The Unraveling

To just about everyone else, it was the worst apartment in San Francisco. But for my mother, Judith, and her college boyfriend, Russell, 3125 Laguna Street Apartment 3 was a dream. Yes, it was a block from busy Lombard Street, but as native New Yorkers, they didn’t mind the noise.

See, it was 1977, and this was San Francisco; it was an idyllic time and place for a writer and a painter, fresh out of Vassar, penniless, in love, and ready to begin their lives. And so it was from this apartment that Judith would sit down and write. Often short stories and poems, but also letters. Letters sent home to Long Island begging her mother, Rita, over and over, to come visit and see her and the life she was creating in California.

The car door opens, one foot in before the other and when they shut the door behind me, I close my eyes and pretend I know where they're taking me. A learned reflex. It feels like I’m choking on my own breath. The sound of my quickened heartbeat rings in my ears. Everything is confused, but happening in slow motion. I tangle my fingers in my lap and keep my eyes closed.

This isn't the first time that police in plainclothes stop me in the streets of Tehran without addressing any of the questions I yell at them before they shove me in a car headfirst.

Tears fill his eyes, which carry a slightly yellow tint, and dried blood gathers in the corners of his mouth. He can’t taste it, and I don’t bother to make a fuss about it. We walk around a little bit. He tells me stories about people buried beneath us that he’s told me many times before. I pretend it’s the first time I’ve heard them. “Cousin Louis’ dad shot himself. Louis was five when he walked in and found him. Yeah, his eyeball blew off and was stuck to the wall."

“That’s horrible, Dad.” He sighed and kept walking.

After a few minutes of hanging his head, my dad wavers back to the car and takes a swig of the vodka he had switched to because he was too full off beer. His body has grown so dependent on alcohol that he is a better driver when he has had something to drink.

I start to ask him about his brother, Michael.

My father spent the last decade of his life in silence. His words could only be heard through pen and paper — his voice confined to the small pages of a pocket-sized notebook. Meanwhile, conversation swirled around him, excluding him.

The last words my father spoke to me were, Do you want the light on or off?

Then, the silence. I wonder, what would he have said to me if he could have?

I was on the phone with my grandmother when she mentioned in passing that her step-grandmother might have killed her grandfather with an axe blow to the head.

"But she acquitted," she said.

To which I replied, "What?"

My dad’s storytelling skills are enhanced by his lying capabilities. He’s good at telling you what you want to hear. Growing up, my dad told me all kinds of stories – funny, scary, sad, especially the story about his mother who, he would say, died when he was very young.

“Your grandmother didn’t die when he was a child,” my mother told me. “But she did leave him.”

This much I knew to be true: My grandfather, Julio Diaz, grew up on a coffee farm in Caldas, Colombia. Then things would get murky. His parents’ professions changed depending on the mood my grandfather was in when you asked about them. Sometimes they were coffee growers. Sometimes his father was a mechanic. Other times he was a government official so important they put his face on currency.

Meanwhile in Colorado, the disappointing response had derailed Thomas’ plans. The polite but rigid refusal by Salma’s parents made him furious. Who are they to not want me? he thought.

If Thomas, who was 33, wanted to accomplish something, he would set out to make it happen. He was finishing his fourth year of residency in orthopedic surgery at University of Colorado. He spent upwards of eighty hours a week at the hospital, operating and seeing patients. He was preparing to apply for a fellowship in spine surgery. His time was valuable, and now he had to come up with a new plan to get what he wanted.

Hardly anyone remembered a time when Madhaviamma hadn’t been in the house, bustling around the kitchen, telling Prema and Murali to do their homework, making sure that they’d had a snack and weren’t hiding their report cards from their parents.

The neighbours would look out their windows some days in the tiny Hyderabad colony where the family lived, and would see an elderly woman dressed in a white sari, barely five feet tall, reach her hand out and pluck the fresh tulsi and marigolds from their garden.

“There goes Madhaviamma,” they’d say. Everyone in the colony knew her as Neelakantan’s mother. And the family never bothered correcting them.

But the thing is, she wasn’t his mother.
 

The only time she slept soundly was when Allie was in treatment or in jail. “Then, at least, I knew she was alive,” Belinda says. Outside of jail or rehab, Allie’s life was a ceaseless cycle: wake up, shoot up, scam, steal, panhandle, buy drugs, shoot up, sleep, wake up, shoot up.

For eight years, Belinda was on edge, waiting for the call. Not the call that Allie had been arrested or overdosed. She’d already gotten those calls over ten times. No, the call she most feared, the one that caused a sharp, relentless pain in her chest, was the one that would say: your daughter is dead.
 

It was past dinner time when three police officers knocked on the door of a small apartment in West Berlin. Hans Isermann, suspicious of the late visitor, came to the door. His
fiancée, Ilse, stood closely behind him, peeking around to see who was there. In a matter of
moments, Hans Isermann was under arrest. He resisted as they handcuffed him, pleading for the officers to listen. He wasn’t the man they were looking for. As the officers searched the apartment, Ilse begged them to listen. Her Hans had been a German artillery officer in Russia, she pleaded. He was a nobody. Without a word, one of the arresting officers pulled a black and white picture from his pocket, handing it to Ilse. There, staring back at her, was the stern face of Hans Isermann, dressed in the polished black SS uniform, a little swastika pinned under his collar.
 

It took me a while to understand what my story is about, and until now, I’m not sure I have it completely sorted out. It's about my relationship with Beirut. That's what I thought it was. Turns out my story is about how my father’s death when I was 12 years old, affected my relationship with my city. 10 years in Beirut and eight months in New York later, here is my story.

In 2017, on a Tuesday morning in July, my 22-year-old step sister, Hannah, headed out for her morning run. But something wasn’t right. Less than a mile in, her legs gave way and her body collided with the cold concrete of the footpath. So, what happened to Hannah? My story throws you into the lives of those closest to Hannah during the urgent hours following her collapse.

Summer in Custer, Montana was hot, dry, and boring, with temperatures climbing up to 90 degrees by midday and dust that stung 9-year-old Donald Bender’s eyes when he played in the yard behind the bar he lived in with his family. It was 1946, and young Don was obsessed with baseball. So too was his father, Walt, who once threw a beer bottle at the brand-new jukebox in his bar when a patron disparaged the St. Louis Cardinals. When Walt decided that summer to pack up his family of six in their 1942 Dodge and drive across the country to see the Brooklyn Dodgers play at Ebbets Field, Don was excited.

We were used to the interrogations because they happened every time. We knew the routine, so we thought we knew what would happen next.

We were wrong.

Madlyn wakes in the middle of the night and memories come to her that do not come during the day. Her life -- now 92 years in -- has felt like and has been filled with many things. Good things, she'll say, that she has seen and done.

But by day there is the one memory, again and again.