Father of the Rain: A Novel

by Lily King

  Barbara is on the porch, both hands pounding against the panes of the back door.

  “Daley!” I hear her cry out in relief. “Daley.” She rests her forehead on the glass.

  I haven’t made it halfway across the kitchen to her when I hear my father hiss, “You let her in and I put you both out.”

  I can just barely make out the outline of him in his pajama bottoms, fists clenched, hovering in the doorway of the pantry where she can’t see him.

  “Jesus Christ, Dad,” I say, and keep moving. Barbara is pressed against the door, crying, the teddy bear brooch clanking against the glass. Behind her are her two hardshell suitcases, getting soaked in the rain. My father must have put them out there before he locked the door.

  I reach the doorknob. It is cold. Mrs. Bridgeton moans, “Oh, Daley,” and I start to turn it and she screams and then my grip is not enough. I am smashed against the wall: head, shoulder, hip. And then I’m on the floor. My whole left side aches, the shoulder wrenched. There’s no one through the glass of the door anymore. It’s possible I’ve been unconscious.

  I notice my father, crouched beside me. “You okay there?”

  I nod.

  “You sure?”

  I nod again.

  He helps me upstairs. He pulls down the covers so I can get into bed. He sits beside me, near my knees. My ear is throbbing. My shoulder is on fire. I don’t want him to know this. I can smell his humid metallic nighttime smell from childhood. I can smell it now, the exact same smell, coming off of him like a steam.

  He pats my thigh through the covers. “Well, we dodged that bullet,” he says.

  “Good night, Dad,” I say evenly. It’s important to give the impression of calm.

  He doesn’t move. He strokes my thigh. I shut my eyes and, after a few minutes, make my breathing heavier. He gets up then and goes down the hallway to his room.

  I wait. I keep waiting. Physical pain is a relief at this point. It blots out everything else. His first snores are weak and uneven. Soon they even out to the steady thrum you can hear all over the house.

  It doesn’t take long to put all my stuff in garbage bags. It hurts and I have to carry them one at a time with my left arm to the car, but it’s all done in half an hour.

  Barbara’s suitcases are still on the porch, but her car is gone.

  I pass through the kitchen with my last bag. I look at the kitchen table. I have no note for him.

  III

  23

  My daughter is speaking in an English accent, which means she is either a queen or the head of an orphanage.

  “You must try to look people in the eye when they speak to you,” she says imperiously to her little brother. “They only mean well.” She has heard that from me, the encouragement to make eye contact. It’s like listening in on their dreams; tiny fragments of their lives are stitched carefully into the story.

  “Not witches. Green-faced witches don’t mean well,” Jeremy says. It’s been a few years, but he still hasn’t recovered from seeing The Wizard of Oz at his grandmother’s house.

  “Not always. But people do.”

  “Yes.”

  “M’lady,” she whispers.

  “Yes, m’lady.”

  They clatter through the kitchen solemnly, Lena wearing my high-heeled sandals and black wool skirt as a cape, Jeremy with an elaborate duct tape belt and a walking stick from the yard. I’m not allowed to acknowledge them.

  The phone rings, and a formal voice asks for Daley Amory.

  “Speaking.” I wait for the sales pitch. But there is a long pause instead.

  “It’s Hatch. Hatch Bridgeton.” He says his name like it is a small joke between us.

  “Oh.” My father must be dead.

  The children, sensitive to my tones of voice, stop their game.

  “Your dad had a stroke. A big one. They can’t stabilize him.”

  I got an invitation to Hatch’s wedding and, six years later, a group email about his divorce. I sent my regrets and a ceramic bowl for the wedding, and a short but I hoped sympathetic reply to the email. Other than that, I’ve had no contact with him in all the years that we’ve been stepbrother and sister.

  “Are you there now?” I ask.

  “I am. But I’m flying home tomorrow. I’ve been here a week and things are falling apart at work.”

  “A week?”

  I can feel him struggle for a way to explain the seven days between my father’s stroke and this phone call. But I know he’s just been following instructions. “I left a message for Garvey, too. They don’t think he’ll make it through the weekend.”

