A few months before my twelfth Christmas, my brother Jeff hung himself from a tree in our neighborhood creek, my dad went to alcohol rehab never to return, and, one dreary, rain-socked wintry afternoon as the holiday drew closer, I curled up on the family room couch with a notepad and a pen, making a voluminous list of all the presents and toys I desired that year. If I had learned anything in the preceding months, it was that people liked to buy children out of grief. And while I realized that on some level it might be a difficult holiday as our family continued its slow, aching shatter, I knew it would also be a year of bounty.

No one lets a child go through that kind of trauma without a new pair of Guess overalls or a pair of Reebok Pumps, so it was best to be prepared.

The new Kid Icarus video game? Check.

A sports jersey? Yes please.

Air Jordans? Don’t mind if I do!

My head swam with a melange of pity presents that would soon need packing and putting away: the new stereo system next to the bed maybe, and all the new shoes lined up perfectly under the closet-full of new clothes, the new TV and Nintendo placed on the dresser so I could play while lying down in bed and whatever would I do with a new basketball hoop? Where on earth would I house the new video collection of the best of “Great Chefs, Great Cities?” Sitting there, on the couch with my pad and pen, I could feel it deep in my bones.

It would be our best Christmas ever.

The year started out quite differently, of course. It was as if I had turned 12 only to realize that some veil had begun to lift — things I had never noticed in the innocence of childhood suddenly seemed apparent: The way my brother Jeff would now rush into a room, for instance, crying, pissed off and red-faced, muttering things like, “Jesus, he’s drunk again and it’s what? noon!;” or the way my parents would deal with Jeff’s own drinking, making plans to take him to a treatment house in Los Angeles after the second or third time he was found slurring drunk by school officials or amusement park security officers.

The night before we were supposed to make the family trip to “get him better,” we sat, just the two of us, squeezed together on a piano bench in the living room. Jeff tapped the keys slowly, certainly not with the force and grace I was used to hearing from him, but I figured he was just as concerned as I was about how much time his treatment thing would take away from more important activities.

“Dad said we could go to Disneyland while we’re down there,” I told him, as the hollow, depressed tones of the piano’s lower register filled the air around us.

“Did you hear me?” I said again, “Disneyland. The happiest place on earth, dude!”

We had been there before when I was younger and Jeff had wanted to take me on Space Mountain, but I chickened out, afraid of the darkness. Jeff promised he would hold my hand the whole time and that was almost enough to convince me. Jeff had taught me how to write computer code on a Texas Instruments computer we plugged into the television. He taught me how to catch crawdads in our creek without getting pinched. He taught me how to ride a bike, and, later, how to pull an old shirt from the hamper and sniff test its ability to withstand one more day of use. If Jeff got a flat top haircut, I followed soon afterward. If he feathered his long blond hair and started sticking a comb in his back pocket, the handle sticking out, I immediately went to the store and perused the personal care aisles I had never known existed. His word was golden, and I trusted him above all others, but the thought of being trapped in a darkened dome and strapped into a rocket ship overrode the comforting idea of holding his hand the whole time. Big brothers can’t protect you from everything. But by then, sitting at the piano with him, I was older, more prepared.

“I’ll even ride Space Mountain with you!” I promised.

“Hey, did you hear me?”

“Huh?” he mumbled vacantly, “Oh, yeah sure — it’s going to be great, Mikey.”

He never looked up from the doomed keys.

“Just great,” he said again. His chin came down on his chest and he closed his eyes tightly while his fingers fell off the keyboard, filling the air around us with some sudden, haunted silence.

Jeff vanished hours later, found only the next day. We would hold out hope that there was some kind of struggle, maybe with some warring suburban gang bent on unknown retributions and a case of mistaken identity, and we would cling to the idea that he slipped while carelessly playing one last time on a familiar childhood rope swing, but you realize only later that this is what people must do when the pain is so unbearable. To this day, the slow bang of a piano’s darker tones brings me back to that living room, our butts and lower backs squeezed together on a small bench, and I’ll close my eyes and curse myself for filling our last moments with castles and roller coasters, these suddenly childish fantasies.

My dad was the next to go, as the family continued to splinter. And I saw this one more clearly. If Jeff’s death had begun to lift the veil, depositing me in some murky shadowland where mysterious dark fingers pull you from childhood innocence into adulthood, my father’s drinking almost pushed it to the rafters.

