We Were Three - Ep. 2

The New York Times app has all this stuff that you may not have seen. The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections.
I can immediately navigate to something that matches what I'm feeling. Play Wordle or Connections and then swipe over to read today's headlines.
There's an article next to a recipe next to games and it's just easy to get everything in one place. This app is essential.
The New York Times app. All of the times, all in one place.

Download it now at nytimes.com slash app. York Times, where you'll get access to all the serial productions and New York Times shows.
And it's super easy. You can sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
And if you're already a Times subscriber, just link your account and you're done. When I went to Rachel's house to interview her for the first time, I had my notes and questions, a whole game plan like I do.
Within half an hour, I gave up on all that. We were sitting in her living room, facing a big Christmas tree covered in beautiful, strange ornaments of insects sent to her by friends and strangers.
Her brother Peter had raised butterflies. And Rachel talked for six hours.
Peter had been dead less than two months. It was her first Christmas without him being alive.
Her first birthday as the sole remaining family member. Her birthday is Christmas Eve.
She just talked about her family, especially her brother. People want so much to vilify his inaction, myself included in that.
And my brother was considered a villain. They were like, oh my God, he should be busted for manslaughter, like back when he was still alive.
She's talking about some of the responses she got on Twitter. She wrote about how her brother hadn't gotten their father to the hospital when he was dying of COVID.
And, you know, that's just how it is everywhere.

I get it. The internet is what it is.

But I just, he has been reduced to like this bumbling conspiracy theory riddled anti-vaxxer

who just sat by and watched his dad die and then he himself died.

And there are so many contributing factors

to that. The disinformation and misinformation, the whole swirl of rage politics and social media

is part of what happened in Rachel's family. The swirl matters.
It did real damage.

But for Rachel, it was nowhere near enough to come to a real understanding of her brother's death. The brother she knew was a survivor, like she is.
Very accustomed to scrapping, avoiding, making do. There had always been one hardship after another to find some way to live through.
How was COVID the threat he and their

father missed? How could this be what did them in? This, and not everything else.

From Serial and the New York Times, this is We Were Three. I'm Nancy Swan.
I'm a White House reporter for The New York Times. I have a pretty unsentimental view of what we do.
Our job as reporters is to dig out information that powerful people don't want published, to take you into rooms that you would not otherwise have access to, to understand how some of the big decisions shaping our country are being made. And then painstakingly to go back and check with sources, check with public documents, make sure the information is correct.
This is not something you can outsource to AI. There's no robot that can go and talk to someone who was in the situation room and find out what was really said.
In order to get actually original information that's not public, that requires human sources, we actually need journalists to do that. So as you may have gathered from this long riff, I'm asking you to consider subscribing to the New York Times.
Independent journalism is important, and without you, we simply can't do it.

Part two, assassin. With COVID, one thing that got hammered into us was the danger of various

underlying conditions, vulnerabilities a person may be born with or may develop over time or both.

But it's not just people who have underlying conditions. It's families and countries.
And in Rachel's family, there was a whole history of events and circumstances that accumulated long before COVID. The Camachos were Pete Sr., the father, Rachel, the older child, and Peter, a year and a half younger than Rachel.
This small family pulled apart and came back together over the years. There were different configurations, competing alliances.
But the core version of the family, built in the beginning, was everything the three of them together. The three of us were known for just being the squad.
And you, your dad, and your brother. And what's interesting is that same dynamic has fallen into this household where I have five kids and, like, there was a time where I'd go out for butter and I'd have my five kids.
Like, we would just always be together. And that was how it was with me and my dad and my brother.
Like, he didn't just go for milk. We would all just go.
Like, we just were so bound. This was Southern California in the 1980s.
Santa Ana, Anaheim. Disneyland is right nearby.
Their dad was a civil engineer. He worked in the oil business, designing oil refineries.
He worked in Orange County and Los Angeles, traveled a lot to work sites.

Even with minimal traffic, he'd usually get home after seven.

He wore white shirts with pocket protectors. He was one of five brothers.

I hesitate to call him white collar because we were on welfare several times.

