Mindy offers to come.

Husband offers to watch our kids.

Mom offers to help. She and Dad haven’t been in the same room since Josh’s bris six months ago.

Dad tried to murder himself three months ago. By that I mean: he stabbed himself in the chest in the front seat of his powder-blue Mercedes. I suspect Mom views him as better off dead (my stepfather Jimmy said as much this morning), but if I insist on going to visit Dad while he is still alive, at a mental hospital a few miles from where I spent summers at sleep-away camp, fine, Mom will pitch in.

Mindy’s husband, Dan, volunteered to take care of their kids. I suspect the husbands over-identify with Dad. Or else don’t want to be perceived as assholes. Or maybe they are fascinated by the horror of it all. “Helping out” could also translate to rubbernecking.

Anyone who read the local newspaper professes shock. When they spot me at the supermarket, hands gripping stroller, eyes glued to the sushi refrigerator at the back of the dog food aisle, they rush to share a hug, and convey kindness with their eyes. The community regards me with some combination of grief, pity, and awe. Grief and pity that I have a parent who has done something like this to himself; awe that I can still grocery shop.

Mindy owns a weekend house up in Lenox. It’s part of the concession package Dan put together after she caught him cheating. Dan will do almost anything Mindy asks, except stay faithful. They also live on the Upper East Side in a beautiful townhouse with their two daughters: Alexis Sabrina, six, and Samantha Rose, four.

Mindy and I met at sleepaway camp. Five summers there did little to prepare us for real life except to show us how much fun we could have when someone else was paying for it. Our summers were filled with acting workshops, ballet and jewelry-making classes, Thursday night barbecues, five a.m. wake-up calls to smoke Marlboro Lights, and Sunday afternoon trips to Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow. We loved the Berkshires, a region populated by middle-aged white people trying to rock an aging hippy vibe. That mountain range of sisterhood continued to summon us, long after we left it for the other institutions we had been raised to embrace: Manhattan, marriage, motherhood.

Mindy and Dan’s house is a mile from camp. I’m taking my breast pump with me, since there is a better-than-average chance I will start leaking in the company of sad men.

Dad has been at Goldenrod eleven weeks. Before that, he was at a trauma center and a psych ward. Nobody really has any idea what to do with a doctor who has tried to kill himself, except Dad’s soon-to-be-ex-wife Tanya, who knows she does not want him home. I contemplated going to Goldenrod soon after Tanya deposited him there, after the ECT sessions and the medication adjustment. But in those early weeks, I didn’t know what kind of shape Dad would be in. I worried the visit would go one of two ways: Dad would either be furious we had let him land in the Berkshires, where he knew no one, or he would be so heavily medicated or fogged out by the ECT, he would barely know who I was. I imagined Jack Nicholson in the moments after Nurse Ratched had had him lobotomized and before Chief  smothered him.

I wanted Dad to be happy and lucid when I visited him, a big ask. Plus, I had a new baby. Two months into his stay, Dad mailed a handwritten letter in his scrawly doctor’s chicken scratch. Hi Pup, this place reminds me of your dorm at Estrogen school. Maybe you can visit and bring your sorority sisters.

Estrogen is the fancy Northeastern women’s college Dad sent me to. I wrote Dad that I would bring Mindy from Estrogen camp, reminding him that her weekend house is nearby. Is she still married to that fella? Dad wrote. Yes, I said, and hoped he would ask no more questions.

While I visit Dad, Mindy will drink white wine and log hours of TV. Last night she emailed: Snack requests? I answered: Chocolate pretzels stuffed with peanut butter plus any other thing crammed with sugar, caffeine, alcohol or saturated fat. Mindy wrote back: Pretzels in the car, plus Tab and chardonnay, ready for your pump and dump.

I take the train into the city, and we drive up the Taconic to Mindy’s house, high on chocolate-covered pretzels and Dunkin’ Donuts’ Coffee Coolattas. We are two small women in one large car. I pump while Mindy drives. I feel my father’s presence lurking as we drive along the twisting road. Mindy and I do not discuss the fact that we are heading to see him in the loony bin. Instead, we laugh and grudgingly answer our phones when our husbands call. We are trying to enjoy this time in the car without car seats. We barely look out the window at the glittering snowy landscape.

