“Wait’ll you taste my eggs, Papa,” Joy calls from the stove. “They’re delish.”
And they are. She has added spinach, cheese, and the last of the grain salad from Saturday night. It’s our favorite way of disposing of leftovers, our composting cuisine, and while an occasional creation doesn’t work, today’s does.
Between bites, Joy describes our most notable egg failures with grand distaste, but her eye is on the clock. At five before eight, she goes to the window in the dining room to check the front drive. Margo starts to ask. I gesture her silent, but that game is done when Joy shouts, “He’s here! I’m going.”
I rush to the front door, only to be hit by ocean air and screen when she is halfway down the walk.
Margo is beside me. “Who is that?”
The car is black. Thanks to the rain, its newness shines.
“Jack.”
Having pulled up at the end of our walk, he leans across to open the passenger door.
“Driving a Tahoe? Not his usual clunker?”
“Twenty years, Margo,” I remind her, then explain, “He needs the space in the car for cages and supplies. And for his dog,” I tack on, feeling a wave of guilt at having shut the dog off by himself last night. “Jack is a vet,” I add, watching to see if he looks our way. I see the chestnut of his hair and glimpse purple scrubs but no face.
“But why’s she going with him?”
“She talked herself into an internship. This was before she started working at Anne’s.” With the briefest glance our way, he waves and leaves. I want more, but don’t know what, especially with my sister right here. So, taking a cue from my daughter, I ask as the truck disappears, “What do we do about Anne?”
Margo says nothing. Arms folded, she is watching me from the door frame. With her wavy hair loose, her face clean, and her eyes probing, she looks so much like the Margo she used to be that it’s scary. Or flattering. She’s aged well.
I wait, but she remains silent. “What?” I finally ask.
“Do you love Jack?”
“I always loved Jack.”
“Still? Now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Like an old friend.”
“Is that what last night was about?” she asks innocently enough.
What does she want to hear? That all we did was talk? Or that Jack started bad-mouthing Dad, so I left? Or that he called Margo insane regarding our mothers? None of this is true, but I’d be willing to say any of these things if that will end it. Saying what people want to hear is my forte.
So here I am again, caught between pleasing others and asserting myself. And suddenly, what Margo wants me to say doesn’t matter. I can’t please others all the time. Last night proved that. There is a me inside that appears to have grown bigger than the me I was back then. If I am who I am now—if I am who I want to be—I have to act it.
“Last night,” I tell her, “was about my needing comfort and his being the one who could give it.”
She is quiet for several beats. Then, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” I snap, still in assertive mode. “There’s nothing wrong with my needing Jack. He may be irreverent, but he is honest and smart. He understands what I’m about, and he cares. If you’re going to talk about how awful he was twenty years ago—”
“I’m not,” she interrupts. “What I meant was that I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you.”
Having been ready to argue, I’m suspended while the apology registers. Then I laugh in relief. “You covered for me with Joy. That was the best.”
“So,” she gives me a reprieve from Jack, “is Anne pregnant, and why did she call you the bastard daughter?”
“I can’t find my comb,” Dad says as he comes from the kitchen. Breathing heavily, he collapses to sit on the stairs. “Someone took my comb.”
“Who would take your comb?” Margo asks gently enough, but he is visibly struggling.
“I don’t know, but it isn’t there. I can’t find it.” Eyes clearing, he looks from Margo to me. This isn’t paranoia, I realize. It’s stark honesty. The words come out in a rush, as if he knows how brief his window of lucidity may be. “I can never find things. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I’m supposed to be. I can’t work. I can’t drive. I can’t finish my crossword puzzle.” Planting his feet apart on the lower tread for balance, he puts straight arms on his pajama knees, his cast barely breaking the cuff. “Listen to me,” he orders, the Tom Aldiss of old. “It’s clear. Right now. She says every old person is like this, but they’re not.”
“She?” Margo asks.
His brow tics as he searches. “Anne,” he finally says, and his blue eyes drill us again. “You’re both here now, so I’m telling you. I don’t want this. I want to end it. I tried to get pills, but my connections are gone. I’d drive over the bluff, but she hides the keys. So, I have a gun.”
We both gasp. I’m telling myself that suicides don’t announce their intentions as clearly as this, and that when they do it’s only a cry for help which we’re here to answer, when Margo says, “Well, you did have one, only we were worried about it being in the potting shed where anyone could get it, so we disposed of it.”
I prepare for an outburst. I’m thinking that he looks frail, that surely Margo and I can subdue him until help arrives. But his thoughts have snagged on something she said.
Incredibly, he smiles. “The potting shed,” he breathes. “That’s where I put it. I forgot.” The smile fades. “See? I don’t remember things. It’s been a long time since I put it there.”
“Did you have it on the boat with you?” Margo asks. “That night?”
I’m thinking of ways to prevent suicide, who to call, how to talk down a man like Tom Aldiss. But Margo is right raising this. It’s an opportunity we can’t ignore.
“What night?” he asks.
“On the boat.”
He gives a quick headshake. “No gun on the boat.” He frowns. “Didn’t I say that?”