We were always strapped. We never had a new car in our lives, always some sort of rusty.
It didn't ever feel like we were successful, but I understood that of all of her sons, my grandma knew to go to my dad when she was about to lose the house. And he was, I mean, for the most part, he was a successful person.
And I think really in my family, that just meant he never went to prison. But his whole upbringing was very different.
He skateboarded, he surfed, and he played baseball. And he would get jumped by his brother's friends for not being Mexican enough.
And they thought that he was doing all that white shit. And in a way, I think that he kind of was trying very hard to assimilate because he had had, his heritage was used against him often, whether in court, against my mom, police.

Your mom using it against him in custody battles for you guys.

Exactly.

And saying it to us, like, you know, you're Mexican.

I should never have had a baby with a Mexican man. Like, she would just say all this ridiculous crap.
Rachel's mother, in a text, denied saying that, calling it a deliberate, outrageous lie. She denied using Pete's heritage against him in custody battles at all.
She sent other texts, saying, among other things, I love all my children and tried hard to save them. That is just another very sad story of injustice and how the race card was well played.
She said Rachel, quote, has been so very successful drawing the ignorant and feeble minded into shelling out money to her for her fantastic heart of hate and acting abilities. Acting abilities is in quotes.
Rachel's dad was 20 years old when they got married. Her mom was 19.
Her mom filed for divorce less than three months after they got married. Rachel was born during the nearly three years of divorce proceedings.
Peter was born after the divorce

was finalized. Their mom put Rachel, then Peter, into foster care.
They were separated. In an affidavit at the time, their mother wrote, quote, because of my fear for the well-being of the children and my concern that they might be beaten by my husband, the children were placed in foster homes.
End quote. It took their dad about a year to get first Rachel and then Peter out of foster care, and they stayed with him from then on.
Their mother, in court documents, claimed their father beat her, he beat the kids, committed burglaries, did drugs, stole gasoline, had a gun in his car. If any of that ever happened, Rachel never saw it, never heard about it outside of these contentious court filings.
Except the beatings. That part was true.
We lied to the mediators and the child psychologists and the judges. We lied because we wanted to stay with her dad.
We didn't want to be in foster homes. We were in separate foster homes, you know, when my mom first put us in.
And so like our attachment, like we really just needed to be together. Like I'd rather buckle myself in and let this turbulent life be it than possibly get on separate planes and they all might crash and we'll never know.
Like, it was just, we needed to have each other. They chose their father.
They were more frightened of their mother's unpredictability, which never stopped affecting the family. Rachel says she took her first husband's surname, McKibbins, partly to hide from her mother.

As a kid, Rachel found her dad to be the more reliable parent.

Because my dad, he would beat the shit out of us, but he would still tuck us in every night and we'd pray together every night. like there was always some sort of like coming back around at the tail end of violence and sort of not an unspoken apology was happening with the kiss on the forehead, the tucking into bed, and our nightly prayers.
Some parts of this story are in the world of childhood memories that only one or two other people, now dead, might have witnessed. But I've spent the last several months talking to people who knew Rachel and Peter as children and adults, and who knew their father.
I've looked through emails, texts, computer files, documents from courts and government agencies, family photos, papers, letters. So this is a chronicle told mostly through one person's memories and perspective, but also based as much as possible on documented facts.
There was no sexual abuse at home, Rachel says. She's written and talked for years about her father's physical abuse, which was worse when he was drinking, but didn't stop during the times he was trying to stay sober.
When Rachel heard the term dry drunk as an adult, a whole mystery from her childhood resolved in her head. There are stretches of her growing up Rachel says she doesn't remember at all.
Entire ages, for instance, eight, just gone. But some memories stayed.
There's an incident she's written about in more than one poem. When she told me about it, I got a sense of the rhythm she lived with as a child.
How abruptly a moment could turn dangerous and keep turning. I was on a church playground.
And in order to get to it, you had to climb this stucco wall that scratched the shit out of you. And I had a dress on and I didn't, I was too small and all of the other kids had already hopped over.
And this man helped me up and he lifted me over. And he put his hand where I knew it didn't belong.
And he wriggled his finger. And I, and afterwards, and then he just stayed in the playground and watched us play.
And it was time to climb back over the wall. He hoisted me up and did the same thing to me again.
And I told my dad this when he picked me up. I said, that man over there near the bushes, he goosed me because that was the word I had been given.
Like, when we'd poke each other, my dad would stop goosing each other. Like we'd just like, you know, poke and mess around the back seat.
And he said, what? And I said, I, oh, he was over there. There was a man over there.
The man, he had like sweat pants, like a jogging suit He, he goosed me. Rachel was in the front seat next to her father as she was saying this.
Peter was in back. Their father turned off the ignition.
He got out of the car and he turned around or he came around, opened the door and yanked me out by my braids and just started smacking me and my body. And how old were you? I was in kindergarten.
And I just, that was it. I just got beat up and then put back in the car, put your seatbelt on, and then drive home.
But he didn't drive home. He drove to my grandmother's, and he just drank like half a bottle of Jack and told the whole household what happened to me, which I was mortified by.
And then I got my hair chopped off. Chopped off my braids to make me less of a girl.
Girl was not a good thing to be, was one lesson she took from that. Another lesson, she understood how alone she was.
The one parent she had left, who was supposed to be taking care of her,

