All of this is second-hand. I’ve pieced it together as best I can, from half-told stories and underbaked memories. It’s not complete, but it doesn’t have to be.

It’s just enough.

0 0 0

In the house where I was born, there was no love.

My father brought my squalling self home late on a June night pockmarked by thunderstorms. He did not smile. On June 11th, he was given a burden—a curse. He was marked to remember this failure for the rest of his life.

I did not know my mothers’ name. He wouldn’t speak it in the house. Only as ”your mother” or “my wife”—always in the present tense, as though he could still sense her standing behind him, craning her neck over his shoulder, watching him manipulate the controls for the big drums of molten steel at the plant. She could see his bite-ridden calloused fingers push the buttons and pull the levers, each finger exactly where it was meant to be. The one thing he knew he could do right. The one thing that made him forget where he was, and what he had to come home to.

She did not survive. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault—but it was mine, it was mine—it was always my fault. We both knew it. If I didn’t exist, she’d still be here. Never mind the fact that they wanted me in the first place.

It was my fault.

My father brought me home the night of June 11th. The storms were the whims of an angry god to me—the thunder his screams, the lightning the gnashing of his teeth. My first view of the world was a dark and loud place where the rain never stopped and I was invisible.

My father said nothing to me on the way home. He drove. I was in the front seat. The carseat they’d kept in the trunk “in the event” remained in its box. He did not buckle me in. Hal had a new dream—but he would never go through with it. He wasn’t brave enough. Only freak chance could vindicate him now.

It was my fault.

My mother’s family hated him. Their love was unspeakable. My father’s family didn’t want him marrying a Chinese woman. Their love was forbidden.

But still—

They found each other. He was an honest man with an honest job, ever in pursuit of the American dream, and he loved her with a firm hand and a tender mind. She was a graduate student of microbiology, and she dazzled him with the speed at which she could turn any situation into a joke. She was smarter than him, faster than him—he was the anchor by which she could always hold on to.

Late that night on June 11th, Hal Hanover pulled into the driveway of his condo, brought me inside through the rain, sat me down on the counter, and watched me scream.

He stared at this thing he now had. All the things they’d bought—the crib, the blankets, the toys, the clothes, the food—turned to gray rot before his eyes.

In the room was the television-static of heavy rain, pounding the roof, driving against the windows. The thunder rattled his world. The lights were off. It was dark and in that dark I screamed and screamed against something neither of us could define.

He stared at me.

He had nothing to say.

0 0 0

Hal never left that night. In his mind it was always June 11th, and it was always eleven thirty-five PM, and he was perpetually surrounded by the driving rain and the divine crash of thunder.

He learned to navigate it. He could turn the lights on in the kitchen to banish the dark. He could play music softly over a radio—he had one in every room, and one of them was always on, at all hours of the day—even when he wasn’t there, so he wouldn’t ever have to come home to a silent house. He started talking to the men at the plant more, opening up—they knew his wife had passed away, and they were accommodating to him, and he went from a cordial stranger to “one of the guys”.

They learned very quickly to not ask about his daughter.

When Hal took his wife to St. Peter’s Hospital, running red-lights and blasting through stop signs, it was still their plan to hyphenate their names for me. I was an equal part of both of them; so why should I only bear the name of one? That was the plan—Hal picked the first name, she the middle, and both would have the last. A true joint effort.

When Hal held me, the bed his wife was in now empty, the plan fell away. She was gone—breathed her last in an emergency-room hallway, face drooping, tongue swallowed, arms bent in unnatural ways. Eyes rolled back, drooling. It came too fast, the bleeding too much—for twelve minutes, she was dead but present; and then she was present but dead. They lived in America; these things were one in a million billion, the odds so small and inconsequential that they had never even occurred to them as they’d raced, sixty-five down route 20—all they had to do was get there, arrive in one piece, and then they’d be with the doctors and they’d know what to do and everything would be okay, and in six hours or so they’d be home again with their greatest creation.

She was the most graceful person Hal had ever known. She died as though she’d been slammed by a semi-trailer. Bloodied and twisted and curdled.

Her family would hate him forever. His family would disown him.

Both of them, somehow, proven right.

He sat in the ward. He was blinded. He became blind. Deafened by the thunder of the shouting, the blurred blaring of medical instruments. Rendered senseless by the white walls, the sterile posters talking about glove safety, tips for high blood pressure, the instruments in their little glass jars. Banality. Surrounded by the inane. Words became dust in his mouth.

There was silence in the empty ward. He could not hear the rain from there.

The doctor had to ask him four times for my name.

And so I became Erika Hanover.

He did not give me a middle name.

Instead, he gave me a void.

0 0 0

And so I grew up alone in a house filled with voices, seeing in a house with no color, a warm body in a cold world.

When the thunderstorms were bad, I could hear him crying in the kitchen.

And I wish—

If he’d found someone else, made even the littlest attempt at progressing with his life—maybe I would’ve been better. Maybe I was cursed from the start, but curses can be lifted. This damage could be undone. Another voice to soften the black stone. I could be freed—but instead, he did nothing.

And I wish—

If he was content to be alone, that he recognized that the only thing remaining of his wife was me. I was born of her. If he didn’t leave me alone as soon as I was old enough to walk and feed myself, maybe those aspects could have been cultivated. He could have found something to love—something through which to drive his wife’s legacy—and one day he could show me to both families, now collections of strangers, and say: This is her legacy—this is what we created. Her name is Erika (blank) Hanover-(blank). She is a unity.

But instead, I was alone.

And I wish—

I wish he told me her name.

Sometimes I dream of finding them, the family that created my mother—and then I remember how they abandoned me, and I know in my soul that they would never want to see the hateful stone that Hal Hanover created.

My mother is a blank to me. And she is half of what I became.

And so I became half-blank. Half-void.

I am formed, and I can speak, and I can know—but I am a stone. I was always a stone.

But I am softening. There is a human in here yet.

Maybe all of this is worthless complaining. I should be happy Hal obeyed traffic laws on the night of June 11th. He was considering not doing so, but he did, and that made all the difference.

I am softening. I am finding the things in myself I could have known about if I’d been given the means—if I’d been given the help—instead of being left to my own devices.

I am almost whole again.

But deep in my soul is a stone. It dries the rest—it pulls out the moisture, it drains the warmth. I have to fight against it. It wants me to sit in a ball in the corner and never speak. It is overwhelmed by the person I became. It is afraid of who I might become.

I cannot let it win.

I am softening. There is a human in here yet.

Erika Hanover is alive.