Lily King: Father of the Rain

My father nods. His face is red and wet.

“It’s strange,” I say to Jonathan that night in the hotel room. “They’ve had a life together. I always thought it was such a desperate act, but I think he grew to really love her. And she has many stories in which he’s the hero.”

“How was she to you?”

“Very kind, appreciative that I came.”

“I’m glad.”

We’re on the big bed in our hotel room. Lena and Jeremy are on the floor in front of the TV, hair wet from swimming, surfing the two hundred and eighty channels. I’ve got an eye on the screen, unsure what might flash on next.

Jonathan tips my face toward him with a finger, away from the TV. “It’s okay,” he says. My overprotectiveness is something we struggle with.

“My father is so entirely himself, that’s the weird thing. You can strip someone of so much, but he’s still there. Just the way his hands rest on the mattress.”

“It must be hard to see him like that.”

“I know it should be. But it feels so much safer with him in that bed. I never thought he could be felled.”

“I didn’t really either,” Jonathan says.

“Thank you,” I whisper, and kiss the hollow below his ear. “Thank you for being here with me.” I feel the defenselessness of my love for him, an utter vulnerability, all my guards down and gone.

It took me several years to agree to marriage. Julie listened to all my fears and said, “You seem to think that once you get married your love for each other is going to start draining out like it’s in a bucket with a leak, like you get this one tank of gas and can’t stop for more. You aren’t allowing for the possibility that love doesn’t always start dying, that it can actually grow.” I thought she was delusionally optimistic.

“You’re gooey,” Jonathan says. It’s Lena’s word for when she feels all floppy with affection.

“I am.”

“Stop hugging!” Jeremy says, his head popping up at the foot of the bed. And when we don’t move away from each other, he climbs up and tries to pry us apart. But he can’t budge us.

I have no memory of ever seeing my parents touch. I suppose it is a luxury, his aversion to our affection with each other. I hope someday he will see it differently.

Lena clicks on CNN. The primaries don’t start for four more months, but they’re playing clips of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigning in different parts of Iowa, as if the caucuses were next week. Jonathan and I look on, but we don’t have our usual argument about them.

“Is your father going to die?” Lena asks after we shut out the light and lie, all four of us, in the king-sized bed. They have no name for him. He is my father, but not their anything.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“Are we going to come with you to the hospital tomorrow?” Lena asks.

“Briefly. Daddy will bring you over mid-morning, and if your grandfather is stable you can say hello.”

“Hello and goodbye,” Jeremy says. Death hangs lightly on a six-year-old. Then he thinks more about this. “Do you like your dad?” It’s new to them, me having a dad. They’ve always known that my father lives in Massachusetts and that I haven’t seen him since long before they were born. But he was never real to them until now.

I don’t know how to explain it all to them. “Yes, I like my dad.” I try to think of why, because that’s what they’ll ask next. “He is so familiar to me.”

“Yeah, because he’s your dad,” Jeremy says.

“That’s right.”

But he wants more. “Why is Granny the only grandparent we see?”

“Because Daddy’s dad is dead,” Lena says. “Mom’s mom is dead, and Mom’s dad is dying. That’s why.”

“But he wasn’t always dying.”

I assumed that once I had children I would get in touch with my father. I thought it would feel important to me for them to know their grandfather. But in fact it was just the opposite. “Here come the little pickaninnies,” I could hear him say under his breath as we approached the house. It wasn’t just the possibility that they would overhear a racial slur, or see him drunk and raging. When I became a parent, even moments I had once thought of as tender went rancid: ridiculing Mr. Rogers, pummeling my stuffed animals at night. Once, when the kids were younger, our neighbor, Maya, who was eleven, came over to bake cookies with us. She had a rope bracelet around her wrist, the first hint of breasts beneath her T-shirt. I realized that she was the age I’d been when my parents divorced, and Lena was Elyse’s age. They were both just little girls. My throat squeezed shut and I had to rasp out my instructions. “Why are you talking so funny, Mommy?” Lena asked. Once the cookies were in the oven I went into the bathroom and pressed a washcloth to my face. I had been a little girl, too, with a rope bracelet and breast buds and a father who was reading us Penthouse at night.

The next morning my father is back in restraints. He has had a rough night, hollering and thrashing. A nurse is walking around in a neck brace, and I fear he’s responsible.

Barbara is nearly done with the sea in her square of needle-point. All she has left is the red hull of the ship. My father is sleeping. He has worn himself out.

A new nurse fiddles with a machine. She changes his IV, then pokes his finger for a drop of blood. He wakes up screaming.

“All right, drama king, settle down,” she says. “You want those restraints off?”

My father nods with pleading eyes.

“You gonna behave yourself?”

He nods again.

With routine dexterity she unfastens and removes the stiff bands of cloth. “You’re sort of smooshed down at the bottom.” She turns to us. “Wanna help me get him up?”

She and Barbara each take an armpit and I am told to push his feet. My father is alarmed.

“Na,” he says. “Na!”

“You have to help us now, Mr. Gardiner,” the nurse says. She pulls up the bottom of the covers to his knees. “Now, your daughter is going to have her hands right here on your feet and you are going to push with your legs.”

It is strange to be called a daughter. I put my hands on his bare feet. They are all bone, every toenail long and gray and bumpy. His calves are nearly as thin as Lena’s and the same shape, doubly familiar to me.

“Push. Push,” Barbara and the nurse say to him. “Push!”

As soon as his torso is lifted from the bed, he starts to wail. “Bacafumee,” he says. I don’t know what he means. “Bacafumee.” It’s the first time I can’t understand him.

“What’s he saying, Daley?” Barbara asks.

“ Bacafumee !” His face is squinched and red.

We get him a few inches higher in the bed. He is covered in sweat. Be careful of me, he was saying. I think of his drunk mother staring at the wall. Isn’t that really all we’ve been saying to each other, generation after generation: Be careful of me ? I am trying so hard to be careful with my children. I look at my father. He’s still whimpering a little. I’m sorry, I say silently. I’m sorry we couldn’t be more careful of each other.

Afterwards, he sleeps again. I try to read, pretend to read, but mostly I watch him. I find him as intriguing as a painting. His body tells me a long story that I have, in the past fifteen years, nearly forgotten.

My phone dings.

“They’re here,” I say to Barbara, after I read the text.

We meet them outside the double doors to the ICU. They’re putting on the antibacterial lotion, Jeremy smelling his palms and then his sister’s.

Jonathan puts out his hand to Barbara but she ignores it, steps right past and flings her arms around him, as if she’d never written in her last missive, after a conversation with Neal’s mother who’d seen us at Neal and Anne’s wedding, that I didn’t need to date a black man to get my father’s attention. That time I did write back and never heard from her again.