Father of the Rain (22 page)

Back on the bed, I think of Paul and how respectful and patient he always was with me, how he did edify me after all, and how now I’m certain I didn’t write him back after he bought the house. I’m the closest thing to a child he ever had. I cry for him and how his grief at losing my mother was too much for me at the time, and how we couldn’t help each other and how it was easier for me to just close the door on him and all his evocations of her, my mother, who loved me but did not protect me, who let me go off every weekend for years and years to my father’s even though I returned a wild animal and she never asked why.

If I sleep, my dreams are a continuation of my thoughts and my thoughts are like muscles, flexing and twitching inadvertently and repetitively, squeezing but never quite hard enough. I feel certain, as one does in bed in the dark, that if I can line up the right sequence of thoughts I can solve the problem of my father, the problem of me and my father in the same room. My mind circles. But at some point through the thin lids of my eyes I begin to feel the slightest lifting of the night from the sky, and then I’m liberated from the cell of these useless thoughts, and I see eucalyptus trees, a narrow road, and a yellow door with a pale green window. My heart begins to pound. I’m free again. The little hollow of the driver’s seat is waiting for me. The radio works. Jonathan had it fixed for me last week. I’ll stop at Howard Johnson’s for breakfast. I’ll sit in the booth my mother and I sat in on the way to Lake Chigham. As I pack up my few things and make the bed neat and tight, just as she taught me, I’m aware of how mercurial my emotions are, how last night my mother felt lost to me in a terrifyingly permanent way, and today she feels close by. Death is like that. Death is mercurial, too.

The hallway is dark, the air moist. I smell the cedar balls in the old chest as I pass it. If I go down the front stairs I’ll see my father, who always leaves his door ajar. But the back stairs are a straight shot to the kitchen and out the door. These steps are steep and I take them slowly, the wallpaper with its relief of ivy and berries beneath my fingers as I descend, the worn steps full of old smells, and then the humming refrigerator at the bottom, the little wedge
of space between it and the wall I used to fit in neatly, so warm in winter. The big dogs are downstairs for some reason. They leap to their feet when they see me.

“Don’t get up, fellas,” I whisper, giddy. “Please.”

They try to block my path. For the first time since I’ve been here, they seem to think I’m in charge. They seem to think I should be feeding them, and they push their noses into my thighs.

The table is clean, cleared of dishes, the blue cloth still on it with just a few grease spots from the lamb. In his careful, slanted boarding-school script my father has written:
The pills should do the trick. Goodbye, Daley
.

There are neurologists who postulate that we have not one but as many as eight brains tucked in our heads. At that moment I’m proof of it. Some of my brains are trying to misinterpret his words. Pills for the dogs? Antidepressants he didn’t tell me about? And some of my brains just want me to keep moving. He’s lying, one says. It’s a trick, says another. But one brain knows that my father and Catherine have a medicine cabinet full of painkillers and sleeping pills.

I find him on his bed in his clothes on top of the covers. He’s breathing but I can’t wake him. I’m still not sure it isn’t a trick, but I pick up the phone.

I press 911, then wonder if it’s 411, then wonder which one I actually pressed. But a woman is on the line, asking me what happened and quickly with sirens there are people in the house and a stretcher and my father’s eyes open but he can’t tell them what he took or how much. There’s no trace of anything by his bed and none of the many prescription bottles in his bathroom are completely empty.

They pump his stomach. Seven Bayer aspirin.

A psychologist comes to talk to me in the waiting area. He has the eyebrows of a surprised cartoon character, thick diagonal charcoal smudges.

“He’s very lucky,” he says quietly.

“Don’t I know it. Another twenty and he could have irritated his stomach.”

The man’s eyebrows invert and become quite stern. “This was a serious cry for help, young lady,” he says, though he can’t be more than five years older than me. “People cross a line when they take pills, no matter their efficacy. Your father might very well have believed seven aspirin
would
do the trick. And the statistics are that he will make another attempt and it will be more dramatic. He will need to be monitored closely.”

