Lily King: Father of the Rain

I kiss them goodbye in the lobby. They are going to Ashing for lunch. In Lena’s pocket is a map I drew this morning of the town, of Myrtle Street, Water Street, Ruby Beach, the sub shop, and the penny candy store. Lighthouse Books no longer exists. It is a cell phone store now, Neal told me in his last email. Jonathan will show them the front terrace on Myrtle Street, where he stood asking me to come with him to California. They know this story. They love to hear it, love the thrill of thinking about how we almost didn’t become a family. I can listen to Jonathan tell it, the way he exaggerates the size of the house, the barking of the dogs, and the leashes in my hand, and laugh. But when I am alone I can remember the years of pain, the hollowness of my life after that moment, and it aches for a while, as if that time never ended, as if it never turned into a funny story that we tell our children.

I get a sandwich in the cafeteria and go back up to the ICU. The woman next door is wheeled away to a different wing. She is sitting up, holding a jar of flowers. Her two sons, old men themselves, walk on either side of her gurney. My father sleeps, loudly, mouth open, ropes of white spit shaking and breaking and forming again after a swallow. Barbara leaves to run some errands, and I am alone with him for the first time. I watch him as if he were an event of some kind. The lines on his face have dug deep: laugh lines, scowl lines, squinting lines. On his forehead they are perfectly horizontal and vertical, etched in squares, a tennis net across his brow. His hands twitch in his dreams. They are surprisingly smooth, not creased and buckled like his face, the veins raised, more green than purple, the most pronounced where they cross the bone in the middle, the pencil lead still blue beneath the skin of his knuckle.

A beeping comes from one of the machines and his favorite nurse comes in. She lasers his wristband, checks his IV, punches a button to stop the beeping. He looks up at her with devotion.

“Are you thirsty, Mr. Amory?”

He nods and she opens a drawer and peels the plastic wrapper off something that looks like a lollipop, swabs his mouth with it, and tosses it into the trash. It is a small moist sponge. He looks at her gratefully.

“They’re right here.” She pats the drawer. “You can do that anytime for him.”

She flicks a switch on the side of his bed, and his head comes up almost to sitting. She opens another drawer and pulls out two small pillows which she slips under each of his arms. He looks much more comfortable than he’s looked all day. I thank her. I’m not sure she hears me.

“Pretty green eyes,” she says to me on her way out. “Just like your dad’s.”

I wait for him to drift to sleep but he doesn’t. He is more upright now than I’ve seen him, his arms resting on the pillows as if he held a drink in one and a cigarette in the other, as if he were lying on a chaise by the pool thinking about a dip and saying, “I wonder what the poor people are doing today.” He stares straight ahead, puffing up his cheeks, then blowing out the air, watching his nurse through the opening key a report into a computer and laugh at something a doctor behind her is saying. Did my father ever have a conscience? Did he ever wake up in the dark and think: I have treated some people badly; I have been selfish; I have caused pain? Or did he truly never develop to that extent? Was he only ever capable of feeling his own needs, his own pain? Was there any way to have had a good relationship with him?

He turns to me and groans. “Ow,” he says. “Ow ow.” He points to his stomach. “Desomfinfissdowdere.” There’s something fishy down there.

“There is, Dad. It’s a catheter.”

“Ow!” he says, more loudly, and puts his hands down in the covers. He lets out a terrible wail.

“Don’t touch it, Dad. It needs to be there.”

He brings his hands out but he glares at me. He balls his fists together and spits out something. “Sick of it,” I think he says. “Sick of it,” he says again.

“I know it’s uncomfortable, Dad.”

He glares. No, you don’t; you don’t know the half of it, he is saying to me.

There he is. There is the man I know. “Try to relax. Let’s think of pleasant things.” I wonder what would be pleasant to him now, apart from a martini. “Let’s imagine you’re back at home on a summer day.”

He glowers. He starts muttering so fast I can’t understand him. He is pissed. He is yelling at everyone, but he can’t get his voice to go much above a whisper. I can make out a few swears, but not much more. He is looking down at his own fists. I feel how distant I am from all his emotion now, how little any of it is connected to me. I’m glad my kids aren’t here to hear him.

“Go to sleep, Dad,” I say finally. “You need rest.”

He turns and notices me again. There are tears leaking out of his eyes. I get up and wipe them, then open the drawer with the sponge lollipops. I peel off a wrapper and put it on his tongue. He closes his mouth around it and sighs. When he opens again, I pull it out, put it in the trash, and sit down in my chair beside him.

His hand knocks against the metal bar. “Wiya ju ho ma ha?”

I put my hand over the bar and onto his. It is cold. I squeeze and he squeezes back. I keep my hand in his for the rest of the afternoon.

That night, around three in the morning, I wake up crying. I cry on my stomach, the tears spreading on the bottom hotel sheet. I shake the bed, but no one wakes up.

Barbara calls at six. They’ve discovered a large clot in his lungs. They won’t let her in to see him.

“We’re coming over,” I tell her, and we hurry to dress.

We meet in the cafeteria. I let the kids have pie with their breakfast. Barbara insists on paying. Her hands shake as she tries to pick out the change from her wallet.

We take a table in the far corner. And then Lena and Jeremy gasp. I look up to see what gruesome bombing in Iraq or Afghanistan they have seen on one of the screens hanging from the ceiling, but they are not looking at the televisions. They are looking at a man in the middle of the cafeteria smooshing his face with his hands for their benefit. They are looking at their Uncle Garvey.

They run across the room and leap on him, hike up him like a tree, and he pretends to try and swing them off. They are still hanging from his back as he hugs Barbara, who is crying, and then Jonathan, and then me, also crying. He smells like his van: chicken and cigarettes.

“They won’t let me in to see him,” he says.

“They’re intubating him,” I say.

“Jesus. What does that mean?”

“There’s not enough oxygen in his blood because of a clot, and they have to put in a breathing tube and then try to get his blood to thin.”

Garvey nods, breathing in. He is nervous. He thought he’d see Dad this morning. Now he has to wait. Now it might be too late.

“How are you holding up?” he says to Barbara.

“Having all you kids here is the silver lining.” Her voice breaks. I think about that Thanksgiving, about how she’d held a family together for nearly forty years and then broke it for my father. Family is important to her. And we are my father’s family.

“Let’s go get you some pie,” I say, steering him back toward the food.

“Someone’s lost her fiery roar,” he says, once we are out of earshot. He has gotten his fair share of cards, too.

“I know.”

“What’s going on with Dad? Is he going to croak before we can get another good swipe at each other?”

“I don’t know. It seemed like he was doing better. He was alert and talking.”

“How’d that go?”

“Good. He’s sort of circa 1980, so that makes things easier between us.”