The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  At last the pharmacist called for him. From a white paper bag she removed two plastic vials, one containing blue pills and the other containing white pills. She asked him if he had taken either of these medications before, and he said he wasn’t sure. She explained that the first medication was a sleeping aid. The second was for erectile dysfunction.

  “But I didn’t order that,” he whispered fiercely across the counter.

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. “We get much younger men asking for it all the time.”

  “But there’s been a mistake.”

  “Would you like to see the script?”

  He heard his daughter’s voice behind him: “Is everything all right, Dad?”

  “Fine, fine,” he said, and he felt he was saying this not only for his daughter’s benefit but also for everyone else in the room who could hear them. He paid for the medications in a hurry and swept the paper bag off the counter.

  “What happened?” Dary said. “Was it a problem with the insurance?”

  “They never give you the generics unless you ask for them.”

  “I hate that,” she said.

  He took one of the two sleeping pills he was allotted that night before he went to bed. It had the strange effect of making him tired but not sleepy. It didn’t stop him from thinking; it just made the thoughts revolve in a slower circle, as if there was more friction along the rails. An hour passed, then another, and still his body exerted itself against the medicine, unwilling to surrender to the mental wool. It had to be very late—he couldn’t hear a single car, not even a distant one—but he was afraid to look at the clock.

  His daughter was talking on the phone in another room, her low modulated murmur occasionally interrupted by a mournful laugh. And it came to him once again that she hadn’t been with her mother when she died. She hadn’t been with her mother because Maida hadn’t been sick and wasn’t supposed to die. She had gone in for a knee replacement. The knee was successfully replaced and she was discharged, and none of them knew that three days later she would die of a blood clot. He wondered what difference it made that Dary had missed those final days, whether she felt the ache of having been excluded from something monumental or the gratitude of having been spared something terrible.

  In the past when he thought of his own death, he and it had moved toward each other at a synchronous pace: death was coming for him in the likely guise of illness or disease, and he would use his remaining weeks or months or years to prepare himself for its arrival. Not that he would be ready when it arrived, but that its signal to him would allow him to access some intensity of being that, although it couldn’t solve the main problem, would rapidly dissolve the old difficulties in the rest of his life. Cancer Time—that was really what he was picturing, that the end of his life would unfold on something like Cancer Time, where there was of course not enough time for all that one might want to say and do, but still some time, and a heightened sense of it at that. Maida’s death, the arbitrary brutal swiftness of it, had changed all that. Cancer Time if you were lucky, but maybe not.

  Why hadn’t he been able to tell Dary what had happened at the pharmacy? Why did some ancient habit make him shy with her? Getting the erectile drugs by mistake—that was funny, wasn’t it? Couldn’t they laugh about that? Right now they could be staying up late making each other laugh.

  The next evening at dinnertime Dary microwaved something in a paper towel and ate it out of her hand on the way up to her room. He imagined her sitting down at the desk to write a letter to the person she had been talking to on the phone at night: Dear X, The air in the East is dim, and my father is an old man. Or she was efficiently composing her mother’s eulogy, taking down as if by dictation the sentences that appeared fully formed in her head. He anticipated hers would be tendentious and smart; it would be unlike her to miss an opportunity for controversy. Maybe in her rendering Maida would be a victim, a woman tragically besieged by the needs of other people’s children. Maybe she would try to pin the blame for this on him, turning him into her mother’s lifelong oppressor. By the time she finished delivering her remarks it might be possible to believe that her parents, these two people called Gene and Maida, had never once sat together with their legs entangled on a couch, or gone for pizza, or made love.

  Gayle and Esther Prince would also speak at the memorial, and four eulogies seemed like plenty to him. But it had nearly been five. Dary had invited Ed to speak too, and he’d initially agreed. Later on, though, he changed his mind, explaining that Gayle would speak for both of them. It was a decision that seemed in everyone’s best interest, since Ed was not exactly known for his concision.

