Father's Day

by Simon Van Booy

  VI

  THE NIGHT BEFORE her father’s arrival, Harvey had a bad dream. Everything she cared about in life was gone.

  In the shower Harvey pieced together what she could remember of the dream: She had somehow slept through her alarm, then arrived at the Charles de Gaulle Airport hours late to find it completely abandoned. Taped to the walls in baggage claim (the way she taped things above her desk at work) were photos of her as a child with her father. They were doing things she had forgotten about. But in the dream it was all happening for the first time.

  Then, at the empty airport, Harvey remembered that the airplane her father was on had crashed into the sea, or had never taken off, or never existed—and when she looked outside, realized the airport had been closed for years. A runway cracked and overgrown with weeds. Birds circling the control tower.

  In the dream she had lived always there. Had never been born in the same way she would never die—and the details of her life conjured from emptiness and longing—her father’s death as much a fantasy as his life.

  Then she was in the hospital.

  A child is being born.

  First a head. Then a glistening shoulder. A film of blood across the body. A clear, sticky liquid over the mouth wiped hurriedly by a nurse.

  Inhalation, then screaming.

  The baby is weighed. Her limbs flap because she doesn’t know what they’re for. She is alive but sees nothing and will remember nothing. This is a world we call the world.

  BY THE TIME Harvey was out of the shower, the remaining fragments of her dream had come apart like tissue in water. She stood in its wake at the kitchen window, taking mouthfuls of cereal.

  Across the courtyard, figures moved between parted curtains. The white corner of a nightgown. The gleam of a pan. A single hand turning, then steam from a tap.

  If Harvey wanted coffee before six A.M., she had to hold a blanket over the espresso machine to muffle what sounded like a heavy truck passing through her kitchen. She had learned early on that otherwise affable Parisian neighbors were intolerant of any noise not made by the human voice.

  She drank her coffee standing up. Then she rinsed the cup out.

  The closet in Harvey’s bedroom had a sliding door with a mirror. She dressed carefully, then looked at herself. She had a pair of new ballet flats that some friends had helped her pick out at Galeries Lafayette. She took them from the black shoebox and removed tissue stuffed in the toes.

  The taxi stand near her apartment on the rue Caulaincourt had only one car waiting. The bald driver was reading a newspaper over the steering wheel. He opened the window and asked where she was going.

  Taped to the dashboard was a tiny calendar with certain days circled. Also, the photograph of a boy. It was early for a Sunday, and Harvey asked the driver if his son would still be in bed. The driver replied that he’d most likely be up playing video games. His wife worked in a factory making in-flight meals but had weekends off. Sunday-morning traffic was always easy, he said, except in August, when everyone was going on holiday. Then he drove with one hand on the wheel and didn’t speak until they were almost at the airport.

  The photograph of the boy made Harvey think of Isobel, sitting at the table with her crayon, listening to her father’s instruction, as people learned to read and write.

  Harvey enjoyed the moments of their family life that coincided with her weekly lesson. Last month a doll shoe had been lost and was not between the cushions of the sofa nor in the transparent case of the handheld vacuum. Harvey heard Leon tell his daughter to wait until the lesson was finished before turning the apartment over. Another time Isobel’s bedroom was so untidy that her father just stood there shaking his head. “It’s like we’ve been robbed,” he said, “except they brought toys.”

  Weeks earlier, Leon had found mouse droppings in a kitchen cupboard. Isobel spent the afternoon looking for the mouse hole, which she told Harvey would probably be a small, arched opening somewhere in the wall. A week later, their lesson was interrupted by screams of horror when Isobel discovered a box of mousetraps in the weekly groceries.

  The echoes of play, and the rituals of their domestic life, made Harvey remember things about her own childhood on Long Island.

  It was not difficult now for her to recall when her father was the same age as Leon. But somehow her father had seemed always older—or never quite so young as he must have been to himself.

