by Bella Pollen
“What?” I shout back.
“Come see for yourself!”
Around the corner, Dad’s grinning. A llama stands ten feet away, an idiotic smile spread across its loopy, bulbous lips.
“Bet he thinks he’s the master of the universe,” Dad says.
“A llama? A nice llama? That’s what’s round the corner?”
“Ha! Fooled you,” Dad steps aside to reveal a random gravestone. He indicates the inscription with a foppish bow.
GENE MCKLINTOCK
THE BUCK STOPS HERE
The jug of water by his hospital bed collects plankton on its surface. Dad does not drink water. Not in a restaurant, not in a desert, not if his life depended on it, which, ironically, it now well might. He claims to have nearly drowned as a child and it put him off, but the truth is he prefers vodka. I become fixated by the stagnant water, the stale air in the room, the varnished walls of germs. My father does not do well in stasis. Stagnant water kills people; flowing water creates life. Quick, jump into the river, fight the current. Swim wherever you like but keep on going.
Boom! “Very disconcerting all this staring,” he says. “Anyone would think I’m a specimen, waiting for dissection.”
“How you doing, Dad?”
“Happy as a clam.”
“Did you sleep?”
“Well, since you ask. One of the other inmates tried to climb into my bed last night.”
“Dad! No!”
“I can’t tell you how alarming it was.”
“Which one?”
Dad inclines his head towards the Nosferatu opposite, propped up against pillows, white and masticating.
“Christ, Dad.”
“Yes, well, I must say, I was quite relieved when an orderly arrived to wrestle him back into bed.”
“Did you complain?”
“I didn’t want to antagonise him, but now you’re here, perhaps I’ll avail myself of the bathroom facilities.”
He shifts himself to the edge of his bed. I help him on with his slippers. “Want me to come with you, Dad?” But even as I say it, I wonder: Could I do it? Could I take care of him? Stroke the blankets, spoon the goo?
“Certainly not. There are certain things—very few, mind you—that a man must do alone.” He pushes to his feet.
“Sure you’re OK?”
He steadies himself on the tent poles of the cubicle. “Damn you, Shackleton,” he says valiantly. “I may be some time.”
I watch him as he goes. My father, the most athletic man I know. He of the faultless hand-eye coordination; the father who taught me to hit a baseball like Babe Ruth; the man who plays tennis in cowboy boots, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He’s walking so slowly.
Please, please, do we always have to do this? Watch the strongest people in our lives separate from us inch by inch?
Susie and I share a plastic carton of pineapple chunks in the hospital corridor.
“Remember when Granny died?” she asks. I nod. Brave, thrifty, Out of Africa Granny. She fought drought and locusts and veldt fires and died in her nursing home just shy of her hundredth birthday.
“Don’t let us live that long,” our parents begged the three of us afterwards. “Pills, vodka, blow to the head, we don’t care—just kill us off, if it’s all the same to you. We don’t want to stick around that long. We don’t want to be a burden.”
But it’s not all the same to us, thank you.
“Promise us,” they kept on saying. “Promise us.”
“Do look.” Dad slows down somewhere outside San Francisco. “A hitchhiker! What say you we pick him up?”
“Must we?”
“Why not? Nice boyfriend for you.”
“He looks rough.”
“So would you if you’d been sleeping on the side of the road.”
“Rough and smelly.”
“No, I honestly think he might do for you.” He slows the car. “You young people could have fun together.”
The hitchhiker has dreadlocks made of caterpillar nests and a smile forged of opportunity.
“Ditch the old man,” he murmurs to me in the Chips Ahoy aisle of the next gas station. “Let’s you and I have some fun together.”
I look at him with pity.
“So, what did you think of our new friend?” I ask Dad as we make our escape.
“Well, I’m fighting a natural aptitude to be critical, but I must say I didn’t take to him as much as I’d hoped. You?”
“I’ve known barnyard animals more appealing.”
