We Were Three - Ep. 3

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Here's a question that occurred to me while I was sitting next to Rachel in her brother's car driving around Santa Ana, California.

Are you kind of hiding out here?

Yeah, absolutely.

I've been hiding out here for a while.

She'd been in California for a few weeks when I got here.

Her plan had been to start clearing out the house where her father and brother had lived.

But when she got to the house, she couldn't stand being in it, so she fled up to Northern California.

She wanted to be alone, did that for a few days.

That was awful.

Then she met up with friends.

That was better.

Rachel's been talking by phone and text and FaceTime with her teenage kids every day while she's here.

But by the time we were driving around together, she hadn't been home to her family in Rochester, New York for a while.

Grief somehow maintains a public image of mainly sadness, fragility.

But grief can also be selfish, unfair, kind of an asshole.

Rachel's aware.

I don't know.

I'm having a hard time right now.

I'm just having a really hard time connecting with anyone.

It's like fucking up my relationship, you know, with my partner.

I just don't feel

like

my like anyone has my griefs back if that makes sense like I just

I, I, like, cry in my car by myself.

I go for drives and just scream.

And then I come home and I'm mom who's got a chore or, you know, snowboard lessons to drive you to, or whatever.

And it's like, I'm just, I don't know.

I just feel like a piece of shit for saying it.

I just,

I just can't connect and get myself to do mundane,

ordinary things that

are required of me.

Rachel's described her father and brother as anchors for her, heavy but stabilizing.

Without them, she's floating, driving around the place where they lived, looking for ways to feel nearer to them, to understand them.

From Serial and the New York Times, this is the last part of We Were Three.

I'm Nancy Updike.

Let's listen in on a live, unscripted Challenger School class.

They're reviewing the American Revolution.

The British were initiating force, and the Americans were retaliating.

Okay.

Where did they initiate force?

It started in their taxation without representation.

Why is that wrong?

The purpose of a government is to protect individual rights, and by encroaching on individual rights, they cannot protect them.

Welcome to eighth grade at Challenger School.

Learn more at challengerschool.com.

Sometimes an identity threat is a ring of professional hackers.

And sometimes it's an overworked accountant who forgot to encrypt their connection while sending bank details.

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Part 3.

I'm all that is left.

Amen.

Rachel and I have separate but overlapping missions here.

We're both trying to see these people she's lost as fully as we can.

I I asked to come to California while she's here, partly because I wanted to see the places she talked about.

But also I'm still trying to understand what life did COVID land in with her brother and her father?

What was happening in their lives before the text messages?

Rachel has some answers and her perspective.

And other answers are here in California.

I'll be there shortly, my dear.

We're off to see Sandy, Rachel's father's longtime girlfriend.

Longtime as in she met him in 1978.

We're going to meet Sandy now because I wanted to talk to her, and she's agreed.

Sandy saw Rachel's brother and father during COVID when Rachel didn't.

And she's also known all three of them for decades.

She met Rachel when Rachel was three years old.

This is the girlfriend Rachel called in the middle of the Wine and Roses fight with her father and his then-wife, Alex.

Sandy remembers the call, though she doesn't remember finding out about the marriage until later.

Oh, I will.

I will.

I'll stall.

It's okay.

We never have eyebrows when we wake up.

Sandy's telling Rachel she doesn't want us to get there until she has time to do her eye makeup.

Alright, I'll see you soon.

I gotta draw him in.

All right, I'll see you soon.

Thank you.

That's great.

Yeah.

Okay.

Bye.

Sandy, in photos from Rachel's childhood, is a young white woman with blue eyeliner around her big blue eyes.

A California girl with her hair parted in the middle and hanging down.

She's holding a grumpy-looking gray cat in one photo, a cigarette in another.

There are also many photos over the years of Sandy with Rachel's dad.

Sandy and Rachel's father never got married, but they never 100% quit each other.

Sometimes Rachel calls Sandy her kind of like stepmom.