  As her taxi neared the terminal where her father’s airplane would soon land, Harvey closed her eyes and pictured her room growing up. It came with the pale darkness of summer nights, the muffled voices from television, and the occasional rising laugh of her father, sitting alone in the next room.

  Then she was able to smell the garage in winter and even brush the damp sides of a box of Christmas things kept under the counter below her father’s tools. These sleeping objects, now less than shadow, all conjured unintentionally by association, were not like most memories—these Harvey felt in her body, a longing without pain.

  VII

  ONCE INSIDE THE airport, Harvey found an empty row of molded seats near the revolving doors and settled into the stillness of someone with nothing to do.

  Her father’s flight would be edging the polar regions of Canada. He might be asleep, or eating, or leafing through an in-flight magazine.

  She looked at her phone and scrolled through the text messages. Then she checked her in-box, though the studio where she worked was never open on Sunday.

  When an orange bus pulled up outside, revolving doors sifted people into the terminal two or three at a time. Some were in a hurry, and frantically scanned their passports at self-check-in kiosks.

  Occasionally a tour group came through like a slow-moving school of fish. Someone at the front held up a paddle for the others to follow. Most of the tourists were Asian, and some were beginning the journey of old age.

  When the cafés in Terminal 2F began serving lunch, Harvey bought a magazine and something to eat. When she returned to her seat, the row had been taken over by a Senegalese family repacking their cases. Harvey went outside and watched people smoke last cigarettes. Then she strolled over to Terminal 2E and found somewhere to sit near the lost-baggage kiosk. The woman on duty wore an old-fashioned hat with an Air France badge on the side. Harvey could see a little behind her desk. The woman had taken off her shoes and was talking on the phone. When other airport staff appeared at her counter, she kissed them on both cheeks but kept one hand cupped over the receiver.

  By the time Harvey had finished her baguette sandwich, Terminal 2E had filled up. There was now a line outside the ladies’ toilets, and an English woman complaining loudly about having to pay a euro to go in.

  A boisterous queue had formed at the lost-baggage kiosk, and the woman in the Air France hat who had taken off her shoes was now handing out forms and pens.

  Then the fragrance of a girl with only a handbag on her shoulder. She must be here to meet someone too, Harvey thought—and wished she had remembered to put on a little perfume herself. She pictured the bottle at home on her dresser, admiring itself in the mirror. Next to the perfume were hairpins in a saucer. There was also a photograph of Harvey with her father. They were in front of the house. It was sunny. Her father crouched so their heads were even. You could see the yellow siding and the house number in black script. Harvey couldn’t recall who’d taken the photo. Maybe a neighbor, or Wanda from Social Services.

  Harvey had not seen her father in almost two years. They wrote to each other a few times a week. His emails were short, but she could hear his voice speaking the words to her.

  Harvey pictured her one-bedroom apartment back in Montmartre and tried to imagine how her father would react to it. As the date of his arrival had neared, she’d found herself adding little touches to the decor—moving vases of flowers around, trying to figure out where each one looked best.

  She would wake at unfamiliar hours. Sometimes just lying there, rolling back over her life. Other times s
he got up and cleaned the sink or organized bottles in the bathroom cabinet. Cleared out a drawer. Threw away old magazines. Wiped a layer of dust from the top of the refrigerator, then stood looking at the drawings Isobel had given her.

  Sometimes she lay awake until dawn, then stood at the kitchen window with something to eat, staring into her neighbors’ apartments across the courtyard. In summer, with the windows open, Harvey listened to their arguments and tried to figure out whose side she was on. If only one voice was raised, she knew it was a phone conversation.

  Sometimes, at night, she could hear people having sex, and sometimes an old woman on the first floor woke up screaming. Monsieur Fabrice said that when she was a girl during the war, her parents and older sister had been taken.

  On New Year’s Eve and Bastille Day, Harvey could always hear the thumping bass of different parties, which Monsieur Fabrice would have stopped if he hadn’t already removed his hearing aids for the night (intentionally, Harvey suspected).

