Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva

by Richard Chizmar, Brian Freeman, Paul Olson

  It is in the hallway–a faint scuffling, a wisping of a breath-like sound.

  And despite knowing what it is, despite what I have witnessed each evening for the past two years, I still get up and go stand in the doorway of the bedroom that has been mine in this house since I was two years old. Each night, each year.

  While the house is dark and there is only a faint nightlight in the bathroom across from me, I can see. I can see what is in the hallway.

  It is my father, and he is crawling.

  He is on his hands and his knees, creeping across the stained shag carpet, and his lower jaw, covered with grizzle, is quivering as if he is speaking, but I do not hear any words. Occasionally his nails, grown longer than most men wear them, snag on the loops of the carpet.

  He is crawling as he has done before and before and before.

  As he did the first time I found him. He had been sleeping on the couch in the living room, having gone there from his bedroom where he said he couldn’t get to sleep. And he claimed he couldn’t stand up from the low-slung sofa when he wanted to return to his bedroom for the rest of the night. So he crawled. He did not call to me, even though I was in the next room. I would have come to help him stand; I did not sleep heavily in those days when I was tending him.

  I would have come to help.

  But he didn’t call.

  And so I found him.

  I bit my lip and knelt down and slowly, carefully helped him to his feet. Hanging onto me, he shuffled into his room. I eased him down onto the hospital bed that he hated so much. I took off his bedroom slippers, worn down at the heel, and put them under his bed.

  I asked him if he wanted water; he said no; and I remembered all the evenings when I was a child that he brought me one last glass of water.

  In the dryness of the night air, a sweetly rotting smell suddenly pervades the room. It is the smell of his cancer, which invaded his bowels, and has eaten its way through his body to his liver, and which somehow in three years had not managed to kill him.

  Somehow he hangs.

  I ask him if he wants anything. Of course, he says no. He does not want to bother me, he says. I tell him it’s no bother, dad, because I’m up already. He says no, go back to sleep, honey. I’m fine, just fine. We do not look at each other.

  I go back to my room and lay down on the narrow bed. My feet hang over the end just slightly. With my hands clasped behind my neck, I stare up at the ceiling in the darkness.

  And after a while, as I knew it would, a light goes on in his bathroom. The light spreads outward, through his room and down the hallway so that small objects in the bedroom suddenly stand out sharply in the semi-darkness, and I listen. I hear the sound of running water. He is up again, washing out his colostomy bag as he does so often during the day. He has never let me help him with that procedure, never let me see what he does even though I have told him I wanted to help. I have only seen that horrible opening with its metallic rim in his stomach just once. That terrible obscene unnatural opening.

  My father is proud.

  I wait until the light is gone, and I hear him shuffle back to bed. He groans, and I close my eyes. I hate to hear that from him.

  I wait in the darkness, waiting for him to call me, and finally I hear him snore, and know that at last he falls asleep.

  I wait for sleep to claim me, but it doesn’t. I am awake when dawn comes with the coolness of a breeze and the sound of stirring birds.

  And when I can put it off no longer, I rise and wash my face and my hair and take a bath. This is the bathroom where he had the hemorrhage that indicated for the first time that something was wrong, very wrong. When I came home from the hospital afterward, I found dried blood across the seat of the toilet and run down onto its base, splashed into the tub and beyond, and flecked onto the wall behind the commode. I scoured these stained surfaces, wiping away every trace of the blood. But I still see it, see it even though it’s no longer there.

  I apply my make-up and dress in good slacks and a tailored blouse with long sleeves which I will roll up later in the day, and while my hair is still drying, I glance into his room.

  Of course, I got rid of the hospital bed after he died. Three days after his death I went through all his things and gave most of them away–his few coats and pants and shirts and the three pairs of new pajamas I had bought him at Penney’s but which he’d never worn–to a Catholic mission for homeless men located downtown. Two men in patched flannel shirts and baggy pants and oversize shoes came to get the boxes of clothes I had packed. They did not speak to me; I watched them as they hefted the boxes into the back of a silver pickup. The other pieces of furniture, a bookcase and badly painted chest of drawers and an old music cabinet he had salvaged from the city dump when I was a child, I gave neighbors.