Sandy lived with the Camacho family more or less constantly, with an occasional months-long hiatus until Rachel was around 14.

Even after Sandy moved out, she lived right around the corner for years.

On the drive over, Rachel tells me she and Sandy have never talked about her father's abuse.

He hit all of them.

The violence, experiencing it, and seeing it twisted Rachel's view of women, including herself

and Sandy.

I grew up resenting her.

I grew up a misogynist.

I grew up thinking women were weak, and I pinned it all on the fact that she would not leave my dad.

I

she, to me, and this is just, you know, a dumb child mapping it out for herself, I

just believed that

women were incapable of having the kind of strength that would

allow you to exit.

There are a lot of things they've never talked about.

I mean, the last time time we had even been with each other,

we were in a physical altercation.

You and Sandy?

Yeah.

This was after Wine and Roses, after Rachel had graduated from high school and she didn't have anywhere to live.

She had her baby boy, and he sometimes stayed with her during the day, and he'd be with her ex-boyfriend's family at night.

And she was pregnant with her second child.

Sandy let her stay on her couch for many months.

Rachel remembers an argument escalating from something tiny, like, did Rachel eat the last packet of Sandy's ranch dressing?

And I was on the phone and she was screaming at me.

I'd been homeless at that point for like nine months and I was just exhausted.

And I'm like, get the fuck out of my face.

And she wouldn't.

And like leaned over me and I was sitting and I just got up and I...

And I just started swinging and she fell back.

And it was pretty brutal.

Yeah.

and you guys have never talked about that?

No.

I moved out the next day.

We've never spoken of it.

The first time we spoke again was like via text when I reached out from, you know, like getting her info from my brother's phone.

Wait a minute.

You guys had not spoken since then?

Yeah, that was like the 20.

You so in 25 years you guys had not talked from from when you hit her until your brother and father died?

Yep.

And

she has since been nothing but a generous, thoughtful, informative person to me.

So that's incredible.

Like, you know, it actually,

I have a lot of shame

that I responded in the way that I did.

And

it's just, that's just not who I am.

It's who I can be, but it's not who I am.

All right, well, here we go.

Here goes nothing.

See what happens.

I'm here.

We park in the driveway alongside a single-story house.

Big succulents out front and by the driveway.

Some geraniums, eucalyptus.

Hi, dear.

Hi.

I'm going to sit in the shade.

This is the house where Sandy grew up and now lives with one of her sisters.

We walked around to the backyard.

Go ahead and go to the table on the lawn.

Oh, is there a table?

Yes, in there.

Sandy's still got long brown hair parted in the middle, hanging down.

A little gray at the roots.

She's tan, wearing a blue sundress and flip-flops.

While we're scrutinizing people here, my hair is also a little gray at the roots.

And I'm dressed in black and navy, like a slightly rebellious cat burglar.

When Sandy met Rachel and Peter's father, the father's name is Pete, which can get confusing.

That's why I mostly call him Rachel and Peter's father.

When Sandy met Pete Sr., the father, it was the late 70s and they were living in the same apartment complex.

It had a pool in the middle.

Pete was putting some very smooth moves on Sandy, and she was smoothly evading them.

He kept saying, come in my apartment.

We have the manager's former apartment.

The air conditioning is great.

Oh, wow.

And it was so funny, because even then after running into him different times, I wouldn't go in.

I just put my arm in there.

I'm going, yeah, that's nice.

Oh, my gosh, Sandy.

Isn't that funny?

I was so cautious.

Puritanical.

I love it.

Oh, how things do.

Yeah, there was always flirting.

And then, you know,

I think it really,

we really became good friends.

With the pool because Gilbert was there too, and then

they talked about how they were gonna play guitar and all so I think I ended up since I played guitar too

You know come on over and then they you know have barbecues and

He invited me to the movies and

so it was actually 78 but it didn't really become like a big romance.

I know he wanted it to be

You know a relationship until like 79.

