by Lily King
“Don’t,” Jonathan says as I pull away from him. “Please don’t.”
But I’m already across the room, reaching for the receiver. “Garvey, what’s wrong?”
“Oh fucking Christ. There you are.”
“What’s going on?”
“Oh my God. Dad. Dad is what’s going on.”
“Is he okay?” I feel that cool whiteness that happens just before you hear someone is dead.
Garvey starts laughing or crying, I’m not sure which. “No, he is not okay or I wouldn’t have been leaving you so many goddamn messages.”
I look at the machine. A red 5 flashes. “Please calm down and tell me—”
“You haven’t been here. You have no idea what I’ve seen in the past—”
“Garvey, you are scaring the shit out of me. What’s going on?”
“Catherine left him.”
He’s alive. That’s all I care about. “When?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a week ago.”
I wait for the rest.
“He is a fucking mess.”
I snort. “Tell me about it.”
“No, Daley. He’s totally lost his shit. He’s threatening to kill all his dogs. And Hugh fired him. It was Hugh’s wife who called me. He’s drunk ‘round the clock. He’s unrecognizable.”
“Unrecognizable would be Dad sober. Dad drunk is not at all foreign to me.” All those years that I had to go up to Myrtle Street every weekend, every vacation, while Garvey showed up for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.
“Daley.” His voice cracks. I haven’t heard him like this since Mom died. “You gotta come here and help me out.”
“What? No, Garvey. I’m driving to California tomorrow.” He knows all about Berkeley. He calls us Malibu Smart Barbie and Black Marxist Ken.
“He’s talked about offing himself.”
“Oh, come on. He’d destroy every living thing on this planet before he’d kill himself.”
“No, Daley, you have to believe me. I think he might hurt himself. I need some backup here.”
“I’m not coming. Not right now. I have a job that’s about to start in California.”
“Stop saying California like it’s so important. I’m in Massachusetts and I need your help with our father. Two, three days, that’s all I’m asking. Just to kind of settle him down. You’re good with him.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You are.”
“I couldn’t even get there tomorrow. I’ve got to send out this article I just finished and have lunch with my advisor and—”
“I know. You’ve very busy. Get here when you can. Just for a day or two.”
“Goddammit, Garvey.”
“Thank you,” he says. “Jesus Christ, Daley, thank you.”
Jonathan is sitting on the side of the bed, his head in his hands. I sit beside him. I have no clothes on.
“I have to, Jon. I have to. Garvey sounds really freaked out.”
“He always sounds freaked out.”
“Not like this. My stepmother has taken off and my father is falling apart.”
“What can you do in two days to fix that? Nothing.”
“I don’t want blood on my hands. I don’t want to hear that my father shot himself while I drove to California.”
“That’s just Garvey being hyperbolic.”
“He needs my help.”
“I don’t think you’ve spoken to your father since I’ve known you.”
“Probably not.”
“But within seconds you’ve decided to fly off in the wrong direction to a man who’s not even a part of your life.”
“Garvey needs help.”
“Are you going to tell your father you’re moving in with a black man?”
“Not if there are any knives around.”
He doesn’t smile. “Don’t do this. Don’t go back there.”
He’s still trying to persuade me to head west when I squeeze into my car the next afternoon.
We’re tired. We’ve argued in circles since last night. And now I’m doing it—I’m about to drive away in the wrong direction.
“Daley,” he says. He squats beside the open car door and holds my hands. It’s still the same feeling from the general store, every time our hands touch. “Please be careful.” He, too, has an uneasy relationship with the future. We understand each other in that way.
“I’ll be fine.”
“Your father has a lot of power.”
“You’re confusing me with Julie. My father has no power over me. He wasn’t even a father.” I see he is scared for me, far more scared than I am. Clearly I’ve told him too much.
“He still has the power to hurt you.”
“No, he doesn’t. It’s all scar tissue now.”
“I’ll be at the yellow door a week from Monday,” he says, kissing me one last time.
“I’ll see you through the sea glass window.”