  “I’m not sure,” I say.

  “I understand. Scott and Carly are sitting this one out, too.”

  In my mind, Carly and Scott are still skipping stones on their beach in Ashing on Thanksgiving Day. But life has lurched on for them, as it has for us all.

  In the fifteen years since I last saw my father, I have spoken to him once. It was the night the Red Sox won the Series and broke the curse. I knew he’d be up. I didn’t think about it. I just dialed the number. Barbara answered and I surprised her. She didn’t know what tone to use with me. She told me to hang on and covered the phone. I could hear him refuse, and Barbara insist. I felt her try to seal the holes of the phone’s receiver more securely, heard his voice rising and snapping, and then a sudden, “Hello there,” fake, and drunk as hell.

  “I won’t keep you on long, Dad. I’m just calling because of the Red Sox. I couldn’t help thinking of you.”

  “What? Oh, yeah. Wasn’t that something?” He kept his voice flat. He wasn’t going to celebrate with me, not even for a second. “Listen, I gotta go.”

  “All right.”

  “Yup,” he said, and hung up.

  Barbara is waiting for me at the hospital in Allencaster, which is fancier now: revolving doors and a glass-domed lobby with an enormous information desk. She is smaller, crumpled. There are black hollows around her eyes, as if the sockets are receding to the back of her head. Her squat forehead is even more foreshortened, the wrinkles thick and deep. I don’t know if this transformation has occurred over the last fifteen years with my father or just in the past sleepless week.

  “Oh, Daley, I’m so glad you’ve come.” She is tiny in my arms. She tries to say more but her chest shudders, like my children just before they throw up.

  “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” I stroke the coarse hair at the back of her head.

  We don’t always like our children, Daley, but we do always love them, she wrote me after she married my father. She hoped I would come visit them. She’d redone the kitchen. When I didn’t answer that card, or the next, or the next, she wrote a fiercer one. I’d always been a rude and spoiled child, she said. She vividly remembered seeing me at a Christmas pageant when I was five or six and complimenting me on my pretty velvet dress and I turned away with my nose in the air. Julie told me to stop reading the cards. They always had a little tender flower on the front, or a baby animal. She begged me to burn them unopened. I lived with her then, in New Mexico. She saw the pain they brought on, the time it took me to recover from one. It wasn’t Barbara’s attacks on my character that hurt; it was the passing references to my father, the portrait of his life with her that she unwittingly depicted for me. He’d gone back to work for Hugh. He wasn’t coaching the “derelicts” at the youth center anymore. They’d been to a party and he’d had everyone in stitches when he snuck upstairs and came down in a kimono and slashes of eyeliner.

  “How is he today?” I ask her, as if we are just picking up from yesterday.

  “They’ve stabilized his heart rate. They still can’t get his blood pressure down and he was very agitated last night. But they took off his restraints this morning, so that’s good.”

  “Restraints?”

  “He wasn’t being cooperative with the nurses.”

  “I thought he was unconscious,” I say, trying to hide my uneasy surprise.

  “H
e’s in and out.”

  “Is he talking?” Hatch told me he couldn’t speak. I wouldn’t have come if I thought he could say something to me.

  “No. Nothing coherent. Just babble.”

