Lily King: Father of the Rain

“What?”

“He wants me to go get Hal Murry. Is that his doctor?”

“God, no. Hal Murry. He wouldn’t have mentioned him .”

I wait for her to realize the improbability of me coming up with the name Hal Murry on my own.

“He’s the new manager at the Mainsail. Your father can’t stand him.”

“Is paysino goo.”

“Dad, this place is good for you right now. While you get better.”

He jerks his head. “Inahn goo shay.”

“You’re not in good shape now, but you will be. You’re on the upswing.” I’m not sure this is true. I have come, after all, to say goodbye. But he was supposed to be unconscious and dying. He doesn’t seem to be dying now.

“Na. Na. Dow.” He tries to point his finger again and winces.

“Gardiner, don’t try to move. Stay still.” Barbara turns toward the nurses’ station. “I’m going to go find somebody. He’s agitated again.”

He watches Barbara speaking and then, when she leaves, bunches his eyebrow hairs together. Who the hell is that? he is asking.

“Barbara,” I say quietly

“Wha she doo hee?”

“She’s your wife, Dad.”

“Ma wife? Ahm mar to Barba Bidgeta ?”

“Shhh, Dad, she’ll hear you,” I say playfully, and his mouth curls up on one side.

“Is na posseb.”

Barbara comes back with a nurse who checks all his tubes and the machines they are attached to. There seem to be many liquids going in to him. One bag is sucked nearly empty. She produces a full one from her pocket and replaces it.

“You want to sit up a bit more, Mr. Amory?” she asks. She is a large woman, my age, with deep brown skin and a southwestern accent. Texas, maybe. How has she ended up here in this strange corner of the country?

“Uh-huh.”

She pushes a button on the side of the bed for a few seconds, and the bed goes up but my father sinks down. So she hoists him up easily and he hollers out, right in her ear.

“No screaming, you big baby,” she says. “You’re going to damage my eardrum and I’m going to have to sue your you-know-what.”

“I’ll sue you first,” my father says, but the nurse can’t understand him.

“That’s his favorite,” Barbara says when she leaves. “He’s very good with her. Gardiner, can you see this necklace I’m wearing?”

“Ya.”

“Do you remember giving it to me?”

“Na.”

“You gave it to me after you got out of the hospital the last time. Do you remember why?”

“Na.”

“Because you said I took such good care of you.”

My father nods, then looks at me hard. I know what he’s saying. I can hear him clear as a bell: Yeah, she took such good care of me, look where I am now, with tubes up my nose and out my ass.

I drove straight from Myrtle Street to Julie’s that night, with a torn rotator cuff and three sprained ribs. I washed down Tylenol with coffee and got there in thirty-six hours. She took me to the hospital and then back to her apartment. We can find some humor in it now — the wounded bird I was, my months on her couch, my tears in public places. And Michael, the unapproachable mountain bike man, tells it from his perspective, how he was just summoning the nerve to ask out the introverted professor (“one of my many, many misperceptions,” he’ll say) when suddenly below him there was talking and crying every night. He assumed her girlfriend had moved in, and it took us a while to correct this impression. I took a job leading tours through Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde and other sites of the Ancestral Puebloans. I walked through those villages built into the cliffs, trying to re-create for my audiences — groups of retirees, schoolchildren, and teachers — a sense of the real lives that were once lived there. I often overheard a pitying remark about how different life was for them, how basic their needs, how narrow their world. But the more I climbed through the carefully laid-out houses and imagined the families who once ate and slept in them, the more I felt how little the difference, how simple our real needs still are: food, water, shelter, kindness. I loved trying to make that world come back alive for people, especially for the kids, whose imaginations were still so open. When it was time for Michael to move in with Julie, I moved a block away. For four years my social life was Julie and Michael, just as Julie’s had once been me and Jonathan. Occasionally they asked someone else over for dinner, a colleague of theirs, but it never took, not for any of us. We had our rhythm. A new person always threw us off. Julie says that when she told me they were getting married, I looked like someone who was trying to be cheerful while my leg was being sawed off. I just couldn’t understand why they wanted to ruin a great relationship with marriage.

I used to sit at my computer and stare at Jonathan’s address online:

1129 Trowbridge Avenue

Philadelphia, PA 19104

There he was. He was there. He’d made it home again. I had his phone number, too, but when I thought of calling, all I could imagine was him straining to get off the phone. Julie wanted to invite him to the wedding but I couldn’t risk having to meet a girlfriend or a wife, see photos of a little baby. But then, without telling her, I put an invitation in the mail. I knew where she kept the RSVP cards people sent back; he never responded.

Julie and her father argued about the ceremony. Alex disapproved of the bridesmaids, the poetry, and homemade vows. He took a sudden interest in Orthodox rituals. He wanted her to circle the chuppah seven times and to enter it alone with her face fully covered. He wanted the rabbi to read the traditional wedding contract in Aramaic. She said it would take forty-five minutes and was nothing but a pre-nup, all about how many cows Michael would have to pay to divorce her. At least, Alex insisted, Michael would smash a glass as a warning against excessive joy. “I want excessive joy!” I heard her scream at him.

She got married in the small garden of the house she and Michael had just bought. The guests filled the seats outside as I helped her dress, slipping the satin buttons through their holes, threading flowers through her hair.

We stood side by side, me in a dark blue silk dress, she in white tulle.

“My dissertation was called ‘Women and Rites: The Misogyny of Custom,’” she said. “How can I explain this white dress to my students?”

“They’ll never have to know.”

Then she looked at me closely. “You look so beautiful, Daley.” She said this as if it were an important day for me, and not her.

I shook my head. “You’re the beautiful one. You are stunning, Jules.” And she was. She was glowing with excessive joy. But I still didn’t understand why she wanted to be married.

And then her father called up to us. It was time.

I didn’t see him right away. He was sitting behind the big hats of Julie’s aunts, and I was under a frilly chuppah. Alex was in front, beaming, teary, all the tension between them already forgotten. And then one aunt leaned over to say something to another, and there he was. My shock broke his nervous face into a wide grin, and that sun hit my face after years in the shade. I couldn’t help the tears. While her cousin read an Emily Dickinson poem, Julie squeezed my hand and whispered, “You see, there were many good reasons for me to get married.”

After the ceremony we met in the middle of the garden and held each other for a long time without a word, our bodies slotted together in the same way. Everything — his smell, his skin, his thudding heart, his breath on my neck — was what I knew, familiar as a season. So this is what happens to me next, I thought, and I finally understood what my mother had meant about falling in love. It was the surprise, the recognition that everything had been moving in this direction without your ever realizing it.