Father’s Day by Laura J. Oliver

Once, my father said, a little girl was watching her father mow the lawn. It was an early evening in June, and the air was sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and the fresh cucumber smell of damp grass clippings. Fireflies drifted at knee level, blinking on and off beneath the magnolia branches. The little girl wore navy shorts, a striped tee shirt, and had a brown ponytail. “Just like yours!” my father said, giving mine a tug.

The man was just starting the last pass across the yard when he looked back and saw the little girl had dropped face down in the grass. He shouted her name and ran to her side. She lay still as death. As he carefully turned her over, ten bloody stitch marks bloomed across her chest.

The lawnmower had hit a croquet wicket someone had left in the yard. Shrapnel had shot like bullets from its blades, dropping the girl where she stood. 

My father often told me stories to keep me safe. Never play near a lawnmower in use, he said. His voice was deep and rich, like a radio announcer.

Stories to keep me safe studded my childhood with the dramatic indelibility of fairytales. (And they didn’t call them the Brothers Grimm for nothing.) Like once, my sister told me, a girl caught snooping in her older sister’s room without permission just exploded into flames. “Spontaneous combustion,” my sister said, eyeing me over her cereal bowl. “It happens.”

And one afternoon, when I got bored digging a hole to China in the wet sand on the beach and buried my leg in it from the knee down, a neighbor boy told me that was a torture method the pirates used. They’d bury you in the sand at low tide with just your head sticking out so you would drown when the tide came in. 

I imagined timing my breaths so I’d live. 

Vowed I’d never invade someone’s privacy. 

Or walk in front of a lawnmower in use.

It was my mother who told me my father was leaving. We were sitting on the pier, our legs dangling over the hot, splintery planks, our bare toes swinging above the green water, when she said, “I have something to tell you.”  We were facing west, towards Pumphreys Point, where the summer day had already surrendered to dusk. “Your father is moving to Baltimore.” He worked in Baltimore. And she said, moving. This didn’t seem like too big of a deal. 

But the next day, in the murmur of conversations about the house, I overheard the word “divorce,” and that new information morphed to become the unsolvable conundrum of my existence to date. “If someone loves you, how can they leave you?” This is an equation my heart still can’t reconcile even though I understand intellectually that love sometimes means you must go. 

A brilliant writer and war correspondent, you might remember Sebastian Junger as the author of “The Perfect Storm.” In his new book, titled, “In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife,” he describes confronting his own death in the middle of a medical emergency. At that moment, his father, a physicist with no belief in an afterlife and dead many years, appeared to him as a benign, loving presence, conveying the message, “You do not need to keep fighting; it’s okay to let go.” But Junger had a wife he loved and two little girls he adored and found the invitation more appalling than appealing. He chose to fight, to return, to live.  

Once he has recovered, Junger tells his little girl that he loves her, but she is so very young he is uncertain that she understands what love means, so he asks her. Without hesitation, she answers, “Love means ‘stay here.’”

Twenty-seven years after my father left, I learned he had died. That, too, was hard to emotionally compute. That, too, didn’t seem possible. My grief was primarily for lost opportunity. With death, the door of possibility had closed. There would never be more between us. Or so I thought.

I reviewed our last phone conversation and felt good; I felt lucky because my last words had been I love you. Not so much an expression of tenderness as an acknowledgment of commitment. I knew I would stand by him as he aged and give him whatever help I could to the end of his days. If that wasn’t love, it was close enough. Love isn’t always a feeling. As he had requested, we scattered his ashes at sunset, where the bay meets the ocean. 

A decade or more later, having thought very little about him, I went to see an Intuitive, out of curiosity more than anything. I’m always open to what we don’t know about life, death, consciousness, and spirit. I hope to discover there is more to life than it appears, but I have no need to discover anything. 

The woman’s name was Allyson—heavy set, blunt cut brown hair, a sweet smile. She welcomed me into her home, and we sat on opposite sides of her desk. She knew nothing about me, not even my name, so to give herself time to get her bearings, she began talking in somewhat general terms about the current state of the world in astrological terms. I nodded, a little impatient. This was nothing I cared about. 

Then she abruptly stopped, looked up and to my left, and said, “Your father has passed, hasn’t he?” I nodded. “Well, he’s right here, and he’s making my heart hurt. I don’t know what he did, but he says you didn’t have his attention in some way. He says he’s still no saint but that he has learned, on the other side, what this has cost you. He is so sorry. He wants to make this up to you now.”

We talked for an hour as Allyson told me things about my life no one could possibly know. At one point, she said, “Your father is showing me a train station. He says you are about to begin a new age of discovery. Like you’re a train leaving the station.”

My car was hot from being locked in the sunny parking lot of Allyson’s townhouse. I lowered myself onto the leather seat and checked my phone to see that it had successfully recorded our conversation. Do you think you choose your parents? On the drive down Route 50 I thought I could make a case that you do, in order to become who you are. It’s a way of saying the things that have happened to you have happened for you.

Maybe my father leaving happened for me. Maybe every loss you have ever endured happened for you. What do you think? Help me figure this out. 

Because here’s what else happened. I make no claims about this experience. No proselytizing that this is reality with a capital “R” or truth with a capital “T.” Make of it what you will. 

My grandson had a Melissa and Doug Sound Puzzle he had left at my house. It is a wooden puzzle the size of a small placemat. The painted picture of a train leaving the station had been cut up into 8 shapes that make the sound of a train whistle when the child correctly places each piece back into the picture. There is a battery housed in the back. The sound is triggered by movement when the pieces are removed or replaced, or more accurately, the sound is triggered by the change in exposure to light. I had put the puzzle in the toy box, all the pieces snuggly in place, enclosed in the dark. 

But when I got home that day, as I entered the front door, the sound of a train whistle filled the room. I opened the toy box and took out the completed puzzle, all pieces in place, puzzled myself, at how that could have happened with no movement in the dark. 

Ten years later, whether the puzzle is in a drawer without the pieces, lying on a bookcase with the shapes all in place, upside down in a dark closet, or buried in a suitcase on vacation in England, the sound of the train whistle goes off when I think of my father, I am in need of reassurance, or asking for help. It makes me smile. If it’s not Dad, we’re going to have a good laugh about this someday. 

I always say hi, and I always add thanks. Because if someone loves you, they don’t leave you, even if their ashes are scattered at dusk on an outgoing tide, and the prevailing theory is they have died. 

My father didn’t need to tell me stories to keep me safe because there is nothing to fear.  

Love is the only story and love has no end.

Happy Father’s Day.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.