Mindy’s house is magnificent, with multiple New England trimmings: screened-in porch, stone fireplace, bedrooms decorated in lavender, white linen and taupe. Mindy tells me to take Samantha’s room, with the canopy bed and Juliet balcony. After I drop my bag on Sammy’s floor, I head back down to the kitchen, and Mindy hands me a thermos of chardonnay, which I sip as she goes through the mail. “I bet you write your way out of this,” Mindy says and takes a sip of my wine. I shake my head. “Peter poured apple juice over my keyboard after he heard me say I needed sugar to write.” Mindy cackles. “These toddlers are such destructive fucks.”

We are both a little tipsy as Mindy drives us to Goldenrod. We pass New England churches, winding roads, snow-covered pine trees and cute little general stores. Nothing about the ride says, You are on your way to visit your family nut job. I close my eyes. I do not want to visit Goldenrod. I do not want to see Dad propped up in a hospital bed, his blue eyes glazed and watering, his expression sweet and grateful, waiting for his meds. I do not want to see him in need of anything more than a cup of strong coffee, his battered black briefcase or his tennis racket. I do not want to think that this is my life now, a life dominated by delicious, loving children, a crazy, crying father, a horny husband and all their cyclones of needs. In his better days, Dad strutted around the house in his tennis whites, unlit cigar in hand, barking that he was hungry for dinner and Where the hell is The New York Times, Evelyn? I’d take that temperamental and periodically cruel guy any day over the loving, unsure man I visited in the trauma center, who thanked me for coming and knew he was headed toward ten or twelve rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, weeks of medication management, zillions of hours of regular therapy and maybe years in a psychiatric hospital. Give me anger over grief any day.

Mindy pulls up to Goldenrod, a big welcoming white house that looks nothing like a menacing mental hospital. I dig around my nursing bag for mints, and give up.

      “I can’t do it,” I say.

Mindy takes her hands off the steering wheel. “I’ll come back in three hours. Is that enough time to show you care without leaking through your bra?”

“I’ll start leaking in two hours. Probably less.”

“You can always run to the bathroom and squirt into the sink.” Mindy put her hands to her breasts and pantomimes milking them, as if I need a tutorial.

“In a public restroom?” I say.

“Didn’t Tanya get him a private room?” Mindy asks.

“No idea.”

Mindy runs her tongue over her top front teeth. “Worst case you go outside, hide behind a bush and pump into the ground.”

At a mental hospital in the snow?”

Mindy smiles. “What better place to expose yourself?”

“For fuck’s sake, Min. I’m trying to maintain some dignity.”

“I’ll be seven miles away. If you need me to come sooner, I can be here like that.” Mindy snaps her fingers.

Then Mindy does what I do when Peter doesn’t want to get out of the car and into the arms of his nursery school teacher. She steps out of the car, walks around to my side, unclips my seatbelt, takes my hand, pulls me out of the car and gives me a hug. “This is not your trauma, Mama,” Mindy says. “At the end of the day, you’re coming home to me.”

I almost say: “Easy for you to say, you whose father did not shove a knife into his heart.” Instead, I repeat what Jimmy said when he heard the news: “Jesus wept.”

Mindy, like most people I know, has no experience with attempted suicide. There is no finish line when the life of a person you love almost ends in tragedy. No laurels or trophies or blue ribbons. You never stop worrying about them. Dad’s attempt transformed my image of him. Whereas I once saw a hungry, raging bear who periodically seemed to contemplate killing his cubs and moonlighted as a skilled radiologist, I now saw a sad, lonely man who might not have a cave or career to return to.

Dad is right: Goldenrod looks like Estrogen school. Behind the snow-covered lawn, the main house stands tall and elegant, with multiple chimneys and a small front porch that practically says, “Warm cookies inside.” The house is attached to two modern-looking buildings connected by hallways comprised of floor-to-ceiling windows. Thick pine trees make the campus look like the winter wonderland set from New York City Ballet’s “The Nutcracker”—and to Dad’s point, a lot like my women’s college. Tanya chose an “open” psychiatric hospital, where residents are free to come and go. Some have their own cars. Dad’s is with Tanya. The driver’s seat was bloody, so she had the car detailed; I suspect she’ll sell it.

The Goldenrod website says that the average stay is six months; Dad wrote that some people only last a weekend; others forever. One guy has been here 38 years, Dad wrote. The grandchild of a media mogul stayed two days before she got caught smoking weed and was asked to leave.

