The Other End of the Line
My father told me, and so did my roommates later, that when he called my dorm-room landline on September 11th, 2001, he was already panicking. I was eighteen, having moved across the country from our rural island to Manhattan, an island of roughly the same size and shape, the main difference being an additional million people.
I lived with four other girls in a five-hundred-square-foot dormitory in the Financial District, across the street from the Federal Reserve and a five-minute walk from the New York Stock Exchange. Just four blocks from our front door stood the World Trade Center where I learned I could buy cigarettes at the all-night Duane Reade. I’d been stealing Camels from my father for years, but in New York, newly eighteen, it was easy enough to make smoking a full-time habit.
It’s a miracle he got through that morning in the first place—the lines were swamped, but out of all our parents, his was the only call that would connect. Later, he told me he couldn’t understand what my roommates were saying when they first picked up because they couldn’t stop screaming.
“Where is she?” he yelled into the phone, trying to stay calm while making himself loud enough to cut through their terror. “Is she there with you?” My roommates, in shock, couldn’t yet speak to say that I’d left a few minutes earlier and was on the train that passed right beneath the two-hundred-and-ten-story towers.
***
For the last twenty years of his life, my father lived on a moldering wooden boat. Blossom was what islanders like to call a “project boat,” which means that he’d been scraping and repainting and rebuilding her since he bought her. Blossom was moored in a harbor less than a mile from where my father grew up the youngest of five children “We used to think there was something wrong with him,” my grandmother used to tell me. “He couldn’t talk for the longest time.”
When he did start to talk, my father had such a tremendous lisp that in elementary school, he was taken out of class to work with a speech therapist. In a little room almost small enough to be a coat closet, the therapist put a rubber band on the end of his tongue and made him repeat after her, sand, sky, seashore, until his sibilant S’s grew fainter and fainter and he could speak as though his words had never been ornamented by the soft th-th-th, wet and eddying and gentle as the tide.
It’s a wonder to me that my father, a prodigious talker, had ever struggled to make himself understood. He could and did strike up conversations with strangers, though on our small island, there were few who could lay claim to that title. Once I left home, he and I would call each other every couple of days. We kept this up for twenty-one years. The conversations were never long—just a couple of minutes while I walked from work or class or picked my kids up from school. He’d ask about the weather, tell me about Blossom, about whatever he was cooking himself that night for dinner. They were the kinds of things we might talk about if we still lived together, if we still saw each other every day.
***
In 1969, my grandparents’ marriage dissolved, and my grandmother pulled my father from school to spend his sophomore year in West Germany where she’d landed a job teaching on an American Army base. That was the year that one night, in the middle of a party my grandmother threw in their apartment, the principal of the Army high school sneaked away from the crowd, walked into my father’s bedroom, and raped him. “I always hated that guy,” my father joked over the phone after telling me the story for the first time, “He screwed up my transcripts.”
When he returned stateside, my father wore his hair long, dropped out his senior year, and went on to engage in a solid ten years of heavy drug use, much of which he later couldn’t remember but which he talked about fondly, nonetheless. But after he told me about what happened to him in West Germany, our frequent phone calls began to feel a little like drinking from a favorite mug after you’ve glued it back together; during each sip, you say a silent prayer that the glue holds long enough for you to finish your tea.
***
On the morning of September 11, 2001, forty-six years after he was born, thirty-one years after his mother threw that party, and just a week after I’d left home to attend my freshman year of college, my father asked my roommates one last time where I was.
“She’s on the subway,” they finally said. He told me later that was the exact moment he was sure I was dead. But he didn’t hang up.
“We’re scared,” my roommates said over the phone, passing the receiver to each other, holding my father close to their ears. They were near enough to be knocked to the floor when the second plane hit. Near enough to watch people jump, one after the other from the broken windows in the smoking towers, dark spots with legs and arms that stayed in their line of sight for far too long.
“We’re going to die in here,” my roommates told him.
And though he believed I was already crushed and lifeless beneath the wreckage, he spoke as clearly as he could, across the country, across time zones, to the eighteen-year-old daughters of other men who were not there to comfort them.