“I am leaving for California today. I won’t be monitoring anything.”

“They told me you were his daughter.”

“I am.”

“Your father has attempted suicide.”

“He drinks on a temperate day six or seven strong martinis. In my opinion he has been trying to commit suicide most days for the past thirty or forty years.” I feel so still and cold inside. I feel like I could rip this man’s lungs out if I tried, and you can hear it in my voice. Goddamn my fucking father for doing this now.

He scrawls something at the bottom of the white page on his clipboard and rubs his face.

“I specifically asked if there was alcohol abuse because of the blood tests I saw, and his doctor assured me absolutely not.”

“His doctor is one of his oldest drinking buddies. Not a reliable narrator.”

He nods, makes crosshatches in the top corner of his sheet of paper. “Are you familiar with the term
intervention
?”

I laugh. Hard. “Let’s see. His second wife just left him, his son claims never to want to see him alive again, his parents are dead, he has no siblings, and his friends should all be in rehab themselves. That would leave me and him in a room. I’d have a better chance in the Coliseum with a bunch of lions.”

“There’s no one who could support you in this?”

“This is not a man who can change.”

“Anyone can change, given the right tools.”

“I challenge you to this one. You take him on and call me when he’s all fixed.”

“California can wait a week or so. Your father needs you.”

“California cannot wait a week or so. I am a full-time professor and my job starts a week from Wednesday.”

“Where?”

“Berkeley.”

“Nice.” He puts down his pen. He is suddenly seeing me as a compatriot. I am in his league now. And I am a woman, I see him also realize. “What department are you in?”

“Anthropology. I’m going to go in and say goodbye to my father now.”

I move down the hallway, blue under the fluorescent lighting. I feel stiff.
You’re worse than your mother, you little bitch
. Seven aspirin, for fuck’s sake. He had everyone jumping around for seven aspirin. I hope he’s asleep.

But he is not. He lies there with the sheets tucked up to his chin, his eyes wide and staring at the door before I come through it. I stand several feet from the bed, keep my hands in my pockets.

“I’m not doing so well, elf.” He bunches the sheet up in his fists. His face turns a raw red and he begins to cry. “I’m not doing well at all.”

I really don’t know where he should begin. The man needs so much. I squeeze the car keys in my pocket. I have to go. This is a sick man. This is a sick man whose problems I cannot remedy.

“I’m not doing well at all,” he whimpers again.

“You’re not, Dad. You need help.”

“I do need help.”

“But not my help.”

“Yes, I need your help.”

“No, you need professional help. You’re sick.”

“I’m just ... I’m just ... I don’t know what I am.” The crying turns to sobs. His chest pumps up and down and his mouth opens crookedly. His teeth are yellow and gray.

“Dad, let’s get you some doctors who can help you.”

“What can doctors do? Perry? Perry can’t help me.”

“Not Perry. You need to go somewhere where people are going to take care of you and help you get better.”

“Where?”

“Some beautiful place. Maybe Colorado or Arizona.”

“No.”

“Maybe nearby. Vermont.”

“You’re talking about that place Buzz Shipley went to.”

“Maybe someplace like that.”

“That guy came back a fairy. He went in a perfectly nice guy and came out a fairy.”

“You need to stop drinking. You won’t be able to see anything clearly before you do.” I wait for him to lash out.

“Okay,” he says quietly. “But I won’t go anywhere.”

“Dad, you can’t do it on your own. No one can. A program is the best way. You go away and you get a lot of support and therapy.”

“Therapy? You mean a shrink?”

“Someone who can help you figure out—”

“No shrink. No way. That stays on your medical record for the rest of your life. It ruins people. Remember that wing nut McGovern picked for vice president? Never. I will not give her the satisfaction.”

“What do you mean?”

“I won’t have anyone talking about me the way they talked about Buzz.”

“No one’s going to talk—”

“Oh yes they will. You don’t know how this town talks.”

“We can say you’re coming to California with me. No one will have to know.”

“I’m staying in my house. If I leave she’ll come and take everything from me. Everything.”