“He didn’t exactly look like the straightest arrow.”
“Or the most informative book in the library.”
“Or the cleanest napkin in the drawer. Plus, I couldn’t help but notice, he had a hungry air about him.”
“No kidding, like he was sizing me up for slaughter.”
“You know,” Dad says. “Considering you’re my daughter, I should probably look after you a little bit better in future.”
“Really, Dad? D’ya think?” I bat my eyes at him.
Ask me what we talk about on the road, and I’d have to say we never get much beyond frivolous. How exactly did Heinz start his baked bean empire? A rehash through the plot of some B-movie, and surely I remembered the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice? But sometimes I wait for him to ask: Are you happy? Are you sad? Pleased with your life or disappointed?
How bad does it have to get for him to ask, I wonder, and the idea makes me cross. I word and re-word the question in my head for ten miles before throwing it out there.
He looks startled. “I never think it’s any of my business.”
“But you’re my father. Aren’t you curious?”
“I assume you’d tell me if you wanted to.”
“But because you don’t ask, I figure you’re not interested.”
“My poor Frog,” he says. “So terribly misunderstood.” The conversation has made him feel bad, I can see that, but my latest burst of petulance is not over.
“I mean, don’t you think there are things you should have warned me about?”
“Like what?”
“Like how easy it was to fuck up in life?”
“I thought you were plenty intelligent to work that out for yourself.”
“You had a head start, you could have saved me some time.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been very selfish. I see that now.”
We’re both still joking—sort of. I’ve long accepted that our natural home is in the spaces between the lines, and so we drive on in silence.
A few miles later, a giant billboard looms on the freeway.
WEARIED BY LIFE? TURN TO JESUS.
“There you go.” Dad squeezes my hand. “The answer for both of us.”
“How did you do it, Mum?” I ask her. We’re walking together along a beach in the Outer Hebrides, where for a while my mother walked the wild and boggy alone. Mum’s hands are shoved deep in her pockets, the curve of her back dictated by the strength of the wind. I’m writing a book set on this island, a book set closer to home in so many ways, and I’ve been thinking a lot about my parents’ marriage—its catastrophes and triumphs, the multiple lost and found of it over the years. How did she do it? I’ve seen how tough it is to construct a life, to lay down tracks to the future. I’ve seen the hard labour and the rock breaking. How does anyone have the tools to see it through?
“You just find them,” she says.
“But after everything, Mum, are you happy, are you sad? Pleased with your life or disappointed?”
When she turns, the wind blows the structure of her sentence into fragmented words, but I catch its meaning.
“I spent a long time crossing through sad,” she says, “but I got to happy in the end.”
There is a routine to illness, a rhythm that accompanies it. Doctors swish in and out. Interns come and go. Orderlies say hi, and fish happens on Fridays. Dad knows the rota of every single nurse and the city and country in which each was born. His fellow pati
ents are beginning to lose their spectral look. They’re now other people’s fathers or husbands. Today when I look at my own father’s face, I see every age he’s ever been, each decade overlaid, one on top of the other, just like the paint and varnish on the walls.
Boom! Dad’s eyes open. “What are you scribbling in that notebook of yours?”
“Nothing.” I lay down my pen. Oh the unfairness of it. That I can’t write him back to health and glamour.
“Copying down all the clever things I say, I’ll be bound.”
“You haven’t said a word for the last two hours.”
“Nonsense, I was probably talking in my sleep.” He turns to the nurse fiddling with his IV. “Tell my daughter she really shouldn’t plagiarise my work.”
And Nguyu smiles the smile I have seen a thousand women smile.
“Don’t let him charm his way out of hospital,” my mother says. “He’s still way too ill, and you know he’ll try.”
“He won’t. We won’t let him,” we chorus. Susie, Marcus, and me, we know the score. We call our younger half-sibs, Josh and Lally. We confer by phone or in waiting rooms or tramp through muddy winter fields in borrowed gumboots, tying small knots onto the end of one another’s long-forgotten threads.
