CHAPTER 1

The last time I saw my father, it was 1975. He was lying in a hospital bed in a room with bright—too bright—green and yellow walls, inappropriate colors intended to console the sick, the dying. As he slept, curled beneath a sheet, I watched him breathe, willing him to, his face still tan against that pillow so white. And as I sat looking at him, I thought of how, when I was small, I would awaken in my room beside the flowered wallpaper and listen for his footsteps down the hall, comfortable in their familiarity, secure in the insular world of my childhood, knowing without question or doubt that when I followed those sounds, I would always find him.

When he first got sick, I wiped his forehead dry until he became too ill and I could do nothing. "Pops," he said, calling me one of my many nicknames, "don't you worry. I'm going to be just fine." And I looked at him then and nodded because I couldn't find the words.

My father died there, three days later, on the eighth floor of Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York.

He was just fifty years old, I barely twenty.

I was so blinded by the loss. Terrified by each day that took me further from the last that I had seen him. Incapacitated by the idea of a life without him, my world grew impossibly small and inaccessible. I did not know how to grieve, to accept, to move on. I shut down. I detached. I fell apart.

I replayed those last days of the hospital—the waiting, the doctors in their silent shoes, the unimaginable words—in excruciating, explosive detail as if in the revisiting, the outcome could be changed in some way.

Walking aimlessly outside, I was stunned by the normalcy of those obscenely bright summer skies. I knew it was useless, but I would whisper, "Dad, if you can hear me, make the leaf move. Or the bird; make that bird fly now," and I would wait. I needed something tangible, some acknowledgment that he could hear me. Some sign that I was not losing my mind.

All of the years that I mourned my father and all of the "magical thinking" that I engaged in could not bring him back. But that didn't stop my trying. In those first weeks I sat alone in his office chair reaching for pens he had held, papers he had touched. I looked at his photographs, imagining him talking to me. I panicked when I thought it might be possible I could very soon forget the way he smiled, or the sound of his laugh and the way his voice trailed up the stairs calling me Pops or Miss Grumple or Nanny. I was so afraid that I would lose him, lose him incrementally, lose him for good.

But grief is a strange thing. After it slams you, it has nowhere else to go. This understanding can take years, can take its toll, can excise you off the planet. And it did for me. I finally started seeing a therapist after the insistent prodding of friends. It took more than a year, but there I sat with Dr. Fein stein, week after week, in a room with shelves of books and no sunlight.

He told me, "You need to visit your father's grave." He said it quietly but emphatically. My mother, my friends were all telling me the same thing: "You need closure." I felt ambushed from all sides. I was not doing well. Although I had just graduated from college, I was depressed. I had panic attacks and the start of agoraphobia. I was overwhelmed by this sadness that was acute and all-consuming and sometimes left me gasping for air. A year passed, then another. June, July, August. Suddenly summers were gone. Fall filled the air in a barrage of color and then succumbed to November skies. It was gray and windy and cold, and I still hadn't done what I needed to do. I could not go to my father's grave.

I found the simplest memory could cause the greatest ache. In one, my father—wearing blue shorts, no shirt—is carrying a small green plate with a corned beef sandwich he has just made; in his other hand, a Coke. He is going outside to eat his lunch in the sun. Thinking the sliding doors are open, he walks right into them and yells, "God damn it!"

He is not hurt. When he sees me, he laughs. "I'm okay," he says, and we are both laughing. On our hands and knees, we clean up the mess with paper towels and pick up the pieces of sandwich. He has a small purple mark on his forehead that within weeks will disappear.

A sticker remains on those glass doors still. It is faded and peeled in one corner but warns when the doors are closed. And sometimes, if I stand there at just around noon on a summer day, I can see the soda spilling across the wood floor, the soaked corned beef on rye, and the green plate tipped in my father's hand. I can see him turning, tanned, and smiling in the sunlight. I can hear my father laughing in the empty room.

CHAPTER 2

On an early winter morning a few years after graduating from college, I drive from Ithaca back to the cottage. It, and the newer house my parents built next door, has been closed for winter. My tracks in the snow will be the only ones except for rabbits, squirrels, maybe a deer. I get out of the car, search in my pocket for the key, push open the door to the house, and turn on the light, grateful that the electricity has not been turned off and that there is still a little warmth.

Nothing really changes here, and my father's presence, even in the stillness, is powerful. A shadow can so easily be transformed, his voice imagined, and for just a moment I envision him there. I hear the familiar sound of his footsteps on the stairs, but of course I see nothing—only the empty steps in the faint morning light.

Although I should be, I am clearly no further along in this grieving process. I haven't found a teaching position, and so I sub in elementary schools when I can and tutor. It isn't lost on me, though, or those around me, that I'm on auto pilot, not fully present, not really engaged, at all.