Sandy got to know Pete and his younger brother Gilbert and the rest of the family.

She hadn't lived with Pete in over 30 years when he died.

But their relationship, in one form or another, outlasted everything

except COVID.

Rachel says her father and Peter, when she talked to them on the phone, often rolled their eyes about Sandy, talked about their relationship with her as if it were a burden.

But Rachel is also sure that they rolled their eyes about her and complained about her behind her back.

So

what Sandy describes is three people supporting each other.

She, Pete Sr., and Peter, celebrated birthdays and holidays, talked on the phone and checked on each other.

Sandy doesn't have a car.

Peter drove her to get groceries and go to doctor's appointments.

Peter didn't like dealing with bureaucracies.

Sandy would make those phone calls for him.

She found a dentist and made appointments for him and his father at their request.

Peter would bring her fresh juice from his juicer.

Sandy says Pete, the father, was calling her every weeknight for a while as he drove back from work because he was afraid he'd fall asleep.

She'd talk to him all the way home, even if she was tired of talking.

Pete had told his son that Sandy was the one he should call if he, the father, ever got sick or anything went wrong.

Your dad was thinking, seriously, considering the vaccine.

And I said, let me make you an appointment.

he said, well, let's let all the,

because it had just come out.

He goes, let's let all the immune compromise people get it first.

And

he goes, because I'm perfectly healthy.

And he goes, maybe next month.

That was January of 2021.

Peter, in the meantime, he didn't like the mask.

He started believing it was going to cause pulmonary,

oh God, edema, all these things.

I would embarrass him in stores on purpose.

Even your dad and I talked about this.

Your dad would go, humor me.

Put your mask over your nose.

I don't want to die from COVID.

Because Peter would go, I don't want it.

I don't get sick.

Sandy got COVID vaccines and boosters as soon as she could.

And when she said she felt fine after each shot, Peter, the son, would say, yeah, well, let's see how you feel in three years.

Long before COVID, Peter had had a habit of dismissing things other people believed that he didn't by saying, oh, you fell for that?

COVID seemed to slot right into the, oh, you fell for that, groove.

Every time Peter drove Sandy to an appointment, he would hand her videos he said she had to see.

I've seen some of the videos Peter was looking at.

There were hundreds of videos and memes on his computer.

A pharmaceutical analyst who said COVID vaccines were intended to poison healthy children.

Someone quoting an undertaker who predicted mass mass deaths from vaccines.

Not people who held press conferences and sounded slick.

Sandy said the videos she remembers were regular person sounding off.

And I swear to God, literally on a corner of New York with

the accent.

And

it was somebody interviewing her, but she was a nobody.

It was just a person on the street, literally.

And Peter's going, listen to this.

I'm going, who the F is she?

You're making making me listen to all this stupid crap you're giving me a headache and he would just throw up his hands I can't believe you Sandy I'm like I can't believe you

Wow I mean we would argue all the way to my Newport Beach pain doctor appointment I'd get there and even more pain

and mentally exhausted a headache and you know how from stress my neck tightens I'd be like give me double the injections please from riding in the car with Peter so we would get into all these arguments, but we'd end up laughing about it.

And,

you know, he'd end up laughing, but he'd go, Sandy, really, you need to start listening to these things.

Her dad just thought Peter was being ridiculous, and he told me numerous times how you just can't.

He said, I did, he goes, you know what I do?

He goes, I try to convince him otherwise on all these things, and he doesn't listen.

He gets really stubborn and upset.

He goes, you can't change his mind.

He goes, so he goes, and I don't like hearing all of it.

You know, he gets on the computer and he starts telling me and trying to get me to believe it.

And he goes, I argue with him till I'm blue in the face.

And so he goes, now I just go, oh, uh-huh, uh-huh, and walk away and go to my room.

Peter started believing that the vaccines made people shed the virus,

and therefore those people were dangerous to be around.

His father told Sandy he didn't believe that, and it's not true.

