-of-the-tongue way): I was six, curled up in my mother’s bed like I always did — or else she would spend all night walking aimless circles around the house instead of sleeping. I fell asleep, and in the dream, my father was a rainbow, and I was a snake. My mother was herself — for some reason, she was her most authentic self in my dreams. We were in a fish tank, or beneath the sea, or maybe floating in a primordial soup. My mother was falling away from us, deeper and darker, and my father and I arced through the water in desperate pursuit.
The next thing I remember, in that inexplicable dream-logic way, is standing in a nursery. My family and I were tangled on the floor, staring up at one of those hanging plastic mobiles with strange shapes that resembled animals — no, not animals. Creatures, probably. My father and I wrapped ourselves around my mother’s waist. We closed our eyes and held our breaths and listened to how her insides resonated at a slower and deeper frequency, like her body was trying to speak something unhuman. We let her vibrations push through us, and I woke up the next day with a raging fever and my eyes burning from sleep. Later, when I told this memory to my wife, she laughed and said she didn’t believe me.
My mother and I tried to find him every summer at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. The one with the big spinning mushroom ride and the colorful arcade with pink jawbreakers and expired glow-in-the-dark bubblegum springing up like plastic corpses from the park entrance. We would blow ten dollars on the dumb claw-machine games, then walk our way down to the pier. I would try to traverse the sand in a straight line, leaving a trail of grimy footprints as bait to be devoured by the water or the fish or whatever other things lived underwater.
I liked to waddle in after my mother, my hands balled into empty fists and tucked into the crevices on either side of my nose to form a pair of fleshy binoculars. We would trudge deeper and deeper until the back and forth of the tide made us dizzy, but we were desperate, and the ocean was always opaque with nothing.
For my parents’ ten-year anniversary, my mother mailed old wedding photos to our friends. I remember staring at my parents in the photos, their profiles fuzzed out with the grain of the photo. I imagined my father swallowing me whole. I imagined myself burning with shame, searing a hole through his belly and tumbling feet-first into the icy Pacific. Sometimes I dreamt of drying up the entire ocean with my hands.
I told my mother this once when I was sixteen, and we were spending Christmas at the Boardwalk, our feet wrinkling from the damp sand as other families waddled around us. I watched sticky fingers wrap around larger, calloused ones and felt something writhe awake in my chest. My mother started crying, and the tension in my body wound so tight that I started crying too. We sobbed until our eyes hurt and the water streaking down our faces left white grime on our cheeks. And when we couldn’t cry anymore, my mother rolled up her pants and soaked her toes in shipwrecked seaweed along the shore, wove her fingers around her waist, and filled the chilling air with her stories. She told me new things this time, like how they used to eat at a local Chinese place just for the plasticky fortune cookies packed with statements like “happiness will bring you good luck” and “in the end all things will be known.”
Sometimes we collected scraps from around the house and lugged them to the beach. My mother liked to throw things into the water for him — aspirin tablets, napkins, bridal magazines stuffed into wine bottles. I liked helping her. It was an alien catharsis, copying the stroke of my mother’s right arm, launching books and flowers into the swell of the tide, not quite sure where or what or whom I was aiming at.
I got in trouble at school a lot, mostly because my mind was always wandering elsewhere. When I wasn’t thinking about the beach, I was thinking about the day he left, about the way my mother might have pushed her skirt up around her stomach and stared at the tops of his lashes from the space between her knees while their cold sweat pooled together in a salty, sour soup. In kindergarten, we drew family portraits. Everyone ripped into the green crayons, their messy stick-figured mothers and fathers smiling against a background of grass and flowers and butterflies. But I picked up the blue crayon and covered my paper in blobs of seawater. My mother didn’t keep many photos around the house, but she hung my drawing on the fridge.
After her cancer, when I went back to collect her things, I realized the stick-figures looked like they were drowning.
As I got older, I became a bit more studious. That, or I actually started taking my father’s disappearance more seriously. I scoured the neighborhood library for stories, learned how to make an annotated bibliography way before college. After those long evenings, I came home to find my mother pacing around the house, walking toward her bedroom before turning around and running to the front door, then shuffling back to the bedroom, back and forth like a wave that couldn’t decide how to break against the rocks.
When I was in high school, I wanted to work at the local aquarium. To get a bit of distance from my mother, who was gradually drifting away. I went through a phase where I was sick and tired of her — her hands, her breathing, the way she always stared at me, unblinking.