  I follow her down hallways. The walls are hung with harbor and beach scenes. She stops at a pair of double doors and puts her palm under a dispenser on the wall. I do the same. Antibacterial lotion squirts out automatically. I rub it over my hands as we go through the doors. The lotion is cold then evaporates. The whole place smells of it. There is a bank of desks and opposite them a row of cubicles. Most of the curtains are open. In the first one is a black man with wires attached all over his bare chest by round adhesives that are not his skin color. In the second a white woman is sitting up, opening her mouth for Jell-O that a nurse feeds her. TVs are blaring: news, sitcoms, the Animal Channel. Two nurses are typing at computers. There is the smell of old cooked eggs. I am aware of everything, as if each pore of my skin is a receptor, waiting for the sign of my father. He is there, in the third cubicle. I feel like I am floating slightly, carrying less than my whole self. I follow Barbara’s coat toward his bed. He is a long log under the covers with arms and a head sticking out. The arms are covered in wide black bruises with green centers. Everywhere else his skin is gray and loose. It hangs off his neck like fabric, and the features of his face, always pronounced and angular, are exaggerated now like a bad caricature. His straight bony nose has a bend in it, and his big ears now have enormous earlobes to match, with a crease in the middle, as if they have just been unfolded. His hair has gone past white to yellow, though his eyebrows are a bright silver, as wiry and abundant as they have always been. A tube is attached to the cartilage between his nostrils but he is breathing through his mouth loudly. At the opening of his hospital gown I can see wires attached to his chest too, the healthy peach of the adhesives no more able to match his gray skin than his neighbor’s. His hands at the ends of the bruised arms lie on either side of him, healthier looking than the rest of him, both curled slightly but not closed, as if holding things: a tennis racquet, a drink.

  There is nothing more familiar to me than those brown veined hands.

  There are two chairs, one beside his head and the other beside his feet. Barbara points me to the one at his head. I sit without taking off my coat or scarf. Barbara removes hers and lays them on the other chair, straightens her blouse, and faces my father from the foot of the bed.

  “It’s Daley, Gardiner.” She speaks loudly, almost angrily if you cannot see how hard she’s trying not to cry. “Your daughter’s come to see you.”

  His eyes flash open. I don’t expect them. I feel my body flinch backwards. He scans the room with his yellow eyes, their color and shape and wariness unchanged by time or sickness, before settling on me. I smile as if for a camera. Friend or foe, those eyes seem to be asking.

  “Hey there,” I say, my throat dry.

  Friend, he decides. The wariness recedes slightly. And fear floods his face as he sees the machines behind me and realizes he is not in his bed at home.

  “You’re going to be okay,” I say quietly.

  His head moves back and forth slowly.

  I touch the metal bar at the side of his bed. “Yes, you are.”

  His head moves in quicker jerks. He lifts his arm with the tubes coming out. His first finger tries to separate from the others and touch the mattress.

  “No, Dad, you’re not going down.”

  His eyes widen, as if he’s surprised to be understood, and he nods.

  “You’re going up. You’re going to pull out of this.”

  He shuts his eyes. His hand twitches. And then he moans. “Ay ay ow.” Way way down. To hell, he means.

  “No, Dad, you’re not going to hell.”

  “Daley!” Barbara says.

  My father grunts. His eyes stay shut. His mouth opens and he begins to snore.

  “What on earth was that about?” She is not pleased.

  “He can talk.”

  “It’s just babble. He’s certainly not talking about hell, for God’s sake.” She is irritated, questioning already her decision to have had Hatch call me.

  My head is pulled back to my father. I need to keep watching him. It feels unnatural to look at or listen to Barbara when he is in the room. I put my hands back on the metal railing and lean in. At the clink of my ring against the bar, his eyes open again right on me. My pulse quickens. I am scared, too.

  “Hi, Dad.” It feels strange to say the word Dad again.

  “Leh ma tehsumm.” Let me tell you something.

  I bend down. “Tell me.”

  I feel Barbara watching.

  His face is a maze of thin lines in every direction. Drool spills down one side of his chin. His mouth closes then opens slowly. “Espays. Airna seva dray hee.” This place. They’re not serving drinks here. “Godagedashekango.” We gotta get the check and go.

  “What’s he saying?”

  “Gogehalmury.” Go get Hal Murry.

  “Hal Murry?” I ask Barbara.

  “What?”

  “He wants me to go get Hal Murry. Is that his doctor?”

  “God, no. Hal Murry. He wouldn’t have mentioned him.”

  I wait for her to realize the improbability of me coming up with the name Hal Murry on my own.

  “He’s the new manager at the Mainsail. Your father can’t stand him.”

  “Is paysino goo.”

  “Dad, this place is good for you right now. While you get better.”

  He jerks his head. “Inahn goo shay.”

  “You’re not in good shape now, but you will be. You’re on the upswing.” I’m not sure this is true. I have come, after all, to say goodbye. But he was supposed to be unconscious and dying. He doesn’t seem to be dying now.

