Families and Other Nonreturnable Gifts

by Claire Lazebnik

  “I’ve never actually read it.”

  She stares at me, openmouthed. “You’re kidding.”

  “I tried once and couldn’t get through it. It’s not really my kind of thing.”

  “God, if he were my father—”

  You’d be a lot crazier than you are, I think. But I just smile and shrug and hope she doesn’t feel the need to launch into what’s so great about the Russian section of Dad’s book.

  But she does.

  * * *

  My mom’s ready to walk out the door when I arrive at Dad’s apartment, but I stop her because I need some information about his medication and emergency contacts and all that. She’s mislaid the paperwork, but I find it eventually on the kitchen counter, under a half-empty cup of tea.

  “Don’t leave him alone tonight,” she says as we huddle in the kitchen together, speaking in low voices so he won’t overhear. “Once he’s been safe at home for twenty-four hours, we can stop being so vigilant, but stick close for now.”

  “You sure you don’t want to stay?” I ask hopefully. I had tried to get Tom to come meet me here, but he’d opted to spend the evening with Lou and Izzy instead. “We could get Chinese food, have a little wine, turn it into a pajama party?”

  “Doesn’t that sound lovely,” she says sarcastically, pouring herself a glass of water. Then she turns the water off and looks at me, laughing. “Actually, it does sound lovely. I don’t know why I said it like that. A Chinese food pajama party with you would be fun. But I already have plans for tonight.”

  “Michael? Or Paul?”

  “Would you believe contestant number three?” She says it lightly, but her cheeks turn pink.

  “God, Mom, you’re such a player.”

  “Hardly.” She leans against the counter and gently tilts her glass from side to side, staring at the water like she’s conducting an experiment in molecular cohesion.

  “I thought women your age were supposed to have trouble finding guys to date.”

  “Maybe it’s different in a university town—lots of old guys around that no one wants.”

  “Michael was kind of dreamy.”

  That tinge of pink on her cheeks deepens. “I know. Charming, too.”

  “So do you like him better than Paul? Or this third guy I haven’t met yet?”

  “Actually, you have. It’s Irv Hackner.”

  “Wait—Mr. Hackner? As in Mrs. Hackner’s husband?” They were old friends of my parents, usually included in the very few parties my parents ever threw.

  “Ellie died three years ago.”

  “Oh.” I feel like I should have an emotional reaction to the news, but I can’t really remember much about Ellie Hackner. She was petite, I think, and blondish. The name is far more familiar than the actual person. “Doesn’t it feel weird for you to date him?”

  “A little. It just sort of happened. We started e-mailing, just as friends. Then we got together for coffee. We’ve only been out on a couple of what you’d call real dates.”

  “Define real.”

  She puts the glass down and smooths her skirt. The woman can’t be still for five seconds. “He pays for dinner, and I give him a kiss on the cheek at the end of the evening.”

  “You’re a wild woman.”

  She smiles without meeting my eyes. I get the feeling she’s enjoying some private joke. One I’m just as happy not to be in on.

  “If you keep this up, Mom, you’re going to break some hearts.”

  “I hope so,” she says, and when she looks up, there’s an avaricious gleam in her large green-brown eyes that I’ve never seen before. It makes her look decades younger. “I would really like to break a heart or two. I never have.”

  “You sure about that?” I jerk my chin in the direction of my father’s bedroom.

  The light fades from her eyes. “I didn’t mean like that.”

  “It’s all fun and games until it’s not.”

  She puts down her glass and says a dispirited good night.

  After she leaves, I pick up the glass and mug she used and put them both in the dishwasher, along with a bunch of other dirty dishes I find in the kitchen. I wander slowly out into the living room, trying to get up the energy to go in and see my dad.

  The living room is filled with the flower arrangements people have sent, and I amuse myself for a while wandering from one to another, reading the notes tucked into the stems or dangling from the vases. There are some work-related ones (the dean of faculty, a couple of colleagues, his graduate seminar students) and a few from friends.

