The Good Father

by Wayne Grady

  “How do you know this?”

  “I wish we’d had this talk when I was alive.”

  “So do I. When you apologized a few minutes ago, what were you apologizing for?”

  “You mean specifically? I’m sorry for not telling you you were special, that I loved you, that I left White Falls with the full intention of coming back or else bringing you with me later, and that I was wrong about that. I’m sorry for your pain, for what I put you through. I’m sorry for making you watch me die. I’m sorry for the sense of release you felt when you closed the back door and stood on the deck, breathing in the night air.”

  “I loved that feeling.”

  “I know, but it made me feel terrible, as though my dying was robbing you of your life, too. Isn’t that what you felt when I left White Falls, that I had robbed you of your life? And here I was, doing it again. You ran up to High Park, through the east gate, sobbing. I used to take you there, remember? I’d lift you up onto the branches of the black oak that grew low and parallel to the ground, and you’d walk along them, holding my hand.”

  “I remember that.”

  “There were animals in a zoo on either side of Deer Pen Road, going up towards Grenadier Pond. Peacocks, llamas, Highland cattle with crazy horns, aurochs.”

  “No aurochs, Dad. I remember the animals, too, and there were no aurochs.”

  “Okay, maybe no aurochs. You have a distorted sense of time when you’re dead. There are aurochs in the past and aurochs in the future, but at that time there were no aurochs. Waterfowl there were aplenty, mallards, Canada geese, an occasional great blue heron. There was a restaurant in the park, I used to buy us hot chocolate in the fall, and bagels with cream cheese, and I think carrot cake. We would sit by the window and look out at the squirrels running through the leaves. It always seemed to be fall in those days, before global warming. Now even the fall is hot. Middle of September, three o’clock in the morning, and it was twenty-three degrees in the park, thirty with the humidex. It’s Armageddon, Daphne, apocalypse now, the whole damn Book of Revelation coming to life. Listen to your dead father.”

  “You see all that?”

  “No, I don’t have to. It’s obvious.”

  Daphne feels, not for the first time, the ground under her feet being pulled away, as though the cabin is not a cabin on an island but a cabin on a ship, a caboose on a train, cascading through time with no one at the controls. Caroline knew Gilean Douglas, who may have died right here in this bed. Caroline says no, she died in the hospital in Campbell River, but she could have been in both places at once. Basic quantum physics. That line in Gilean’s poem that reads “a notion of lucidity,” when you say it aloud it sounds like “an ocean of lucidity,” and she must have meant both at the same time. Quantum poetry. It makes her head spin. The still point at the turning centre, in the widening gyre. Daphne looks back at the bed and her father isn’t there. The blankets are disturbed and the mattress sags a little in the middle. She panics for a second. Then she sees Gilean Douglas lying on the bed, smiling up at the nailheads in the ceiling, admiring her handiwork, not a rusted nail, not a water stain or a warped board, a tight ship on an ocean of lucidity. Armageddon is a little way off. It’s not the Apocalypse yet. The United Nations gives us twelve years to avoid climate catastrophe. Lots of time. We keep putting things off. Or doing things that don’t work, simply because we can. Gilean Douglas the historian, the time traveller, smiling up at her ceiling. There will be aurochs again, not because we need them, who the hell needs an auroch? but because we know how to bring them back, so we will. It’s easier than saving the species we still have.

  “By the way, The Big One was not a good title for that film.” Her father is back.

  “Why not?”

  “I guess you don’t remember Jackie Gleason. He played Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners.”

  “I don’t remember him, but I know who he was.”

  “Kramden was always pretending to have a heart attack: ‘It’s the big one this time, Alice!’ he’d say, holding his chest. Except it never was. So the message in the film’s title is, false alarm.”

  “What would you have called it?”

  “How about It’s Our Fault?”

  “You never could resist a pun.”

  “The Big One would work if Jackie Gleason had eventually died of a heart attack, but he didn’t.”

  “What did he die of?”

  “Colorectal cancer, same as me. Our semicolons became exclamation points. So, there you were in High Park, looking at Grenadier Pond, thinking that the pond was going to evaporate until there was nothing left but pond scum and the brittle bones of the grenadiers who fell through the ice, back when there were grenadiers, back when there was ice. Do you remember me telling you that story? About the soldiers who decided to use the pond for target practice one night, as a prank, high spirits, youthful exuberance, homemade hooch, so they loaded up their ten-pounders, did their ballistics, and fired away?”

  “I remember. A bedtime story.”

  “Direct hit. What fun. Just as some of their comrades were sneaking back across the ice after carousing in one of the taverns on Bloor Street. Probably about three a.m., the same time you were there. Kaboom!, as they say in the comics. Did you hear it? Krrr-ack! You pictured the scene as you stood there on the pavement looking through the trees at the stillness and the silence of the pond’s surface. You imagined cannonballs flying through the air, the ice breaking up, the soldiers’ screams drowned out by the noise of exploding artillery. You thought about going home, but you couldn’t pull yourself away. There was more of me present in that park than there was in the house.”