The day after Jeff disappeared, my mom, oldest brother, Tom, and I drove around the neighborhood, searching familiar haunts, before returning home to find an unmarked police cruiser parked at the curb. My dad opened the front door when he saw us arrive and his eyes must have conveyed enough, because while I don’t remember him saying anything at all, my mom broke down in the driveway, shouting “No!” loud enough to alert the neighbors, while I clung to the door of our car — this curious desire to run away washing over me. Instead I limped inside, glanced at the piano in the living room, suddenly hearing some ghostly, invisible tune for the first time, and then fell into a couch, sobbing so loudly my body heaved.

Neighbors began to arrive. The two beefy police detectives who had brought the bad news sheepishly exited in the commotion. “What can we do?” the neighbors asked. I couldn’t hear what my dad said, but soon a friend’s dad who lived across the street and coached my little league baseball teams returned with a bottle of scotch so beautiful that I knew it must have been expensive, good stuff — the kind of thing you break out for an occasion like this, not the cheap-looking bottles my dad stocked our own pantry with. We were in the backyard by then, probably getting some air, and I still remember how beautiful that bottle looked and the way the amber liquid caught the fading sunlight just so, sparkling like a prism on the picnic table where it sat. At first, the prism was immense, covering the entire table with drunken rainbows, but as the hours twisted away from us, the prism shrank and shrank until it barely skirted the bottom of the bottle — barely any liquid left to cast spells.

Twilight came and my dad was led inside the house. I followed behind, watching the stumbling progression up the short steps into the family room, and at one point I turned around, suddenly aware, and said to Jeff, “at least it’s not noon!” only to realize I was speaking to the vapor.

I’m not sure how it was decided — I wasn’t a part of those conversations — but it was explained that my dad would be going away.

“It’s just 28 days,” my mom said.

When the month was over, my dad moved into an apartment complex across town, explaining that it was temporary, that “I need to work on me,” while miles away his family continued to break.

These events happened in the months leading up to the holidays, which had always been a joy in a house with three boys — all of us waking much too early and stalking into the living room to find a trove of presents. One year, on the night before a merrier Christmas, we boys tried to predict exactly how much bounty we would receive: Tom pointing to the coffee table, saying the presents would end there; Jeff pointing a little bit further; and me, greedy for even more.

“Oh, I don’t know,” my mom said, walking over to where the living room ended in a hallway, “I’m guessing Santa is going to pile the presents all the way to here.”

I was amazed to wake up the next day and discover the trail of presents ended exactly where she said it would.

“How did you know?” I asked, while she smiled from behind a coffee mug and the rest of the family suddenly came down with a cough.

Holidays had always been fun. Despite all the problems to come and issues with money and alcohol, we managed to sit as a family for Christmas Eve dinners and then wake up to a cheery morning, all of us wondering what special gift dad had bought for mom and had wrapped at the fancy gift wrapping service Macy’s offered. The rest of us wrapped presents in whatever we had lying around, like birds assembling a nest — all gum and twigs and used newspaper scraps, whatever we we could find — but my mom’s gift always shined, the corners perfectly put together and the sides so smooth the paper looked painted on. I remember thinking that when I grew up and got married, I’d also spring for the wrapping service because on some level, my dad knew what he was doing.

But that year, things were off. Dad didn’t want to come over for Christmas Eve dinner, spending the night at his new apartment across town. I didn’t understand it at the time. Holidays were about family — and, more importantly, things. It wasn’t until decades later, when I quit drinking myself, that I realized exactly how much that first holiday without alcohol is unbearable — that the very reasons holidays were so fun, having everyone together, were the same reasons it felt so right to drink so much. But there was, of course, something else keeping him from our home that night.

After our Christmas Eve dinner, my mom insisted on piling Tom and I into the car to go see him, the cold vinyl seats biting into our legs and elbows. I tried to beg out of it, thinking only of my enormous list and the bounty I was expecting the next morning. All I wanted to do was curl into bed and wish myself asleep, knowing the morning would come faster. But she was insistent.

“I have to see,” she said.

I remember the way the cone of light covered the stoop of his aging, cracked stucco apartment, the yellow light tossing down a flickering pyramid upon us. Moths and bugs crisscrossed above our heads and the slow roar of the freeway could be heard in the distance. My mom knocked loudly on the door, while Tom stood rigidly at her side, shivering a bit — from the cold maybe. I stood behind them, peering through legs and arms, trying to get a glimpse into my dad’s apartment. I had never been inside and was curious about how he was spending his days without us.

He opened the door a crack, offering a startled hello as he stood in the doorway, almost as if to block our way. It was Christmas Eve, and while I wasn’t expecting much from him at the time, I did expect a little more hospitality. A virgin egg nog maybe, at at least a hello and a “Merry Christmas!” But from my viewpoint behind my mom and remaining brother, I only saw shadows and glimpses in the aging yellow light, with occasional words making their way past my familial blockade.

