Looking at My Father, Inside and Out

IT is nearly midnight when I get home from my waitress job. I've been out of college for two years and have moved back into my mother's home in Islip, N.Y., for the summer to save money for graduate school. When I walk in the back door, my mother is at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. "Jane called," she says. "She wants you to call her. I think she's in trouble."

Jane is my father's second wife, the woman he began having an affair with a week after my mother moved out nine years ago with my three siblings and me. I wonder if my father is drunk and throwing things across the room as he did when I was a child. He could even be throwing Jane across the room.

Immediately I start to worry about Michael, their son, my 5-year-old half brother. Where is he in the midst of this trouble? Under the covers holding very still? Or with Buck, his older brother? Maybe they're both on the roof where my sister Meegan and I used to go when hell broke loose.

I dial Jane's number, and she picks up the phone on half a ring. She is drunk and whispering. She wants me to come get her at the end of the driveway as soon as I can. I hang up the phone, and my mother looks at me. I'm scared. I have not been in this type of hurricane for quite some time.

In another 10 years my father will be dead from alcoholism, and Jane will be sober, and we'll all be survivors of some kind, but I don't know that now. All I know is he's capable of doing great damage.

Maybe my mother should have said, "Don't go" or "Call the police." Or maybe she at least should have said, "I'll go with you," though her spending any time in the car with Jane, her replacement, would be hard to imagine. Yet the look on my mother's face is not bitterness but resignation and concern for this unlikely sort-of sister who knows all too well what it is like to live with my father.

I drive the dark roads to his house. When I reach the driveway, there is Jane in bare feet, her nightgown blowing in the wind, a bottle of Scotch in her hand. She is only five feet tall and weighs maybe 90 pounds, and the bottle looks enormous in her grip.

Jane must have been desperate to call me. She and I have never been close. I'm not sure I've ever seen her sober. The first time my siblings and I met her nine years before, she said, her voice slurred, "Your father loves you very much."

What the hell do you know? I wanted to say. It was the middle of a winter afternoon. My father had told us that Jane lived in Mexico for several years, and I thought maybe her strange speech was due to a Spanish accent.

Jane gets in the car, swigs what is left of the Scotch. As she talks in her drunken way, we drive to nowhere in particular, sometimes stopping at dead ends that overlook the Great South Bay.

"Michael is my beautiful little boy," she tells me. "It doesn't make him a sissy to need to go to the hospital. He knocked his head on the coffee table and cut his eyelid, and there was so much blood, but your father wouldn't let him go to the hospital. He's hit his head so many times, and your father just says: 'He's not a sissy. He's not going to grow up to be a pretty boy like Buck. He's going to be a hockey player, and hockey players don't care about scars."'

I listen to this horror in silence.

"But Kerry, am I wrong? Is it wrong to want to take him to be checked out? Now your father won't talk to me. Did he used to give your mother the silent treatment? Buck got home and saw Michael's eye and said: 'I don't care what Peter says. We're taking him to the hospital. He needs stitches, Mom.' So after your father went to sleep, we walked up the road to Tom's, and Tom drove us to the emergency room, and they stitched up Michael, and now your father won't talk to me. Tom said, 'Thank God you brought him in because if you hadn't he would have had a lazy eye for the rest of his life, and actually he still might."'

My father was a successful negligence lawyer, of all things. I don't know what his problems were besides alcoholism; no one ever will. My mother used to tell us his mother never held him when he was a child.

I have a picture of my father as a 4- or 5-year-old boy. In the picture he looks shy; his face is gentle. He wears shorts with suspenders and leans against a fence. My half-brother Michael and I have his blond hair, fair skin, and knobby knees.

I saw my father cry only once. I was in fifth grade, and I had been sitting at my desk, drawing a map of the United States for school. It was very late, but I had to finish my homework; everyone else was asleep.

"The Great Lakes look like a palm tree," I said to my father as I shifted in my chair.

"I never would have thought of that," he said.

I heard something in his voice so I looked up and saw there were tears in his eyes.

That's when he told me that he loved our family very much, but that he was going to be moving out for a while. He said he had been a bad boy. I had never liked the Scotch-and-Dial-soap smell of him and would hesitate even to hold his hand while we crossed the street. But he seemed to like my map, and he looked so sad, so I put my hand on his arm and said: "It's O.K., Dad. Really."

But soon after, he was living at home again, backing me into the full dish rack while pounding my chest repeatedly with his fist. I don't remember what had set him off. Maybe he'd found a gum wrapper of mine on the lawn that I'd failed to put in the garbage can.

The next day in gym class I changed in the bathroom stall because I was worried that the teacher would see the bruise. When my father got home from work that evening, my mother must have pulled him aside because he came right over to me, pulled down the neck of my T-shirt, stared at the bruise for a moment, and then walked away, looking sad about what he had done. Once again my impulse was to reassure him: It's O.K., I wanted to yell. It's O.K.

But Meegan, who is three years older than I, saw things more clearly. One evening she had made clay ornaments for the Christmas tree. She had baked them and painted them in bright detail. And then my father came in and whacked the cookie sheets into the air, and the ornaments flew against the walls and floor, shattering.

As my mother knelt to gather the pieces, Meegan bolted from the kitchen into the dark of the garage, where she ran straight into the yellow snowplow blade that was up on blocks, knocking it over with a loud crash. It gashed her leg open, but still she kept running. I took off after her down the dark road, my heart shaking. And when I caught up with her, we didn't take the road because we feared each set of headlights could be our father looking for us. Instead we walked behind hedges, through yards, for a mile to her friend Jillian's.

Meegan was brave enough to tell Jillian's parents what had happened that night and other nights. I sat there hardly breathing, feeling there was something wrong about Meegan telling. It took me years to realize the wrong thing was that Jillian's parents did nothing. Just as our neighbors did nothing when we showed up at their place one evening after Dad had sucker punched Meegan in the head. Just as my friend Amanda's parents did nothing when we showed up late one night in our pajamas with similar tales. They listened intently, patiently, then drove us to the end of our driveway and watched as we walked up to our house and in the front door.

Jane wants a cigarette, so I drive to the 7-Eleven. She gets out of the car in her nightgown.

"Jane, I'll get them," I say, opening my door. "You're in your pajamas. They won't let you in there without shoes."

"All right," she says.

Back in the car she smokes cigarette after cigarette as I tell her that nothing has changed since I lived with my father. But I sense she doesn't want to hear this. Her guard is creeping up; she is slightly more sober, talking less freely.

I half expect her to say, "Your father loves you very much." And maybe some stubborn part of me does believe it is impossible for a father not to love his children, even the ones with eyes he has left bloodied, even the ones who are bruised and limping, even the ones who have had to do mental gymnastics to try to understand themselves and him.

"Don't pull in the driveway," Jane says to me. "I don't want Peter to hear the car."

I stop in the road, and she gets out. I know it will not be O.K. for her to be back in that house with my father, yet I don't stop her. And she knows it will not be O.K., yet there she goes, up the driveway. In her sleeveless nightgown and bare feet Jane looks like a little girl walking into that unlit jack-o'-lantern of a house.

E-mail: modernlove@nytimes.com

MODERN LOVE Kerry Reilly, who teaches writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is working on a novel.; The contributing editor for Modern Love is Daniel Jones, who edited "The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood, and Freedom" (William Morrow).