  The biggest, most dramatic bouquet is from Tom’s parents. They’re a little over the top, the flowers a little too colorful, the arrangement a little too big, and the note—“You’re in our prayers”—is exactly the kind of thing that would drive Dad nuts, so I slip it out and toss it in the wastebasket. They meant well.

  On the coffee table is a small flowering plant from an unexpected source. “Hope you get well soon,” the card reads. “All my best, Michael Goodman.”

  Mom’s date sent Dad some get-well flowers? Is that what people do under these circumstances? Not that these circumstances are common or anything, but still…

  “That’s just weird,” I say out loud to the empty room.

  There’s no response. I take that as agreement and head into Dad’s room.

  * * *

  It’s not easy coming up with things to talk about. We’ve seen each other a lot recently, so we’ve used up any news, and he’s not the kind of father who wants to chat about TV shows or restaurants or how my old high school friends are doing.

  Instead, he asks me whether I’m ready yet to get serious about my future, a conversation that holds no hope of being enjoyable for me.

  It’s not just the topic that makes talking to him a drag. He also deliberately uses arcane words, then asks me if I know what they mean. If I say I don’t, he tells me I need to be reading better books and educating myself, but if I say I do, he presses me for a definition, and even if I have a vague sense of what the word means, my attempt to articulate it always fails, and I end up stammering and feeling stupid.

  He’s done this to me my whole life.

  When he finally moves on from the topic of Keats’s Wasted Life, it’s to give me a lecture about the heart, both as muscle and as literary trope. It’s clearly something he’s put a lot of thought into, but none of his observations seem all that original to me, and after a while, I can’t restrain a yawn, which sends him into a long rant about the deterioration of the American attention span—which makes me so bored I could scream, which I guess proves his point.

  “First it was books, then it was articles, then it was blog posts, now it’s those Twitter things,” he says. “People are no longer capable of processing information that takes more than a sentence or two to be conveyed. In another generation, we’ll be communicating entirely in emoticons, and elegance of language will be as dead as the ancient Mayans.”

  He’s a fun guy to spend time with, my dad, especially when you add in how morbid he’s become since his heart attack.

  “I suppose I’m luckier than most,” he says a little while later. “I have three children and a few books that will live on after I die. Even so, who’ll remember my name in a century or two? No one. Not that it will matter to me then, of course. Dead is dead. It’s only in the here and now that the thought stings.”

  He wants me to reassure him that his books will always be read and his descendants will always revere his memory, so I do. But I feel like a kid being forced to set the dinner table: I chafe at the chore and do a sloppy, half-assed job of it.

  “We should have some dinner,” I say when even this miserable conversation sputters to a stop. “What do you feel like eating?”

  “I’m not hungry,” he says. “I’m never hungry anymore.”

  He has gotten noticeably thinner over the last week. His cheeks have caved in, and his pajamas hang on him. He looks a decade older than he did at my birthday
party—and he didn’t look so great back then.

  “You have to eat something, Dad.”

  “Why do people always say that? It’s not like healthy human beings will let themselves starve to death. It’s only the old and the dying who turn away from sustenance, and it’s in everyone’s best interest to let them go gentle into that good night.”

  Self-pity much? I’m not going to indulge him. “Dad, I promise you that the second I locate an ice floe in the greater Boston area, you’re on it.”

  “That’s my girl,” he says proudly. Odd what wins approval from this guy. “You get your lack of sentimentality from your mother. You’re both pragmatists.”

  I think of my mother, smiling coyly to herself at the thought of breaking hearts, and wonder if she’s as pragmatic as Dad thinks. She does seem to be practical and unsentimental about anything concerning him these days, but maybe that’s because sentimentality would only complicate things at this point.

  I slide to my feet. “And now I’m going to order in some dinner, and you vill eat it and you vill like it.”

  “I do so enjoy hearing a Nazi accent come out of my daughter’s mouth,” he says. “Brings back so many fond World War II memories.”