I blow Mindy a kiss goodbye, walk up to the front door, push it open and enter the front hall. No one stops or greets me. Persian rugs cover the floor, and an unlit fireplace is on the right. Four winged armchairs sit close together at the far end of the hallway, under a door with a transom. On the left is a sitting room, with another Persian rug, this one red, resting under upholstered chairs and a black leather recliner. The ceilings are high and the windows are covered with sheer white curtains, which let in the afternoon light. The place reeks of Boston Brahmins, Boston marriages and patrician moneylenders.

In a large room on the right, I spot Dad. He sees me too.

“Pup, over here!” Dad calls out. He looks healthy and rested, in a white V-neck tennis sweater, blue corduroys and the same beaten-up leather loafers he wore to my college graduation.

“Dad,” I say. “Dad.”

Dad is sitting with two other guys at a round wooden table. Bowls of tea bags and hot chocolate packets, canisters of granola and dried cereal and plates of protein bars sit on side tables. These guys drinking tea look happy enough; even though I know most of the people here struggled with some sort of suicidal ideation, none of these guys look as if they recently jumped out a window, overdosed on something toxic or tried and failed to hang themselves. One looks downright dapper in a pink cashmere sweater and jeans.

“Gentlemen,” Dad says proudly. “This is my daughter, Vivian.”

The one in the pink sweater stands up to shake my hand. “Nice to meet you, Vivian. I’m Jerry, same as your Dad, though I’m not a doctor, and I spell it with a J. Does daughter Vivian play Ping-Pong, Gerry?” Jerry with a J has thick blond hair and beautiful manners.

“Daughter Vivian,” Dad asks. “Do you?”

I nod. “We had one in our basement. Remember?” I stop short of saying, “We played when you were still acting the part of my marginally sane father.” But now is not the time to remind Dad of his marriage to Mom or the house they once owned together, the house where Jimmy now lives, where the Ping-Pong table has been removed to make room for Jimmy’s couch and TV.

“Maybe your daughter would like a cup of something first,” Jerry with a J says. “You said she had a long drive.” He looks at me. “Would you like some tea, daughter of Gerry?”

“Sure,” I say. “With caffeine if you have it.” Mindy’s chardonnay is making me sleepy.

I follow Jerry over to the tea table, take a bag of cinnamon-cardamom-vanilla–spiced tea and walk into the kitchen. Jerry points to the hot-water pot. I feel him watching as I pour the water and add two heaping tablespoons of honey. I need to ditch this guy. I walk back to Dad.

“Dad, could I see your room?” I ask.

Dad nods. “You’ll be given the grand tour.”

Dad leads me down a short hall and pushes open the third door on the left.

“You keep your door unlocked?” I ask.

Dad taps the gold watch on his wrist. “This is the only thing of value I have here, other than my huge heart and curious brain.”

I sit down in the chair across from Dad’s bed. The bed is queen-size. And made. Dad did no domestic chores in the house he shared with Mom but knows how to make a bed with hospital corners. I wonder if the made bed is for my benefit, or if he is expected to keep his room neat. There is a plain wooden desk with a chair tucked under it, an unlit fireplace, a floor lamp and a reading lamp on the end table next to the bed. The tidiness of the room coupled with the sheer white curtains are at odds with what I thought would be Dad’s mental state—chaotic, messy, sanguineous.

“If someone wants to steal my watch while I sleep, they can have it.” Dad shrugs. I wonder what kind of meds he is on.

“Can I take a peek at your bathroom?” I decide not to share that my breasts are swollen.

“Of course.” He points to a door next to the fireplace.

The bathroom is huge. I turn on the faucet, lift my shirt, undo the snaps on my nursing bra, and squeeze drops of milk from each nipple, into the sink. The pale liquid dribbles down the drain. I wonder if Josh knows what he is missing. I pumped four bottles of breast milk before we left, but that isn’t the same as having my breasts pressed to his soft little mouth, each of us loving and nurturing each other with proximity and warmth. I keep the water running and sit down on the toilet. An unpleasant thought shimmies its way into my cerebral cortex: Dad seems fine; can I go? I open the bathroom door and see Dad sitting on his bed, fingering a cigar wrapped in cellophane.

“Dad,” I ask. “How is it here? How is the therapy thing going?”

“I’ve been in therapy, and I’ve been in debt,” Dad says. “Debt is better.” He unwraps the cellophane. “They make me smoke outside,” he says. “They must have consulted your mother.”