could decide on a dime to hurt her instead, and blame her for pain she didn't even understand. Family included those truths as a baseline for Rachel.
And then there was the rest of it, because family never means just one thing. Rachel told me, I am who I am because of my father.
She meant a lot of things by that. She's funny like her father, smart like him, determined, a good arguer, a showboat.
Their father was irresistible when he wanted to be. Charm itself, the way many alcoholics are.
He could fix things, build things. He loved to throw money around and be generous.
Their father was, when the mood was right, a giddy co-conspirator with his children. Like, my dad would go ding-dong ditch with me and my brother.
And, like, this is an older dude,

and he had a retired cop car that had been spray-painted beige,

and that was what we drove,

and we had this wild old, like, dragnet spotlight

that you could shine on people.

It was just really just a card,

like a character written by Tennessee Williams and Wes Anderson.

Movies were a huge part of their life as a family,

Oh my God. Just a card, like a character written by Tennessee Williams and Wes Anderson.
Movies were a huge part of their life as a family. Almost every Sunday, Rachel, Peter, and their father would go to Edwards Cinemas in Anaheim for a matinee.
It was cheaper. And see probably an action movie.
Peter was a big Van Damme fan. Favorites they would rewatch at home until they'd memorized lines, trading places, La Bamba, planes, trains, and automobiles.
The lines that cracked up Rachel and Peter became like sea glass, softened and beautified by being returned to again and again. Rachel says her father would never let outsiders criticize his kids.
Even when she or Peter hurt another child and a parent showed up at their house and complained, her dad might say, for instance, Well, maybe your kid's a little fuckface. And let's face it, some kids are.
Rachel remembers being a kid other kids were scared of. Her brother, too.
if you're not playing with other kids, or if when you do, you're the one who throws a rock at someone's face, or you're the one who takes something, you take tag and it just gets violent, or there's duck-duck goose and you just can't help but harm the person instead of just tapping them on their head. And these are all things that your brother did? Yeah, I mean both of us.
When it came to playtime, we both were the kids who would take it too fucking far. Home had to be a hidden world full of secrets.
Rachel and Peter knew without being told how important it was to lie, especially to anyone in authority. But Rachel says sometimes their father would remind them anyway, be careful what you say or you'll end up in foster care.
As Rachel and Peter got older and learned the American caste system as it plays out in school, they found even more reasons to hide. Rachel remembers shoplifting Tide because Peter told her someone at school had said he smelled poor.
She says she was more adept than Peter at blending in. The disguise worked while she was at school, but home was always a wild card.
We always had shame about having friends over because, like, you know, we didn't have cool furniture. One time we had lawn furniture as our furniture.
Like he once had a kiddie pool in his room full of crawdads and like not an aquarium, but like a $3 Toys R Us kiddie pool you could get in that summer. And we just lived, we lived in a way where we understood it wasn't normal and the kids would make fun of us for it.
Most of their father's violence happened inside their home. But the times Rachel remembers her father hitting her or Peter in public, and no one around them intervening, made clear to her, Peter and I are on our own.
That realization created an enduring and subtle connection between them. They could laugh at things no one else would find funny.
They'd speak in code, like dad's bottom teeth are showing meant he's drunk. Rachel remembers the feeling of being in bed at night and hearing her father's door open down the hall,