And then I start the Datsun and drive east.
10
You can’t get to my father’s house from the highway without passing the Water Street Apartments. I didn’t mean to come here first. I meant to go straight to Dad’s, but I find myself peering into my bedroom window. It’s someone’s home office now, with two computers, a fax machine, and a leather swivel chair. The posters of Robert Redford, Billy Jack, and the Fonz are gone. Paul would have taken them down when he moved out the summer after my mother died. I’m certain he’s rolled them up neatly in tubes; he’s saved everything for Garvey and me in storage somewhere.
My mother died instantly. People tried to comfort us with that. But to whom was that a comfort? To me? I would have liked to see her one last time, no matter how crushed her body was; I would have liked to say goodbye, even if she couldn’t have heard me. Was it a comfort to her? Who would choose to die instantly, without a chance to process the transition? But then, I don’t like to be startled. I don’t like to be surprised. She and Paul had eaten dinner in Boston, he’d gone to get the car, she’d decided to cross Tremont to make it easier for him to pick her up, and a car had struck her. The driver had had a few drinks in him; my mother was prone to daydreaming. It’s hard to say what really happened. No one claimed to have seen.
I walk around to the living room windows. The current tenants have a sofa where we had one, a large dining table where our small one was. I’d been in my dorm room when Paul called. I was a sophomore in college. My roommate was dating a hockey player who’d just gotten back from a game. His shoulder pads were leaning against the wall by the phone. Paul was crying. The inside of the pads were streaked with filth. I just talked to her last night. I think I told this to Paul many times. It might have been the only thing I said. I couldn’t think of anything else. It was the only thing that made sense. Garvey came and got me a few hours later.
I often try to remember my mother’s funeral. It was at the little Episcopalian church she used to take me to before she left my father. I can remember those Sundays: my blue velvet coat, the white gloves, and my mother’s long prayers on her knees on needlepoint cushions. I don’t think she went to church after she left him. I don’t think she needed to. But I can’t recall the funeral. I don’t know what was said. All I remember about that day, that whole week, was my father’s absence.
Garvey thought my expectations were ridiculous. “You’re going to make yourself sick your whole life if you think he’s ever going to behave like a father to you,” he told me as we lay on the twin beds in my room after the funeral. “We’re basically orphans now. Get used to it.” But I could not.
I think I believed that with my mother dead the barrier between me and my father would fall magically away. I spent the second half of my sophomore year of college waiting for him to call me. I took a job that summer in a restaurant in Rhode Island and sent him my new number on a postcard, and he never called it. I didn’t visit him before I went back to school. I spent Christmas with a friend’s family. And then, spring break of my junior year, I took a b
us to Boston and a train to Ashing and appeared at the kitchen door where he was feeding the dogs. “Well, well,” he said. “You pregnant or broke or both?” I stayed the night. It was just the three of us. Catherine made a roast. As they got drunk, then drunker, I waited for them to slip and make a jab about my mother, the way they always did. I waited to catch them. I was going to make a scene. A huge hair-pulling scene. For God’s sake, she’s dead. Can’t you leave her alone now? But they never mentioned her. He hugged me goodbye at the train the next day. “You’s a good kid for visiting,” he said. I spent the rest of the break off campus, in a friend’s empty apartment, alone, sobbing. I had held off the grief with anger towards my father, but now I was blindsided by it, terrified by the sudden gaping hole of my mother’s absence. She was my ballast, my counterweight to the downward pull of Myrtle Street, and she was gone.
I take one last look at the apartment. My mother’s toes used to snap when she walked barefoot. Alone in the bathroom she talked out loud and made herself laugh. I was unhappy when we lived here together. I ricocheted from this apartment to my father’s house for seven years, until I went to college. I was never able to please either household. At my father’s I was too bookish, too liberal, too much like my mother; at my mother’s I was moody, mercurial, and under-achieving in school. I’m sorry she can’t know me now. My daughter is a tenured professor at Berkeley, she might have been able to say in a few years. She would have liked that. She would have liked Jonathan.
