Debts

Three months before my father died, I enrolled in a course on Historical Memory in Russia. I had worked at Harvard for ten years and had never taken a class, but that summer I grew convinced that learning was all I needed to be happy. My life felt lonely and small, and I thought if I could understand people who lived far away and long ago, I might find a remedy.

A week into the new semester, I got an email from my half-sister, Amelia. She wanted to meet. I hadn’t seen her in a decade, and I knew why she was reaching out now. Nora, Amelia’s mother, had texted and emailed me about my father’s declining health, but I never replied. I liked that my father was dying without me. Even a year after our divorce was finalized, I still heard Matt’s measured voice in my head telling me that I was evading. I ignored that, too.

I agreed to meet Amelia because she was the one person in the world who would understand me. I decided not to share my own feelings with her, but to sit and listen patiently to her emotional outpouring. I would tell her, “Everything you feel makes sense,” and that would be enough. I was friendless, which I blamed on Matt, but I could be a good sister.

Two days later, I waited in my favorite Starbucks for her. They know my order, which I accept as love. I read a book by Svetlana Alexievich in which everyone ends up killing themselves and took careful notes on the how and why. When Amelia arrived, I had a moment of double vision, seeing her first as a stranger, and then as my father, before understanding who she was. Her smile was studied when she said, “Hi, Leah. It’s good to see you.”

I had forgotten how young she would be, but with her in front of me I felt every one of the twenty years that separated us.

“Hi,” I said, feeling shy and uncertain. She was like a creature of another species. Her bleached buzzcut, army surplus jacket, and septum piercing showed me who I could have been in another life. The stark black tattoos on her skin, the same shade of white as mine, spoke of self-determination. She did not look like my sister, and I felt very old. “Thanks for reaching out,” I said. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” she said, with a confidence I admired. “School is going well. I just declared my major. Chemistry. How are you?”

“I’m okay. I’m taking a class this semester, too. All about memory in Russia.” Amelia hadn’t been born when the Soviet Union existed, and I thought about what it meant to remember something you didn’t live through. “I was glad you emailed me.”

A flash of skepticism on her face, and then she was neutral again. “My mom said you haven’t replied to any of her messages.”

I felt caught. “That’s different,” I said. “She just wants me to go see him.”

Amelia shook her head. “She wants help.”

“Help?”

“She’s done everything on her own.” There was pride or defensiveness in her voice, and I envied her relationship with Nora. “You know they aren’t married anymore? Not for five years now. And she’s still taking care of all the medical shit because you just disappeared.”

“I’m glad she left him,” I said. And I was, really, because Nora always deserved more than what my father could give her. “But he’s not my dad, not really. I haven’t seen him since my wedding. And I didn’t talk to him for years before that.”

“Right, but you’re still his daughter. You’re a full adult. And my mom can’t do it all on her own.”

“So, is that why you wanted to talk?” I had hoped for something transcendent, not something transactional. I had hoped for us to meet on the grounds of our shared history.

For the first time, she looked unsure. “I don’t know,” she said, as though not knowing was a moral failing. “It’s been so long. I guess I wanted to talk to someone who would understand. I love my mom, but it’s different for her. Maybe it’s worse.” She was systematically folding the wrapper of her straw. I was amazed it hadn’t torn yet, and we both watched her fingers as she transformed it, smaller and smaller.

“How has it been for you?” I asked. “With him being so sick.”

“Weird.” She said it and then sealed her mouth so that I thought the conversation could be finished. She unfolded the straw wrapper and pressed it flat, trying to get rid of every crease. When she spoke again, she said, “What was he like, when you were growing up? And how old were you when your mom left?”

“I was sixteen. I’m sure you know what he was like.”

She shook her head. “He couldn’t have been as bad for you.”

It offended my pride. Amelia’s suggestion tore at the edges of my own story, the only thing I had left. “Why do you say that?” I asked. I kept my voice even because I was twenty years older than her, and I knew I couldn’t be angry at a child.

“You would have helped us,” she said. She twisted the paper wrapper, both strengthening and weakening it. How had it not torn yet? Quieter, she said, “Why didn’t you help us?”