At the aquarium, the lady in charge made me fill out a background check about my parents. I told her that I couldn’t write down the name of my father because I didn’t know his name. She glared at me. There was a wart on her nose. It drooped so low it almost touched her upper lip. It reminded me of the plants on our kitchen counter, which were always chronically overwatered so that their leaves grew, thrived, bloated, then died.
For my eighteenth birthday, I finally decided to tell my mother.
“He’s gone. He’s gone, and he’s not coming back.”
My mother stared at me across the kitchen table. Her eyes: sharp and bright.
“Are you going to say anything?”
She reached across the kitchen table. Touched my cheek. I thought her whole body would be shaking — she was always complaining about how cold it was inside the house — but her touch was firm and insistent.
“I can’t handle your moping anymore.” I didn’t mean for this to sting, but the cold shock of her hand made the words rougher. “You’re literally making yourself sick, and for what?”
I knew I could move my face away. It would be easier to turn around and storm out of the room. But it had been so long since my mother held her hand out to me, and in the most monstrous way possible, I wanted her to stay.
“Please, please say something.”
My mother blinked, and her eyes misted over. It was as if she was looking past me, across the interstate highway, toward the nothingness of the ocean. And just like that, I had lost her to him.
He must have been watching us. But I’m not sure. Thinking about this interaction now makes me feel a little seasick.
On the day of my college graduation, my mother spotted his blurry picture in the newspaper. He had blue eyes — cobalt, like mine. So I spent most of my adulthood standing in the dim light of my apartment in Santa Barbara, inspecting that space between my temples in the mirror and watching my pupils expand and contract in my fogging reflection. They were breathing, maybe.
I met my future wife at the same aquarium I worked at when I was sixteen. We met by one of the older displays, the one with a taxidermized plastic eel slithering above our heads. When I snuck my hand into hers, I felt watched by the sea creatures around us.
When I introduced her to my mother for the first time, my mother gave her a small wave and my wife (girlfriend at the time) beamed back. She was born with five extra teeth in her mouth; her parents couldn’t afford a dentist, so my wife’s smile was all tooth and nothing else. Later, when we were about to leave, my mother pulled me aside and breathed softly into my ear.
“Are you going to tell her about your father?”
“I mean … What is there to tell?”
“It’s just …” My mother made a face that, to this day, still haunts me.
I shrugged her off my shoulder. “I can handle my own relationship, thanks. Nora’s basically part of the family now.”
I thought my mother would be exasperated, but to my surprise, she burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
My mother laughed until she started crying. I was still frustrated with her that I refused to hold her (though now I regret this with every bone in my body). Finally, when she wiped her wet face with the back of her hand and said, “One day, I swear, you’ll understand everything.”
I proposed to my wife at the Boardwalk. We ate at a nearby Italian place and stumbled wine-drunk across the beach, our sandals in our hands and our eyes trained on the sand, the tiny kernels rolling out and around our feet. When the sky reddened with dust, I got down on one knee and opened my mouth. I had my entire speech prepared, but when I looked into my wife’s eyes, those beautiful breathing things, I felt my words sink below the depths, like something was dragging language away from my body.
I wonder if the same thing happened to my father. I imagine this is how our family forgets our truths. Maybe my mother was onto something.
My wedding night was, for the most part, a soft kind of darkness. My wife stroked my hair for hours, which made me go a little cross-eyed until my vision grew blurry, and for a brief moment, I thought about how this will one day resemble the last time I see her, with her legs wrapped around my neck and her manicured fingers massaging the base of my skull. I felt the thin band of color around my pupils pull taut, and the motion hurt, actually hurt, like my optic nerve was being twisted and yanked through my skull. Perhaps this is what happened to my father on the day he left, when he slotted himself into the driver’s seat and knelt down in front of my mother, like he was shaking her awake from a dream.
How did he vanish? Did he disappear in a puff of smoke, like it was magic this whole time? And what about me?
The next day, I caught a few glances of myself in the mirror. Everything looked a bit hazy. In the shower, my wife’s eyelashes were heavy with moisture as she asked me what we should name our child. We can give him as many names as we want to, I told her. When we stepped out, I counted the water droplets clinging to my body.
My mother passed away six months later. The doctors said it was cancer. But looking at the veins crawling across her whitening face, I imagined the weight of my father’s identity cremating her insides, her immune system kicking into overdrive, her cells multiplying in a desperate attempt to protect our family.
