How You Know Your Family

How you know your family.

You dream them into a small white room with bare walls after your father dies. You sit on a creaky old bed from another time and watch him walk for the first time without the braces. Without the crutches. You are all watching him. He is packing his old brown suitcase, the hard top that weighs so much. Back and forth across the room, with trousers in his hands, socks, maybe a book or two. He is packing to go and your mother watches leaned against the wall, your brother too. Mostly you just watch his legs moving smooth across the wood floor, his feet lifting and setting just the way they always should’ve. In this white room with the bare walls, your father is long and lanky and not at all old. He’s a farm boy that is packing to go. Your father but lighter. He’s wearing those white pants you’ve seen in the old pictures, the pictures from the early days of his polio. When he first started his job as a photographer, when he had a goatee and black rimmed glasses and he lifted his crippled legs up off the floor and put them up on a desk and smiled at the camera like he wasn’t angry or sad. Those white pants. And a tank top, the kind he wore under his button-ups. But here in this room of your dream your father isn’t on the edge of the bed, in his underwear, putting on each brace with the loose skin of his arms and the hardness of his mouth. No. He’s wearing the white pants and the tank top the way he would’ve, the way he always wanted. You could see that he felt his body again as a place to live instead of a place to die. You could see it as he walked back and forth across that room putting shirts and underwear in an old suitcase, packing to go.

How you know your family.

You hear the color red in their voice when you talk to them on the phone. Something red beneath the surface of their words. You feel stopped when they say the things they say. Like you ought not. Ought not what they will ask when they read this. And you will struggle to tell them ought not anything is what it feels like. Like it’d be best if you could just disappear. And maybe you have. Not in one big poof like in a magic show, or like a bullet to your head would. But day by day, moment by moment, year by year, a little bit less of you.

How you know your family.

You let them sit inside your head and whisper. Even the dead.

How you know your family.

You walk on the hard winter ground of your father’s youth and come to stand where the old barn used to be and try to fathom your young father’s heart up there in the loft with the kittens crawling and mewing with him in the hay. His delight. The tenderness in his small boy hands. And then the hard line of your Grandpa’s mouth, his words and his tall rigid body sending your dad to the creek to drown them. Your father standing at the side of the creek, the kittens squirming in the sack, mewing, their bodies curled up against the hard stones. Your father’s arm slack by his side, maybe his teeth coming down on the soft flesh of his lower lip, watching the water move.

How you know your family.

You turn 40 and you decide to go gently with yourself, to live with the tenderness of your heart alive, the fire in your belly lit. You decide that a loyalty to yourself is the only penance you need to pay for your family’s pain. You wonder why you can’t mean it as much as you wish you could.