  My father’s room is bare of furniture, but not of memories.

  I remember when I was seven or eight, and he would lie down in the afternoons for a nap when he was home from work or on the weekends after he’d mowed the front and back lawns. I would come in and lay on the other half of the double bed, and we would talk for a few minutes, and then I would get drowsy, and fall asleep. And when I awoke, he was gone.

  Under the window overlooking the backyard, he had placed an old kitchen table. It was yellow-topped, with rounded chrome legs, and very ugly. He stored his art supplies there, kept his drawing board with the water-color paper taped to it. He had a German beer stein filled with camel hair brushes in various lengths and fullnesses, and in plastic boxes he had brought home from work he had rubber erasers, and broken pieces of charcoal in several shades, and leftover paperclips and brittle rubber bands and a couple of pretty rocks he had picked up one day when we were picnicking in the Manzano Mountains.

  In his closet was an old ice cream bucket, the kind made of heavy tan cardboard. He always used it as a hamper, even though the laundry hamper was just outside his door. But he would put his underwear and socks–always black or dark blue–into it. Mostly he dropped them on the side of the bucket or on the floor around it, and I remember my mother complaining that she couldn’t understand how he could miss it so often, and then not bother to pick up the fallen sock. She thought it was very unfair of him. I used to smile, thinking it was such a small matter.

  At the other window, facing the neighbor’s backyard, is a honeysuckle bush, long overgrown. In the summer, when my father cranked his window open wide, you could smell the fragrant flowers and watch the bees darting among the delicate yellow and white blooms. One day while he stood there, a BB tore through the upper pane of glass, missing his head by only a few inches. Our neighbors’ son was testing his new air rifle. My father marched over to their house and took the BB gun away because he said the boy–just a year older than I–was not responsible enough to use it. He put the gun into the trunk of our car, and when I asked him for it, he refused. I never saw it after that. The boy saved his money from his allowance and paid for the new window. We never talked of the incident after that.

  I leave the bedroom, and glance once at the other silent, other empty bedroom next to it. It is my mother’s. Or rather, it was. She died six years ago. A stroke came upon her late one night–I had seen her only a few hours before–and then she was gone, a vein in her head bursting without any warning. It was only a few months later that my father was diagnosed as having cancer. It cannot be a coincidence, I think.

  I eat my breakfast of toast and unsweetened tea in the dingy kitchen, at the table where he used to eat his breakfast, and I remember making him oatmeal. He never wanted anything else, just oatmeal. Oatmeal was filled with fiber, and he had read that that was good for you, was supposed to prevent cancer. Only it was too late; he had bowel cancer by then. But still he ate the oatmeal every day.

  I cooked it for him, and set the bowl in front of him, and watched him as he picked up the spoon, watched as the spoon made its quavering way to his mouth. I would look away, afraid I would cry.

  I used to cry a lot around
him, and he cried with me. Tears can be cleansing upon occasion, but these were not. They only made us feel worse. But somehow we couldn’t help it.

  I grab my purse and my jacket, and car keys and head out the front door.

  I test the door. It is locked, as I knew it would be. I test it again. A habit taken from my mother, I guess, who always checked things two and three times.

  I drive to work, a long commute, even on the freeway. I am employed at the University of Albuquerque across the river from the city. It’s a good job, not too difficult but with some challenge, with mostly pleasant people, and I am well-paid.

  And while I work, I do not remember.

  ****

  You don’t look so good today, Diana says right before we get ready for lunch. She sits at the next desk in this large office, and we talk often during the day while working. She is probably my closest friend, my only friend. Aren’t you sleeping? she asks.