But in in the name of keeping the peace,

Peter's 67-year-old father now couldn't imagine getting vaccinated.

He said,

you know, well, I've been thinking about it, he said, Peter would flip out.

That would have probably been by that time, the end of February or March, because that's when Peter

did not want me in the car anymore.

And that's when he really got weird thinking that we shed the virus.

So he said, I could never get it.

He said, with Peter believing that, you know, we would talk about it all the time.

And he said,

he'll think I'm going to shed the virus all over the house.

And then what?

And I said, just do it and don't tell him.

And what did he say to that?

He goes, secrets always find a way of getting out.

And he goes, let's see how this plays out.

This is how it played out.

Slowly, he started thinking just like Peter, and I was horrified because he kept saying he wanted to get the vaccine.

Then all of a sudden, well, I want to wait on that.

Then he started saying he was worried about what was in it and that he was reading things that it could kill you in three years.

I mean, he was sounding like Peter.

Sandy, for years, had been noticing Pete Sr.'s quick, sharp brain.

becoming less quick.

Now the decline seemed to be accelerating.

Pete, the father, was forgetting words.

He even forgot to come by on Sandy's birthday, which was utterly out of character.

Several months before he died, he started lecturing Sandy and her niece, Sarah, via text.

He put me and Sarah in a group texting, like bashing Fauci, some little JPEG.

And this is what you look like after vaccine, some monster.

I'm like, oh my God.

And it got to the point where

he and I, I mean, her dad was always a fun, smart guy.

It got to the point where, and he still was, we'd talk on the phone and laugh, but every, you couldn't say anything

without it going back to the vaccine.

Sandy, like Rachel, distanced herself from Pete.

She'd known him for 43 years, and in the months before he died, she was barely talking to him because the COVID conversations were unbearable, and he wouldn't talk for long about anything else.

Like Rachel, she figured she and Pete, the father, would go back to talking more and seeing each other once the COVID fervor had run its course.

When Sandy got the text from Peter that his father was dead, she had the same reaction Rachel did.

Oh my god, car accident.

Because just like Rachel, she'd had no idea he'd been sick.

Sandy says her knees buckled when she grasped that Pete, the father, was gone.

Peter told her he had asked his dad if he wanted to go to the hospital and his dad said no, he didn't have insurance because he was in between jobs.

Sandy wanted to scream, but he did have medical coverage.

His father was 67 and covered by Medicare, and she remembered when Pete signed up for it.

Peter told Sandy he was sorry he didn't call her when his dad was sick.

Sandy was so angry at Peter, but now he was sick.

She put off her anger and worried about him.

Peter texted her from the hospital, the one Rachel had talked him into going to.

Two days later, he told Sandy what he didn't tell Rachel, that he was leaving the hospital against medical advice.

Peter's phone is full of texts from Sandy in the last weeks of his life checking on him, suggesting different clinics and urgent care places he could go to since she knew he wouldn't go back to the hospital.

She could not budge him.

Neither could her niece, who'd known Peter since they were kids.

And Peter was lying to Rachel this whole time.

The fact that they were all women, and that we here were all women, sitting around talking about men who were no longer alive.

Men Rachel and Sandy had tried to keep alive in this pandemic.

It stuck out.

Rachel said that when she thought about it, her brother's COVID views and her father's had always skewed in the same gendered direction in her conversations with them.

The women in their lives were pleading with them to get vaccinated.

They were all a bit hysterical about it.

Her father and Peter both used the word hysterical.

A bit simple.

Brainwashed.

One of Peter's last texts to Sandy was: You really need to stop talking or mentioning the word COVID or anything remotely related to COVID.

Listen, machismo and misogyny helped assisted my brother's death as much as many other things.

They

thought that we were dumb women.

I mean, they did.

They were patronizing and

would be paternalistic at times.

They were like a little snarky.

Peter was worse.

Oh, yeah, he was very bad, but like, he learned that.

That's learned behavior.

