Sometimes when he was drunk he would fly into a fit of rage. Thundering voice. High-flying hands that threw dishes and put holes in drywall. And when the rage was over he would retreat to his wife’s bedroom door and knock, gently, like a child, and whisper, “I’m sorry, Jen. I’m sorry, okay? Just open the door. Please.”
And Jennifer, because she was a soft woman capable of forgiving anything, always opened the door and let him in. Then I would sit in my bedroom, usually with Tommy not far away, and I would listen while Gannon slumped to his knees like a sack of potatoes, sobbing apologies into the late hours of the night. All the while his wife would whisper—the soft sound of her voice drifting through the walls like an incantation—and her whispers would be full of forgiveness and something more. Absolution maybe.
I had once asked Jennifer why she forgave Gannon the way she did. “Because,” Jennifer said, “the heart can break and break and break again, but then turn around and love like it’s never known how.”
Jennifer held out hope for her and Gannon’s emotional resurrection. But I knew better.
If this had all happened when I was younger, I might have been inclined to lie awake at night worrying about the fate of my latest set of foster parents. But The Memory Gospel was full of foster parents whose relationships didn’t last. Foster parents who had taken in foster children in the hopes that by filling the empty places in their home they would fill the empty places in their hearts. That’s all children really were when you got right down to it, I figured: just a person’s attempt to create someone who loved them wholly and completely, from birth. Someone who would carry that love forever.
Children, in the end, were gods of our own design. And when you couldn’t build your own god, you called social services and had one delivered. But I was tired of being someone else’s therapy.
It was during one of Gannon’s outbursts a few months ago that I made the decision that Tommy and I should run away.
“To Florida?” Tommy asked. It was late and Gannon was in the living room screaming and Jennifer was in her bedroom refusing to let him come in. The house trembled and shook, but continued standing.
“To the launch,” I replied.
“This is that whole Jupiter thing again, right?” Tommy asked.
I sighed a long, slow, damning sigh. I would have to explain it all yet again to my brother. “Not Jupiter,” I began. “Europa. One of Jupiter’s moons.”
“Still don’t care,” Tommy said.
“They’re sending a probe up there that might find life.”
“They won’t,” Tommy replied. He was lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling as we talked. Whether he genuinely didn’t believe in what I was telling him or whether he just wanted to frustrate me, I couldn’t decide, but the latter was the one that was working the most. “And no,” Tommy said, “I don’t need you to explain the math to me about how they actually might find something there. That whole Frank’s equation of whatever.”
“The Drake equation,” I corrected him.
“The Bobby equation. The Joe equation. The Captain America equation. I don’t care what it is,” Tommy said. “It’s not going to happen.”
“I don’t know why I bother,” I said.
“Because I make frustration fun,” Tommy said. Then he smiled a self-satisfied smile.
“Do you remember Dad’s letter?”
“Nope,” Tommy replied, almost before the question could be asked.
“He said, ‘Even back then I knew that Europa was important.’ Do you know when people first had the idea that there might be life on Europa?”
“Nope, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“As far back as 1989,” I said. “That’s when the Galileo mission was launched and sent back all that data in 1995 that showed there might be an ocean under the surface. Dad was just a kid back then, younger than us, but I bet he heard about it and fell in love with Europa immediately. He knew it was special. He knew we’d have to send a probe there one day to find out. He always knew.”
“Good for him,” Tommy said. He rolled over onto his side, tucked his forearm beneath his head and closed his eyes. In the living room the sound of Gannon’s yelling was starting to subside. He’d be asleep soon, and then Tommy would fall asleep, but never before.
“Let’s do it for Dad,” I said.
“Dad’s dead,” Tommy replied. “He’ll never know whether we do it or not.”
“We’ll know,” I replied.
“I’m not going,” Tommy said. There was finality in his voice, like a door being closed. “And if I don’t go you won’t go.”
He was right, of course. And I knew it.
So that night, while Gannon descended from shouting to slurred mumbling to that final, incomprehensible bit of soft gibbering that always swept over him in the moments before sleep, while Tommy was on his side, falling asleep, I began being buried in The Gospel:
...Tommy is twelve years old and wants to be a magician and I know that he won’t be any good at it but I sit patiently as Tommy stands in front of me with a cape made out of a foster father’s jacket and a top hat that is nothing more than a baseball cap and Tommy clumsily holds a deck of cards and shuffles them back and forth in his hand and he has forgotten to say the magic words and he has forgotten everything else so that when he holds up the seven of hearts and asks, “Is this your card?” I say to him, “Yes!” even though it isn’t my card and Tommy, because of his knowledge of his own weakness with memory and planning, doesn’t trust that he has chosen the correct card and so he turns it around and looks at it and then looks back at me and his eyes ask me to confirm whether or not he has chosen the right card—because he knows that I will remember what he doesn’t and he has come to trust The Memory Gospel and trust what I tell him to be true—and he stands waiting, never looking more like a child than right now, and he asks a second time, “Are you sure this was your card?” and without hesitation I say to him, “Yes, that’s it,” and Tommy smiles stiffly and doubts himself and his lack of memory even more and I know that, because of this one moment, he always will and so I decide, right then and there, to always be the keeper of not only the past, but also the future...
He was checking on his father every single day and, when he was honest with himself, he didn’t know how much longer he could keep doing it. They had never gotten along. He’d always been a burden to the Old Man—as least, that’s how it felt to him—but now with things going the way they were in the world, the good thing for him to do was to make amends before the end came in that soft, quiet way it was coming these days.
It had been his girlfriend’s idea. “Make up with your father,” she said. And she said it in that gentle, movie-of-the-week way of saying it. The way a person says it when they have no idea what they’re asking of someone.
It wasn’t that he hated his father. Not anymore,