I watch Dad suck on his cigar. Right about now, my sons are probably fresh out of their baths, wet, warm and wondrous, wrapped in towels, giggling and waiting for Husband to snuggle them and give them dinner: pizza or roast chicken for Peter; jarred sweet potatoes and a bottle of me for Josh.

Dad seems to intuit what I am thinking: I am needed elsewhere. “My therapist’s name is Wigglesworth,” Dad says. “I see the man four times a week. He never fails to find something to say.”

“Isn’t that the point of talk therapy?”

Dad shrugs. “He says it takes at least two to solve the problems of one.” Dad makes air quotes: ‘He has a second-rate mind but a first-rate intuition.’ ” Dad smiles. “Kissinger on Rockefeller.”

I suspect Tanya packed a Kissinger biography in Dad’s suitcase. “Will they let you switch therapists?”

Dad closes his eyes. “No. Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing there is a field. Meet me there.” Dad opens his eyes. “Rumi.”

“You’ve been reading poetry.”

Dad smiles. “They have yards of it up in the library.” He sucks his cigar and exhales an imaginary plume of smoke. “I asked them to let me practice doing an MRI on Jerry, but given that my medical license might be revoked, they told me to find something else to focus on.” Dad taps his right index finger on his cigar. “Is this bothering you?”

“Not at all.”

He inhales again. “Drill down, Vivian. Many people don’t make it past middle age.”

“Yes, Dad,” I almost say. “You tried to make that abundantly clear.” Instead, I nod.

Dad examines the wet end of his cigar. “Are you writing?”

I shake my head. “I’m nursing.”

“They are not mutually exclusive. Life presents us with choices. It is up to us to choose wisely. When your children write your eulogy, do you want the theme to be, In memory of our mother, who lived without realizing her true ambition? Or do you want the theme to be, The story was she wrote about it all?”

“The story was I had two kids in three years and my father tried to end his life after I had my second son,” I say.

“People don’t want to hear about your problems,” Dad says. “But they do want to read about them.”

”I may teach a writing workshop in the spring,” I say, which isn’t true at all.

“Workshop sounds like worship,” Dad says and blows another ring of imaginary smoke out of his mouth. “We make decisions that feel right at the time, but are they right for all time?”

I toss the empty teacup into the garbage can near the desk. “Let’s go play Ping-Pong, Dad.”

“Do you think you could beat Kissinger?” he asks.

“Is he here?”

Dad laughs. “Not yet.”

I follow Dad out into the hallway and down the stairs to the game room. It’s the kind of setup you’d find in the basement of a college dorm or a ski resort: a Ping-Pong table, pool table and air hockey machine, a room with four laundry machines, weights, yoga mats, balls and a treadmill. I see Jerry with a J in the laundry room, putting clothes in a dryer.

In the before times, Dad played singles tennis four days a week, before and after work. I’m not sure what he is capable of now. On the day after Thanksgiving, he was taken to a trauma center via ambulance, endured hours of surgery and now (according to Tanya) has a thick red scar zigzagging across his chest and stomach. He has been knocked up by all sorts of drugs as his doctors adjusted his meds—this was after writing prescriptions for himself, pre–suicide-attempt, for Zoloft and lithium and who knows what else. I have spent the last few months birthing and nursing a baby, and running on the treadmill to try and shed baby weight. Dad looks better than he did four months ago, but for the first time in both of our lives, I am probably the stronger of the two of us. In his current state, I might be able to beat him at Ping-Pong. The question is: Do I want to?

Dad picks up the ball. “Ready Pup?” He holds up his paddle and whips the ball across the table. I whip it back at him. Round and round we go. Jerry with a J walks over and starts coaching Dad. “Use your arms like wings,” he says. “See?” Jerry spreads his arms out and shows Dad how his wingspan reaches both sides of the table. I beat Dad, 11–4. We are both surprised: Dad plays tennis against adult men at suburban tennis clubs, on grass and Har-Tru courts. Ping-Pong in a mental hospital against his postpartum daughter shouldn’t be so hard. But, and this is crucial: I’m not sedated.

We play another game. This time, Dad focuses on whipping the ball into the far left corner of my side of the table, forcing my backhand. The score gets to 9–9. Jerry watches closely. I glance at Dad’s face, his mouth tightened into a straight line, his eyes focused and competitive. I suspect he is thinking I can beat this little imp.