There was a time in my life I didn't imagine it would be me and you at the left at the table

can you imagine like who knew holy shit we it's shocking it's just shocking I'm still in shock

like we've outlived a lot

alongside each other and you know in spite of the men in our lives who

who just couldn't get it right right

You know when he was the worst was Anaheim.

I know.

He was drinking more than

what?

Why, I wonder?

That's third grade.

No, that could have been because of having to go to Lacey, maybe.

Lacey is the Theo Lacey Corrections Facility in Orange, California.

Rachel remembers hearing that her dad had to go there on weekends for a while.

I asked why.

Why did he go to Theo Lacey?

Because he assaulted me.

We kept it quiet from the kids, and he would tell them he...

Wait, I thought it was for...

Me.

No, I thought it was...

So Theo Lacey was because of you.

Yeah.

They began to have this conversation they'd never had.

Gingerly.

They didn't get into the incident between them where Rachel hit Sandy, but they talked about Pete, the father, and his violence.

One of them would mention an incident, and the other would remember part of it also.

Rachel murmured, I'm so sorry that happened to you.

Sandy told me later that it had been many years since Pete, the father, had hit her.

The memories are vivid and painful, and mixed in with good memories.

She said Pete never stopped asking her to marry him.

She never wanted to.

Lots of reasons.

It took Sandy a few tries to move out of Pete's place for good and settle into an apartment that was separate separate but close by.

And I don't know how I ever forgived him, but...

You had to forgive a lot, Boo-Boo.

I know I'm shocked at myself.

Forgive a lot.

I'm mean and I'm old and mean now.

I wouldn't have forgiven any of it, you know, at this stage of my life, but...

You're not mean and old.

You know, I loved Rachel and Peter so much.

Leaving like for good killed me, you know, being away from the kids.

I mean, they really felt like my children, and I guess that's probably why I was stupid and coming back sometimes, you know.

He was a lot better when he wasn't drinking.

Oh, yeah.

But even

then, yeah, he had a temper.

You just didn't know.

And he said his dad used to beat the shit out of all the five boys.

I'm just glad that we're alive, lady.

I know, I felt like

sometimes he took, he would just maybe be frustrated over tired.

and I had a feeling he took more of it when I was there more of his anger out on me.

And I used to think hopefully that saving you guys.

That's true.

It is true.

And I hated that.

I'll be honest.

Like that tears me up that we would be relieved that at least there was a third body now that would take hits.

Well, yeah, because that's so sad.

That's just scary to my God to be low.

My dad did the same to me.

You know, I remember being terrified as a kid and being alone with my dad when he wouldn't, It was the same thing.

It was the alcohol when he would drink.

You know, when you're little and you got this madman chasing

the fear.

The conversation moved on.

Sandy waited until the very end of a cigarette at the table.

Menthol.

God, I miss smoking.

I loved everything about it.

The ritual, the repetition,

the enforced pause of just taking one out and lighting it.

I could go on.

Sandy told us about a couple of quiet evenings with Pete, the father, from the early days of COVID.

I could picture it, a different kind of pause.

Two people who've known each other forever in a country at the beginning of a terrible time, full of uncertainty.

And they sit outside, near each other, but apart, talking, listening, afraid of the the same thing he came a couple times like by himself you know after work and we just sat out in the yard here and um

and he

you know he hugged me and then before he left he kissed me and he was like oh my god i'm sorry because he goes I know we shouldn't be, you know, because it was,

I know I shouldn't be doing that at this time.

I'm, you know, I hope I didn't freak you out.

Because I even said, you know,

not necessarily six feet apart, but maybe we shouldn't

be kissing.

Rachel and Sandy are the two who are left to their continued surprise.

But they're also the two who get to talk, or at least start to talk, about what happened.

Rachel spent her whole life saying in different ways, can we just talk about what happened?

She couldn't do it with her dad.

She'd thought after her dad died, oh, Peter and I are gonna have some conversations now, real conversations.

It never happened, and maybe it wouldn't have happened even if he'd lived.

