Lily King: Father of the Rain

“You’re kidding.”

“He thinks I’m joking when I tell him he’s married to Barbara Bridgeton.”

Garvey laughs.

“Hatch told me he was unconscious, and then I get here and he opens his eyes and starts talking to me. Sometimes they have to strap him down because he’s taken out a few nurses. They’re all walking around with neck braces and bandages.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“It’s a little trippy.” It feels so good that Garvey is here and I can exaggerate everything.

“Is he about to die? Is the doctor going to come find us and pat our backs and tell us they did all they could?”

“I don’t know.”

My father dying still doesn’t seem possible to me. It never has. Seeing him in a hospital bed seems like a violation of natural law. And now, with Garvey here, he’s turned back into a caricature, fodder for jokes, not someone who is our father and is about to die. We don’t know how to be serious about that.

Garvey looks toward the parking lot. “I don’t really want to be here for that.”

We pay and head back toward the table. “Kids look good,” he says. “Lena’s shot up three feet. They’re not mad you dragged them up here for the macabre deathbed scene?” He throws his head back, raises and tightens all the tendons in his neck, and rattles quietly, so Barbara can’t hear, “ Don’t let them take me! He’s not exactly going to go gently, is he? Jeremy looks darker than he did last Christmas. He got some serious African genes, didn’t he? Very Masai. Lucky bastard. Shit. No sickly pouffy-haired portraits of him by a fucking fountain looking like Lord Fauntleroy.”

“How’s Baby D?” Lena asks when we reach them.

Baby D is my namesake. Garvey pulls out a new photo. She’s a very large two-year-old and Garvey likes to take Paul Bunyan-like photos of her. In this one she is lifting up the back end of one of his moving vans.

“How does she do that?” Jeremy asks.

“She’s a strong little girl,” he says, and winks at Lena.

“We have a giganormous TV in our hotel room!” Jeremy says.

“Cable?”

“Two hundred and eighty-six channels!”

“They don’t get much TV at home,” I explain to Barbara. “So it’s a big deal.”

She nods but she’s not listening to us.

“There’s a TV right there,” Garvey says, pointing up. The screen is split three ways, with John McCain getting into a black SUV, Hillary making a speech to a huge crowd, and Obama springing up the metal steps of his airplane with the big O sunrise on it. “I guess I don’t have to ask who you guys are for.”

I wait for Jonathan to react. He lets Garvey get away with a lot, but this assumption is a particular vexation of his.

“We’re one of those families they interview on local news shows, split right down the middle,” he says.

“Daley’s always had that dyke side,” Garvey says. “I should have warned you.”

“Could you watch your mouth, please?” I tell him, a perpetual refrain when he’s around. “And I’m the Obama supporter, thank you very much.”

“You’re for Hillary ?” Garvey asks Jonathan.

Jonathan is used to this. He has condensed his response. “He can’t win. She can. She has the party behind her and she knows how to play hardball.”

“They did find in medical examinations that she has one more testicle than he does,” Garvey says. Lena and Jeremy are perplexed. I need to carry earplugs. “I don’t know, man,” he continues, serious now. “I think you’re underestimating him. This guy knows how to play the game.”

“But in the game, the real game, there’s no room for a man of color.”

“Have you seen the crowds he draws?”

“Hillary is beating him fifty to twenty in the polls.”

“Not for long.”

“If he wins the nomination, we’ll get to see how deeply racist this country really is. The guy doesn’t have a prayer.”

“He’s going to be our next president.”

“And then everyone can dust off their hands and forget about the black poverty rate and that one in nine young black men are in prison. We’ll be post-racial . Have you heard that one yet?”

“Man, and I thought I was cynical,” Garvey says. “I bet your mother doesn’t share your sentiments.” He and Jonathan’s mother have become good friends over all the holidays we’ve spent together.

Jonathan laughs. “No, she does not. My mother is the biggest pie-in-the-sky dreamer there is. She’s walking door-to-door with her Obama pamphlets right now, I’m sure.”

“Our mother used to do that,” Garvey said. “Remember all the rallies she dragged us to?”

I shake my head. Garvey often remembers me into his youth, but most of the time I was home with Nora.

“I’d vote for Obama,” Barbara says.

Garvey pats her hand. “I think you need to lay off the hard stuff in the morning, Barbara.”

“I like him. I like his smile.”

“Well, he’s got the white vote at this table,” Garvey says. “It’s the black vote that’s going to be the bitch.”

At quarter of twelve we move over into the ICU waiting room. Jeremy brought a deck of cards, and Jonathan and Garvey play War with him and Lena on the floor. Garvey introduces all sorts of new rules and strategies, allowing for alliances, pacts, spies, and explosives. They make a great deal of noise with all the bombing and the laughing, but we have the place to ourselves. I sit on a flowered couch with Barbara, and when I notice she is crying I pat her arm.

At one-fifteen the doctor comes out. They have gotten his blood oxygen saturation levels up a little bit. He’s still sedated, but we can go in, two at a time, briefly.

Barbara urges Garvey and me in first. “He’ll want to see you. He’ll want to know you’re both here.” Will he? Or are we all just pretending, playing the parts we’re supposed to play?

He’s in the same room. His bed has been lowered flat, which makes him look more seriously ill. There’s a tube now coming out of the side of his mouth, taped to his cheek, and a thinner one coming out of his nose. He’s asleep, not rattling anymore. The machine breathes for him, pshhhh, click, pshhhh, click . Garvey stops halfway to the bed.

“Shit.” He looks back at me.

“I know,” I say.

I let him have my chair. He sits tentatively and does not lean forward. He watches my father, his father, for a long time. It is strange to have all our DNA in the same room: our big ears, our bony knees, our brittle defensive humor. And our father lying there, the gash in his children’s heart.

Garvey opens his mouth to say something, then stands up. “I can’t do this, Daley. I don’t know why I’m in this room.”

“Sit down. It will come to you.”

“I doubt it.” But he sits.

We both watch his mechanical breaths.

Garvey starts laughing. “Do you remember Libby Moffet?”

I see a chunky teenager doing a swan dive. “Who used to babysit for the Tabors?”

“Yes, her. I was home one time and went up to see Dad and Catherine but they were out and she was babysitting Elyse.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You weren’t there. You were at camp.”

“I never went to camp.”

“Then you must have been down at Goodale’s snorting coke with the stockboy. So they come home, Libby and I have fallen asleep after having sex in their bed, and Dad is ripshit. He wants to fight me. And I tell him he’s too drunk and I’ll come back the next morning for a fair fight. So I come back the next day, right at eight like we said, and Dad’s just sitting there on the top step of the back porch. He’s got tears in his eyes.” Garvey has told me this story before, I realize now, but I let him continue. “It was the morning Gus Barlow shot himself. Remember that? Dad had just heard. He made me promise I’d never do anything that stupid.”