  “Na. Na. Dow.” He tries to point his finger again and winces.

  “Gardiner, don’t try to move. Stay still.” Barbara turns toward the nurses’ station. “I’m going to go find somebody. He’s agitated again.”

  He watches Barbara speaking and then, when she leaves, bunches his eyebrow hairs together. Who the hell is that? he is asking.

  “Barbara,” I say quietly

  “Wha she doo hee?”

  “She’s your wife, Dad.”

  “Ma wife? Ahm mar to Barba Bidgeta?”

  “Shhh, Dad, she’ll hear you,” I say playfully, and his mouth curls up on one side.

  “Is na posseb.”

  Barbara comes back with a nurse who checks all his tubes and the machines they are attached to. There seem to be many liquids going in to him. One bag is sucked nearly empty. She produces a full one from her pocket and replaces it.

  “You want to sit up a bit more, Mr. Amory?” she asks. She is a large woman, my age, with deep brown skin and a southwestern accent. Texas, maybe. How has she ended up here in this strange corner of the country?

  “Uh-huh.”

  She pushes a button on the side of the bed for a few seconds, and the bed goes up but my father sinks down. So she hoists him up easily and he hollers out, right in her ear.

  “No screaming, you big baby,” she says. “You’re going to damage my eardrum and I’m going to have to sue your you-know-what.”

  “I’ll sue you first,” my father says, but the nurse can’t understand him.

  “That’s his favorite,” Barbara says when she leaves. “He’s very good with her. Gardiner, can you see this necklace I’m wearing?”

  “Ya.”

  “Do you remember giving it to me?”

  “Na.”

  “You gave it to me after you got out of the hospital the last time. Do you remember why?”

  “Na.”

  “Because you said I took such good care of you.”

  My father nods, then looks at me hard. I know what he’s saying. I can hear him clear as a bell: Yeah, she took such good care of me, look where I am now, with tubes up my nose and out my ass.

  I drove straight from Myrtle Street to Jul
ie’s that night, with a torn rotator cuff and three sprained ribs. I washed down Tylenol with coffee and got there in thirty-six hours. She took me to the hospital and then back to her apartment. We can find some humor in it now—the wounded bird I was, my months on her couch, my tears in public places. And Michael, the unapproachable mountain bike man, tells it from his perspective, how he was just summoning the nerve to ask out the introverted professor (“one of my many, many misperceptions,” he’ll say) when suddenly below him there was talking and crying every night. He assumed her girlfriend had moved in, and it took us a while to correct this impression. I took a job leading tours through Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde and other sites of the Ancestral Puebloans. I walked through those villages built into the cliffs, trying to re-create for my audiences—groups of retirees, schoolchildren, and teachers—a sense of the real lives that were once lived there. I often overheard a pitying remark about how different life was for them, how basic their needs, how narrow their world. But the more I climbed through the carefully laid-out houses and imagined the families who once ate and slept in them, the more I felt how little the difference, how simple our real needs still are: food, water, shelter, kindness. I loved trying to make that world come back alive for people, especially for the kids, whose imaginations were still so open. When it was time for Michael to move in with Julie, I moved a block away. For four years my social life was Julie and Michael, just as Julie’s had once been me and Jonathan. Occasionally they asked someone else over for dinner, a colleague of theirs, but it never took, not for any of us. We had our rhythm. A new person always threw us off. Julie says that when she told me they were getting married, I looked like someone who was trying to be cheerful while my leg was being sawed off. I just couldn’t understand why they wanted to ruin a great relationship with marriage.

  I used to sit at my computer and stare at Jonathan’s address online:

  1129 Trowbridge Avenue

  Philadelphia, PA 19104

  There he was. He was there. He’d made it home again. I had his phone number, too, but when I thought of calling, all I could imagine was him straining to get off the phone. Julie wanted to invite him to the wedding but I couldn’t risk having to meet a girlfriend or a wife, see photos of a little baby. But then, without telling her, I put an invitation in the mail. I knew where she kept the RSVP cards people sent back; he never responded.