  I shrug. Not really. I tell her that I’ve been having problems at night.

  She puts down her pen and looks at me sharply. What sort of problems?

  I fidget with the handful of paperclips on my desktop, unbending and bending them into grotesque shapes. Problems, I say.

  Insomnia?

  Sort of, I mutter. I cannot meet her eyes. I take a deep breath, then look up abruptly. I have a ghost in my house, I say lightly, thinking she will smile. It’s my father.

  She exhales sharply, as if she has been holding her breath. Her expression has not changed. At least she has not laughed at me.

  I wait for her to speak, but she doesn’t say a word. Had she heard me? I ask her.

  I heard. A ghost? Of your dad, you say?

  I nod.

  A ghost.

  Yes. Every night since his funeral I see him crawling up the floor of the hallway, just the way he did that one time right before he died. It’s awful.

  Even in the daytime, the image remains too bright, too persistent in my mind, and I close my eyes briefly, as if that would clear the picture.

  It’s been over two years since your dad’s death, Diana says, as if I do not know how long it’s been. I don’t think it’s a ghost, Becky. Not really.

  Why not? Why isn’t it a ghost?

  I think you’re just dreaming. I mean, how do you know you’re not? Why do you think you’re awake?

  Well, I see it so clearly–

  Which means it can’t be a dream? Of course not! Come on, it’s just memories. For some reason–and I’m not sure why–you still feel guilty about your dad’s death and what happened just before it. So your mind, which still hasn’t let go of all that, is conjuring up these weird images. They’re dreams, Becky. That’s all. It’s part of the natural grieving process. Yours has taken two years; some people take a much shorter time, while others never get through. It’s an individual thing. You can’t rush it, you can’t stop it. But you can work it out–mostly through talking. You haven’t done that, you know. Not really.

  I know, I say. I feel guilty again.

  Come on. It’s not the end of the world. You’re having some bad dreams, but that’s all. Your memories become your dreams, and that’s why you think you have a ‘ghost.’ She laughs. You don’t believe that, now do you?

  I smile. You’re right, Diana, you’re completely right, of course. And for the rest of that day I feel remarkably better.

  But then at five, I must head home once again, head back to that silent house.

  ****

  It is nighttime again, and for once I am in bed by ten. It is early July and too warm, with no breeze to cool me off, and I have only a light sheet across my body. I hope I can sleep through the night without awakening, but I know I won’t be able to. I haven’t been able to since I tended my father those last months. Not in two years have I slept completely through the night. I awaken each night, time after time, waiting to hear those sounds, waiting to hear him call my name.

  And sometimes he would do that, so faint that at first I didn’t hear him. When it happened more and more, I awoke at the slightest sound.

  But I would get up and go into his room. What did he want? I would ask, and sometimes my voice would be sharper than I wanted.

  He wanted to know what time it was. I would look at his clock with its luminous dial on the bookshelf behind his head, and I would tell him. One-seventeen; three-thirty-three; four-oh-five; five-fifteen. Whatever time it was then.

  Sometimes he wanted a drink of water, and I would hold his head up with one hand, as I guided his icy hand to the flexible straw in the glass and to his lips. Sometimes it ran out of his mouth, and I would wipe his face softly, as if he were a baby.

  Sometimes he wanted nothing, but I think he wanted just to see me, just to make sure that I was really there in the other room, that he hadn’t died yet.

  Sometimes I would get up and go into his room, even though he hadn’t called me, and I would watch him as he slept. Would watch his thin chest rise and fall so rapidly. Surely he couldn’t be asleep, not a natural sleep. But he was.

  Sometimes, as I watched, his breath would catch and hold for an impossibly long time, and I would wonder if this were it, if this were the moment of death, but then he would exhale, and I knew it wasn’t time.

  Each night, each day I wondered how much longer it could be.

  I prayed for his death. I didn’t want him to live any longer, not when it was like that. Not when he wasn’t the father I had known all my life, the tall and athletic man who was never sick, who never felt pain.