When we were driving to see Sandy, Rachel had had no idea what she would be willing to talk about.

But here Sandy is, grieving the same two people with her own heavy load of memories.

And she was up for excavating some of the past with Rachel.

Coming up, and finally, we start excavating the house where Peter and his dad died.

That's after the break.

Let's listen in on a live, unscripted Challenger School class.

They're reviewing the American Revolution.

The British were initiating force, and the Americans were retaliating.

Okay.

Where did they initiate force?

It started in their taxation without representation.

Why is that wrong?

The purpose of a government is to protect individual rights, and by encroaching on individual rights, they cannot protect them.

Welcome to eighth grade at Challenger School.

Learn more at challengerschool.com.

Sometimes an identity threat is a ring of professional hackers.

And sometimes it's an overworked accountant who forgot to encrypt their connection while sending bank details.

I need a coffee.

And you need Life Lock because your info is in endless places.

It only takes one mistake to expose you to identity theft.

Life Lock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second.

If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it guaranteed or your money back.

Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com/slash special offer.

Terms apply.

Need to restock inventory, cover seasonal dips, or manage payroll?

OnDeck's small business line of credit provides immediate access to funds up to $200,000 exactly when your business needs it.

With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and full control over repayment, you can tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat.

Apply today at on deck.com and funds could be available as soon as tomorrow.

Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by ONDEC or Celtic Bank.

ONDEC does not lend in North Dakota.

All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

Rachel's last conversation with her father was a few months before he died.

It was an email exchange about her decision to vaccinate her kids against COVID.

It started out okay, then got very bad.

It ended with Rachel writing, Eat shit, you corny misogynist.

And he responds minutes later, I would tell you to eat shit too, but you're already putting something worse inside you.

And that's the last straw.

That's when I say

you're making a face.

Like, am I really going to read out loud what I said?

But

caps like you are.

Yeah, because this is how I am.

L-O-L-O-L-O-L.

Die lonely, dude.

Die without the family you massacred and beat into a pulp every chance you got.

Wretched little creature.

Guess what was the worst thing for my health, Pedro?

You, all caps.

And then I blocked him.

In my family, I sometimes fancy myself the blunt one, except for maybe my beloved Aunt Frankie.

And this email is so far out of my league.

Maybe because to me it seems final, like relationship over.

But Rachel has no doubt she and her father would have come back from this.

In the months before her father died, she was preparing herself for how her dad and her brother would make fun of her down the road, for how over cautious she'd been about this COVID thing.

How credulous.

Now, instead of arguing with them, she's going to the house they died in.

She needs to start clearing it out.

We pull up into the driveway.

A small ranch house with an attached garage closed.

Rachel hasn't been here for a few weeks.

Since that day she ran up to Northern California.

What are all these stickers?

These are new.

They're stickers in the front windows.

Agents, contractors, inspectors.

Please know this property has been winterized.

Yeah, they turned my water off and they kept it off.

Those fucks.

And that's the bank who did that.

Please leave breakers in their current position, except for items winterize.

Rachel's wrangling with the bank over this house.

I'm like worried about what it's gonna smell like in here.

Wow.

Madness.

Rachel's told me a lot about this place.

How much she hates it.

In fact, it's so prominent in some of her memories of growing up.

I pictured the inside as bigger, I guess, to contain all the unhappiness.

Rachel and Peter spent a lot of time here as kids, and she did not see it as a refuge.

It was her grandparents' place.

And Rachel remembers both her grandparents, her father's parents, as cruel.

She says they'd tease Peter about his lisp,

pit family members against one another, swat the kids with fly swatters, throw stuff at them.

She remembers an uncle overdosing in the the living room, another uncle punching her in the face, and on and on.

She calls it Hill House from the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, a very creepy book.

She was horrified when Peter moved in here at 17 years old after the Wine and Roses fight.

Rachel says he had to put a padlock on his bedroom door to make sure no one in the family stole from him.