“Tonight’s not a good night” and “I’m sorry” and “I just got lonely is all.”

We never did go inside. My dad remained at the door, not letting us see behind him for some reason, while eventually my mom turned around, shook her head sadly and somehow made it to our car. Tom lifted an arm and wrapped it gently around her shoulders, helping her with the door, while I stood frozen for a moment, watching this sudden display of tenderness. I momentarily forgot about the presents awaiting us in the morning and looked back at the cone of light above my father’s door and the way it tossed prophetic shadows, pulling at me somehow. It snapped off a few seconds later, and standing there in the darkness, it was as if I saw the bruised night sky for the first time, as if some veil had finally lifted.

***

Dana told me to come back in the morning.

“Just one night,” she said, “One of us should get some sleep!”

She made me promise to return at 7 a.m. I had been sleeping on a hospital cot next to her bed — the kind of cot they cover with plastic and thin sheets, probably making it easier to clean if someone pees themselves in the night. It struck me as particularly odd. I could understand making the actual hospital bed easy to clean — that’s where patients rest after deep, intrusive procedures that sometimes make their bladders and bowels run free. But it kept me up for long stretches, wondering what type of procedure a patient would have to go through to make their guests pee themselves in the night.

Of course, the thought wasn’t the only thing keeping me awake. Emmeline was barely three days old at the time. She opened her eyes more, seemed to look around and find the world so tiring that she almost immediately drifted off again. One of the books I read said it was important for dads to bond as much as they can with newborns and that skin-to-skin contact was the best way to do it. As Dana slept in her bed, I undressed Emme and then took off my own shirt before placing her gently on my chest and lying down to nap. I could never sleep, of course, not with this warm bulb sighing gently into thick tufts of chest hair. In the still quiet of the middle of the day, I looked at her dreamily, stroked her hair and whispered to her the stories I had read to her in the womb. She would know my voice, I thought, she would look up and say with unspeaking eyes, “Hey, that was you!” And we’d share a smile and drift happily off to sleep. That is what it was supposed to be like, this dreamlike slumber and instantaneous bonding — like catching a glimpse of someone through a fence and not being able to take your eyes off of her as she looks both ways for a door before suddenly starting to climb. This strange creature on my chest would one day break me, grabbing my hand as we walk down the sidewalk together and looking up with a smile. “You know daddy,” she’d say, “I like you.” But at the moment, in those early days, she usually startled awake, offered a high-pitched, hungry cry and tried to bite my nipple.

“Dana,” I’d whisper, handing over our child across the beds, “Dana I think she’s hungry again.”

We were all three stuck in this hospital room. There was Dana’s bed, my cot and the little steam tray bassinet they wheeled in and out. We had our own bathroom and our door was usually left open, the nurses popping in to help with the breastfeedings. There was one miraculous moment when things seemed to work out just fine, when Emme grabbed ahold of Dana’s boob and gulped greedily and painlessly, but usually the feedings involved me rubbing Dana’s back while some new shift nurse came in, fondled my wife’s enormous breasts for ten minutes and then held up her hands in apology.

“Has anyone told you about formula yet?” one of the nurses asked. The word alone stung like defeat, as if we were horrible people to even contemplate giving our child what we had, somehow, managed to put on the same level as poison. A steady parade of professional lactation consultants began knocking on our door in those first few days, and each one of them waved the idea of formula away from their faces, like they might swat at pests.

“Do you know what they put in that?” one of them snorted, waving her hand again.

In a moment of pure yuppie food snobbery, I smirked right along with this woman, saying, “I know! And one of them is even made by Nestle! The chocolate bar maker!” This would, of course, become the only brand Emme would consume in the following weeks and months, and I’d remember with shame my over-parenting exclamations. But at the time, with all the advice from the consultants and books and Internet articles swimming around in our confused, tired heads, we were insistent, the two of us: Emme would be breastfed so don’t even mention that other thing.

Emme, who had come in to the world so blue, had turned a remarkable shade of pink — her bulging cheeks and thick lips resembling some healthy farm animal. But as the hours went by, the color drained out of her face again. She grew pale. Her color faded to a muted gray. Her eyes seemed to bulge out a little bit more and those pudgy fingers I so lovingly held and caressed in my own grew thin and wispy, like doll-sized pencils falling out of the cup of her hand.

“Tell you what,” one of the nurses said on one of those first nights, “We’ll take her off your hands for a few hours, keep her in the nursery here and let you two get some sleep.”