“What could I have done?” I wanted her to give me something easy, and to leave me out of it. I was here to listen to her story, not give her my own. “I wasn’t in contact with him at all. I didn’t really know Nora.”

“But we went to lunch,” she said, a sudden urgency in her voice. “My mom took you to lunch, and you didn’t help her.”

The lunch. It was a month after Matt and I got engaged. I hadn’t wanted to tell my father, but my mother insisted, so I sent him a curt email. He responded with exaggerated relief that my lesbian phase had worn off. It was the first contact we’d had in four years. I didn’t expect to hear from Nora; I didn’t think they’d still be married. But she texted me and invited me to a celebratory lunch in Cambridge with her and Amelia.

What did she ask of me then? I remembered being cornered, forced to listen to an account of my father’s cruelty, and I wondered why Nora had brought ten-year-old Amelia. She felt like a hostage, or a weapon. Nora spent an hour blaming me for the decisions she’d made, for every time she’d considered leaving but hadn’t, and then I couldn’t stand it anymore. I walked out.

“She didn’t want help,” I told Amelia. “She just wanted me to feel guilty.” I regretted saying it, because it felt like something Amelia would twist and use against me. I felt a shift in the atmosphere between us. We were both our father’s daughters.

“No, she wanted you to help her leave. She asked you. And you called her a gold-digging bitch.”

“I did not.” I know I didn’t.

Amelia looked at me like I was a freight train and she was in my path. “Do you think I’d forget something like that?” In a swift movement I didn’t catch, she finally tore the wrapper in two. “My whole life, you could have helped us. When I was born. Anytime when I was growing up. When she wanted to leave, or when she did leave. But you always ignored her and any time you talked to her, you belittled her.”

“Look,” I began. I saw a road before me shrinking toward the horizon. “Look. I’m sorry it was hard for you. But I lived with him first. If you were me, I know you would have done the same. You wouldn’t have looked back.”

“You don’t know that, actually. You don’t know me.” Her fierce eyes, two coals burning bright, raised a mirrored fire in me.

But then, I remembered that we were not just in a Starbucks, we were in the Starbucks I came to twice every week, where the baristas knew me and where I tried to be their favorite customer. I smiled at Amelia, and I interred every nasty thought and said, “I’m sorry. This doesn’t feel like the right time or place for this conversation. But I’m really glad we got to see each other.”

When I got home, I finished reading Alexievich for class and another person killed themself. I looked around at my studio apartment and thought how sad it was to be forty years old and completely alone.

#

Nora sent me an email in December telling me that my father was dead. It was the day before my final paper was due for the Russian history class, so I didn’t reply right away. Instead, I wrote about Stalin, the Great Terror, and the silence that followed. I wrote about the hope that by obliterating a thing from speech, one might also obliterate it from memory.

The next day, I turned in my paper, and then, sitting at my desk in the admissions office, I replied to Nora. I told her I would come to the funeral and that I didn’t want anything he had to leave behind except his money.

I called my mother, something I did rarely enough that when she answered, she said, “Leah? What’s wrong?”

“Dad’s dead,” I said.

“Thank god.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you going to the funeral? Who’s organizing everything? Is that your job?” She sounded curious and eager.

“Nora’s fixing everything.”

“The bitch.” She said it reflexively because she had made a practice of hating Nora. While my mother had been the one to leave my father, she had never remarried and didn’t like that he had. When we first found out about Nora, my mother had said, “If he wants a child bride, he should at least pick someone pretty.”

“Will you come with me? It’s on Sunday in Arlington.”

“God, I can’t go to his funeral. What would Nora say? And how am I supposed to get to Arlington? You go, and tell me all about it.”

“I will,” I said, though we both knew I wouldn’t call her again until the next time I had bad news.

After we hung up, I felt that stinging loneliness again. There were friends, people I used to spend time with, but in the year and a half since Matt left, I saw them less and less. Without Matt glowing by my side, they saw that I wasn’t very kind or funny, and they melted away like ice in the scorched summer.