Being here now, Rachel is overwhelmed.

Every room is crammed with stuff on shelves and all over.

They started acquiring shit and then

never made room for new things.

Instead, they just started stacking and like, oh, one day this will be worth something.

Or if I hold on to this for 40 years, it'll be worth quadruple its value.

Like, that's how they operated.

I wish this light wasn't.

She walks down the hall and goes into her dad's bedroom.

Starts opening drawers in the bureau.

what are you looking for i don't know i just want to see stuff

sucks

she's looking for clues details about the life her dad and brother were living in these years she didn't see them interesting what were they doing

so my brother thought my dad was

sober and this is evidence he was not that's a beer can hidden in his

workout clothes drawer.

We each wander separately for a while.

I was also trying to imagine the life Peter and his dad had built in here.

What was this house for them?

The most startling aspect of the house is how dark it is inside.

It's bright Southern California sunshine outside, and then you step into this bunker.

The windows are completely covered with fabric or curtains that aren't just closed.

They're clipped together so no eye can peek through.

The curtains were to keep Rachel and Peter's mother from seeing inside if she came by.

Their mom and dad divorced in 1977.

But Rachel's mother has been a factor, Rachel's entire life.

Rachel remembers being on the phone with Peter years ago.

Their mother was outside knocking on the door, and Peter was army crawling on his stomach using his elbows to get from the kitchen to his bedroom to stay below any possible sight line.

Neighbors were unnoticed to let Peter and his dad know if they saw her.

After texting with Rachel and Peter's mother, talking to people who've known her and encountered her over the years, and reading court documents that include statements she's made, I believe she's someone who's been failed by multiple systems in this country and is also someone whose behavior has had a sustained, devastating effect on Rachel and her family.

The darkness made the house, to me, feel somewhere between a trap and a cocoon.

Rachel found stacks of papers in the house and let me look through them.

From these, I finally get a sense of her dad in his own words.

I found an application her father had filled out.

for relief under the Dodd-Frank Making Home Affordable program.

There's a handwritten statement in neat blue all-caps writing called a hardship affidavit.

It's from October 2016.

Her dad wrote, quote,

since 1975, I have been employed as a professional in the petroleum engineering industry that has fallen on hard times due to collapsing oil prices, causing me loss of employment and income.

I'm currently receiving $1,800 per month in unemployment benefits, and that is my only current income.

I have depleted all of my cash reserves in order to help keep a roof over the heads of my daughter and five grandchildren.

I have no stocks, IRA, 401k, or pension plan to fall back on.

The second mortgage on my primary residence increased from $751 per month to $2,768 per month recently, and I'm in danger of losing my home of 52 years as this statement is written.

End quote.

Rachel says her father was always mysterious about money, and she says she didn't know about any of this, didn't know he was unemployed back then, didn't know about the ballooning second mortgage, didn't know how worried he'd been about money long before COVID.

Pete Camacho was an intelligent man with a college degree who made decent money when he was working and worked most of his life.

He also fully supported his adult son and had helped his daughter get and keep her family's home in Rochester.

Peter told Rachel after their dad died that the last job their dad had gotten, he'd been let go the first day because he couldn't provide proof of vaccination.

Peter said their dad had cashed out his life insurance policy a few weeks before dying because he was behind on mortgage payments for the Santa Ana house.

A cocoon and a trap, like many people's homes are.

Rachel doesn't blame Peter for talking her father into his COVID beliefs.

No, I'm mad at my dad for creating

a person who could talk him into that.

I mean, it's

Frankenstein's monster.

It's as Mary Shelley as you're going to get.

Like,

you did this.

You

cobbled together the pieces of a person you broke.

And you did your best to keep them animated, but in the end, like

you didn't.

You just did.

You just.

There just wasn't enough effort on your part to sort of undo the damage that you caused.

For years, she's been carrying in her head visions of alternate futures for her dad and her brother.

In every one, they are out of this house and away from each other.