  “How was life in the Third Reich?” I shoot back as I leave the room.

  I cross through the living room and let out a startled yelp when something moves inside the kitchen.

  It’s just Jacob.

  I lean against the doorway to let my heart rate go back to normal.

  “I thought you were a burglar,” I say. “You almost had your second 911 call of the week. Was there something you neglected to tell us about the heart attack? Did you surprise Dad the way you just did me?”

  He smiles good-naturedly. “You know, at the time, it seemed like good fun to hide in the closet and jump out at him wearing a gorilla mask. But in retrospect—” He looks a little different today, and I’m trying to figure out why. I realize he’s wearing jeans instead of his usual khakis and a T-shirt instead of a buttoned-down oxford. I guess this is rugged Jacob, which isn’t very rugged. The T-shirt is a soft blue, and his arms are more skinny than buff. Still, he looks infinitesimally less nerdy than usual. “Sorry I didn’t call ahead,” he adds. “My phone battery died a sudden, inexplicable death.”

  I come the rest of the way into the kitchen. “I’m sure it had a good life.”

  “You think? Shoved in pockets, left behind in coffee shops, accidentally dropped in the toilet more than once.…”

  “I take it back. It probably committed suicide. And by the way…more than once?”

  “You don’t want to know. Anyway, I just came by to drop off some food and see how your dad was doing. Oh, also—” He picks something up off the counter and shows it to me. It’s a big square envelope with “Professor Sedlak” written in large, loopy letters on the front. “A get-well card from his graduate students.”

  “I hope it’s a cartoon picture of a guy in a hospital bed,” I say. “With a pun. Oh, please, let there be a pun. ‘Best wishes for a hearty recovery.’ Something like that.”

  “One can hope.” He leaves the kitchen, which I figure gives me permission to poke through the contents of the bag he left on the counter: a couple of turkey sandwiches, an apple, an orange, and a small bag of pretzels.

  When he comes back a couple of minutes later, I point to the groceries. “We’re being very healthy, aren’t we?”

  “Trying to. The doctor said your dad should be careful what he eats.”

  “That explains one turkey sandwich. Who’s the other sandwich for?”

  “You.”

  I give him a look. “Liar. You didn’t even know I was here. You’d give away your own dinner just like that, wouldn’t you?”

  He shrugs. “There’s more where that came from. How long are you staying?”

  “All night. Mom thinks someone needs to be around full-time for a day or so.”

  “I can stay tonight if you want to go home.”

  “It’s okay. I cleared my calendar.” I wonder if he can tell how tempted I am to say yes. I don’t think so. I’m working hard to hide it. The only thing keeping me from saying, Yes! You stay! I go! Good-bye! is some sense that because it’s my father and not his, I should be the one camping out on a sofa tonight.

  “Oh. Okay.” A pause. “Do you want me to leave you alone?”

  “God, no! I’m desperate for company. And I want to order in a pizza, but Dad probably shouldn’t have that, and I don’t want to eat an entire pizza by myself.” I reconsider. “No, actually, I do, which is why you have to stay and throw yourself on the bomb.”

  “You sure you don’t want some time alone with him?”

  “Are you kidding me? I’ve been here less than an hour, and already he’s driving me nuts.”

  “He hates being so helpless. That’s what makes him irritable.”

  “Yeah, well, he makes me irritable. If you stay, you’ll save us both from a lot of irritation.”

  “All right, then,” he says with an easy smile. “What do you like on your pizza?”

  10.

  Dad barely manages to get down two bites of the turkey sandwich before he pushes it away and says he just wants to sleep. He took a painkiller a few minutes earlier, so it’s not surprising he’s drowsy.

  He’s sound asleep before the pizza even arrives.

  Jacob and I take it over to the small round table in the living room, the one near the window, which means we can look out on that amazing view, although it’s subdued at night. The river doesn’t sparkle the way it does during the day. It’s black and serpentine, and its edges blur into its equally dark banks.

