Dive (14 page)

“I’m going to miss my dad,” I say. I envision his empty slippers.

“Tell him, V. You know, Romeo and Juliet may have loved each other, but they didn’t communicate very well. Now, the French writers, they know how to communicate.”

“Like Rimbaud?” Did she say tell my father?

“Rimbaud’s the best,” she says, and smiles. It’s as if she’s never smiled before, because I can’t take my eyes away from her face. When Jane looks over, the smile actually slams into me as I look back, but in such a pleasing way, I swear there’s never been anything like it. How can I feel this way when I’m crying about my father? “There’s nobody like him,” she says.

I choke. Does she know what I’m thinking too?

“Do you know his stuff?”

“Not much,” I say.

“Well, he started writing when he was
ten
years old, and his first poem was published when he was sixteen. After school, he became a wanderer and a real bohemian. I’ve read that he lived in a state of filth, and that’s because he was reading occult and ‘immoral’ literature—whatever that is—I haven’t found out yet. He was rebelling against the bourgeois life he was surrounded by. But then he’d write these
beautiful
poems. Listen to this one,” she says, and pulls the ragged book from her knapsack:

On blue summer nights I will go down the paths . . .

I will not speak, I will not think a thing,

But infinite love will rise in my soul,

And I will go far, so far, like a bohemian.

By nature, happy as if I had a girl.

“You know, the first time I read it, I thought it said, ‘as if I
was
a girl,’ but it’s better this way, don’t you think, V?”

| | |

What does she mean? I can’t answer that question. She calls me V like we’ve known each other forever. Like we trust each other. What do I think? “Did you study him?” I finally say.

“Oh, no.” She tosses another rock into the pond. “Both my parents teach French lit. They’re going to start summer session at the college soon.” She laughs. “That’s why we’re staying in that hideous house at Sagamore.”

“Don’t you like it there?”

“Sure, me and all the other robots.”

We laugh. Then we’re as quiet as the air. Maybe I will trust her.

“So what do you think about death, anyway?” I finally ask.

Jane doesn’t even hesitate. “What I think these days is how sad you are and I wish there was something I could do.”

I take a deep breath, and when I let it out, a piece of me seems to go with it. In the empty space is a new feeling. One that trembles, roaming and tender, that shakes my hands from the inside out. Who is Jane? I want to touch her, to make sure she’s real.

Landing

My dad is home.

Who said that? I did. A simple matter of hours passing has managed what was unthinkable just a few days ago. He’s home. Isn’t that amazing?

My dad’s amazing. From gagging to crazy to walking out the door. A couple of nurses were standing in the hall, shaking their heads. “Sometimes they just close their eyes when they hear it—but will you take a look at
this . . .
” said one. And their heads actually wagged. “Looks like he’s got plans, if you get me,” said the other. Their wagging seemed to be shaking the disbelief out. They laughed almost like they were coughing, the weight of relief landing in the sound.

I heard and saw it all because I was walking behind my dad, Baby Teeth’s hand in mine. Edward had Dad’s suitcase and was thoughtful enough to carry it on his unaccompanied side, so it didn’t smash into my leg. Wasn’t that nice? My mother had one arm around my dad’s bony shoulders. “Take your time, sweetheart,” I heard her say. “There’s no rush.”

“You must be kidding,” he said, and they actually laughed. “Get me out of here!”

My dad had refused to sit in the wheelchair that was required, for insurance reasons, to wheel patients beyond the hospital entryway, to the outside. To the world. “I’m no longer a patient,” he said to the attendant who had appeared and recited these rules as we were leaving the room. “I’ll find my own way out, thank you,” my dad said.

The attendant, with a helpless shrug of his white-coated shoulders, began to follow us, leaning on the handles of the empty, rolling wheelchair. Though it took my dad forever to walk, we eventually reached the main exit. He had begun to push with one hand against the yellow wall to create momentum.

