The Day We Exist Again

I’m standing in front of a gated garden of wildflowers in New York City, beside the old water-pumping station at 119th Street and Amsterdam, where I told my father to meet me. It’s my street, but I didn’t tell him it’s my street. My mother tries to keep each new address a secret from him, and my instinct, however flustered I was by his call, was to follow her lead. It wasn’t until I hung up that I realized how very not-covert a meeting place I’d chosen, and I kicked myself for not thinking of the cathedral on 112th instead.

It’s September, but the weather hasn’t cooled much yet, and my cell phone has grown slippery at my cheek. My boyfriend, Rich, is on a business trip, and I should probably let him go, but I’m clinging to the phone as if he could make this easier somehow, and I’m wishing he were here and I were holding on to him instead of this hot silver rectangle; except that would mean that he, too, would have to deal with my father, and that would be too much, too embarrassing. So then I’m glad it’s only me.

“This is like some gross, incestuous date,” I say. “I feel so weird.” I can’t decide where, or how exactly, to stand. “Why am I doing this?”

“So don’t do it, then,” Rich says. “He makes you miserable—forget about him. You don’t need him.”

“He’s my father,” I retort, more from reflex than conviction. “I can’t just forget about him.” In our two years of dating Rich has barely heard a redeeming word about this man, and still it stings to hear him say this.

I take a deep breath and exhale it slowly. “OK, I can do this,” I say. “And I am not going to cry.” Privately, I also decide that I am not going to sweat, that I will be cool. “He’s always on time. He likes to look around, or talk to people. Where is he?” Then I spot him across the street, talking to a Columbia University security guard in a glass booth beside a service entrance.

“Oh my gosh, he’s so . . . old.” His black hair is sprinkled through with far more gray than the last time I saw him, making me feel as though ten years have passed, not three. My parents divorced when I was fourteen, and more or less since then he’d been skipping alimony payments, threatening my mother, and stealing or vandalizing her property. Eventually, whenever something bad happened—car trouble, a flat tire—we were left to wonder whether it was bad luck, road construction, or him. Just after I finished college, his threats escalated to the point that I became afraid for my mother, and finally I told him that he could talk all he wanted about how this wasn’t my business, but until he started acting like a decent human being I wasn’t listening anymore. I hadn’t expected him to stop talking.

My mother and my two sisters and I are all close, and while I did feel his absence, the four of us were fine together. Well-intentioned relatives would try to pursue conversations about how difficult divorces were on teenagers, wanting us to talk about our feelings. What they didn’t realize was that it wasn’t the divorce that was so upsetting—their marriage had been a bad one, and each of us was relieved to have it end. What hurt was the realization that our father wasn’t the kind of father that as young girls we imagined we had. The greater disappointment was that, instead of setting the mark we held all other men up to, our father had become the most dangerous man we knew.

I walk to the corner and wait, hoping he doesn’t see me before the light changes; I don’t want to have to maintain eye contact from this distance. Rich has changed his...