  Gene wondered what Gayle and Esther would say about Maida and what they would say about him. Gayle could be relied upon for simplicity and sincerity. She would be soothing and sanguine, a postage stamp of feeling. Esther was more difficult to predict. She and Maida had lived together at Bates and had remained friends after Maida dropped out and Esther went on to get a master’s in Boston. As long as Gene had known Esther she’d had hair the same shade of platinum and the same tiny waist. Her nostrils were pinched to slits and her forehead was large enough for someone to write a message on it, but somehow these extremes didn’t diminish her attractiveness. She was the kind of woman both men and women referred to as striking, and he supposed she had gotten used to being beautiful and felt she had to maintain her good looks the same way some people maintained a mustache or a hair braid as a signature of personality. In her twenties, when Gene first met her, men were always following her around trying to talk to her, and rather than pretending it was a nuisance for the sake of other girls’ feelings, she used to laugh about the hangers-on and speak of them as if they were appendages she had a right to encourage or discourage as capriciously as it suited her. She’d never married but traveled sometimes with a man she referred to simply as “the Greek.” More than once Gene had gotten the feeling that whatever interest Esther showed him was merely a courtesy to Maida, a formal accommodation that for her fell somewhere between an annoyance and a joke. He, in turn, found her vain and self-approving, which neutralized for him the enticements of her beauty.

  Just as he was thinking about her, his body did something strange.

  There.

  And there again.

  What had started out as an almost pleasant sensation grew frightening. Something in his chest—his heart?—began to seize. He gripped his chest, pressing his hands to the seizing thing. He could hardly breathe.

  Eventually the sensation passed.

  When he felt sure it wouldn’t happen again, he got up and knocked on Dary’s door.

  “What is it?” she said, her tone cordial but nevertheless indicating that he was interrupting her.

  “Just checking to see if you’re still there,” he said through the door.

  “Still here.”

  “Okay. Me too.”

  And that was all.

  He paused before the photos of her in the hall. The youth soccer diptych with her on one side kneeling in the grass, and on the other, the full team assembled in their yellow-and-maroon jerseys. The school pictures with their vaguely cosmic marbled-gray backgrounds, an awkward triangular shape cut out of her bangs in one, a missing tooth dramatized with the tip of her tongue in another, and the rest unfolding somewhere along this spectrum of changing hairstyles and orthodontics. He had always thought of these images as describing a progression that was deeply personal and unique to her. But now it occurred to him that the images could belong to nearly anyone’s childhood, and that the passage of time made them almost generic.

  Years and years ago he and Maida had talked about how the best way to parent a child was probably to do it impersonally: on the one hand, to take nothing of the child’s wretched behavior as a reflection of your own worth, and on the other, to take nothing of the child’s sweetness as a measure of your success. But this was not quite being honest. Because there was nothing less impersonal than so
wing your genes and all of the muck they carried into a new human being. It was hard not to want your child to turn out a certain way, especially if in the desired scenario she brought you happiness.

  He knocked on her door again.

  “What is it?”

  “Is it too hot? You can open the window.”

  “Already open.”

  “It didn’t get stuck?”

  “Just write it, okay, Dad?”

  He went downstairs and watched a little news and checked his email. There was nothing new in his inbox but he reexamined the messages anyway, the ones he had kept provisionally because he couldn’t decide whether to officially keep them or discard them. This time, as in all previous times, he didn’t find any new reason to make this distinction. He clicked on a news story about an Ohio couple, tourists in Hawaii, who had fallen backward off a cliff while having their photo taken.

  After a while he went back upstairs, to Annie’s room, where the items of her clothing that she hadn’t packed for the camping trip were scattered across the floor. He wondered whether she was having fun with Ed and Gayle and their grandchildren. He hoped so. Though at the same time he also hoped for an invisible parameter on that fun, one that included missing him a little.