  Since we’ve left the door to Dad’s bedroom open in case he calls out, we keep both the lights and our voices low, like teenagers who’ve come home late from a party and don’t want to wake up the parents.

  In that spirit, I decide we need to track down some alcohol. I search through Dad’s cabinets and finally score something: not the beer I was hoping for, but a couple of bottles of red wine that were languishing in the bottom of the kitchen closet.

  I show them to Jacob who says, “You know, there’s a chance those are really good. People are always giving him bottles to celebrate some occasion or another.”

  “So they could be worth, what, like thirty bucks each?”

  “Yeah. Or even like a hundred and thirty.”

  I tighten my grasp on the bottles. “You think I should put them back?”

  “It’s your call.” Then Boy Scout Jacob surprises me. “But he’ll never notice they’re gone. He didn’t even know they were there in the first place—I’m the one who put them away. Let’s go for it.”

  He doesn’t have to tell me twice. I find a corkscrew rolling around in a big drawer that’s otherwise empty, and we open a bottle.

  “Nice,” I say after we clink glasses and each take a sip, but it’s more of a question than a statement, because I don’t really know that much about wine. “Yeah,” says Jacob and I suspect he doesn’t know any more than I do.

  We dig into the pizza, and before long, Jacob is refilling our wineglasses. I get a buzz going pretty quickly, which feels good. It’s been a tough week, and I don’t think I’ll be able to fall asleep in that apartment without being at least a little bit drunk.

  We talk about the hospital—which nurses we did and didn’t like, how Dad’s roommate always had the dividing curtain closed and his TV on, the eternal mystery of why they wake up patients for routine stuff when sleep is so healing—and work our way back to the night Jacob found Dad on the floor of the apartment.

  “When I first saw him lying there, I honestly thought he was dead,” Jacob says. “I instantly flashed to having to tell your whole family.”

  “We’d have taken it well,” I say with the cheerfulness of the semi-drunk.

  “I figured you’d all blame me for it. If I’d just come earlier—”

  “Blame’s a harsh word. Let’s just say we would have hel
d you responsible—legally and morally.”

  “Thanks.” He pokes at the tangle of pizza crusts left on his plate. For a small guy, he can scarf down a lot of pizza. “I don’t ever want to have a moment like that again.”

  “Then the next time you see someone passed out on the floor, run away.” The apartment phone rings. I get to my feet and sway there for a moment, waiting for the sudden head rush to pass. “I’ll get it.”

  He rises, too. “I’ll go check on your dad.”

  We head in opposite directions. I go into the kitchen and answer the phone. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Keats. How’s Dad?”

  It’s Hopkins. We may not talk very often on the phone, but I recognize her flatly brisk voice almost immediately. “He’s doing pretty well, I think. Not that I know anything about anything, but he seems like he’s getting better. He’s lost a lot of weight, though.”

  “Huh?” Hopkins’s voice fades and then comes back. “—in a cab. Don’t know why it’s affecting our connection but it is.”

  I wonder if she heard anything I said.

  “I’ll have to jump soon, anyway,” she says. “Only have a second or two. Is Mom there?”

  “She was, but she left. Now only Jacob Corwin and I are here. And Dad, of course.”

  “Tell Jacob I say thank you. He was the one who found Dad, you know.”

  I feel vaguely annoyed by her “you know.” I’m the one who’s there in Boston with Mom and Dad. She’s the one who’s never around. Of course, I know. “Yeah. He’s a good guy.”

  “Best assistant Dad’s ever had. Can I talk to Dad?”

  “I think he’s asleep. Jacob’s in there checking. He’s totally paranoid about him now.”

  “Tell him he doesn’t need to be. I looked over all his tests before they discharged him. He’s fine. For now. But he is getting old—it’s just a matter of time until something more serious takes him down.” She says it the way you’d say, It’s nice out now but it might rain tomorrow. “So where’s Tom tonight?”