I slam the ball as hard as I can. Adrenaline rushes through my blood and sweat pools in my armpits. The score is 10–9, then 11–9, me–him. I won, I won, I won, I think. Bring it! I am ecstatic. I am competing against a mentally ill man and winning. This is shameful. Then another feeling trumps my glee, and I am overwhelmed by it: If Dad can play this well at Ping-Pong, maybe his depression is receding. These truths that exist simultaneously—yes, I can beat Dad, and yes, Dad is back to his life-grabbing self—make me positively euphoric. I do a little jig.

Except: My shirt is wet and my breasts are swollen again.

“Dad,” I say, “I need a break.”

“Gerry,” Jerry says. “Your daughter is a ringer.”

Dad looks at me and breaks out into a grin. “She’s a savage,” he says.

Before I came up here, I had a long conversation with my half brother, Adam. After my father and mother married and had me and then Ben, Adam came to live with us. I was nine and Ben was six. Adam was twelve, and though he didn’t seem particularly interested in being the oldest of three, and could barely tolerate my mother, he lived with us until he went to college. Adam refers to my mother and our father as “our parents.” Adam lives in Northern California now, near his biological mother, Paula, who was briefly my father’s first wife. Adam went back to Berkeley, close to Paula, for college and graduate school. He has a PhD in computer science and lives in a group house with other programmers. He visits Dad every July; that’s his schedule and he sees no reason to change it.

“You are wasting your time, Vivian,” Adam said, when I told him I was driving up here. “Why don’t you let Ben go?”

Our younger brother, Ben, lives in Wilmington. He and his wife, Jennifer, had a baby (Bethany) six weeks ago. Ben also has no immediate plans to visit Dad. Ben says that he will come and visit once they hire a nanny and Jen goes back to work and blah blah blah never.

“Vivian,” Adam said. “Our parents have been masterful at pretending they like us, but Ben is the clear favorite. There is nothing to be done about it except go and make your life elsewhere, away from these people, as I have done.” Adam, so he tells me, has lunch once a month with Paula, but says he has basically given up on the idea of parents: both having them and becoming one.

Suddenly, music begins to blare from two speakers flanking the door to the laundry room. The beat from Maurice White’s voice booms out.

Jerry with a J yells, “Dance party!” Jerry and Dad grab hands, and start dancing around the Ping-Pong table, as if they are doing the hora. Dad grabs my left hand and Jerry grabs my right. They pull me around the Ping-Pong table and dance and sing to the music.

Milk rushes out of my breasts and soaks my shirt. I drop hands with Dad and Jerry, run from the game room out the exit door and head outside. There’s no one around, nothing but snow drifts and pine trees and the fading sun. I follow Mindy’s instructions, lift my shirt, pop my breasts out of my nursing bra, and squeeze a few drops into the snow. Sweet, cold relief. Standing half naked in New England in thirty-degree weather, beneath cotton clouds and behind a copse of ponderosa pines, my breath bursting like a steam engine, I realize an unfortunate truth: I look unhinged.

What would it take to lose my mind and land in a place like this? How far removed from happiness would I have to be to hatch a plan to end my life, savagely in the front seat of a car? If the kids move out, if the job doesn’t pan out, if the spouse leaves, if the friends stop calling, what’s to stop a curtain of darkness like Dad’s from descending on my own stage?

And yet. Though part of me worries I could one day feel as desperate as Dad did, another part of me thinks, Nah, probably not.

An hour later, I kiss Dad goodbye and go to sit on the front steps of Goldenrod’s front porch. The sky above is almost white, and the snow has lost its sparkle. I am worried about Dad, yes. But this is a pretty nice place to be, and he seems happy—his life possibly being ruined, notwithstanding. My shirt is still wet and I am starting to feel cold when Mindy drives up and waves. I hop in her car and immediately latch the pump’s plastic nipples onto mine. As the pump engine whirs, my milk flows into the plastic sacks. I tell Mindy about the Ping-Pong tournament.

“You beat a sad man in a mental hospital?” Mindy says.

“He didn’t seem that sad,” I say. “He seems pretty cheerful.”

“You didn’t show your father any mercy?” Mindy asks.

“Showing him mercy would have been disrespectful,” I say.

“What was his friend Jerry in for, may I ask?” Mindy says.

“Mental hospitals are like jail,” I say. “You don’t ask people why they’re there.”