  And each day, Sacré-Coeur’s ancient bells tumbled down through the streets of Montmartre. Harvey did not hear the sound so much as feel it, the way a child in the womb must feel the tolling of its mother’s heart, long before the coming separation.

  VIII

  AFTER GRADUATING FROM a four-year art school, Harvey had taken a job at Dairy Barn, a drive-through convenience store on Long Island near where she grew up. People pulled up to her window and told her what they wanted (usually cigarettes or coffee or beer or milk or diapers or toilet paper). She finished around eight o’clock in the evening, then went home to draw or watch movies in her bedroom until falling asleep. Sometimes her dad took her out for Mexican food or to Jones Beach for a walk along the sand.

  In the months after Harvey’s college graduation, one of her friends from high school got married at the Excelsior on Jericho Turnpike. People read stories onstage about the bride and groom from pieces of paper with their hands shaking.

  Friends of the groom told Harvey she could get a job at the new outlet mall in Babylon. Other friends from college insisted she return to the city and look for a share in Bushwick or Greenpoint. She could work as a waitress, they said, at one of the new coffee shops on Graham or Manhattan Avenue.

  Harvey listened politely but was confident in her abilities as an animator. Her final thesis—a full-length comic about an outlaw motorcycle gang whose members all had disabilities like Asperger’s or obsessive-compulsive disorder—had won the Alumni Prize and gotten printed in the school magazine.

  Most of her wages from Dairy Barn she used to print her portfolio and send out by courier to prospective employers.

  ABOUT A YEAR after Harvey graduated, someone called from Europe—an art director for a creative media firm. During an interview through Skype, Sophie said she was crazy about Harvey’s outlaw bike gang comic strip. The firm had several clients who wanted edgy comic strips on their packaging—including one of France’s biggest yogurt manufacturers, who planned on targeting adolescent boys. Two weeks later, Harvey was working full-time as an assistant animator at the firm’s headquarters in Paris.

  Sophie had been there to meet Harvey at the airport, and found her easy to get along with. Sometimes Harvey invited Sophie back to her small apartment in Montmartre, where they took off their shoes, put their feet on the couch, and drank wine. They laughed and gossiped about work, the men who were interested in them, and the ones they thought were gay. Harvey warmed up little bites in the microwave, or cut cheese and saucisson sec.

  IN THE DAYS before she left Long Island for a new life in Paris, Harvey cooked things that could be frozen and reheated. She also hid notes around the house that would make her father laugh or remember things they had done together.

  Driving to JFK, the traffic was slow because of an accident. When they saw planes circling overhead, her father said they were close.

  At the line for security, Harvey turned and went back. “I can’t go,” she said. “I can’t do this.”

  Her father held her and said nothing.

  Then she picked up her bag and rejoined the line. He watched her inch along, then hung around the terminal until the screen said her flight had taken off.

  When someone at the United desk confirmed that her plane was in the air, Harvey’s father bought a cup of coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts and sat watching the bags and cases move along the belts. Then he followed signs for the AirTrain.

  After looping the terminals once, he got off and looked for the section where he had parked only hours before. He retraced the route he had walked with his daughter. Remembered the weight of her suitcase. Then he sat in the car outside airport parking.

  He could imagine Harvey on the plane listening to her iPod or making conversation with the person next to her.

  He remembered what she was wearing when they said goodbye. How he’d wiped the tears from her cheek with his hand.

  He felt that something had come to an end, yet everything around him was going on as normal.

  He stopped for gas near the Belt Parkway and wondered if he should have tried to enjoy things more—marveling at the finality of moments he now recognized as happiness.

  Then he drove to Jones Beach and walked up and down, as if trying to find what was already his.

  IX

  SOPHIE MET HARVEY at the airport, and they rode in a taxi to a hotel on the rue de Rivoli. Harvey’s room looked out on a Ferris wheel.