“How did you get a gun?” I try, to which he snorts.
“Any fool can get a gun.”
“When did you buy it?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Maybe last year?” His gaze moves to the dining room window, eyes distant again. “It’s self-protection.”
“Against what?” Margo cries. This is the first hint that she is as disturbed by the discussion as I am. “There are no intruders here.”
“The future,” he says. “When my mind goes, but my body stays. I don’t want to live that way.”
Crossing to him, I sit on the stairs. “That’s not the answer.”
“What else…” He shrugs, but it’s the look on his face that moves me. It is gentle in ways I’ve never known, gentle and apologetic and sad. Here is a humble Tom Aldiss wanting to end his life.
I grip his arm. “Don’t, Dad. Please. You have lots of good times. Can’t you still enjoy them?”
“Enjoy what?” he asks and proceeds, with tragic insight and total lucidity, to add to the list. “I can’t write an opinion. I don’t understand the ones I read. I can’t figure out how to use the phone. And who would I call? People call me to see how I am. I’ve known them my whole life. They have to tell me that. It’s embarrassing. Same with going into town undressed.”
“You were wearing pajamas,” I correct, only then realizing my mistake.
“She told you. Embarrassing,” he says, seeming oblivious to the fact that he’s also wearing pajamas now. “And Lina. Babysitter. I’ll need more than that soon.”
“Not soon,” I argue because I hate this. For all the times he was difficult, this is the worst. He is begging us to understand why he hates his life in ways that would have had me on my knees if I hadn’t been perched on the stairs.
He rumbles on. “I don’t know what I like for breakfast. Don’t know the beach. Don’t know shells. I can’t find clams. I can’t take the boat out.”
“I’ll take you,” Margo offers, on the stairs with us now.
&nb
sp; But he’s focused on me, just as I always wanted him to be, though not in this situation. “That little girl plays the piano—”
“Joy.”
“—and I don’t know the names of the songs.”
“Can’t you just enjoy the sound?”
“But I don’t know the names.”
“But we’re all here, Dad,” Margo reasons, “all three of us, plus Joy. Don’t you want to be with us?”
He looks up, seeming surprised to see her. “Where’s your mother? She should be home by now.”
His blue eyes fade as they slip from Margo to me. “Ach,” he says, “the potting shed. Potting.” Pushing himself up from the stairs, he wavers. Margo catches one arm, me the other, and we boost him to his feet. “I’ll talk with her.”
He opens the front door, looks out, then closes it and returns to the kitchen. On his heels, we follow him through the mudroom, but when he lets himself out and, leaning crookedly on the railing, starts down the steps, Margo catches my arm to hold me back.
“Give him time,” she whispers.
“How much?” I ask as he plods unsteadily over the grass.
“I don’t know. But he’s talking with her. It’s all she ever wanted.”
We watch him open the door of the potting shed as he has apparently done many times these last twenty years. We can’t see him once he’s inside.
“What if he tries something?” I whisper, afraid to say it louder.
“Like what?” she whispers back. “We found the gun. It’s gone.”
The words are barely out of her mouth when we hear a sound that can’t be anything but.
Chapter 22
I tear free of Margo’s hold. Yes, we took the gun, but that sharp crack suggests there’s another. What had he said—that any fool can get a gun?
My father is no fool. I race across the grass thinking that if he bought a new one each time he forgot where the old one was, he might own three or four or five. And how many more hidden panels are there?
Always that little bit faster, Margo reaches the door first and screams. Tom is on the floor in a crumple of pajamaed arms and legs, skin white, eyes open and unseeing. Falling to her knees, she shakes his shoulder gently at first, then less so. “Dad? Dad?”
He doesn’t blink or twitch. There is an utter stillness to him. The only sounds in the shed are frightened ones coming from Margo and me.
Having raised a child on my own, I know the drill, but reality is something else. What to do first? I manage to cry, “911.” Then, “CPR!”
Dead weight is all I can I think as we roll him to his back. While Margo starts chest compression, I race back to the house for a phone. After calling 911 from the kitchen, I tear upstairs for my cell, run back to the shed, and crouch on Dad’s opposite side. Margo’s body jolts with each push of her arms, and my own heart is pounding, but he doesn’t move.
“Anything?” I ask.
She shakes her head no without breaking the rhythm of her palms on his chest.
Anne. I call her, but she doesn’t pick up. I try a second and third time in quick succession, prepared to keep at it—when she clicks in with an annoyed, “I’m working.”
“Dad shot himself,” I shout before she can hang up. “He’s on the floor of the potting shed, and he isn’t breathing. You have to come home.”
“Oh please, Mallory,” she mocks, “I’m not an idiot. He can’t shoot himself. I got rid of the gun.”
“He must have had another—Annie, you need to come!”
She falters then. “Is this a joke?”
“No joke,” I wail, staring at Dad’s lifeless body. “He shot himself!”
Then I realize that he hasn’t. If he’d shot himself, there would be blood. But his head is intact, and there is blood neither on his pajamas nor pooling out from under his body. I don’t smell it either, just a wisp of something match-like fading into the ubiquitous smell of the sea. Bewildered, I look around and, yes, a handgun lies on the cement floor by a stack of clay pots, though whether he fired it himself or it went off when it dropped, I can’t tell. All I know is, gunshot is not the problem.