The problem was that I wanted to grieve, but every mode of grief felt wrong. Every memory I had of my father was at best tainted, and at worst poisoned. I still heard his voice in my head, all the time, deriding my decisions and encouraging my meanness. I knew that if it hadn’t gone away by now, at forty, it never would. This was what it was to live. This was what legacy meant.

I tried to be grateful that his only weapons were his words and his money, at turns withholding or dispensing with either. I wondered if that was what Amelia meant, that he had turned to physical violence in his second marriage. I wouldn’t know, now.

The only person in the world I wanted to talk to was Amelia. I thought about emailing her, asking her to meet again, but I was too embarrassed by our last encounter. I kept trying to remember that lunch with her and Nora to see which of us was right, but I couldn’t reshape how I saw it. Amelia loved Nora, it was clear, in the kind of way I didn’t my own mother. It was a difference of blame, probably, because I knew that what happened to me was my mother’s fault. Amelia didn’t seem to think the same about Nora.

Finally, late, I called Matt. We exchanged occasional texts, and we’d met up twice. We didn’t get along, but he was the only person I could think to call. Though I rarely talked about my father with him, he knew better than anyone else what this would mean to me.

When he picked up the phone, he repeated my mother. “Leah, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said, and then my tongue stopped working.

He paused. “Okay,” he said carefully. “Can I ask why you’re calling?”

“My dad died.”

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“It doesn’t matter what I feel. He’s dead.”

“Right.” He sounded distracted. I imagined a woman in his apartment, waiting patiently as he talked to his crazy, withholding ex. “Did you want to talk about it?”

This would have been a good time to cry. “I just needed to tell someone.”

“Okay.” He paused and gave me room to say more, but I didn’t. “Well,” he said after a long moment, “If that’s all, I kind of have to go.”

“Whatever.” I heard the ice in my voice.

“Leah, come on. You can’t be mad at me.” I could, and I was, and it was delicious. “I’m just not there yet. It hasn’t been that long. Let’s not force intimacy.”

“I’ll leave you to enjoy intimacy with someone else, then.”

“Jesus, Leah, can you not?”

“It’s just that my dad is dead, and all you care about is getting off the phone again so you can fuck some twenty-three-year-old.” The girl he cheated on me with had been twenty-six, but I rounded down.

“Jesus, Leah,” he said again, and now he was angry, too. “You hate your dad, and you’re obviously never going to talk about your feelings, so I don’t really see what else you want from me.”

“This is your fault,” I said, and then I hung up. It felt good, for a moment, to resent him and feel morally superior, but then I remembered all the reasons he left in the first place, and I finally cried, not for my father, but for the lasting effects of my upbringing at his hands.

#

I wore a black dress and a black wool cardigan and black fleece-lined tights, but I didn’t have black shoes. I stared at my closet, wondering how I could possibly not have black shoes. I had black sneakers, and I had black sandals, but not a single pair of black dress shoes. I put on grey suede flats, and I could hear my father sneer about it.

The service was in a Methodist church, though as far as I knew, my father had never been religious. The preacher gave a generic homily about death with a few anecdotes about my father that I was sure Nora had supplied him with. She looked more beautiful than I even remembered her. She and Amelia sat near the front, Amelia in slacks and a suit jacket, Nora in a black dress, black cardigan, and black tights that made my ensemble look cheap. She even wore a black hat over her still-brown hair. I wanted to hide from her. Suddenly, she seemed like the only person who would see through me.

After Mass, I approached her out of a sense of duty, and she smiled and hugged me. “Leah, it’s so good to see you. Thank you for coming.”

“Hi, Nora,” I said. Even now, when I was forty and she was forty-six, she seemed so much older than me. Rather, she made me feel young. “Thanks for arranging everything.”

Amelia, next to Nora, rolled her eyes, but Nora just waved her hand. “Of course. I know none of us had a simple relationship with Gerald, but it was a nice service, wasn’t it? And he deserves that, at least. Are you joining us for the interment?”