  Dary was on the phone again. He listened through the wall. She had canted her voice low so that her words thrummed together in a way that made them sound more like dull music than units of meaning. From this continuous murmuring a complete phrase sometimes lifted itself just barely out of the thrumming—

  It isn’t a question of being willing…

  That’s easy to say when you’ve escaped…

  It just doesn’t enter the equation for him…

  He opened the window and stuck his head out. The heat buzzed in his ears, insectile and electric. There were two blooming buttonbushes in the yard below, buoyant, springy shrubs with broad leaves of green topped with pale orbs of flowers. Moths feeding at the pale blooms lifted and rearranged, lifted and rearranged, in coordinated adjustment to the breeze. He leaned farther out over the ledge, wrapping his ankle around the arm of the desk chair for counterbalance. “All right,” he heard her say. “Okay. You too.” And then he presumed she hung up, because she suddenly appeared in the window and sat down at the desk.

  He ducked back into Annie’s room, still close enough to her that they could have had a conversation through the open windows. On the desk, next to a stack of blank pages, the sheet on which he’d written “Something definite was lost” was sitting where he’d left it. Nothing had been added to it, not even a tiny desecrating doodle, which he found somehow disappointing. He began folding up the page, his hands executing the familiar folds without the intercession of his brain.

  When he was finished, he leaned out the window, testing his angle. Then he thought about how stupid it would be to meet his death sending a paper airplane into a room, and how his daughter would never forgive him if he died falling into the yard. He drew back inside.

  He aimed and shot at the closest buttonbush. His aim was good and the colorless moths rose into the air and hung motionless for a second. Then some unseen signal passed among them, and in the same instant, they were drawn back to the dark bush. It was a kind of ordinary magic. He hoped Dary had seen it.

  He wondered how he and his daughter had arrived at this moment, traveling their separate trajectories of grief. Had it taken a long time—the length of her life—or just one instance? When had she decided that she no longer belonged in his world? There was a photo of her, in which she couldn’t have been more than three, at a UNH football game wearing a Wildcats T-shirt that hung past her knees. When the time came for her to think about college, he’d hoped she would apply there, but by then she had already determined that she wanted to go out of state. She also didn’t apply to Walden, where her mother’s employment would have meant deeply discounted tuition. Instead, the colleges that had captivated Dary looked like temples. There were phrases about truth and light carved into their stone lintels and pediments. These institutions asked their freshmen not to worry about planning a career, instead encouraging them to offer themselves up to an experience. He was concerned that the kind of education she would receive at a place like that wouldn’t prepare her for the world she actually had to live in, and he tried to convey this to her without being dismissive of her interest. But evidently he was too successful in his light-handed approach. When a small, private liberal arts school in Massachusetts offered Dary a spot, she happily accepted it.

  In college while other girls went to courtyard dances and dorm-room parties, Dary bustled around with a small group of friends who earned their distinction by haranguing the administration. Writing petitions and staging demonstrations, they struck against the school’s health clinic, the dining services, and a hallowed college ritual in which, every spring at the center of the newly seeded quadrangle, a crop of willing freshman girls was invited to compete in a drinking contest in which the penalty for losing was taking off their shirts. In their most well-known complaint, Dary and her peers protested that the women’s athletic facilities were inferior to the men’s, and at the height of the rancor four young women, each wearing the uniform of one of the women’s sports teams, stripped on the steps of the President’s Office, a stunt that landed them in the national news. It was bewildering to Gene why taking off your clothes in one circumstance could be so objectionable and in another a righteous mode of protest. An acquaintance remarked that if his child had behaved the same way, she could expect to foot the bill for the rest of her schooling. But when the bills from the college arrived, Gene dutifully paid them with funds from the thirty-year loan he had taken out for that purpose.