  He had accidents. Sometimes he couldn’t make it to the bathroom in time.

  Once he peed on himself in the kitchen as he stood at the sink, and I yelled at him when I saw the yellow puddling at his feet. I dabbed at his thin legs and the floor with paper towels, and I was crying for him, and for myself, but mostly I think it was because he was reduced to this, such a feeble old man, so unable to tend for himself.

  It is nighttime, and I cry, my pillow uncomfortable, my cheeks damp, and I ache inside.

  ****

  I am watching the television, looking at it with the sound turned off, trying to read the lips of the actors and actresses, trying to guess what’s going on. I think what I make up is much more interesting than what is really going on, and sometimes I laugh aloud, the sound odd in an otherwise silent house.

  I am staying up late. I am trying to prove to myself that this is only a dream as Diana claims it is, not a ghost.

  I yawn and stretch and realize that I’m getting tired, and here it’s only after nine. But I can’t go to bed. Not yet.

  I decide to step outside; perhaps the cool evening air will wake me up. I go out to the backyard and look up into the sky.

  The air over Albuquerque has grown thicker with smog these past years, but you can still see the stars, can still watch them.

  My father used to sit out here on the patio for hours every summer evening. He’d sit on a webbed chair with a can of beer in his hand and stare up at the sky. Looking for flying saucers, he would say with a knowing grin, and I would giggle.

  The memory feels good, and there is no ache inside. Simply a warmth.

  Memories, I tell myself, can be good, as well as bad. I grin.

  As I watch, I see something shimmer in the sky… a shooting star, or perhaps only the lights of a distant airplane. I prefer the former.

  The temperature is dropping. Even though it’s summer, the nights can be cool, and I shiver. I go back inside, and decide it’s time for bed.

  I take a quick bath, and see no blood in my mind’s eye, and I brush my teeth, and pull on my short nightgown, and go back to my bedroom. As I brush my hair, I hear a sound outside my room.

  I frown, lay the brush across my knees. Wait and wait and wait.

  And once more I see my father.

  I am not sleeping. I am awake. Too much awake.

  Diana was wrong.

  ****

  My father is a ghost, and he comes to me each night, each year. I do n
ot think he means to, but I don’t think he has any choice.

  I bring him here.

  It is my guilt that calls him.

  Even though I did all I could, I didn’t do enough. There had to be something more that I could have done for him. Something. I don’t know what. But there had to be something else.

  I look back, and I’m not happy with what I see. I yelled too much. I crabbed at him. I didn’t mean to, but I did. Sometimes it was just too much for me, day after day like this, and I would raise my voice. He would always look at me with his yellow-brown eyes, look at me and say nothing, and I would feel terrible, and I would apologize at once. But no words could take back the tone I had used. To my father.

  I forget the times when he asked me to tie his shoelaces, and he would sit on the organ bench because it was high and thus easy for him to sit on, and I would kneel in front of him and gently tie the laces, tie them for the seventh or eighth or ninth time that day. I forget the times when I helped him into the bathroom and he would send me away, too proud to let me see. I forget the times when I read to him from the newspaper, or talked about what I had done at work that day. I forget.

  I remember only the yelling, the anger, the resentment that my life was dying with him.

  During the day for a few hours I had aides come in to take care of him. They were expensive, but there was no choice if I was to continue working and bringing in money to support the two of us. Luckily, hospice provided an aide for a few hours a week, and that was good; that was some respite.

  But every evening when I came straight home from the office he was already in bed, his thin chenille bedspread pulled up to his chin, two winter-thick blankets spread across the bed. Even if it was July and August and in the 80’s or 90’s, he was freezing. Always cold, because the disease sucked the warmth from his blood. In the day, he wore a Haines tee-shirt under a heavy flannel shirt, thick woolen trousers and a bathrobe over that. And he turned the heat up when he thought I wasn’t looking.