  “That’s always been true, Dad.”

  “That’s a cheap shot. I was always there for you.”

  “Always there, never here.”

  “I’m here now.”

  “Not really.”

  “Nothing changes but the nature of change. A physiotherapist I sold wine to had a sign in his waiting room: Change is movement through time, and through movement change can be cured. It’s an interesting idea, to be cured of change. You’d think only death could achieve that.”

  “This is the longest talk we’ve ever had. Except for those three months when all you talked about was wine.”

  “I like to think we talked all the time, that year you lived with us, but I know we didn’t. At least not out loud. As you said, we talked sideways. We thought we had lots of time. But I always had a lot fewer years than you. Do you talk with Tom?”

  “Yes, some. But there are things I don’t tell him. He’s like you.”

  “I saw the movie he made here.”

  “You did? Once More the Storm?”

  “The father was an idiot, as most fathers are. And that Jimmy Crimson. At first I thought he was a kind of Will Scarlet, you know, Robin Hood’s lieutenant, but he was the opposite of Robin Hood. He was a modern crook. He’ll take from the rich, but only until he himself is rich, and then he’ll start taking from the poor.”

  “What did you think of the daughter?”

  “I sympathized with her. She reminded me of you.”

  “In what way?”

  “She had no values of her own. So she oscillated between those of her father and those of Jimmy.”

  “But she comes around in the end, doesn’t she?”

  “Wasn’t that Tom’s idea?”

  “And I’m coming around, aren’t I?”

  “You jogged back through the park, breathing in the dawn.”

  “I don’t jog.”

  “The sun was almost up, the lights above the path were hardly brighter than the sky. Shakespeare said something about the sun being ‘uneffectual fire.’ I like that, uneffectual fire, except the sun these days is getting more effectual all the time. I was frightened for you, a woman running alone in a park at night. I was frightene
d for you living by yourself in Vancouver, not knowing where you were, what you were doing. I imagined all kinds of things. I was always imagining all kinds of things, usually bad things. Elinor called me a catastrophist. I wanted you to be safe, like the father in the movie, like Yeats praying that his daughter would come through life’s howling storms. But you were always the kind of person to put your head down and damn the torpedoes. I feared and admired that in you. Every father wants that for his daughter, wants to be like the father in the movie, not to have his daughter out wandering alone in a big city at four in the morning, wants to have her happy to be at home. Be happy. That’s all we ask. Not being able to give you that happiness nearly drove me crazy. But you made it through the park without incident. You made it through Vancouver.”

  “Not without incident.”

  “No, but you made it. For me, it was like watching a horror film, duct-taped to my chair with my eyelids propped open, like that guy in A Clockwork Orange. Only worse, because it was you I was watching. My poor heart, it’s a miracle I didn’t die of a heart attack.”

  “You didn’t imagine that dumpster.”

  “I flew out to Vancouver without the slightest idea where I was going to find you. What I was going to do.”

  “That’s how I got there, too. That’s how I got here.”

  “It’s how we all get everywhere. But as I said, you can’t see the future. All you can do, all any of us can do, is try to see how the future is made out of the past. Me hurrying after you on Dunlevy Street. You running back through High Park, under the uneffectual street lamps, the animals waking up, the peacocks, my god, I jumped every time I heard those crazy birds. You were thinking of me then, weren’t you—that I might be awake, too, wondering where you were. My pain pills, the constant humiliation of the colostomy bag. I am a creature of habit, or was. You complained about that. Same clothes, same hotel, same restaurants, same order—steak frites, half-litre of the red—but what is a habit but the future composed of familiar bits of the past. So I drove and walked around all the usual places, Powell, Dunlevy, Cordova, Railway, Alexander, I walked through Oppenheimer Park. I circled the square, checked the missions and the needle exchanges. You weren’t anywhere. It was cold. I didn’t know where else to look, how far back to go.”

  “Do you think people can change?”

  “No, people do not change. André Malraux once asked a priest what he’d learned about people after twenty years of hearing confessions, and the priest answered: ‘There is no such thing as an adult.’ We’re like domestic dogs: our emotional and intellectual development arrested in adolescence. We cannot change. We remain essentially the same, unfortunately for us, but fortunately for those looking for us. You change your dress, I change lanes on the highway, but I knew we would find each other.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Do you remember, in the restaurant, paraphrasing a line from Ariel’s song in The Tempest to Winston Curtis, ‘Full fathom five my father lies’?”

  “Vaguely. I was showing off, as usual.”

  “I think it was more than that. You thought you were telling Winston that as far as you were concerned, I was dead. But Winston reminded me that in The Tempest, when that line is delivered, Ariel is trying to convince Ferdinand that his father is dead, drowned in the windstorm that she created at Prospero’s command. But Alonso isn’t dead. Ariel is lying to Ferdinand.”

  “And you took heart from that?”

  “Well, Winston thought I should.”

  “News flash: Arcane Literary Theory Saves Woman’s Life.”

