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sixteenth-Cherokee face. I dig in my pack until I locatemy handheld tape recorder. Holding it close to my father’s lips so the wind won’t obscure his answers, I begin the interrogation I’ve waited most of my life to conduct.
    â€œOkay, Dad,” I say. “I’m ready. Tell me. How did it begin?”

1

An Untimely Death
    H ow long have I been searching for a father? Nearly as long as I have breathed air.
    I was seven months old the day my real dad went backpacking in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and an aneurysm exploded in his brain. He was leading a group of Boy Scouts, teaching them to track a black bear, hook a trout, and build a fire with one match. He collapsed in a scree field, cutting his cheeks on shards of million-year-old rocks. His friends carried him back to the trailhead, because the blood pouring out of his artery impaired his ability to see. They took him home and laid him on the sofa, where my mom found him shivering beneath a wool blanket, though the temperature was eighty degrees.
    We lived on the Lemoore, California, Naval Station, where my dad worked as a weapons technician. He rode on the USS Kitty Hawk , making sure the bombs on the planes it carried didn’t accidentally detonate. When Mom opened the door ofour military-issue tract house, she knew instantly that something was wrong. My dad’s boots, which he always placed at attention (whether he was standing in them or not) were slumped against the living-room wall. Hearing the story of his fall in the mountains, she dropped my four-year-old brother, Chris, and me off at a neighbor’s house, then raced our dad to sick bay, where she was told to come back the following Tuesday because it was Flag Day and all the good doctors were out playing golf.
    My dad spent Sunday and Monday in bed. He complained that his head felt like a pressure cooker that couldn’t release steam. On Tuesday, he tried putting on his uniform, but he was staggering and sweating, and then he threw up. My mom took this to mean his condition was worsening. Throwing a pillow onto the driver’s seat of the family station wagon, she drove back to the tiny naval hospital, sobbing and steering, while holding me on her lap.
    The doctors found blood in my dad’s spinal fluid and made plans to operate. But the night before his surgery, my parents both knew he was going to die. “I’m afraid,” he told her, though he couldn’t have wanted her to know such a thing. He was Peter Lewellyn Ross, twenty-nine, youngest chief in the Navy at the time. She was Doris Mary, a twenty-seven-year-old Canadian transplant, who, eight years after coming to America, still said srimp instead of shrimp. They clutched each other on his hospital bed while my mom kissed his bandages and pressed ice cubes on his lips.
    We buried my father a few weeks later in a cemetery in Twin Falls, Idaho. But my mom swears he came back to us after the funeral. She and I were sleeping in his childhood bedroom at my Grandmother Ross’s house when he returned. It was cool outside,and the window was open, so my mom said he just climbed in. She remembers exactly what he was wearing: blue-and-black checkered golf pants and a baby blue polo shirt. He had a list in his hand, just like he always had when he’d been living. He gave her the bright, beautiful smile she says I inherited along with his sea-green colored eyes. He stood over my cradle, adjusted my blanket, and laid his hand across the soft spot on my head.
    Seeing him, my mom sat up, a little girl in her cotton nightie.
    â€œHow did you get here?” she said.
    â€œCan I visit you? I miss you. I need you.”
    My dad sat down on the edge of her bed. “Go back to sleep, Doris Wakeham,” he told her. “I still have work to do. I’m not leaving anytime soon.”
    Six months later, Mom packed up our belongings, emptied her military pension, and moved us into another split-level ranch