The night before her heart died, I rushed her to the hospital — the same one I was born at, coincidentally. Coincidences, it turns out, can be tragic like that. I sat by her hospital bed all night, trembling with exhaustion. Perhaps I picked up my superstitions from my mother, but that night, I felt my father closer than ever. Like if I was lucky, I could reach out and touch him. Like if I leaned over and pressed my ear against my mother’s belly, I might be able to hear an echo of a family.
People often describe grief as a deadening thing, something cold that infects you like a slow poison. But people don’t talk about how grief can also strike you full of bullet holes. Grief is angry — it lashes out, and I did too, learning over and begging, really begging my mother, one last time, to tell me about my father. Why he left us. Why I had his eyes.
But by then, the truth had started coming to me. Day by day, my wife’s stomach ballooned into a bubble of hot flesh, and feeling that unbearable heat at night, I was also realizing. I knew I would change, I knew my father had changed, and I knew that the stories about my father, the ones swimming inside my mother, were changing at that very moment.
So I wasted my mother’s dying moment learning something I already knew.
When my mother passed away, he was spotted again in the Caspian Sea. The message was relayed by three fishermen who lived in Turkmenistan. My wife played me the news broadcast on her phone, balancing it on her pregnant stomach, and I chuckled at one of their eyebrows, thick and untamed in a way that made the whites around their eyes spill out from their sockets.
I wanted to hold my mother’s funeral on the Boardwalk, but the police got involved and said it was a bad omen for tourism if a woman’s ashes were dumped into the sea. My wife and I had no choice but to dig out old sand toys and bury her remains in our backyard. I stayed up for three nights after that, studying the rumors about my father: digging through archival footage, stumbling across articles about new DNA testing technology (written by scientists with capital letter credentials). Was I seeking out the truth or confirming what my mother’s stories had been telling me all along?
During one of our visits to the Boardwalk, my mother pulled me into a cheap souvenir shop. She pointed to one of those fortune-telling machines, the ones that would spit out a yellow ticket with lucky lotto numbers on it. This one was brand new,the gold paint perfectly untouched. The animatronic inside — the torso of a mustached man wearing a turban — stared over my head, and I remember turning around, staring out at the beach to figure out what he was gawking at, or searching for. I asked her what she was going to do.
“Your father and I, we never knew what the future would be like,” she replied, digging out a crumpled dollar bill from her shorts. She slid it in. The two of us took a step back, watching the man inside the machine come to life. His eyes glowed red and the speaker below him croaked, “I can see your fortune — come see it too, no?”
My mother kept the yellow slip with her until the day she died. I know, because when my wife and I visited her during the holidays, we would find her curled up in front of the fireplace, worrying the paper between her teeth. Before the cremation, the doctors handed me the slip, which was so worn and wrinkled that the writing had completely rubbed off. I think the fortune said something about apologies, or a happy reunion with a loved one, or how to discover your own truth, because why else would my mother treasure this prediction like her own child — with all the love in the world, knowing it would eventually transform into a monster before her very eyes?
A few weeks before my wife’s due date, I stopped sleeping. I tried taking medication, but the pills made my skin dry and flaky, and I started shedding bits of myself all over our apartment. Sometimes, if my wife woke up in the middle of the night, she helped me pick at my dried cuticles, laying them out on my pillow like a tarot card reading. But I mostly spent those long nights with my calves tangled around my wife’s knees, stroking her throat as she twitched in her sleep. I would bring her pulse close to mine. Close my eyes and think about the future. The exact moment when parenthood would drag me under, and I would take my first breath, my first real one.
In kindergarten, we read Where the Wild Things Are. I imagined my father was one of the horned creatures in the book. I imagined that my mother tamed my father like Max did, by sailing across the ocean, calmly meeting his gaze as he drifted farther and farther away. I imagined that my father was the wildest thing of all.
One day, my wife will give birth, and then I will realize: this was never about my father’s decision to leave. I will spend my nights following him instead of my mother, wondering when my own child will learn about the things that breathe underneath the water. I will wish I knew how it felt. Holding that infantile thing in my arms, peeling back its eyelids with a thumb and forefinger, and watching its irises swim away from the white light glaring down at them from the ceiling of the operating room. Perhaps this flesh will have my eyes too.
One day, I will unlock all the possibilities hidden in my body. Then, I will do exactly what I was born to do: nestle between my wife’s legs, press my ear against her stomach, and listen to the humming, drumming echoes in this untamed space. The buzzing of awakening creatures: my child, and me.