“Ginny wake up, I need ya,” Dad was calling in a fairly calm voice while simultaneously banging repeatedly with a closed fist on the wafer-thin wooden door to my room.
Had I forgotten to cancel a tutor? Did someone else die?
I had blankets over the windows and a few strings of Christmas lights plugged in for light so I didn’t know what time of day it was. Or what day it was. I crawled out of my cocoon of blankets and opened the latch on the door.
“What?” I asked, only half awake, trying to peer downstairs and see if it was night or day.
Dad pushed into my room grinning, holding the cordless phone.
“Yep, I’ve got her right here,” he said cheerily and then covered the receiver with his hand.
I backed up onto the bed and sat down.
“It’s just someone from the bank, they need to verify that you’re you and that you agree to sharing an account with me with this new account,” he said hurriedly, pushing the phone at me.
“Oh. Okay?” I took the phone, glaring at my dad confused.
I had shared a bank account with my mom; I assumed that was what he was talking about. Any access to an account with money in it was good for me, right?
“Hello?” I managed.
The man on the phone gave me a cheerful hello. He then asked me to verify my name and social security number, which I did. He then asked, “And you’re going to share the account with your dad here, yes?”
And I said yes, and he said great and thanked me and told me I could hand the phone back to my dad.
Dad greedily took the phone, turned, and left down the stairs.
Soon after, he started fixing up his truck. New seats, a new paint job, new tires. He decided to close in the patio on the side of the house. New appliances were showing up, a TV, a new washer/dryer. He was also being more generous when giving me cash when I asked for it, and since I had my own shit going on, I took it as good fortune and tried to stay out of the way.
I really like turtles. And when I like something I immediately start researching and learning all I can about whatever it is. In third grade, was once pulled out of class by a teacher from a higher grade because word around school was that I knew about turtles; this teacher had found a turtle and didn’t know what kind it was, and so went and found me to ask.
There were lots of turtles where I lived. Green water turtles, red-eared sliders, snapping turtles, mud turtles, wood turtles, and of course, box turtles. My positive feelings towards Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle were probably about 80% just because I liked turtles.
(Take a shot every time I say the word turtles, the writing will vastly improve.)
There’s this thing that box turtles do in the summer when it rains. They come out from wherever they are hiding in the woods, and they walk out into the street. The roads where we lived were maybe 70% paved, but narrow and windy with barely any markings or lighting. No one expected pedestrians because there were no sidewalks or traffic lights, so many turtles fell victim to cars unable or unwilling to brake for them.
When a summer rain would get going, my dad would drive me around in his pick-up truck for hours, carefully cruising the country roads hunting for turtles to save. My dad had a collection of cassette tapes to choose from in his truck – The Beatles, The Doors, Simon and Garfunkel, Genesis – white Baby Boomer music. I remember Dad liking to play “Riders On The Storm” while it was storming. 8-year-old me thought it was cool. Much older me feels like that is way too on the nose for any decent narrative.
But it was a sweet thing. It was something we could do where my dad didn’t feel the need to mock or belittle my interests. We both cared about animals and we both liked riding in cars. (I prefer train travel, but I’ll take a good passenger seat in a long car ride in a pinch.) There was never a fight about riding around and saving turtles. I never came home in tears. It was maybe the only father-daughter activity we ever engaged in.
If there was a good place to leave the turtle, we might release them in a place just off the road, but more often than not we scooped them up off the road and put them on the floor of the truck at my feet. Sometimes we would find two or three turtles in one trip. We would drive them back home and then release them in our yard, which was surrounded by woods and bordered the local park property. A couple of summers, I kept track of the turtles.
Box turtles have patterns on their shells as distinct a human fingerprints. The colors of the patterns range from light yellow to dark orange-red. And you can tell a turtle’s age by the rings on the plates of their shell, just like rings of a tree. (However, you do not need to cut open a turtle to see the rings. Please do not cut open a turtle. Just thinking about that makes me so sad.) I took polaroid photos of each one, and a few summers the same turtles would return to our yard. One summer we documented 30 box turtles.
(Are you drunk yet?)
As I got older, the turtles started showing up less and less around the same time my dad and I stopped wanting to spend time with each other. The turtles didn’t need us anymore. And sadly, our efforts to save them from being squished in the road were not enough to impact the greater turtle community.*
*“In 2011, the International Union for Conservation of Nature downgraded the conservation status of the (Eastern Box Turtle) from near threatened to vulnerable, noting that the population has dropped by nearly a third over three generations.” – https://www.pennlive.com/wildaboutpa/2017/06/turtles_of_pennsylvania_maybe.html
My first pet was born before I was. She was a skittish black and white cat named Snookie who was already 5 years old when I showed up. I cannot place what prompted me to ask this, but as my mom was putting me to bed one night when I was 8 or 9, I just looked up at her and asked “Mom, what if Snookie dies?” I don’t know if I had been thinking about death or if the cat had been to the vet recently, or if it was just one of those creepy things that kids do where they seemingly at random bomb you with questions about reality. But there was something about the prompt to imagine a world without Snookie that made my mother tear up and I teared up, and we both cried about a cat who was still alive.
Snookie lived to about 16 years old, which is decent for a cat.
I once brought home an elderly cat that was covered in burrs (those sticky pointy things that get on your clothes when you walk in the woods, I think they used the idea to make velcro or some shit) and had no teeth. We had her fixed up and found her an elderly lady who adopted her. It was always acceptable to help strays in my home.