“Remember after that shitty boyfriend of yours left and I slept in your bed for a week?” I ask Susie.
“Remember when I tried to stop you taking all those drugs and sent you to a GP?” she counters.
“Remember when you thought Giacomo’s father was coming to steal the children?” Marcus puts his arm around both of us. “You were in a terrible state. I was supposed to be flying to Uist, but I didn’t go. I waited by the phone in case you called.”
I turn to look at him. “Oh, Marky, I didn’t know.”
“I never told you,” he said.
Over never-ending cups of tea, I look at my brother and sister huddled close around the kitchen table. Marcus buys and rebuilds struggling manufacturing companies. Susie is an ace adviser of the art world. Like me, they have their jobs, friends, kids, dogs, excitements, and disasters. We are no longer eldest, middle, and youngest child; we are just us, and we all agree. Of course Dad cannot come home! Apart from anything else, it wouldn’t be fair on Mum.
“You look tired, Mum,” Susie says.
“Yes, Mum,” Marcus and I agree. “You really do.”
“Fuss, fuss,” she says, and we know better than to push it.
I don’t tell her, though, that I caught sight of her the other day walking down the street in London. There was something about the way her hair was hairdresser-pretty, something about the way she carried herself, that had me swerving the car over to a meter and shouting after a complete stranger. Mum, no, I think as I watch her make pie of the cottage and feed the dogs, stay close, do not do this. Just as I’m spending more time with you and Dad, do not even think about getting ready to leave me.
“Promise me,” she says, sitting back down. “All of you. You know how persuasive he can be. He’s not to come home until he’s out of danger.”
“Don’t worry, Mum,” we tell her. “We promise.”
“Stop the car!” Dad says near Flagstaff.
“Why?”
“Just do it, but keep the engine running.”
Worried he’s ill, I pull off the road, but he leaps out, gazelle-like and waves down the car coming towards us.
“Dad, what on earth are you doing?”
“My good deed of the day. Watch.”
The car stops. The driver looks like a gas/oil rep: maximum air conditioning, and briefcase from Office Depot.
“Just in case you were thinking of visiting the world’s largest meteorite,” my father tells him, “I’m here to let you know it’s not worth it.”
The gas/oil rep looks baffled, as well he might.
“Eighteen dollars each for what amounts to a large hole,” Dad explains. “Honestly, I’d give it a miss if I were you.”
“Well, thank you, sir,” the rep says. “Appreciate it.”
“See!” Dad says, after the rep’s driven off. “I do believe he was genuinely touched.”
“Oh, just get in the car, Dad,” I sigh.
“You know something,” he says a while later. “I’ll cut off my pinky without anaesthetic if that car behind us doesn’t belong to a sheriff.”
My father thinks every car he sees contains a sheriff—just as every lightning-blackened tree on a hill is an Apache scout. Besides, I’m barely ten miles an hour over the speed limit.
Five minutes later a sheriff is knocking on the window.
“Told you so,” Dad says, leaning over me as I wind it down. “Good afternoon, Officer. Are we in trouble?”
We’re not in trouble; of course we’re not. Man, woman, sheriff, horse—my father would charm a lightbulb if he thought it might help it to shine brighter. It’s his means of communication with the world, and because the language of charm is universal, a speeding ticket is out of the question, just as our under-forty-nine-dollar motel room is always a shoo-in.
“Sir, is this your wife?” the sheriff asks.
“Good God, no!” Dad says. “I wouldn’t be married to a nag like her. What’s more, I regret to inform you, she’s a terrible driver. I’d arrest her right now if I were you.”
The sheriff looks as befuddled as the gas/oil rep.
“I can assure you,” Dad says, “it’s for her own good.”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary, sir.”
“I blame myself,” Dad continues. “The truth is I haven’t always been a very good father to her.”