  But Harvey soon found a place she liked in Montmartre. The apartment complex had a birdcage elevator with a sliding grate door. The elevator moved slowly between floors and would not come at all if the grate had not been properly closed by the previous occupant. There was red paisley carpet on the stairs, and hall lights clicked on when they sensed motion. Most residents were long past retirement and had lived in the building since their glory days in the 1970s.

  The concierge, Monsieur Fabrice, was a slight, yellow-haired man in his seventies who was once connected to the fashion world of Yves Saint Laurent. He lived now on the first floor with two cats, oversize velvet cushions, and heavy-framed photographs of Richard, his late husband of four decades.

  Monsieur Fabrice told Harvey where to put her garbage, not to flush the toilet between midnight and six unless absolutely necessary, and that the hillsides of Montmartre were once covered with windmills.

  The day Harvey moved in, she kicked off her shoes at the front door, but then heard her father’s voice and carried them dutifully to the closet. The apartment smelled of fresh paint, and it would take time to pick out furniture.

  Everyone was nicer to Harvey than she had anticipated, and her new cell phone quickly filled up with numbers. She learned early on not to mistake the French aversion to change for unfriendliness.

  Harvey’s new workspace soon resembled her desk at home, a mess of colored markers, scraps of paper, comics, magazines, gum wrappers, empty soda cans, and various Apple devices she needed to do her job. It was one of many desks arranged in a square under an ancient skylight. Heavy rain drummed upon the glass in spring and fall—and in winter, interns balanced on ladders, melting snow with hair dryers.

  Harvey loved Paris most in springtime, when sudden showers swelled the Seine, turning the water brown, and birds returned to the parks, where people ate lunch under statues dismembered by weather or furred over with moss.

  In the occasional handwritten letter from home, her father shared news of his life and goings-on in the neighborhood, and would always mention some detail or moment from childhood—such as the time they went to the mansion at Old Westbury Gardens during a heat wave. Harvey had taught him to do cartwheels on the grand lawn, but the sight of him trying made her scream with laughter.

  After, they went to Ben’s Kosher Deli at Wheatley Plaza, and had potato pancakes with applesauce, rainbow cookies, and grape juice. Outside the restaurant, lying on the low wall of a small fountain, too hot and too full to do anything, Harvey asked her father for a penny because she wanted to make a wish.

 
; She told him to make one too, and he wished that nothing would change.

  “You weren’t supposed to tell me,” she scolded. “Now it won’t come true!”

  SHE WOULD PRESENT to him the fountains of Paris; the lush gardens; the Church of the Madeleine and Notre Dame. Maybe they would trek to Versailles and get some pictures together in a rowboat, or sharing cake at Marie Antoinette’s house . . .

  The last parcel Harvey received from the United States was not from her father but had a return address in Franklin, Wisconsin. The shipping to Paris had cost more than the item itself. Harvey’s hands had searched among the balled-up pages of some midwestern regional weekly until she felt the smooth leather sides and rough stitching on the seams.

  It wasn’t the actual baseball from that day, but was still a baseball. The other objects that made up his Father’s Day gift were already packed into the shoebox in her closet.

  She had stayed awake so many nights rehearsing the moment she would give it to him, and had already picked the restaurant where he would open the box and discover the first piece. They would be sitting outside under lamps on a terrace. He would be staring at the shoebox, wondering what was inside and preparing to be overjoyed, regardless of the contents.

  Sometimes, in the shallow waters of sleep, Harvey invented some vague speech or a few sentences to accompany his gift. Other times she just lay in silent thought, floating upon the surface of possibility.

  X

  AS PASSENGERS STREAMED into the arrivals terminal, Harvey raised her sign.

  WELCOME TO PARIS DAD!

  People read it and smiled.

  After making it, Harvey had worried that he might be embarrassed but decided to hold it up anyway. She was going to write JASON on the sign but thought DAD would be better. It would be something for him to look back on, to put in his letters, or to tell coworkers at the supermarket when they asked about his big trip.