THE BOOMERANG

“He must have admired its craftsmanship. Though he was in medical school, he loved working with his hands….”

When I was five, my dad brought a boomerang home from a trip to Australia and hung it on our dining-room wall. He must have admired its craftsmanship. Though he was in medical school, he loved working with his hands; our basement was packed with woodworking tools, welding equipment, a potter’s wheel and kiln. Sometimes I’d take the boomerang down, just to hold it. It was lighter than I expected, made to fly.

We shared an artistic sensibility and a dark sense of humor. We once left a San Francisco 49ers game 20 minutes in to go see Muriel's Wedding instead. He wasn’t a sports fan—he was my fan, my biggest. But when I was a senior at Barnard, he ended his life, three months after baking me a chocolate birthday cake and pouring my first legal glass of champagne. We've moved away from saying "committed suicide" because it implies a crime and invites blame. Yet blame filled my heart. I knew he'd been depressed, but why hadn't he fought harder, sought help? Didn't he realize what his death would do to me?

I flew home to Oregon for the funeral, held at a Lutheran church that my father, a committed atheist, would never have attended. After a week that passed in a nauseated blur, I tucked the boomerang into my suitcase to bring with me to school. I wanted something of his, and for some reason it spoke to me.

Back on campus, I found a voicemail from my faculty advisor—the Hungarian medievalist who’d taught my first creative-writing class—wanting to know how I was doing. We began exchanging messages, meeting for coffee and walks. Timea told me about the grandfather she’d never met, who killed himself when her mother was a girl. I told her how my dad had left orthopedic surgery to become an inventor, working for years on a device related to joint replacements that he patented but failed to sell. I told her how abandoned I felt, how I couldn't let go of resentment.

I graduated. Before I left to teach English in Japan, I gave Timea the boomerang. It was a gesture of thanks, but I also wanted to be rid of that reminder. I was anxious to move on. I stayed in Japan two years, then returned to the U.S. for grad school. I settled in California, published a novel, got married, had a son. I was too busy to think about my father very often. I believed I’d moved past my grief. Still, I bristled whenever my mother referred to him as my son’s grandfather. To me, he hadn’t earned the title.

Twenty years after my father’s suicide, our family briefly moved to the East Coast for my husband’s work, and Timea asked if I’d teach a class at Barnard. Being there was unexpectedly hard. The short, dark days, the leaf-bare trees, the students shivering in the cold—everything took me back to my father’s death. This time, though, as Timea and I walked and talked, something in me shifted. Now in my mid-40s, close to my dad’s age when he died, I saw how pressures and disappointments could pile up, how you might question your worth and even imagine others being better off without you. I felt less sorry for myself, more sorrow for him.

When we returned to California and unpacked the things we'd left in storage, I realized I no longer owned anything of my dad’s—nothing his strong hands had touched, not even a photo of us together. Then I remembered the boomerang. I doubted Timea still had it after all these years, but just in case, I emailed to ask. She replied immediately: Of course she did, and would I like it back? I hesitated to reclaim a gift, but she insisted she’d only been taking care of it for me.

My son watched me unbox the boomerang and hang it on the wall. I told him it had belonged to his grandfather. "We probably can't throw it, can we?" he said wistfully. I said no, explaining that it was the only thing I had left of my dad. Only then did it strike me that a boomerang's purpose is to fly away and return—just like this one already had. It felt like a joke, one my father would have enjoyed. Or perhaps a message. I looked at my son, who is both scientifically inclined and artistic, tall and strong but terrible at many sports, quick-witted with a dry humor. And it seemed that although my dad had flown away, part of him had indeed found a way back.

—Malena Watrous

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Malena Watrous is the author of a novel, If You Follow Me, and co-author of two cookbooks. She lives in Santa Cruz and teaches for Stanford Continuing Studies.

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