“I don’t have a car,” I said, “so, I probably can’t make it to the cemetery.” I couldn’t stand how good she was. Somehow, the venom that my father had infected me with, and my mother, and even Amelia, seemed not to have touched Nora. She was as sweet as she was the first time I met her at her wedding.

“Amelia can drive you,” she said. “I’m driving your Uncle James in his car, but Amelia’s taking mine.” Amelia didn’t display any emotion at the suggestion. “Please, it would have meant so much to him.”

I doubted that, but I still hadn’t been able to mourn, feeling nothing but a blankness gross in its magnitude. Maybe seeing his coffin lowered into the ground would unlock something in me. And I would get to spend a car ride with Amelia. So, I agreed, and a few minutes later Amelia was driving me in Nora’s red sedan, following the hearse.

“How have you been since he died?” I asked.

She flinched when I said the word died. “I’ve been a mess,” she said. “Haven’t you?”

I hadn’t. I had gone to work every day, not bothering to tell my coworkers what had happened, and if I felt depressed, it was no different than the year preceding his death. But I said, “Yeah, sort of. It’s been hard to process.”

“Right. I hated him so much for most of my life, but he was still my dad. Seeing him at the end—it was just really hard.” She paused, and then shifted her hands on the wheel. “He asked for you a lot, when he knew it was over.”

I didn’t know what to say. In some way, I felt vindicated that he recognized, at least obliquely, my importance. But I had shut him out of my life fifteen years ago, and I had never regretted that decision.

When I didn’t reply, Amelia said, “Have you thought about our conversation?”

I thought about it all the time. I was always imagining what I could have said that would convince her of the truth of my memory. She was the only person in the world who’d lived through the same thing as me, and she hated me. “Some,” I said. “I’m sorry that it ended the way it did. I would like—I mean, we’re sisters. That means something to me.”

She laughed, a little wet sound, and then she started to cry. “Bullshit,” she said. “That’s such bullshit. If it meant something to you, you wouldn’t have ignored me my whole life.”

“I can do better. I’m ready now.” I wanted to reach out and touch her, rub a hand over her buzzed hair. Something that would communicate what I was willing to give her.

“You don’t get that,” she said. “You don’t get to dive in when you want, not when you left us alone for all the hard shit. How are you my mom’s age and you’re so emotionally stunted? You’re such a child.”

“At least I didn’t go to his funeral looking like a fucking dyke,” I said. It came out of my mouth before I could think about it. My father’s legacy on my tongue.

She was shocked into silence. I needed to apologize. I needed to tell her that I wasn’t like him. I needed to lean on grief and the strange loss we’d both undergone as excuses. But I didn’t say anything. We were silent for the rest of the ten-minute drive to the cemetery.

When we got out of the car, Nora was already there, and Amelia slipped toward her like rainwater in a clear creek. Nora wrapped an arm around Amelia and held onto her like a mother is supposed to at a funeral.

When they lowered my father into his grave, it didn’t feel like anything. But I cried, like my body knew something my mind didn’t. I cried and I couldn’t stop crying. Nora said a few words, and so did my uncle, and then they threw a few fistfuls of dirt onto the casket, and then it was time to leave.

“I’m not driving you,” Amelia said to me before I asked. I knew she wouldn’t. I couldn’t walk home, and there wasn’t a bus route, so I walked around the cemetery for a few minutes to let everyone leave before I could call a car.

I looked at the different headstones and I thought about the class I had gotten an A in. Memory was a tool and a weapon. It helped to think about Russia as I shivered and my shoes bit into my heels. It helped to think about millions of people enduring something together and then collectively determining what it meant. It helped to think about the Gulag and the Siege of Leningrad and the October Revolution, all gruesome in their way, not one touching me at all.

---

C.M. GREEN is a Boston-based writer with a focus on history, memory, gender, and religion. Their work has been published in beestung, Full House Literary, and elsewhere. Their debut chapbook, I Am Never Leaving Williamsburg, is out with fifth wheel press in February 2025, and their poetry chapbook Without Instruction is forthcoming later in 2025 from JAKE. You can find their work at cmgreenwrites.com.

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