Not to be upstaged in helping the less fortunate, soon afterward, my dad brought home an elderly deaf man. He had happened upon this guy on the road, or in the woods, I’m not sure. He was living nearby in a run-down shack down a dirt road, so over-grown that you wouldn’t believe anyone lived there. After exchanging some scribbled-on scraps of paper (my dad’s handwriting was worse than mine was in kindergarten, so I’m sure it was a struggle for both of them), Dad learned that his name was Charlie and he often walked along the road and accepted rides.
Charlie had no electricity, no way to communicate with the outside world, and no means of transportation. So my dad took it upon himself to make friends. My dad pronounced his name “chawl-ee” or “cholly,” however you say it with an exaggerated New Jersey accent. It was like a weird nickname my dad gave him, one that Charlie would never know about because he couldn’t hear it. They communicated mostly in hand gestures and head nods and the occasional exaggerated mouthing of words.
Dad would give Charlie rides to places he needed to go and treat him to lunch. In the winter, Dad made sure to go by and check on him and help shovel out a path for him if he needed it. Charlie was resistant to the idea of leaving his home, so there was only so much anyone could do. After many months of rides to various appointments , a caseworker of some kind came to our house with him to give some insight into Charlie’s situation, and eventually he was placed into care somewhere.
It was a good and kind thing. A thing that you hear about and think, “Wow, what a nice man.” I saw my dad going out of his way to help people off of the street, but he would also go out of his way to be cruel to me on a daily basis, a cruelty that escalated every year. Mom would always tell me not to take what he did personally, but kids don’t know how to do that. Most adults wouldn’t know how to do that.
It felt like my father grew to hate me and my mother, but what was happening was a decline into depression and substance abuse, which masked at least one personality disorder and a whole lot of other damage. This also wasn’t the first time Dad had been through the cycle of setting up a family and then destroying it. It wasn’t even the second time. After the third or fourth try at fathering, dad told me I was the reason he got a vasectomy.
It turned out that my mother had created a will allocating our home (that she bought solely with her money) and most of her savings to me, with instructions for one of her friends to be guardian and overseer of the estate.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t yet had it finalized, signed, and notarized. All of her instructions on what to do and how to make it so I’d be okay were just a useless file sitting on her computer.
So as it was with the funeral, all decisions were diverted to my father without question. Everything was his. I was his responsibility, which meant I was no one’s responsibility. And just as things started appearing, they also started disappearing.
My mom’s ceramic Beatrix Potter figures were gone from out of a hutch. Her very old copy of The Secret Garden that she had kept on her dresser went missing. Her souvenir Loch Ness Monster stuffed animal that wore a little tam o’shanter. Mom had always been an anglophile or rather a… UK-ophile? Great Britain+. It’s one of her traits that imprinted on me greatly, thanks to PBS playing a lot of shows from the BBC during the 80s and 90s.
These symbols of her personality and of my childhood had no meaning to my father, and thus he couldn’t fathom that they would matter to someone. Or maybe he only got rid of things when he was on a certain combination of drugs because he thought they were haunted. It wasn’t as if he needed the money.
Meanwhile, I was busy ignoring reality, unable to play babysitter to my father’s whims.
And then one day I came home and my kitten was gone.
Deedlit had been a birthday present at 6 weeks old in October, so she was only months old. All of our cats were allowed outside, and none had ever gone missing.
“Dad, have you seen Deedlit?” (Yes, the cat was named after an anime elf. I will not explain myself to you, reader!)
“You aren’t around enough and we have enough cats.”
“Dad, what did you do with her?”
“She’s fine, she’s gonna get a new family. She’s fine, drop it.”
“DAD, WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO WITH MY CAT?”
A few more screams and I got him to admit he had taken her back to the local SPCA. I ran to a phone and called to ask them to please not adopt out the long haired black and white girl cat they had gotten earlier in the day. I don’t know what story he told them, and I don’t remember what story I had to tell to get her back, but I came home with her.
I’m not sure how I did not then run to the nearest sharp object and stab my dad to death then and there, but there are countless times in my story that I wonder the same thing. That I never murdered this or any man is truly a testament to my enduring goodness and evolved sense of civility. Or I’m a huge coward.
A few days later, my dad got in a mood again. I don’t know what set him off. Maybe the kitten got under foot. Maybe his drug supply was low. Maybe I said the wrong thing. This time I was holding her and he ripped her out of my arms. I screamed and cried. I tried to hold onto her without her being hurt. I was shoved onto the stairs, he slammed the door, and then she was gone.
This time she wasn’t at the SPCA. Maybe he had really taken her to a nice farm to play with other kitties. I’ll never know.
It was at this point that I gained the ability to detach from things. Nothing was going to stay. Nothing was safe. And I felt that if I tried to continue living there, I’d end up being the next thing to go missing. So without a plan or inkling of what I could do next, I quietly started gathering my things.
One day while dad was out, I went into the garage to see if there was anything I wanted to take with me. I loved that tiny garage because it smelled like gasoline and old cars. Some of my old toys and tattered kites were still hanging up on a high shelf. And then on a bench next to some old rags, I spotted the urn with my mother’s ashes (or rather, the box containing her urn, still sealed with the labels and tape still on it).
I closed up the garage and went inside.
I didn’t ask about it.
She was gone. Her things were gone and my cat was gone and my boyfriend was gone. What good was a piece of pottery filled with ashes?
I never saw the box again, and never found out what happened to Mom’s ashes. I imagine they were scattered somewhere in some opioid-binge in the yard or something. Who the hell knows. We’re all dirt anyway.
I never got to follow up on what that phone call from the bank really was, either. But years later I figured out that my dad had taken out a credit card in my name and racked up over $40,000 in debt.