and her and Peter each in their separate rooms, reaching out to one another any way they could. There were coughs we would do sometimes to notify.
We would do certain knocks. I don't remember what they meant, but we would check on each other.
there was one time where my brother wedged a triangular block a wood block so my dad you could hear him try to open the door real hard and he banged into it and like it was worth it like sometimes we do that for each other like I put a roller skate like my one of these weird old metal roller skates that i'd inherited and i was like these are useless these are not cool and like we would sort of create like toy infused booby traps um or just things to just make the moment that we knew was inevitable a little like ridiculous and comic. And I think about it, I'm like, it wasn't really to stop our dad.
We knew that couldn't happen, but it was just to entertain the listener. They were each other's listener, their witness.
But the bond Rachel and Peter shared of both being victims of this man they loved and were tied to was constantly forced into competition with their own separate instincts to be spared.

because i think about in movies you see like the two kids climbing to bed together and hide under the covers and everything and but instead what we did was like i would be frozen in my bed and he

would be across the hall in his and you hear the bell and you think oh which room is he just coming

into But instead what we did was like I would be frozen in my bed and he would be across the hall in his. And you hear the bell and you think, oh, which room is he just coming into just to randomly drunkenly beat one of us up.
And so just to have that constant like your shoulders are up to your ears at all times and your back hurts from it. And over time, you know, it just became, you know, it went from like hushed whispers across the hall to like just the soundtrack of a beating about to happen and the quiet of it.
and we don't scream and we don't make sound

because we don't want to disrupt the neighbor's night and it beat up in silence is such a weird it's a weird galaxy um to not make a sound when you hurt really bad to have yourself picked up by her hair lifted off the ground like three feet and like all of the yelp that your natural body wants to do gets pushed down um yeah I became a loud mouth when I was older I was done and I think that that didn't ever happen for my brother.

It was never granted an outlet to just make a proper sad noise.

Being a loudmouth versus staying silent,

these roles, these choices to speak or not, came to define them, and eventually to separate them. Rachel and her brother got school photos every year, and her father seems to have kept almost all of them.
I looked through the photos after I'd been talking to Rachel for months, and my expectations were colored by what she and others had told me. I'd heard Peter felt uncomfortable having photos taken of him.
He didn't like smiling. But he did fine in these.
A kid with a round face and thick brown hair who looked like he could have been cutting up with friends right before or right after the photos were taken. Rachel, though, had a relationship with the camera, the way some people just do.
In the photos, she looks like she's enjoying the attention, rather than simply accepting it. She pays attention back.
She's got a giant, dimpled smile, big eyelashes. She's beautiful.
I talked to people who knew Rachel and Peter in high school. The two of them went to the same school, Rachel always a year ahead.
As an older sister, she cast a big shadow. She had friends, a boyfriend, she was a jock, a theater kid, a good student, a writer.
By the end of her junior year, she was also a mother. She'd kept her pregnancy secret from almost everyone, including her father, for a while.
Rachel says the baby stayed with her at night, and with members of her family or her boyfriend's family during the day. And Rachel managed to stay in school and keep doing well.
And on top of everything else, she was a fighter, so other students didn't mess with her. Peter was a quiet kid, kept mostly to himself, which of course isn't allowed in high school, so people did mess with him, if they thought they could get away with it without Rachel finding out.

Peter struggled in his classes. He wasn't a jock.
He didn't do team sports. He liked dodgeball and handball.
Rachel had gotten help when she was young with speech difficulties and dyslexia.

She never saw Peter get help, for instance, with his lisp and his reading problems. She doesn't

know why. School just never became a place where Peter managed to shine or find close friends.
At home, their father insisted on being scrupulously equal with them, to the point where Rachel remembers he would measure each one's glass of milk so they were the same amount. But the more Rachel succeeded, the more her father encouraged her and focused on her.
When she was a gymnast, he bought her a balance beam. When she was in Dracula, he built the coffin for the set.
He went to her games, her meets, her award ceremonies. He took her to acting lessons in Beverly Hills.
In high school, the alliance between Rachel and Peter frayed. He resented her.
Rachel doesn't remember her father saying anything explicit like, my money's on Rachel, or Rachel's a smart one. But kids perceive all sorts of truths their parents never say out loud.
And this one was obvious. Well, enough to where my brother could say, well, dad favors you.