  College was the time when Dary began to see a therapist. Why she voluntarily chose to undergo this was baffling to Gene. She was an accomplished person who was doing well. She hadn’t been abused, neglected, or otherwise stunted—to the contrary, he and Maida had tried to give her every opportunity they hadn’t had, even when that had meant mortgaging their lives. Dary used to refer to the therapist by her first name with a frequency that made him uncomfortable; it was as if the woman became a part of their family interactions. Once when Dary was visiting during a winter break, Gene asked her why she felt it was necessary to see a therapist. She demurred and when he persisted, she said it was free through the university health plan, an idea he found absurd when he considered that it was his thirty-year loan that was financing this free care.

  He now wondered if those were the years he’d lost her.

  The breeze lifted a piece of paper on the edge of the desk. He grabbed for it, but he wasn’t quick enough. The breeze carried the paper out over the yard, where it descended past the buttonbush and the moths and came to rest on the lawn. When the breeze came again, rather than resisting it, Gene moved the stack onto the windowsill and allowed the pages to be whisked out. The breeze played with them, tilting them in the air, then pitched them into the bushes or onto the dark lawn. When it wasn’t strong enough to take what remained of the stack, he pushed the pages off the sill.

  The door of Dary’s room opened. There was the sound of unhurried feet on the stairs. His daughter appeared in the yard. She was wearing the same dark shirt and white shorts she had been wearing all day. She walked a little ways through the littered yard and then paused to look up at his window. He perceived an attitude of imposed calm. She picked up one of the blank pages and held it toward the porch light. After a moment, she crumpled it and let it fall back to the lawn. She picked up another page, and it received the same treatment. Then she disappeared around the side of the house.

  When she returned, she was carrying a rake, which she used to begin cleaning up the yard, dragging the loose pages to a central point in the middle of the lawn. His eyes went to the paper airplane lying at the base of the buttonbush. It was raked up and added to the pile of debris.

  His daughter seemed to regard so much of what she did for him as an inevitable inconvenience, demanding comp
letion but not inquiry. Was it all just so ordinary to her, raking paper from the lawn of her father’s house at night? It would be, he supposed, if she was eager to return to a private life, a life that didn’t include him. She was dutiful but not the least bit curious. It seemed his curiosity about her far surpassed her interest in him.

  But what did he actually know about his daughter? He could tell you all about her golden retriever, Hoolie. Hoolie was housebroken, even though he’d had a number of accidents, which Dary called “setbacks.” The dog suffered from separation anxiety when he was left alone during the day, so Dary had made a recording of her and Annie talking and they played it on a continuous loop when they were out of the house. A big breakthrough had come when the dog trainer taught them to use Hoolie’s name only in a loving way, so he felt “emotionally connected.” Hoolie was charming and funny and neurotic and sometimes, listening to Dary talk about him, Gene felt himself starting to believe what was not possible—that is, that a dog had a personality as complex and interesting as a human’s.

  Had she ever been in love? The question was almost too awful to ask. He remembered some men—there had been times when a man’s name was mentioned, an explanation for the way she would get to an airport, or how she would carry a desk up a flight of stairs. Maybe these men had meant something to her. Maybe she had left behind a ward of bruised hearts. He hoped so. He wanted her to have every possibility in love.

  He and Maida had often lain awake in bed talking about Dary and what her life would be like. The choices she made worried them not because the decisions in themselves were necessarily frightening, but because she would bear the consequences alone. He wasn’t so antiquated to think that a family could be assembled in only one order, the order in which lovers became spouses and then parents, but he thought it was its own kind of stubborn backwardness not to acknowledge that this was the way it happened a lot of the time. If a person was arrestingly beautiful or boundlessly wealthy or gifted with exceptional talent, it seemed somewhat easier to transcend this order. But for everyone else, for the ordinary and merely regular, the order couldn’t be disregarded as completely irrelevant. He worried that by raising a fatherless child Dary had imprinted her life with an odd tattoo that prevented her from blending into a normalcy that wasn’t desirable simply because it was considered normal, but because it had brought a great many people the most genuine happiness they could point to in their lives. He worried she had traded her happiness for her independence, or had confused them as interchangeable. But this was only speculation.