Mindy shakes her head. “I am sorry for your loss, old friend.”

“What loss?”

She waves her hand. “Loss of the Dad you thought you knew.” Mindy’s father is stable; and though you could argue he self-medicates with scotch and golf, he’s not on meds. He gambles—her mother transferred their Las Vegas house to her name so he wouldn’t lose it—but he’s neurotic, not bananas. “I guess it was good to see your dad making the best of a shitty situation,” Mindy says.

I consider this. “I don’t think it’s all that shitty.”

Back at Mindy’s house, we drink chardonnay, play footsie on the living room couch, call our husbands, gossip about the girls we went to camp with based on what we have gleaned from Facebook and go to sleep. The next morning, Mindy drives me all the way back to Silverside. Mom meets us at the door and says that Husband has taken Peter to pizza and a movie, and Josh is upstairs napping. I rush upstairs and tiptoe over to his crib, inhale his sweet, warm cheeks, look at his little smiling mouth. My breasts are swelling miserably. I want to wake him and nurse him while he dreams his baby dreams; I know he is capable of sucking and sleeping simultaneously, a skill strangely specific to babies. Instead, I tuck his blue blanket around him and kiss his forehead. Downstairs, Mindy says her goodbyes and Mom walks me into the kitchen. There are six avocados spread out on the counter.

“Peter asked for guacamole,” Mom says.

“In March?”

“You asked me to handle all requests.” Next to the avocados: a pale red tomato, a garlic clove, a bottle of tabasco sauce, a lemon and a red onion. “So,” Mom says, as she hands me an avocado and a knife. “How is Daddy? Did you speak to his therapist?”

I shake my head. “The therapists aren’t there on weekends. We played Ping-Pong.”

Mom laughs. “That sounds like a playdate.”

“I killed it at Ping-Pong.”

“Good for you. And probably good for Daddy.” Mom takes a knife and cuts a line across the length of an avocado. “Do you think he’ll get well enough to resume his life?”

I know that when people hear about Dad, they try to camouflage their curiosity with concern. Mom isn’t even bothering with camouflage. She’s worried I will be stuck caring for her ex-husband, and she’ll be stuck hearing about it. “It’s hard to predict,” I say. “Tanya will no doubt leave him, he’ll start dating younger women and invariably one will break his heart and dump him. Then what?”

      “Any chance Tanya will take him back?”

I shake my head no. Mom takes a U-shaped wire scooper and begins removing the green avocado meat from the pebbly, black avocado skins. I cut the onion in half, dice the tomato, then mash the garlic. Mom measures out the lemon juice and tabasco sauce.

“Any chance one of your brothers will let him come live with him?” Mom asks.

“Adam doesn’t like him and Ben is busy.”

My mother nods. Adam’s arrival in our household seemed to accelerate Dad’s fury—one marriage had died, a second marriage (to my mother) was coming undone, and Adam was witness to both. So Dad went after Adam, as if harassing your children was a video game and Paula had just given him a new player. But Adam played chess; he could see several moves ahead of Dad. He bulked up and joined the football and Lacrosse teams. When Dad had a temper tantrum and started hurling insults at him at the dinner table, Adam pushed his seat back and stared at Dad with an expression that said, “You done, son?”

As Adam became stronger and taller, Dad stopped going after him and turned on me. (Ben had been born cross-eyed and sweet so Dad mostly left him alone.) I looked like my mother—same auburn hair, big teeth, pinkish mouth—and in Dad’s ferociously mixed-up state, I became a stand-in for her, the woman who had once loved him and was now getting ready to leave him. Our dinner table became an elegant nightmare—all china, sterling silver and duck à l’orange, while Dad maligned us and called us ingrates and parasites. Dad could be crushingly cruel. And deadly accurate.

I could not blame either of my brothers for not going to visit our father. The only reason I had gone was because Mindy had made it easy.

“Mom, can we talk about Daddy’s first breakdown?” I ask. I know I won’t get the whole story, because no matter how hellishly Daddy behaved, Mom’s instinct has always been to sugarcoat the truth.

“Sure,” Mom says. “You were almost two. He had been acting very loving and saying things like, ‘I don’t deserve you, you’re too good for me, you’re wonderful.’ I knew something was wrong.”

“So what did you do?”

“I called a psychiatrist, he got an appointment three weeks hence, and one day after Thanksgiving, he called me from the hospital and said, ‘I’m fine, but they’re keeping me here.’ He was at Payne Whitney.”