As I walk from room to room I find the quiet unbearable and so in the kitchen, I switch on the radio—my mother's station, the last one played—classical. The music breaks the silence, but it feels jarring, droning, and I quickly turn it off and walk into another room.

In a closet I find what I have come for. My father's box of old letters, his 511th Airborne booklet, other memorabilia, and the family photo albums, a myriad of colored covers, each one marked with a specific year. I sit on the floor, the books and letters and other items spread before me, and I open the first album; Dad on the boat saluting behind the wheel; playing poker with his friend Dick; swimming with my sister and me in the lake; Dad rolling around with the dogs on the lawn. Another album, then another, a slide show of images flashing too quickly, on and on, until the pictures stop on a half-filled page because weeks later my father was gone.

I get up and stand at the window, watching as a bird feeder, empty for years, swings precariously. I look at the vanishing light and the falling snow, and I am surprised so much time has passed.

Kneeling again on the floor, I begin stacking the albums, carefully refolding the letters and other items and placing them into the box. I see I have forgotten to put my dad's old yearbook in. I open the cover and find him quickly. His brown eyes looking back at mine.

I return the book and close the top, ready to set it back on the closet shelf. But I worry about the dampness and the passage of time, the erosion of what remains, and quickly decide this time I will not leave it behind. I will take the box with me. These things cannot be lost.

I stay a moment more in the silent room, the empty house, knowing that I'll have to keep doing this. I will have to keep looking. That in order to go forward, I will have to go back because even all this time after his death, his absence feels unmanageable, implausible still.

At the landing I reach again in my pocket for the key and lock the door behind me. It has begun to snow heavier and I can barely see my tracks.

Starting the car, the wipers battle the falling snow and a blast of air hits me as I turn down the gravel drive and begin back ...

CHAPTER 3

During the school year, we live in a large Tudor house in Pacific Palisades, California, on the west side of Los Angeles. But every summer we fly to our cottage in upstate New York, built by my mother's grandfather and great-grandfather where, with the exception of the years my sister Jodi and I were born, my mother has come every summer of her life.

We pack up our two dogs, our two cats, give them their prescribed sedatives, and put our three pet rats in their tiny yellow fabric-covered travel cages in preparation for the long flight. We always arrive at night, crunching down the gravel drive, the suitcases piled up in back and the dogs leaning out the window, like a Norman Rockwell painting. June, fireflies in flight, glowing in and out of darkness, my dad whistling and then all of us calling in a singsong voice, "We're here! We're here!" There is no greater thrill than this first arrival, with all of summer, a lifetime, just ahead; my father as ecstatic as my mother, my sister, and I when we see the little red house.

The cottage has three tiny bedrooms with sliding wooden doors and one bathroom with only a toilet and sink. We bathe in the lake or in a small shower in the trailer across the lawn where my great-grandmother stays in the summer months.

One day my dad will tell me how he was once washing in the lake when a boat approached. "Pops, I was standing there in my birthday suit, and I heard the boat coming closer and closer. I made a mad dash and crouched under the dock so that I wouldn't be seen."

At the cottage, we dry our clothes outside on a line and my mother hands me pins from a small blue and white cloth bag so that I can hang my own. I am a little chubby in those early years. My hair is curly like my dad's, and my mother makes me get it cut in the summer, which I hate. I am also short for my age and sometimes have to stand on my toes to reach the clothesline.

We talk a little as we work. "Did you know," my mother says, reaching into the bag, "this is the same clothespin bag we used when I was a little girl?" She helps me pin up my wet bathing suit. "Maybe you'll keep it for your kids."

Our days in the summer relieve my dad of his life in Los Angeles, show business, and the madness and pace of the city. Still, he struggles to balance the two ways of life, and I watch him running in and out of the house to answer the ringing phone, jarring against the quiet voices from the lake below, the hum of the cicadas—all of the summer sounds.

Even at the cottage he is continuously writing and creating. But for a while, at least, he takes himself out of the passing lane. He turns the phone down and lies in the hammock, reading there every afternoon, pushing himself back and forth with a stick he found on the beach, his glasses sliding down his nose while he dozes. When I am six or so, I dance around him, playing, balancing pebbles on his toes, challenging the sleeping, snoring giant to awaken and chase me away.

My sister, Jodi, three years older than I am, often plays a few feet away. Her long, brown hair is tied back as she gallops two toy palomino horses, making them whinny as they round a tree. She is obsessed with horses, even then.

And my mother, in the distance, arms full of freshly picked orange day lilies, walks across the porch and then into the cottage.

For a while there are just the sounds of the screen door closing as my mother carries the flowers inside, my father continues his rhythmic snore, my sister talks to her horses, and a boat motors slowly along the shoreline of the lake below.