She'd imagined Peter possibly married, a father,

transformed by parenthood in wonderful ways if he was lucky.

He was only 44 when he died.

Plenty of time for even big changes, if he'd wanted that.

Here in the house, I saw Rachel mourn these lost futures one by one and begin laying each to rest alongside the people her father and brother had actually been.

She sat down on a chair in Peter's room.

I was thinking the other day how

close he was to a world where my dad wasn't in it, where our dad wasn't there.

You mean if your dad had died and then Peter had survived?

If Peter had survived, like the night I said, Peter, we have to sell that house, knowing he was going to deny it.

And when he said, I know, that changed everything for me.

I understood that he understood the weight of this house, like the true

weight of it, how physically demanding to.

crawl through all of this, you know, like mountains of cascading fucking nonsense.

He understood in that moment, even when he was dying, that this house had to go.

And I think

of like who he could have been without this house

and who he could have been without my dad.

Like he could have.

And maybe this is just my own rewriting, but I really believe that

he could have been free.

Like

I felt like with our dad dying, I was getting a new brother.

I was getting a peatless Peter.

And what was that going to be like?

I had hope.

I had hope.

What's left in the waning days, what we hope are the waning days, of a pandemic?

Just us.

The country we were before we lost over a million people to COVID.

The country we still are.

A place with a non-system of health care and mental health care, with 67-year-olds who are running out of money, and 44-year-olds driven to paranoia by lies and isolation, and poets slogging their way through death paperwork while raising children and trying to make sense of their losses.

After spending months talking to Rachel, I thought about how often grief has questions at its core.

What have I lost here?

How much?

Is what's left enough?

A lot of Rachel's poems are answers to those questions.

Different answers at different times.

She has a love poem that has no title.

I asked her to read the end of it out loud.

It's about loving someone after you've loved a bunch of other people.

It's about the overwhelming feeling of finding home

after having wandered for a very long time.

Uh,

last love,

I once vowed my heart to another.

Forgive me.

Last love, I have let my blind and anxious hands wander into a room and come out empty.

Forgive me.

Last love,

I have cursed the women you loved before me.

Forgive me.

Last love, I envy your mother's body where you resided first.

Forgive me.

Last love, I am all that is left.

Forgive me.

I did not see you coming.

Forgive me.

Last love,

every day without you was a life I crawled out of.

Amen.

Last love, you are my last love.

Amen.

Last love,

I am all that is left.

Amen.

I am all that is left.

Amen.

We Were Three was produced by Janelle Pfeiffer and me and edited by executive editor Julie Snyder.

Editing help from Neil Drumming, Ira Glass, Jen Guerra, Hannah Jaffe Walt, and Sarah Koenig.

Editorial consulting by Kiese Lehmann, Ivan Aranski, and Sarah Cavedo.

Research and fact-checking by Ben Phelan.

Original score by Sophie Allison of Soccer Mommy with additional original music by Matt McGinley.

Sound design and music supervision by Michael Kamite.

The supervising producer is in Day Chubu.

Julie Whitaker is digital manager.

Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor of the New York Times.

At the New York Times, thanks to Jordan Cohen, Kelly Doe, Lindsey Fischler, Jason Fujikuni, Dana Green, Desiree Ibakwe, Lauren Jackson, Nina Lassam, Jeffrey Miranda, Anisha Mooney, Megan Shepard, Julia Simon, Alamein Sumar, Kimmy Tsai, and Susan Wesling.

Special thanks to Anthony Almagera, Rena Adish, Tyson Bell, Trevor Bedford, Rachel Bender Ignacio, Danielle Elliott, Jeremy Faust, Derek Lowe, Kristen Punthagani, Jason Salemi, Mark Shapiro, and Tim Trumbull.

I'm grateful to everyone who talked to me about Rachel, Peter, and Pete.

And thank you to Rachel and to her family.

They let me into their home at inconvenient times and answered every question.

We Were Three is from Serial Productions and the New York Times.