  “I thought I’d lost you. You hid in Wendell’s van, sitting in the dark, and I didn’t see you. Then you went into that coffee shop and spent most of your time in the bathroom. I kept combing the area, I knew you couldn’t have gone far and that sooner or later you’d come out. And eventually you did, and I was there.”

  “You were. I’m so sorry, Dad.”

  “Don’t be. You gave me my finest hour. There’s nothing a father wants more than to save his child’s life.”

  “I ran home from the park. I had no idea I’d been gone so long, the sky was light, there were delivery vans on the streets. I knew. I knew when I looked up at the sky, at the street lamps, and I started to run. I knew when I turned onto our street and everything was moving. I ran up the front steps and put the key in the door. My hand was shaking, I was crying. I’d been such a moron. What was I thinking, leaving you alone when you were so close? How could I have been so selfish? Dad, I…I’m so sorry. You were lying in the same position, your hands on your chest, your face turned away from the door. For a minute I thought I’d been wrong, that I still had time to thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For being a good father.”

  “You’re here. You’re healthy. You’re happy. What other thanks do I need?”

  “I am here. I am healthy. I am happy.”

  “I left when you were still at Grenadier Pond, caught in that fold of time. You were happy there. You’d been looking after me for months, the simplicity of life here was such an important part of your recovery. Death was so close that you could clearly see how different it was from life. You weren’t afraid you’d go back to drinking, all that wine in my basement, right next to where you were sleeping.”

  “I wasn’t even tempted.”

  “That run in the park was you reminding yourself of everything you wanted out here.”

  “But you died on me.”

  “I didn’t die on you. I just died.”

  “You could have waited. You could have let me say goodbye.”

  “Now who’s feeling guilty and angry? We die alone, sweetheart. Have you noticed that? The family sits around the hospital room with the dying guy, waiting for him to go, looking at their watches, listening to the beeps on the monitor, watching the almost imperceptible rise and fall of his chest. They want to be in at the end, they want their goodbyes to be the last thing he hears before he kicks off. But the guy isn’t cooperating, he just goes on lying there. For hours, days. It’s like they’re in some kind of staring contest with him. Even the doctors are nonplussed, they don’t know what’s keeping him alive. Then the family leaves the room for two minutes, one minute even, to confer with the doctor, or to get some coffee, and when they come back, the guy’s gone. Why? they ask themselves. Why did he wait until we were out of the room to die? But maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe they should ask themselves why they decided to leave the room just before he died? I know, we’re conditioned by Hollywood to think that a good death is when the person dies in someone’s arms, gazing up into their eyes, saying a few last deeply meaningful words. But really, when you’re dying you don’t have a lot to say to anyone. You’re not trying to stay alive, you’re concentrating on dying. You’re wondering if you have enough strength to take another breath, and realizing you don’t have to. It’s an interesting moment. You’re not aware of who’s in the room and who isn’t, you’re not lying there saying to yourself, Okay, they’ve gone, now I can die. Dying isn’t a piece of theatre. It doesn’t require an audience to make it real. Isn’t it far more likely that the living know more about what’s going on in the room than the dying person does?”

  “Are you saying I got up and went for a walk in the park because I knew you were dying and I didn’t want to be there? That’s crazy!”

  “The first thing you did when you got back was poke your head in my door and check on me. I liked that. It was love. The room was still dark. You saw me lying there, you thought you saw me breathing, and you quietly closed the door and went into the kitchen to make coffee. That’s how I wanted it, that’s how it’s supposed to happen. No fuss. No histrionics. No big deal. You look in, you go make coffee. Let me sleep, I had a long day ahead of me. I had a chemo appointment. You were going to have a break. The way I see it, even if you knew I was going to be dead when you got back
, you still did the right thing when you went for that run.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “You put the coffee on, then you came back into my room. That’s when you realized I was dead.”

  “I touched your arm. It was cold.”

  “When I found you in the dumpster, you were cold, too. Your hands, your cheeks. I ran to the Needle House and got Sister Darlene. She had a helper with her, a big guy, lots of tattoos. He and I lifted you out of the dumpster. You were covered with snow. I couldn’t feel your pulse, but I might not have been checking the right place. I brushed the snow off you and put my coat over you, and we carried you into the clinic. It was right there, not fifty feet away. See, you even thought of that.”

  “Did I?”

  “Sister Darlene gave you an injection of something—”

  “Naloxone.”

  “—and I called 911, and by the time they got there you were breathing again. I saw your chest rise and fall.”

  “You came with me in the ambulance. You held my hand.”

  “It was still cold, but I felt it getting warm. That’s what happiness is.”

  Daphne gets up from the bed, pours herself a cup of tea, and goes outside, leaving the cabin door open. On the porch, she hears the wind worrying the treetops, waves slapping the rocks, her small motorboat knocking against the dock. She walks out to the point. The little shrine to Gilean Douglas is altered; while she was away, someone put a carved wooden feather beside the plastic buffalo. She thinks of “Moonset,” the poem of Gilean’s she found on the Internet, a poem she now knows is about this place: In the darkly sanguine ebb and flow / with reason lashed upon the spar of why, / here is serenity.