He's always favored you.

Like when he find like when those words finally came out of his mouth, like when it was like within the last two or three years that happened.

I think it was actually like four years ago because I just remember feeling so guilty because a truth was named and we all kind of knew it.

I hoped it wasn't wasn't true.

I'll see you next time. I just remember feeling so guilty because a truth was named and we all kind of knew it.

I hoped it wasn't true.

Along with resenting Rachel, Peter, as he got older, would often shut Rachel down when she tried to call their father out.

Sometimes he'd go so far as to take their father's side against her.

Rachel remembers a moment.

Of course it happened while they were watching a movie.

One I was pretty shocked they watched together.

It's a TV movie called The Burning Bed,

starring Farrah Fawcett.

It's about domestic violence.

Rachel was sitting there with her father and brother,

watching this movie,

having seen her father hit his longtime girlfriend,

as well as her and Peter. And he turns to me and says, don't you ever let a man touch you like that? If he does, you tell me.
Your father said that to you. Can you imagine hearing that? How hollowed out.
And I'm like, you're saying that to me? You're a fucking wife, Peter. Peter turned to Rachel.
And I'll never give you a, shut up, shut up. That's what Peter said.
Yeah. Like, it just had that weird ring.
Shut up. Like, just.
The honeymooners kind of shut up. It was bad.
And it just even made me... I was levitating.
I was like five inches from the ceiling at that point. Like, ew, fuck it.
Like, I didn't say it, but I was just like, both of you, you're liars. This was how the big shift started happening in Rachel's head.
Her family's secrets stopped feeling like secrets. They just felt like lies.
Lies that protected other people, not her. It's like there was a huge liberating turn when I finally was like, I'm not protecting people by lying anymore.
I'm over that. In fact, I'm probably going to tell the truth too often.
I'm going to be uncomfortable very often. And it's true.
Like, I've been called a bully even for it. Like, I've been called all kinds of terrible names because of it.
But I just... That's me, off mic, asking if a certain spectacular blowout she'd told me about had been the turning point.

The wine and roses affair.

I didn't even think about that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Shit.

Fuck.

Yeah.

A stranger comes to town. With wine.
That's after the break. This is Sarah Koenig, host of the Serial Podcast.
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Hiring? Indeed is all you need. Wine and roses.
Okay. That is shorthand for an avalanche of events that happened in the spring of Rachel's senior year of high school.
This is where Rachel and Peter's paths fully diverged. Rachel is a playwright as well as a poet, so she lays the story out like a play, just one mad scene after another.
I've heard from other people who were there for the moment that unfolded in public or semi-public that they do remember these scenes. And please note that this upcoming small back and forth between Rachel and me is one of dozens of moments in our conversation where I can barely follow what she's saying because it's yet another bombshell.
She starts off talking about Peter moving out. He actually moved in his senior year back into my grandmother's house and moved out from the house that he was living in with you and your dad into your grandmother's house with your grandmother? My dad left us for a co-worker and moved out in the middle of my senior year.
He moved out and didn't tell us. Oh, so you two were living on your own.
Yeah. Yeah.
It was wild. We didn't know this woman.
And then one day she showed up packing our dad's stuff and yelling at us that we're bad kids. And we're like, woman, are you what and it was his co-worker and they were married i'm like bitch get out of my house like who is this crazy white woman i don't know who this is it was just wild and he didn't tell you no what was going on that's even after he moved out he didn't call and say, look, I moved out, or anything.
No, he'd send us an envelope every month, $60 that was lunch money. No note, just cash.
Nothing, nothing. No preamble.
You had no idea this was coming. No.
No, dummy, are you listening? They never saw it coming. Let's just all accept, as Rachel and Peter had to, the new reality that their father, the parent who had fought to get them out of foster care, fought for custody, and had been their only stable home ever since, that person had suddenly up and left, gotten married, and moved in with the new wife, Alex.
And let's start at the introductory dinner Rachel and her brother had with their father and his new wife. There was an olive branch moment where he came and they took us all to Claim Jumper.
And we had this dinner together, the four of us. And we were sort of meeting our new mom that we had never, it just was so awkward.
And what I understood during that dinner was that they both were alcoholics who were absolutely leaning on each other. Turns out they met in AA.
It seemed clear to Rachel they were not sober at this dinner. Like they were acting a little hyper and goofy and which isn't always necessarily out of character with my dad, but it just kept ramping in a way and then getting goofy.
And then he grabbed her boob in front of us. And we were just like, all right, you know what? This is what the hell? And so kind of as a dig, I brought up, well, interesting, because I've been cast as the lead in Days of Wine and Roses.
This is a high-end dig. The Days of Wine and Roses is a fascinating bit of pop culture from the late 50s, early 60s.
It's a love story about two alcoholics, an early portrayal of AA. There was a movie version with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick and the original teleplay with Piper Laurie and Cliff Robertson.
And in both, there were some poignant performances of true love and true drunkenness, both the giddy, flirty, mischievous kind and the dead-end, destroying-your-life kind. Her dad and Alex, for some reason, loved this idea.
They got really excited about it. So he was, he was really enthusiastic and said, I would like to help you in any way I can.
And then he just put $500 on the table. And we were like, uh, is this for back rent? Like, what is this? He goes, no, just, just put this towards, uh, put this like looking at Peter who was just like well what do I get like and he goes well you don't do anything and Peter just sat there and I was like oh see and now I gotta go home with my brother and it's just it's just there's to be that shit tension that happens.