“It’s going to be alright,” he told them. “Do you hear me? You’re going to be alright.”
***
A few months before his death in 2022, I sent my father an early draft of this essay. He pointed out parts of it that were inaccurate, though he urged me to keep it unchanged. “It makes a better story,” he said. He didn’t usually read my work, but I think he wanted to see his life in print somewhere. Still, I made the corrections, and he checked in often to see if I’d made any progress getting it published. That fall, after years of heavy smoking, he lost the ability to breathe. Phone records show he made several calls to family early in the morning of October 6th before finally dialing 911.
When the island’s volunteer paramedics arrived, they sedated him, inserted a tube down his throat, and then airlifted him to a public hospital in Seattle. In the chaotic handoff, they’d gotten his name wrong, so at first, no one could definitively tell me where he was. After speaking to several operators, I finally found someone sympathetic enough to figure out that the mysterious “Derry Tadman” who’d been airlifted that morning was really my father, Gary Cadman, a mix-up I knew he’d find inherently funny despite the circumstances. But by the time they transferred me to his ward, a social worker answered to tell me my father had just suffered a massive heart attack. They were doing chest compressions.
“How long will you keep going?” I asked.
“We’ll stop after half an hour.”
I wish I’d thought to ask if he could hold the phone to my father’s ear so I could speak to him, comfort him even though he wasn’t conscious, but I didn’t. Instead, alone in my apartment in Ann Arbor, I lit a candle and got on my knees.
I was not religious then, and neither was my father, but I couldn’t just sit there and wait. At the base of the candle, I lay a copy of his passport photo from 1971 which I always keep in my wallet. In it, he is fifteen, smiling shyly in black and white. A boy who is not yet a husband or a father; a boy whose lungs are still clear, his body unscarred from the life he will lead.
“I love you,” I said to the photo, to the candle, to the empty apartment. “I love you,” I said to my father and the teenager and the little boy he once was. “You were a good man,” I said. “You led a good life.”
Minutes went by. Half an hour came and went, and I continued to call out to him, knowing as I did that he would never answer, that his life had already rolled backwards, pulling out to sea like a foam-flecked tide.
My flight back to Seattle was delayed for several hours before being rescheduled for the next morning. My father was already gone, but I felt a pressing need to go back to our island, to sit on his boat, to fold his clothes, wash his dishes, put his things in order.
While I waited in the Detroit airport that night, I spent a long time on the phone with a nice woman from organ and tissue donation. There were times in the conversation when I felt close to vomiting or passing out, but more than anything, I was thankful for the extremely personal nature of it. In addition to reading me required statements about the irrevocable nature of tissue harvesting, the woman asked me to detail everything I knew about my father’s body and what it had been through over the years. Illnesses, injuries, travel, sexual partners, drug use. I couldn’t stop giggling when she asked me how many times he’d taken LSD, how long ago, and in what form. Psilocybin. Cocaine. Marijuana. She asked about the smoking and the drinking, about tattoos and animal bites and how long he spent in the sun without protection.
There was a lot I couldn’t tell her because I didn’t know and will never know the truth, but there was so much I could still offer. One tattoo, constant smoking, never used sunscreen. West Germany, Greece, India, Laos. Too many lovers to count. After each answer, the woman thanked me, transforming my facts into gifts.
When I got off the phone with her, all I wanted to do was call my father and have him console me. I wanted to tell him how awful it was that he had died so suddenly without the chance for a proper goodbye. I wanted to tell him that I longed to have one last cigarette with him on his boat, that I loved him more than I’d known possible when he was alive. Amidst my fellow impatient passengers, I scrolled through my deleted voicemails, recovering every one he’d ever left me. They were brief, these messages—nothing wise or important, but in them I found the comfort I needed.
“I love you,” he said.
“Hope you’re staying warm.”
“Call me.”
Julie Cadman-Kim’s work can be found in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Catapult, Passages North, Witness Magazine, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. Raised on a small island in the Pacific Northwest, she currently lives in Michigan where she’s the Program Manager for the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program after earning her MFA there in 2022.