“Heart,” I say with dawning horror, recalling the shortness of breath I had seen several times and ignored. “It must be his heart.”
Anne must be remembering the same thing, because she says a frightened, “Okay,” and ends the call.
“He gets breathless,” I tell Margo in a rush. “Remember how he sat down hard on the stairs just now after walking two steps from the kitchen? He was worse walking up the hill from the square and even going down the beach stairs yesterday morning. I knew there was a problem, but he kept saying there wasn’t.”
“He knew,” Margo says with one downward push, then with another, “Didn’t want. Intervention. But he came. For the gun. He wanted to die.”
“He can’t die now,” I argue in a high-pitched voice, “not when we’ve all just come, not when he’s still thinking straight, not when there are still so many questions.”
“He. Wanted to die,” she repeats through gritted teeth.
She is angry. But so am I. “He is not allowed to tell his heart to stop.”
“Tom Aldiss. Makes his own rules.”
“Do you feel anything?”
“No!” Her bark shakes me. Margo is the oldest, the strongest, the smartest. One word is all it takes.
“Is there anything else we can try?”
“No!”
“Can I take over for you?”
“I’m good,” she says, which is a crazy remark but one I understand. She needs to do this herself. Through the rhythmic up and down of her body, she says, “Meet the EMTs. Bring them here.”
I don’t want to leave her alone, but she needs this, too. Tom Aldiss is her father, no questions asked. Whether justified or not, she will be feeling guilt for not being part of his life all these years. This effort to save him is redemptive for her.
My car is still alone in the driveway. Phone in hand, I call Jack, fully expecting voicemail, relieved when he picks up.
“She’s fine,” he says with a smile, but his voice is low, like he’s with a client, which would give me pause any other time, just not now.
“Something happened to Tom!” I blurt. “I think he had a heart attack. I think he’s dead.”
Jack sobers. “Where is he?”
“The potting shed. Margo’s doing CPR. I’ve called 911, but, God, how long do they take?”
“Not long. Do you want me to bring Joy home?”
“No, uh, not yet.” Squeezing my eyes shut, I finger my forehead and try to decide. “Uh, maybe. No. I don’t know.” Yes, I want Joy with me, but no, I do not. She was barely three when my mother passed and has no memory of death. Schoolmates have lost grandparents, one an estranged dad, but Joy’s emotional involvement with those was nil. This is immediate and personal, the darkest moment of life. I want to shield her but am not sure that’s right.
“How much of this should she see?” I ask Jack, and there is nothing rhetorical about the question. I need his opinion.
He is silent for a beat before offering a soothing, “Nothing yet. The uncertainty will be hard, and she’s happy enough here. Call me when you know more.”
With the crackle of tires on gravel, the Volvo appears.
Ending the call, I meet Anne, who races past me toward the potting shed. I’m picturing the scene inside, with Margo pumping on Dad’s chest, when a heavier crunch of gravel marks the climb of the ambulance up the bluff.
* * *
They do everything they can. When he doesn’t respond to CPR, they try defibrillation, and when that doesn’t revive him, they try an IV, even intubation.
Nothing.
We are a frightened trio, crowding at the door of the shed since there is no room for us inside, what with three large paramedics and their equipment. We don’t know any of the men; Margo and I have been gone too long, and if Anne knows names, she’s too upset to say. She knows the police, who were alerte
d by the 911 call, and start arriving, one squad car after the next, but she pays them little heed. Her focus is Dad. Repeatedly, she begs them to get him to the hospital, until Margo says a soft, “They’re doing it right.”
“But it’s not working!”
“They’d have to stop CPR to put him into the ambulance,” she explains in a tempering voice. “They don’t want to do that. Better to work on him here.”
“She’s right,” one of the cops says from behind us, to which Margo adds, “It’s protocol.”
But Anne is indignant. “How do you know?”
“Dan’s mother had a heart attack. This is what they did.”
“Like you were right there? You hate his mother.”
Margo’s voice remains low. “After his dad died, we were all she had. We were the first ones she called when she felt chest pains. It was the middle of the night. We arrived at the same time as the ambulance, so we saw what they did.”
I’m not sure whether Anne accepts Margo’s authority, or whether she is simply worn down by fear, but she grows silent. And so, we huddle there at the door, craning around for whatever glimpses we can get of Dad when the men switch places. They are in constant touch with the hospital, low voices alternating with a radioed one. None are hopeful.
Ten minutes pass, then twenty. After forty minutes with no response, they sit back on their heels, arms limp, radio silent. The eyes that meet ours hold regret.
“There has to be something else,” Anne protests, “maybe this is just a blip, maybe he’s just zoning out because he isn’t always completely clear with his thoughts, but he is totally healthy…” She is still talking when, apparently notified by the cops, Bill appears at the door and draws her out.
Margo and I squeeze farther inside. “Is there any chance?” I don’t hold Anne’s false hope, but I have to ask.
A Week at the Shore Page 27