And we went home and my brother went up to his room and didn't talk to me probably for a week. It was just the usual type of thing that would happen with us.
Rehearsals for the play moved ahead. Rachel's dad was on call to help, like he always was with her theater projects.
one week I had called him at work and said we need props do you have any empty like whiskey bottles and when I say that he came and in front of all of my peers opened up his trunk and there were at least I think it was 60 it was it was between 60 and 70 bottles and they all like all my crew a bunch of punk rock kids were like laughing like what I like it's just it was incredible and I was so embarrassed and I you know I just it just felt like my entire life had been dissected for science class in front of everybody, but like without my consent. And what was interesting about our theatrical productions at the end of year is that there would be judges who would come in and we did three different plays and they would nominate people for like the Academy Award of Tustin high school and I love this high school it was just so goofy because it wasn't even a sport or it wasn't a an arts school but our teacher just really wanted us to like ride the momentum like this is this is exciting you could actually propel yourself to like stardom who knows knows? She was great.
And so I was nominated for Best Actress for my role in Days of Wine and Roses. Of course she was.
And soon it was Tustin High School's Academy Awards night. But that same night was an Eagles concert.
And my dad chose to go to it instead. And I was like, really?

Like, you know what? I'm going to go listen to Peaceful Easy Feeling for the thousandth time instead of seeing you. And when I like went through his stuff, I found the Eagles concert ticket going through the photo albums, trying to be all like sweet and nostalgic.
And I'm like, 94 Eagles concert. So I go and his wife comes as his proxy and she was sloshed.
And I was like, are you? So I went, what was, was she? Sorry, go ahead. You went, go ahead.
Well, I mean, she just was, I'm here to take pictures for your dad. I was like, oh, Lord.
And I win. And my dad's not there.
And I said, you know, I don't think it's really fair for me to be given this award. Because we are only given three months to prepare for our roles and rehearse.
And my peers, you know, they had like 90 days, but I had 17 years to prepare for this role.

And when I, this was your acceptance speech?

And that's it.

And I walked off.

I was done.

If you're not going to even be here for us to like help assist the lie into existence. And I just, I'm done.
I'm done. Rachel remembers getting off the stage, sitting down at a table, and Alex, her father's wife, sitting next to her and pulling out a bottle of wine from her bag and proceeding to pour wine for herself into one of the glasses the school had provided for the non-alcoholic beverages that the children and other adults were drinking at this high school event concerning a play about alcoholism.
And understand, too, some of the actors were freshmen freshmen, like it was, you could be 14 or 18, 17. And she, you know, and she just would not look at me.
And then at the end of the night, she grabbed the back of my arm and she goes, why did you do that to your innocent dad? And I just started, I was like, innocent. It was just weird that she chose that word.