I continue on toward Myrtle Street. The BMW in the bank parking lot might be Catherine’s. She’ll go back to him. I feel sure of it. She just needs a few days to cool off. I cross the railroad tracks and head up the hill. The houses are larger on this side of town, big clapboard Capes and Colonials with wraparound porches and pots of daisies on the wide steps before their front doors. There are hammocks and swing sets and lacrosse goals in the long green yards. The harbor glitters behind them. I can smell the salt in the air. It’s heavy, humid air. I need sleep. Garvey will have to let me have some when I get there.
I park next to Garvey’s van. It’s one of the small ones. He has his own moving company now, a fleet of six trucks with flying refrigerators painted all over them. The dogs go berserk at the sight of my car, the three of them, a tan one, a black one, and an auburn one, chasing it and then positioning themselves in front of the car door, their legs and chests motionless as statues, their mouths and throats furious at the foreign invasion. They make a ridiculous racket. The older I get, the more my father’s dogs exhaust me.
“Calm down,” I tell them coldly as they triple-team me all the way up the path. They are big dogs, retrievers of some kind. Something stirs on the porch. A little white and brown thing. A bunny? Then it bounds down the steps, or it tries to bound, but it ends up moving sideways, its hind legs stronger and braver than those in front. It runs right at me with no barking, then scrapes all its little paws at my jeans as if trying to climb straight up. The other dogs stop barking to watch.
“You’re a little hairball,” I say, laughing at its smashed-in face, its wet black nose. I scoop it up and it snorts a tiny spray at me. The tag on its collar says Maybelle. “Hello, little Maybelle,” I say. And she buries her funny little face in my neck. I leave my suitcase on the lawn and carry the dog in instead.
I see them through the screen door. They are both on the floor, in that wide open space where the kitchen table used to be. My father is lying down, bleeding from somewhere on his face. Garvey is sitting up but bent over, rocking.
“Is he dead?” I hear myself scream. “Is he dead?” I don’t know what I do with Maybelle. I’m on the floor between them, wiping the blood with my sleeve. It’s coming from just below my father’s eyebrow, not quickly. His skin is a green gray. “I think he’s dead!”
“He’s not dead,” Garvey says quietly.
It’s true. I can feel breath coming out his nostrils.
“I’m sorry I called you.” He stands up slowly. It hurts him to straighten up. “He’s not worth it. Just get in your car and go.”
I don’t move.
“I mean it, Daley. Leave. Go to California. I’m serious.”
“He’s unconscious and he’s bleeding.”
“He’s fine. He’s drunk and he has a scrape. C’mon, Daley. Get up and come with me.”
“You did this. You hit him.”
“All I did was defend myself. C’mon. We’ll stop at Brigham’s and I’ll buy you a lime rickey.” For the first time my brother looks old to me. Old and sad. He is growing jowly.
“You just had me drive sixteen hours in the wrong direction and now you want me to leave him passed out on the floor and drive away?”
“I said I was sorry. I was wrong, all right? Come with me. Now. Trust me on this one, Daley.”
“I can’t.”
“Fuck it then. Suit yourself.” He slides his old leather jacket off a doorknob. The screen door smacks behind him. “Call me when he’s dead,” he says, and starts down the steps.
“Garvey!” I want to run after him but I’m scared to leave my father. “You asshole!” I get up and scream through the screen at his back, moving away. “You fucking asshole! What am I supposed to do with him?”
“Walk away,” he calls without turning.
I go back to my father on the floor. The van starts up, the dogs bark, and Garvey yells at them as they chase him and his goddamn flying refrigerators down the driveway.
Maybelle has taken to her leopard-print bed in the corner but jumps up when I get a rag out of the drawer. She follows me to the sink and back to my father.
As soon as I put the wet cloth on his forehead he comes to, or maybe he’s been awake the whole time.
“Hello, elf.”
“Dad, I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“All right,” he says. He sounds grateful, as if he’s been waiting a long time for somebody to say those words.