“Did he say, ‘I tried to commit suicide’?” I ask.

My mother shrugs.

“How long did he spend in the hospital?”

“A month? A little longer? By New Year’s Eve, he was back home because we had a wedding. And then in June, he had another episode, so he went back on Elavil.”

I look up. “He had gone off?”

Mom nods. “By then, we had moved to a building with a pool. You were two and a half, and he would come home every day and take you down to swim. He taught you to jump off the side of the pool. He was very devoted to you.” Mom looks pleased with the memory.

“And then?”

“There were no more episodes,” Mom says. “However, he became meaner.”

“If he was mean, why did you stay?”

“Because you have children, because you think it’s going to get better. Divorce wasn’t common. People stayed.”

“Did he keep taking his meds?” I ask. “He didn’t act like he did.”

“I have a feeling he did not take his meds. He was never one to follow the strict order of things.” Mom’s voice takes on an infuriating singsong quality. I know this is how she navigates stress. She sails away from it and waits for other people to salvage the wreck. I hear Josh cooing. “Wait for him to cry,” Mom says. “Daddy loved the theater, he loved traveling, he was athletic. It wasn’t all bad. But there were times when we’d go out with company and he’d become difficult, and so I’d take my own car. I threatened to leave, and he’d say, ‘Leave, go ahead.’ Then, he’d write me a poem.”

“You should have left him years before you did.”

“I thought it would be easier for you if I didn’t.”

“Just because you meant well doesn’t mean it went well,” I say. “He was a very difficult father to have.”

Mom puts her knife down. “Yes, he was, and he was a very difficult husband to have too.” Her voice rises. “He is a very difficult man.” Mom pats the guacamole. “When we travelled to the Caribbean, he would take you all over. He was always interested in spending time with you and doing fun things, and I welcomed that.” She laughs. “We just should have kept him on vacation all the time …”

I run upstairs. Josh smiles at me from his crib, one of his boy-am-I-glad-to-see-you smiles. He lunges at my breast, I unhook my bra, press him to me and we sit down together in the rocking chair. We hold each other in the dark, him sucking, me gliding. I contemplate Dad’s future. There is a limit to how much you can parent an adult, especially one who has a driver’s license and money in the bank.

Josh releases his mouth and gazes up at me. I lift him, press him to my shoulder, stand, take him down to the kitchen, and place a tiny dot of guacamole on his tongue. He spits it out, then takes a swipe at the bowl.

Mindy is correct: I do write about my father. I write two memoirs: The Grief Joy Handbook and In the Shadow of Lunacy. Mom cheerfully complains about the stories I knit together, stories that detail how she and Dad failed each other. It is true, I did do that. It is also true that she and Dad handed me the yarn and the knitting needles.

After our sons grow up, Husband and I travel. One March, we take a walking food tour in Miami’s Little Havana. We stop by a cigar making store and the guide explains to us the ritual of tobacco leaves. We watch a woman with a long, gray ponytail roll out three large, veiny leaves, then take a fourth leaf and wrap the three small “filler” leaves in it. She rolls them tightly together into a fifth “wrapper” leaf, cuts off the end with a blade, and voila!—she holds up a cigar. I stare at her, transfixed: in all my years of watching Dad smoke cigars, I never understood how they were put together. Our guide explains that the woman with the gray ponytail has been doing this for fifty years. She has a glass tip jar on her desk full of fives and ones. Husband puts in a ten and asks the guide if he can buy a cigar. Of course, the guide says. That night, we go for a walk on the beach behind our hotel. I school Husband in lighting up a cigar outside. We stand near a wall near the pool, our backs to the Atlantic. The smell of the cigar takes me back to the days when Dad smoked on the back deck, staring at the Norway spruce trees that circled our yard. A saxophone player stands alone by the pool and plays Looking Glass’s “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl).” Husband and I grab towels and go lie down on the sand. Husband smokes his cigar, and I look up at the stars and the planes flying low above us. The planes, I suspect, are searching for people swimming to shore. The saxophone wafts over us.

Back in our room, my iPad tells me the storage is full and I can add no more. I try to delete apps, then videos. Scrolling down, I find an old video Mom sent of Dad playing with Ben. He is laughing and throwing Ben in the air, while I look on. Dad’s blue eyes shine above his wide grin. Ben and I look ecstatic