And then so I thought, well, innocent of what?

Like, what are we?

Because I was like, if you want, like, we can get ugly if you want to get ugly.

But I'm going to go get pizza.

I'm not sticking around.

I don't need a ride from you.

Because, you know, she was going to drive me home. Like, I'm good.
I'm good. Lady, I don't know you.
I don't know you. Like, get away from me.
Don't talk to me about. Oh, she goes.
She goes, karma, karma, karma. And I was like, I don't.
In a California bullshit. Literally.
Take that shit back to Venice Beach. And kick some sand over it like some dog shit.
Because get out of my face with that. Rachel remembers the awards night as the first time she ever called out her father in public.
And even though he enjoyed being the cheeky dad who showed up at his daughter's rehearsal with a bunch of empty booze bottles, Rachel telling a room full of adults especially a room full of white people

that she'd spent her whole life with an alcoholic, that was not the same at all. The finale of all this, an ensemble number, took place the following Saturday.
Rachel says their father showed up at their apartment with Alex, the wife, and they started to go full Grinch on the place. They take the TV, they take the new CD player that he had bought for my birthday.
They started taking the knife block, like just emptying out and my dad comes to me and he just goes you are an assassin you're an assassin and I said why because I told the fucking truth why don't make me tell the truth in front of your new fucking wife he's's like, you're an assassin. You're a liar.
And my brother was just sitting in the background like, oh, God, Rachel, don't don't do anything like we're all going to get beat up like everyone here will get beat up. And I just remember her saying, how could you ever be this way to your dad? Look at how you don't appreciate anything he's done for you.
And I'm like, bitch, do you know he has a girlfriend? And my dad looked stunned because my dad had a longtime girlfriend. And I go, I'm telling Sandy.
And I get on the phone and I call her and I go, did you know my dad got married? And I'm just sitting here like, yep, they're here right now. They're packing everything up.
They just took my, they took my CD player. And she's like, wait, what, what, is she pretty? What does she look like? And I was like, oh, what is this? Because bless Sandy, but like she was asking all of the wrong questions.
I hung up the phone and he was just like, he couldn't believe I did that.

And I'm thinking, homie, you just you left us.

You've given us a world of pain numerous times.

You got married.

You try to introduce us to our new mom, who's just not our mom.

Like, what is this?

And I was like, and another thing, your your fucking bottles you fucking drunk hobo psychos like what the fuck why would you do that like what is wrong with you and i just i just was screaming whatever i could at them just to hurt my dad and also to embarrass her with like you don't to embarrass her with the truth like bitch you don't know and well you he beats the shit out of us all our fucking lives? Do you understand that he threw me through this glass fucking dining table? And that's why it's just a board? Like, let's get into it. And he just, he was just screaming assassin.
Then they left with all the stuff. Rachel and Peter were alone again.
He turned to Rachel, assessing the damage. He's like, you killed us.
And I was like, you killed us. I'm like, I didn't kill us.
Like, leave me alone. Like, what the fuck is this? He was blaming you.
Yeah. Yeah.

For the whole thing.

Yeah.

I was like, I don't, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

It's like, we're not going to get lunch money anymore.

And my brother was just like, I gotta, I gotta get out of here.

Rachel had felt like she didn't have much to lose by telling their secrets in front of Alex and the audience at school.

She felt like, fuck my dad.

What's he going to do, leave?

He's already gone.

But Peter, who was 17 and had another year left of high school,

concluded that he did have things to lose.

The subsistence level stability he'd managed with up to now, for example, like regular lunch money, that might go away entirely. He was facing a new level of chaos.
Everybody for themselves. Peter moved out.
He couldn't move in with his father and Alex. They lived too far away for him to get to school every day.

The house he moved into was his grandparents' house,

which is where he lived for the rest of his life.

Rachel left Southern California, but it took a while to do it.