The afternoons are spent with a family that lives five minutes away. The Delavans. There are four girls—readymade instant friends. We are together almost every summer day. Ann is Jodi's age and Debbie just one year older than I am. Edie is a year younger and Cathy four years younger. Debbie, Edie, and I are all reading the Laura Ingalls' books, and together we set up a house in the woods with boards for mattresses and colorful old sheets and blankets to cover them. We furnish the "house" with chairs and tables we find in their barn or our attic. We even have an old spinning wheel and a red-checkered tablecloth for the kitchen table. In dresses of our grandmothers', stored in a dress-up trunk, we spend hours cleaning and sweeping that dirt floor. The trees provide a canopy from the heat, and every day we are there singing and playing in the woods in our old-fashioned, too large dresses that we tie at the waist to hold up. Jodi and her friend Ann— before boys become their main interests and tormenting us is less exciting—often spy on us from a small tree house several yards away. They once find a dead fish that they stick in one of our pots when we're not there. We all scream at the discovery, and they try to muffle their wild laughter where they sit watching us from above.

When it rains or threatens to, we make a mad dash down the path talking to each other in character all the while, "Laura, you get the sheets! Mary, hurry!" and we quickly put the blankets and tablecloth and anything else not waterproof under cover.

Throughout these early summers we eat chocolate ice cream cones, my dad reads stacks of Mad magazine and plays hide-and-seek with us. He plants roses and even corn, and keeps a diary of the garden's progress. "Bunny," he tells me, "look, it won't be long now until we're having corn on the cob."

Everyone in my family has nicknames; even the animals. Rarely is anyone called by his or her proper name. My mother calls my dad "Elyan," after his Hebrew name Rowelyan Ben Shmuel. He calls her C.B. for Carolyn Bunny, and Jodi is Jo-Ball or Steve (one day she will marry a Steve). I call my father "Roddy Rabbit" or "Stuart Little." He even signs notes to me: "Love, S. Little." He calls me Miss Grumple, or simply Grumple, Bunny, Little Raisin (he was Roddy Raisin), Small Rabbit, and both Momma and Pops.

There is something timeless and joyful and tranquil about being at this old, red house built so many decades before and where, in photos on a wall, generations of relatives gaze out at us from another time in their heavy, old-fashioned clothing, sitting on the same porch we do with the lake in the distance. It is this simple peace that we miss the moment the cottage is boarded up for the season and we fly back to California.

My father loves it here, skipping rocks along the shoreline and swimming in the cool, clear lake. He loves the summer storms that blacken the sky, that are both exhilarating and alarming and seem to roll in from nowhere. He lies out in the warm sun, walks on the beach, and pulls us aquaplaning behind the boat. He and my mother have drinks on the porch, and my dad cooks on the grill. My sister and I and our friends stage dog shows and make-believe horse shows. We brush the dogs until their coats shine and then practice for hours, finally presenting the performances on the lawn after dinner. Jodi is the designated announcer. "The show is ready to begin," she says in a deep, dramatic voice, and she turns and signals for us to start circling around the "ring." We lure the dogs with biscuits, but there is generally a struggle as they often fail to cooperate (unlike in rehearsals when they listened). With the added attention and excitement, they charge up the porch steps to escape us and greet our parents. We have to pull them back, whispering loudly, "No Maggie!" "Come Michael!" and we lead them back to the "ring," the biscuits crumbled in our hands. Once we have them in control again and doing their routines, our parents applaud, and one or the other of them gives out the ribbons we have carefully cut out and colored for the winners.

Sometimes our parents and the Delavans go out for dinner and we have a babysitter for the six of us. One early summer evening while the babysitter is busy with Cathy, the youngest, the rest of us decide to dress up our Irish setter, Michael, in my dad's T-shirt and underpants. The minute we get outside, Michael lifts his leg ... in those underpants. We are all giggling until Michael spots a squirrel and takes a run for it down the path, leaving the underpants, and us, behind.

Michael doesn't stop. He keeps running. Past the other cottages, past families sitting on the beach or on their docks— the four or five of us kids chasing him, calling him, trying to sound stern behind our laughter, "Michael!" excusing ourselves as we run weaving between the families, everyone smiling and pointing at that red dog racing miles ahead in my father's white shirt.

Early in the morning, my dad sits with his blue porcelain cup filled with black coffee and two scoops of sugar and leans back in the wicker chair, his feet on the porch rail, listening as fish jump in the lake below.

He loves the visits from friends; his childhood friend Julius "Julie" Golden and wife, Rhoda, come every summer from Long Island and stay a week in July. One year, Julie brings an old photograph of their Boy Scout troop that he has enlarged. I see them unrolling it on the porch table, pointing and laughing.

(Continues...)