The nurse wheeled Emme’s little steam tray out of the room, while Dana and I almost immediately went to sleep — a weary, exhausted sleep filled with the dreams of crying, hungry babies. In the middle of the night, the same nurse wheeled Emme back into our room.

“She’s so hungry,” the nurse said, “Let’s try again.”

I hated myself for faking sleep, but that’s exactly what I did. I remained on my cot as the nurse handed Dana our baby and watched the usual routine with one half-open eye: Our baby crying, writhing; Dana wiping tears and grimacing at the pain, blood forming around the thin suction where mouth met breast. What kind of father just watches this?

“There there,” the nurse said, putting Emme back into the bassinet and heading for the door, “We’ll try again in the morning.”

The door clicked and I lifted my head.

“Are you OK?”

“Dana, are you OK?”

When we woke up, it was more of the same — this unending parade of nurses and consultants we ended up paying $100 a visit. Nothing worked. No new positions, no herbal remedies. Someone suggested Dana drink a pint of Guinness to generate more milk. We tried everything. And each feeding looked exactly like the other — the two of us watching this baby shrink before our eyes.

My mom stopped by the hospital, holding her new granddaughter and giving us a chance to sleep. In that odd incessant wakefulness of new parents, I closed my eyes on the cot and listened as my mom sang my daughter the same songs I remember as a child. Then she’d get up to go and I’d tell her “we’re fine, we’re fine” and watch her for a long, long time through a pane of glass as she hesitantly made her way out of the hospital, glancing back occasionally.

That night, Dana made up her mind.

“Listen,” she said, “I want you to go home. Go home and get some sleep.”

I told her I wouldn’t leave.

“One of us needs to get some sleep,” she insisted, “And I need you to be ready to take care of her.”

In that light, it was my job — to get the rest I needed so that Dana, the next day, would be able to get hers while I took care of our baby. She made my promise I’d be back in the early morning, about the time Emme woke up and demanded more blood.

“Promise me,” she said, and I did, kissing her on the forehead and kissing our daughter on the cheek.

It was late when I got home. I cracked open a bottle of beer, falling asleep in a leather recliner as Martin Sheen gave some presidential speech on the television. In my childhood, if you fell asleep in front of the television, the National Anthem would wake you up at some point. Instead, I got Billy Mays, screaming through his beard about laundry detergent. It felt lonely there, in the living room, a faint sliver of moon light cutting through the window blinds. The clock on the cable box said it was almost 4 in the morning, and I hoped that Dana was sleeping in her hospital bed across town. Four o’ clock. I had a few more hours. So I slipped into bed, set the alarm and woke up already late, having apparently hit the snooze button until it broke.

I showered, changed into new clothes for the first time in days and floored the car to the hospital — walking in to find Dana and Emme on the bed, sobbing together.

“Where were you?” Dana said.

“I’m sorry.”

“It was awful.”

“I’m …”

There was a look in her eyes, a sad, defeated, wounded look of inevitability. And I knew immediately what she was thinking. We had talked about my dad but not much. I never wanted to. The story must have seemed vague to her. He was there, in the beginning. For a long time, he was great, playing catch, jumping in the bushes with me during games of hide and seek, saving me from midnight illnesses with a gentle touch. When we talked about my childhood, he repeated the same story: how he used to dance around my nursery in the middle of the night, my head sweating into his shoulder. Then he was gone. In seeking help for himself, he abandoned the rest of us, coming around only to talk about recovery and god — everything a 13 year old is interested in — and then stopping altogether. When we needed him most, his family suffered a slow shatter, the pieces breaking apart. Could I ever fully escape that? Is fatherhood some doomed prophecy, fulfilling itself with each new generation? If the father runs away, will the son? It was as if I could read these questions on Dana’s face. They needed me and I wasn’t there when I said I would be. What was being fulfilled? What unseen, haunted Oracle had conjured the past into the present?

I took Emme off of Dana’s chest.

“I swear it,” I promised. “You can trust me.”

I told Dana to get some sleep, that I would watch Emme, who twitched in my arms and groped the air with her mouth. I moved to the window and looked at the city below us, shrouded by moody, prow-like clouds and the cloudy mists of morning fog, together casting shadows on us in the room. Emme began to fidget and squirm, so I rested her head on my shoulder, patting her back.

“It’s OK,” I whispered. “It’s OK. Daddy’s here.”

At the window, a new light upon us now, I whispered stories into Emme’s ears and rocked her slowly until the fidgeting stopped. If she began to cry, I began to hum, and I didn’t realize what I was doing until I got a glimpse of the two of us in the window reflection, dancing slowly around the room, her tiny head sweating into my shoulder.