She spent a year after high school living wherever. Friends' houses, ex-boyfriend's house, the park sometimes.
She lived at her father's girlfriend Sandy's house at one point. Then she moved in with her boyfriend's family.
Rachel was barely in touch with Peter or her father that year and the following few years. She says one time she got a call out of the blue from Alex, her father's ex-wife at that point.
Alex had gotten cancer, gotten sober, divorced Rachel's dad, who'd been drinking heavily. He'd gotten a couple of DUIs.
Rachel says Alex is the first adult she remembers apologizing to her, saying basically, I got it wrong before when I believed your dad over you. Rachel landed a job, got her own place, lost the job.
She had three kids. The kids helped her reconnect with Peter.
As adults, she and Peter found comfort in the fact of each other, veterans of the same obscure war. But Peter was hunkering, and Rachel was headed outward.
She got married at 27 years old, moved across the country, and started publishing her poetry, often about her family and childhood. She knows her father read her books.
She's not sure Peter did, or how he felt about the fact of her writing about their life. He would attend poetry readings with me and hear me describe events that he too survived, endured, suffered, whatever the word, but I got the applause.
Did you guys talk afterward about what you had said in the poems? Never. Never.
You never talked about the abuse as adults? Well, he, it was normalized. Like, you know, my dad kicked our asses.
I'm like, kicked our asses just just too passive, in my opinion.

They stuck mostly to safer ground.

Movies and TV, her kids, jokes, some memories, the Lakers.

Every once in a while, a brief allusion to stresses and fears known only to the two of them.

Peter became, as other relatives died off, the proprietor of his grandparents' house. He had a few girlfriends over the years.
None of the relationships lasted. Peter was tall and nice-looking, and he could be warm and chatty in brief encounters with, say, a cashier at the grocery store or a receptionist.
But he still struggled to make friends. He fixed up the house, made a garden in back, and raised butterflies, took care of stray cats and a tortoise that wandered into the yard.
His father worked out of state a lot, but he'd stay at the house with Peter when he wasn't working far away. Peter and his dad eventually settled into a symbiotic relationship.
His father had the one bank account they both used. His father took care of the mortgage and the bills.
Peter took care of him. He had this kind of air of authority over my dad that was interesting to me because he, as a non-drinker, as a non-smoker, he really believed that my dad was poisoning himself, so he was trying to save my dad from that.
And when my dad finally settled down and lived back in the house, which was maybe, I'd say, 10, 15 years ago, my brother became really sort of like this parent. Their father would give up drinking and go back to it, sometimes in excess, sometimes he'd just have a beer.
Peter would get upset at any drinking. They got a juicer and resolved to get healthy.
They worked out together. They were best friends, as Peter said in a text after his father died.
He and Rachel had each built their own stronghold. Rachel in her writing and

her own family. Peter at his father's side.
And the old squad, the three of them, as a three,

also still existed somehow. Damaged and imperfect, but recognizable.
Every summer for

Thank you. the three of them, as a three, also still existed somehow.
Damaged and imperfect, but recognizable.

Every summer for five years in a row, Rachel and her family drove across the country and stayed for weeks with her father and brother in the house in Santa Ana. Then the family couldn't

drive out to California for a few summers in a row because of work and then COVID.

Part of me wishes I never moved to New York.

Part of me wishes I had just, but I was just,

God, I was going to be eaten alive, so I just needed to,

I needed to go, but if I'd been more present in my brother's life, who knows? Who knows? I'm in constant debate with myself. And I think all people in mourning do this.
I know that they do. All the what-ifs and all that.
I asked Rachel if she's writing about any of this yet. She said no.
She said when she writes a poem, she's settled someplace with whatever she's writing about. She was still roaming when we talked.
She still wasn't sure what happened during the months she was barely talking with her father and Peter, what came before the texts. She was letting me roam with her.
But a girl can reach her limit with all the questions.

Like, it's very unnatural to be interviewed during all of this. I know.
It's not a normal thing. It's weird to speak of things you haven't even processed yet.
but like this is also sort of giving me permission to go about my life knowing that like I've uncovered things and I'm gonna put those pieces together and figure it out but um they can also wait and or you know some sweet gingery white lady can just put it all together for me help my help me figure this one out hello I am the gingery white lady can just put it all together for me. Help me figure this one out.

Hello.

I am the gingery white lady, courtesy of Wella.

And I did figure some things out.