I remembered that feeling, that pushing. I did that as a kid—against a wall, or against the ground at the beginning of a race—maybe to catch up with somebody, maybe just hoping nothing could stop me. My breath snagged when I saw my dad’s pushing hand. Then I got the hiccups. Edward started laughing. Then Baby Teeth started. I had to beg them to stop because laughing and choking simultaneously was agony. It almost had me crying, exactly what I was trying to avoid.

My mother made a big homecoming meal of Dad’s favorites, steak and new red potatoes, sauteed string beans, white onions in her special cream sauce. She was opening and closing oven doors as soon as we arrived home. “I was hoping it would make you hungry,” she said to Dad. Since she had prepared everything earlier in the day, the stuff just waited for us.

Edward helped my dad get situated at the dining-room table, and that took as much time as it did for me to take Lucky outside for his walk and then back inside to his waiting dinner bowl. My dad’s so skinny, it looks like if he even thinks about walking his legs might break. But they made it from the car to the dining-room chair. Edward’s hand under my dad’s elbow is a good support, Dad had said.

At the table he began to ask all kinds of questions—had Baby Teeth lost any molars, and how was Edward’s car running? Let’s see Lucky’s leg and when was the cast coming off? I began to wonder if this was really my father, because these were the kinds of questions he had never asked.

My old father was always talking about lawn mower engine sizes or how old the pine trees would have to be before they could act as a privacy fence between us and the house next door. My mother had to remind him of stuff like birthdays and Baby Teeth’s stubborn bicuspids. As he sat there, my dad actually turned red from all those questions. My mother had to tell him to slow down.

So there we were in the early American dining room, surrounded by polished, gleaming wood; everything in this house was made of wood, the room usually reserved for holidays or company. In a way, we were company. We were the new Dunns, the downhill ones, the after-the-news-keep-a-stiff-upper-lip-that’s-the-Irish-way Dunns.

| | |

And what was wrong with me? I was suddenly filled with a terrible urge to laugh. I knew if I did that the sound would be as high-pitched as a siren, but more bitter. I could taste it. Then I began to experience that crawling feeling, the one that lifted me out of my chair and sent me floating to the ceiling. There I was, looking down at the good-smelling, gleaming dinner table. I saw everyone happy and relieved, and then I lost my appetite.

The person on the ceiling wondered if this was really my father, or whether, because so much had happened, he had turned into someone else. Shut up, I said to myself, it’s just vertigo. I’m dizzy. It’s just anxiety. I floated down.

I slid my hand under the table and fed bits of steak to Lucky, the begging expert, who waited with his head against my leg, chin on my knee. Lucky ate more than anyone. I noticed that though all of us were acting very carefree, heaping food onto plates and pouring gravy, no one was actually eating.

Dad must’ve noticed too, because he cleared his throat and said, “Let’s make the best of it, okay? It’s a great meal and we’re all together.” Now, that was my
old
demanding dad talking. But who was the new one? And what would I say to him? I looked at the skinny, gray person in my dad’s chair. His jaw and cheekbones stuck out like they were too big for his face.

“Chew every bite one hundred times!” Baby Teeth said, each hand wound so tightly around her knife and fork, she wouldn’t be dropping any utensils at this meal.

“That’s a fine idea,” my mother agreed, her eyes as bright as the chandelier above our heads.

“For digestion,” Baby Teeth added. Her voice was normal.

“That’s what they say.” My dad nodded.

“Mrs. Engel said so. . . .” Mrs. Engel was the grammar school librarian. But something was not right. Baby Teeth’s knuckles paled as she gripped the silver.

“No plucking mole hairs either,” Baby Teeth added, in a smaller voice. Edward gagged on a mouthful of onions. I wanted to disappear. I remembered one of the fifth-grade teachers who had had a mole on her chin, but I couldn’t recall her name. Oh, yes, Mrs. Angel. I looked uncertainly at my sister, waiting.

“That’s right,” Baby Teeth said, tapping a potato with her knife. “It can give you cancer.”

“Rachel!” My mother’s fork clattered against her plate, slid into her gravy.

We all looked at my sister. For no reason, I thought the chandelier might crash down onto the table.

“Let her,” my father said, wiping his hand over his brow.