I study my knees while the sheriff backtracks through his academy training for the correct response to unsolicited confessions of this nature.
“Move along,” he says finally.
“Not a very good father, huh?” I start the engine. “That’s one I’ve not heard before.”
“Well, since you ask,” he says, and for once there’s no trace of pith in his voice, no sarcasm waiting in the wings. “I was never around all that much when you were little. And never when I should have been.”
My daughterly jaw drops. Seriously, Dad, seriously? After all that we’ve come through, after all that we are as a family? Absences mean nothing, I want to tell him. No more than empty air.
“You think that’s what counts?” I ask. “Minutes added up?”
“I think you know I love you,” he says simply. “I just never knew if that was enough.”
I look away.
Idiot father. It was always enough.
“Good news,” Dad says brightly as I walk in. “Doctor God here says I can come home tomorrow.”
A consultant stands at the foot of Dad’s bed, talking with one of his underlings.
“That’s right, you haven’t met the new Doctor God yet, have you?” Dad says. “He visits obscenely early in the mornings but apart from that he’s a most reasonable fellow.”
Most reasonable means that he and my father have bonded over a species of tree found in the doctor’s hometown of Jaipur. The doctor is homesick for Jaipur and very especially for this tree. My father, for many years an amateur tree expert and trustee of some famous public arboretum, has promised to help the doctor find a way to plant this tree in his own garden. After he’s tracked down the seeds, he will drive halfway across England to a small shop in the backwoods of somewhere. He will adore doing this and will very likely ask me to accompany him.
I stall. “What happened to the other Doctor God?”
“He hasn’t been around for a while. I have a horrible feeling he may have snuffed it.”
I drag the new consultant away from his entourage. “How can coming home possibly be a good idea?” I hiss. With impeccable timing my father coughs, and I hear something stubborn in his chest—a squatter that knows its rights.
“Good grief, anyone would think she wasn’t pleased.” Dad is now addressing me through the doctor, sucking him into his conspiracy.
“Why on e
arth would I be pleased?” I don’t just address the doctor. I take him out of the room and into the reception area, and though he is intimately acquainted with my father’s notes, blast him with the whole history. My father has not been suffering from a mere tickle of the throat! He’s been in and out of hospital for months with pneumonia, with this incessant, terrifying, unyielding cough.
Doctor God has eyes the colour of malt whiskey. He has been put on earth solely to make my father better. Part of me wants to give up the rest of my life to polish his shoes; the other half wants to take him out with a crowbar.
“You really think sending him home is a good idea?”
“Just for a day or two,” the doctor replies gently. “It might do him good.”
“Then you’d better sign the forms quickly, before my daughter starts grumbling again,” Dad says on our return. “I don’t know whether I mentioned it, but she’s a terrible grumbler. Never stops.” There is hurt behind the lightness.
“Dad,” I falter. “It’s freezing outside.”
I know my father is going mad in here. That staying still, staying in one place, is the equivalent of death for him. But how can his beleaguered lungs withstand the booby trap of a frosty morning, the sneeze of a passer-by, or that coiled spore of the flu virus waiting for its chance? In the war of attrition that is old age, death always has the greater resources.
“Fuss, fuss,” he says. “It’s not like I haven’t got a good coat.”
“Of course he must come home,” Mum says when I tell her about Doctor God’s proposed bail. “Don’t be so silly.” She turns away so I won’t see her tear up. “Besides, I miss him terribly.”
I’m in the attic of my parents’ house. There have been other nights like this, nights when I sleep in the comforting single bed with an electric blanket and the window grumbling in its frame. Except sleep is not what I do. At best it’s a paddle through the shallows of an insomnia that Mum’s pills, my pills, and even the illegally scored big-city Xanax don’t touch.
Night is the time for demons of every sort, and after they’ve finished with me, I lie twitching, nauseated, unable to calm my mind.
