Lily King - Father of the Rain

“It’s like the Ramsays’ house,” Alex says, getting out of the car.

“‘Will you fade?’” Julie says. “‘Will you perish?’”

“‘We remain!’” Alex bellows.

My father flashes me a look: They’re not playing with a full deck, are they?

The ocean is across the street, booming with waves. Alex stops before stepping onto the sand. “Magnificent.”

Julie and I take off our sandals and let the fathers go ahead of us.

“So who’s the guy with the mountain bike?” I ask.

“What?”

“The guy who won’t talk to you.”

She crosses her arms. The wind is blowing her short hair into a short funnel. “Damn. How’d you know?”

“I’ve never heard you complain about people not being approachable .” Julie could make friends with a barnacle.

“He lives in the apartment above me. Alone. But I haven’t been able to speak to him.”

“What?”

“I know, it’s weird. I just get all — bashful.”

I laugh into the wind. “We need to track this. This is a first. He’s bringing out your tortoise side.”

“It’s so good to see you.” She slips her arm through mine, and I squeeze her to me. “I’m trying to get a sense of your days here.”

“My father marked his ninetieth day in AA two weeks ago. It’s a big deal.”

“I was talking about your days,” she says, but the men have stopped to wait for us so I don’t have to answer. What could I tell her? That in three and half months I’d written less than three pages of a nonacademic article?

“I love the proportions of this beach.”

“The proportions, Pop?”

He shrugs. He likes to be teased by her. “Some beaches are too long and skinny, some you have to walk a mile to the water. This one is just right.”

“The Platonic ideal of beach?”

“Exactly. And see that island out there, slightly off center? There always has to be something asymmetrical within the concept of perfection. Like Julie’s nose.”

“Daddy!” she says, covering it. It bends slightly to the right.

He wraps his arm around her and kisses her on the forehead. “Asymmetrical perfection, my love. Nothing more, nothing less.”

My father and I walk back to the car behind them.

“Nice guy,” my father says. “Did you know he was a shrink?”

“I did.”

“He told me a story about a guy who came to see him for a few years. Passionate fly fisherman. He’d bring his box of flies to every appointment, and that’s what they’d do: go through each fly, what it caught, what time of the year you could use it. The guy can’t ever say why he’s there, can’t answer that question. Two years go by, and one day the guy holds up a fly and says, ‘This is the fly my son tied the day before he died.’ Christ, that’s a story, isn’t it?”

At lunch we all order lobsters, except my father, who ribs Alex for wearing his bib.

“This is a decent shirt,” Alex says.

“I just hope we don’t see anyone I know.”

“You can tell them I’m your retarded cousin from Akron.”

“Daddy!”

“Excuse me, Jules. So how’d you end up here in Ashing, Gardiner?”

“My wife told me we were moving out of Boston, and the next thing I knew the vans were at the door.”

Alex laughs. “It’s like that with women, isn’t it? They know what they want.”

“And what they don’t want,” my father says, looking down at his paper plate.

I ask whom they’re visiting in Maine, and Alex tells us about his friend from med school who has set up clinics in war-torn areas. They’re lucky to be catching him in the country. He describes his own visit to the clinic in Guatemala and the experience of using a translator for therapy, how he was able to be much more aware of the person’s emotions as they were speaking to him because of the delay in meaning. Julie and I have many questions for him, about the conditions and the civil war, and his answers just stir up more questions. My father eats his hot dogs and nods and says, “Is that right?” several times, but he’s not listening. He has a hard time relaxing. His leg jiggles continuously beside me. He’s like a boy in school waiting for the bell to ring, or, if you look closely, like an animal who’s not certain there’s not a predator nearby.

After plates are cleared and fingers cleaned with lemon-scented wipes, Alex gets out a small set of watercolor tubes and a small black notebook with thick pages. He looks over my shoulder at the harbor and hastily dabs paint onto a page. My father insists on paying the bill.

He and I sit in the back on the way home to Myrtle Street. The maples along both sides of the road are old and flourishing, impossibly tall, their leaves just starting to turn. My father rubs his thumb on a seam of his pants.

I invite them in, but Alex says they have to be in Wiscasset by five. It’s Julie’s turn to go to the bathroom, so I take her in the house and wait for her in the kitchen while our fathers talk in the yard.

When she comes out she says, “I thought if I came here and saw you it would all make sense, what you decided.”

“And that didn’t happen?”

“That man is doing just fine. You don’t need to be here, Daley.”

“He puts on a good act. And he is getting better. He’s growing.”

“I’m worried you’re waiting for something from him that he can’t ever give you. And if that’s not it, I just hope you understand that your life and your growth is every bit as important as his.”

I can’t bear another parting lecture at the door. “You need to think of me now as a sort of Charlotte Brontë figure, the unmarried daughter of the town vicar.”

“Please don’t say that, even in jest. I don’t know why you’ve thrown everything away.” She looks like she’s about to cry.

“Tell me you wouldn’t drop everything to be with your father if he needed you.”

“He wouldn’t let me.”

“If your father broke his back and couldn’t get out of bed, you’d be right there for him.”

“He wouldn’t let me stay. It would break his heart if I lost something I’d worked for my whole adult life because of him.”

“Your father must have a lot of people he could lean on, but my father has no one but me right now. I’m it.”

“I understand that it’s important to you to believe that.”

“Spare me the therapy-speak. I am fixing something with my father that got destroyed when I was eleven years old. What job title could ever compare to that?”

“I’m not talking about the job, Daley. You can get another job. I’m talking about Jonathan. You two are what all the rest of us are looking for.”

“Don’t idealize us. It was a flawed relationship, obviously, if he couldn’t understand my decision.”

“ I can’t understand your decision. No one understands what you’ve done.”

“But you are still speaking to me. Jonathan has disappeared.”

“I think for some reason you’re scared of what you have with Jonathan.”

“He’s gone, Julie. It’s over. Use the past tense.”

“No.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

“You really haven’t heard from him?” My heart is slamming now.

“No.”

I realize I was counting on her to tell me today where he’s gone and how he’s doing. The big fist of pain shifts and forces up a few tears. She puts her arms around me and makes it burn even more. She’s leaving and Jonathan is really gone.

“Let’s make you a plan,” she says softly. “How much longer do you think you’ll stay here?”

“I don’t know how long he’ll need me.”

“Then you’ve got to decide how long you want to be needed.”