“Did you know that, Daddy?” Baby Teeth asked.

“I didn’t know that, no.”

“You don’t have cancer, do you, Daddy?” Baby Teeth’s knife was rapping against her plate. She didn’t notice.

“No, honey, I don’t.” My father grabbed the white napkin from his lap and wiped behind his neck with it.

“We’re at the table,” my mother said. I could hear her teeth clench.

“It’s
okay.”
My father looked only at my sister’s plate, and Baby Teeth finally became aware that her hand was connected to the rapping noise. It stopped.

“I guess I have something worse than that, honey.”

My mother twisted in her chair, but she said nothing.

“And right now it’s okay that I do, because I’m here. We get to be together. That’s okay, isn’t it?” When I managed to yank my eyes from their hold on my shriveling, cold potatoes, I saw that my dad’s eyes were wet.

“So you’re staying home now?” Baby Teeth asked.

My dad nodded.

When Baby Teeth nodded, her hands finally relaxed, and her knife and fork tumbled to the tablecloth.

“It’s real good you’re here, Dad,” Edward said, eyes as thick as the milk in his glass.

When my father smiled, his face looked like it was made of wax. “Thanks, Ed. Just a little worse for wear is all.”

Nobody said anything more, so we tried to eat. And then we stopped trying. It was obvious my dad couldn’t eat right now; he’d managed to cut up and swallow only a few soft onions, so nobody else ate either. Baby Teeth dropped her fork again and let it stay dropped. I reached for my water glass. It was hard to swallow. It wasn’t what he said, but what he meant. We’re all together now. Soon we won’t be.

After dinner we watched old home movies. It was Dad’s idea, after he changed into his favorite robe, the brown one with the patches on the elbows, and his old slippers. Even Edward watched. If the projector didn’t whir noisily as the motor spun, I’d swear the only thing anybody could hear would be the way my heart pounded. The dusty reels came out of the closet, and we sprawled across the living-room floor to watch. My parents sat on the couch behind us. My father usually made the movies on holidays, so as a result he didn’t appear in much footage. I’d never noticed that before—his absence—and when I saw it, even my eyes felt empty. As if he were already gone.

The rest of us, in successive years, walked through the front door, sometimes in matching holiday outfits, and waved at the camera. We looked like a happy family. And as we watched, we laughed as if we were. My mother laughed, whooping louder than anybody, mostly at herself, because each time the camera had focused on her, she had fled. When it caught her, she was blushing, embarrassed. She looked like Baby Teeth.

Between reels, my mother disappeared into the pantry. I could hear the ice tumble into her glass. Lucky rolled around on his back, doing his dog twist, ecstatic that people were on the floor with him. I scratched his belly. After a while my ears began to ring, I realized, unaccustomed to all this noise and commotion in my own house.

Baby Teeth eventually turned the lights back on, and Edward rewound the last reel of film. When my father said “I’ve had a good life because of all of you” is when everything suddenly stopped moving. Edward forgot to shut the machine off, and all we heard was the film flapping as it spun into a chaotic mess all over the floor.

Lucky barked as if the film were alive, which Baby Teeth seemed to find the most hilarious moment of her life. Then all of us were laughing. We only stopped when we saw that Baby Teeth had begun to cry.

Welcome Hurry

My life is in a slithering heap on the living-room floor. The film is everywhere. Too bad I can’t toss my thoughts into the pile, since they seem to be heaped in my head. Too bad I can’t just take a broom and sweep up the big, slippery mess. What can I do?

| | |

I call Jane. Even though I worry it’s too late at night, at least it’s Friday. It’s Friday, right? She answers on the first ring.

“Where have you been?” she says. “I was hoping you’d call.”

“My dad’s home. We watched all the old home movies.”

“Are you okay?”

I don’t say anything. That’s a good question.

“I wish I was there,” she says.

“So do I.”

“Look in the mirror.”

“What?” I say. I worry.

“Go look in a mirror. Can the phone reach?”

“Hang on.” I’m in the den. Just me and my snoring dog. I open the closet door and pull the phone over.