Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

Back to the hospice at dawn, but her father was already awake. He was staring at the slowly turning ceiling fan, in something like alarm. “What?” Cynthia said. “You want it off? Are you cold?” She switched it off, but the expression on his face stayed the same. She saw his lips moving and went to lean over him at the head of the bed.

“What is that?” he said. “That is, how far away is it?”

You’d answer a question like that, and he’d nod, as if you’d made perfect sense, but then half a minute later you’d see the same look in his eye and you’d know that the question was just more substantial than any answer you could provide. The detailed aspects of himself that would resurface from time to time — the wink that used to mean he was putting you on but couldn’t possibly mean that now, or the particular clicking noise he made with his tongue when he understood something he hadn’t previously been able to figure out — were, Cynthia realized, just vestiges, tics that no longer signified what they used to but that had somehow outlived the more essential parts of him, as if he were fading away from the inside out.

“Who are those idiots?” he said. He lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the sun even though the room was darkened almost completely. “Clear the green!” he said. “For Christ’s sake!”

“Oh my God,” Irene said nervously. “There’s nothing there. You’re seeing things.” She took his hand; he jerked it away and started swinging his legs toward the side of the bed. The rails weren’t up, and Cynthia didn’t know how to operate them. The two women began trying to force him back into a prone position.

“Are you crazy?” he said to them. “It’s a shotgun start. We have to get out there! Where are my shoes?”

“Ring for the nurse,” Cynthia said to Irene, but Kay was already behind them. One look into his eyes was apparently enough to satisfy her that he was beyond the reach of her usual charms; she touched a button beside his bed, and another nurse came in holding aloft a needle.

“Oh shit,” Cynthia said. She and Irene backed out into the corridor and tried not to listen. “Shit shit shit. It’s not supposed to go like this. I mean, is it?”

“It’s just a bad moment,” Irene said, though she was shaken too. “It’s not his last. He won’t go out struggling like that. He’ll be ready.”

God, it hadn’t even occurred to her, until Irene mentioned it, that her father might be in the process of dying right now. One of the nurses came over and gently closed the door. Cynthia stared at it. “How do you know?” she said.

“The Lord won’t allow it,” Irene said. She smiled and laid her hand on Cynthia’s arm. Her expression suggested that she was trying to convey something important and soothing. Cynthia wasn’t sure whether Irene was choosing this moment to out herself as some kind of Jesus freak or whether she was just saying whatever came to mind to calm Cynthia as if they were mother and child, but either way, that hand on her arm sent a bolt through her that made her whole body stiff with revelation. Oh my God, Cynthia thought. There’s no more time. She drew her arm away as cautiously as if she were pulling an arrow out of it.

“The Lord won’t allow it?” she said. “The Lord won’t allow it. Okay.”

A few minutes later, Kay came out of her father’s room and left the door open behind her. “He’ll be sleeping for a while,” she said, her eyes moving back and forth between the two women. “We really don’t like to do that unless we have to, but as I guess you saw, he was getting very agitated. The only other option was restraining him. I’m sorry.”

Cynthia turned to Irene. “Well,” she said brightly, “it looks as if we have a few hours anyway. I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

One of the orderlies directed them to a Cracker Barrel just across I-75. Cynthia rode shotgun in Irene’s car. She didn’t know what time of day it was anymore but she ordered a huge breakfast. “Breakfast served twenty-four hours is one of the things that makes America great,” she said to Irene, who wasn’t really sure what that meant but smiled delightedly. It was the opening Irene had been waiting for, and after they ordered she began by asking Cynthia some perfectly reasonable questions about her children: how old they were, whether she carried any pictures of them, the degree to which they looked like their mother and grandfather.

“I have three grandchildren,” Irene offered. “The oldest is in the navy, living on a submarine, if you can believe that. I don’t know how he does it. My two daughters are homemakers, one in Charlotte and one all the way out in California, in Silicon Valley. Jackie has a son who would be just about your son’s age. Wouldn’t it be something if they could meet?”

Cynthia waved to the waitress and mimed drinking a cup of coffee.

“You know,” Irene said in a different tone, “I know that your father may not have been the most stable figure in your life. But some men just aren’t made that way. For what it’s worth, I know he had a lot of regrets along those lines. There are a lot of things he would have done differently.”

“Irene?” Cynthia said.

Irene gave her the look of a patient receptionist as the waitress set before them two plates so laden that food tilted over the sides.

“I do not want to talk about these things with you,” Cynthia said.

“Why not?”

“It’s past. There’s no point.”

“But it helps to talk about it. Right? I know it helps me to be able to talk about him with you.”

“It does not help. You weren’t there. You cannot insert yourself into it and honestly the thought of you talking about it at all seems kind of obscene to me.”

Irene looked stricken.

“I’ll tell you my thoughts about the past,” Cynthia said, leaning back against the plush booth. “It’s like a safe-deposit box: getting all dressed up and going downtown and having a look in there isn’t going to change what’s in it. I have very little time left with my father. The closer the end gets the more suspenseful it all is and to be honest I don’t have the time to learn anything new about you or about anybody else he might have shacked up with. I don’t have any interest in any kind of half-assed bonding experience with you, like you’re going to be my stepmother or something. And if he’d wanted things to be like that between you and me, he would have mentioned you to me back when he still could have. You know, I’ve changed my mind. It actually does help to talk about it.”

The corners of Irene’s mouth were weakening. “May I ask, then,” she said, straining to be dignified, “why we’re here?”

“Because there’s something I want to ask you, Irene, and I haven’t really known how to ask it. But as I’m sitting here, I realize that it doesn’t matter what you think of me. It doesn’t matter. So what I’ve been wanting to ask you is this: what is your endgame here? Because I’ll tell you something. I don’t know you very well, obviously, but I know him well enough to guess what kind of relationship the two of you had. He was a man who got off on being admired, and when that feeling wore off he would move on, but since you had the good fortune to be there at the end you probably think it was a love that would have lasted forever. He didn’t really live much of a life but if he had a woman in the room with him who thought he was just the shit, well, that’s all he needed to feel good about himself. He could be a little cutting sometimes, right? Pumped himself up by teaching you things and making you tell him how smart he was? And I’ll bet he had lots of good reasons not to get married whenever you brought that up. But the bottom line is you have no real legal connection to him, no obligation, and to be brutal not even an emotional relationship with him anymore, considering that he doesn’t know who you are.” She put some half-and-half in her coffee, because that was the only option on the table down here in fat country. “Do you see where I’m going with all this, Irene?”