I know the way to the hospital in Allencaster. Mallory and I were candy stripers there one summer. We take my father’s car with automatic windows and seat levers. The steering wheel has a thick leather sheath. He falls asleep before we hit the highway. Every few minutes I poke him.
“Why do you keep doing that?” he says.
“Just checking on you.”
“Don’t check on me anymore.” Unlike my brother, he seems not to have aged at all. He looks as I always remember him, tanned, taut, and bony. The knees beneath his khakis are the same knobs I’ve seen all my life. I find myself wanting to stare.
He smells of alcohol and I’m glad. The doctors will notice. Maybe they will suggest a treatment center. Maybe this is the proverbial rock bottom.
It’s a small hospital with a small parking lot. We get a spot near the door. I help him out of the car and he walks slowly, more bent over than usual, one hand shielding his bad eye. I steady him, relieved when I see a wheelchair out in front of the door. I steer him toward it but he bats the idea away with his free hand and the word pansy and keeps walking.
After my father is admitted, I return to the desk and ask if I can see Dr. Perry Barns, who was his internist and occasional doubles partner when I was growing up. He comes quickly, short-limbed in his white tunic, one lone tuft of silver hair left on the top of his head. I barely know him; he is just a name I’ve heard on Myrtle Street all my life.
“Look at you!” he says from the doorway. People in the waiting room glance up at the unnecessary boom of his voice. He begins shaking his head. “You were this high.” He puts a flat hand level to his kneecap
I stand and he gives me a hug and a moist kiss too close to my mouth.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Dr. Barns. It would just make me feel better if you’d take a look at him.”
“At who?”
“At my father. I’m sorry. I thought they had explained—” I glance over at reception. The chair is empty.
“What’s going on?” Like that, he switches from country club parent to doctor. I feel my
body relax.
I tell him what I know, and he disappears through the swinging doors. I zone in and out of The Price Is Right.
When he comes back a few minutes later, he is smiling again. He sits next to me in a plastic chair and puts his hand on my leg. “You.” He squeezes the skin of my thigh several times. “You are all grown up.”
It would be one thing if I were recently grown up. But I am twenty-nine years old. “Could you tell me about my father?”
He pulls back his hand. “He’s going to be okay. Honkey-donkey, as my daughter used to say.” I never knew what a moron this guy was. “He’ll be hitting those famous crosscourt volleys in just a few days.”
“I’m concerned about his drinking.”
“Drinking?”
“Since Catherine left, he’s been on a bit of a tear.”
“Your father has never been a binger.”
I laugh. “You’re right. More of a steady alcoholic.”
He frowns. “Oh, now, alcoholic is a strong word. He likes his martinis, I’ll grant you. But that’s never been a problem.”
I have a swirling slippery feeling in my stomach. I feel the small stool in St. Thomas beneath me. “You’re right. I’m exaggerating. Please don’t mention to him that I said that.” I don’t need my father’s fury turned on me during the forty-eight hours I’ll be in Ashing.
He smiles. “I won’t.” He puts his hand back on my leg and squeezes a few more times. “I promise.”
My father is wrapped up in a lot of bandages, and in many more places than I thought he’d been hurt: both wrists, one ankle, his entire forehead, and around his chest. The wrist wraps look hasty and uneven and I wonder if he did it himself when the nurse left the cubicle. Once he has the bandages on he becomes even more frail, moving more slowly to the car than he did into the hospital.
When we get home I take him directly upstairs to his bed, hoping I can steal a little sleep as well. But as I’m leaving the room he says in a small voice, “Any lunch down there?”
At least I know what to make him: three hot dogs, no bun, and a sliced tomato slathered with mayonnaise. I’ve seen him eat that lunch my whole life. Tomatoes and hot dogs are the only edible things in the fridge. The other vegetables have blackened; the milk has gone sour. There is an explosion of dirty dishes in and around the sink. As far as I can tell, Garvey and my father ate everything with ketchup, which has now hardened into a scarlet shellac on every plate. I can’t cook, can’t even boil hot dogs, in such a filthy kitchen.