“What about AA?” Julie’s uncle is in AA. He hasn’t had a drink in over twelve years. “I bet there are meetings nearby. Will you do that?”

He nods.

“Every day?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Dad, I know you’re not going to do this.”

“I am. I need to. I know I need to.” He is not convincing.

“I’ll leave and you’ll just go back to your old patterns.”

“So stay and watch me.”

“I can’t.”

A nurse comes in. She pads across the room like a child pretending to be a nurse. Her hands move efficiently, though, changing the IV bag, making a ripping sound with Velcro, sealing everything back up.

“Let me show you how the bed works, Mr. Amory.” She taps the blue and red buttons on a remote with a long fingernail. “This will sit you up and this will make you lie back down. Would you like to sit up a bit now with your daughter?”

“Yes, thank you. Ah, that’s much better. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Amory.”

“You’ll come back before one and show me how the tube works, right? The Sox are in Cleveland this afternoon.”

“Oh I know just where they are. And Clemens’s ankle’s worse, and they’ll probably start Ryan, Lord help us all.”

“Oh, c’mon. Six-point-five’s not good enough for you?”

“Not by a long shot.”

My father laughs. She pulls the door shut and then he looks back at me and seems to remember he’s supposed to be suicidally depressed.

“I know you need to go. I’m proud of you. I really am. I know this is no way to show it but I am, Daley.”

“Thanks.”

“You know what I keep thinking about is that time we went to get your mother a painting in Wellesley. Do you remember that day?”

“No.”

“You weren’t more than four or five. We snuck out of the house early so we didn’t have to tell her where we were going. You’d gotten yourself dressed in a little pink dress and you’d put some sort of bow in your hair all crooked, and we went to a gallery where there was this painting of the swan boats that your mother liked and we walked in, and the man there said hello and you lifted your dress up all the way and you weren’t wearing anything underneath. You should have seen the man’s face!

“You know, the saddest day in my life was the day your mother drove off. Saddest day of my life. I never thought she’d do something like that. And take you with her. Take you away from me. I know it was tough on you, but it was tough on me, too. My daughter was gone. I kind of went off the track then, you know. I shouldn’t have hooked up with Catherine so quickly. It wasn’t right. It was never right. She wanted me to be someone else. They always want you to be someone else. Even you want me to be someone else.”

“No, Dad. I want you to get sober and then see what things look like from there.” It’s slightly hallucinatory, the whole idea of him being sober, becoming self-aware.

“Oh Jesus, you sound like that girl Garvey brought home one time. What was her name? Lynnette? Lianne?”

I don’t supply the name, Lizette. I don’t say anything.

“I’d go crazy if I had to see things any more closely. Ever since Catherine my brain has been gnawing on itself.”

I know that feeling. “And you drink to stop feeling that way?”

“Oh Christ, I suppose so. If I stop with the booze, I just don’t want to turn into a guy like Bob Wuzzy. Remember him with his diet sodas? Jesus Christ.”

I can’t help smiling. “You won’t become anyone else, Dad.”

He looks out the window. I study the fine crosshatching near his eyes, the thin straight ridge of his nose. “I know you’re right,” he says without looking at me. “I know you are.” His hands are folded neatly in his lap, like a sad little boy in church. “But you’ll go and I’ll go home and it won’t feel like you’re right anymore.”

At least he knows himself this much. I have to be on campus on July ninth, ten days from now, to start an urban kinship project. I can skip the stops to see friends in Madison and Boulder. I can drive straight through, taking catnaps along the way.

“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll stay for six more days. You go to AA every day. You have one drop of alcohol and I’m gone. On top of that, you will not make racist jokes or objectifying remarks about my body. Plus you will not be allowed to insult me or my mother, or anyone else for that matter. Deal?” I put out my hand.

He unthreads his fingers and clasps my hand tightly. “Deal.”

“You’re going to be miserable.”

He gives me a thin smile. “I know it.”

We take a cab back to Ashing. It turns out my father coached the driver’s son in Little League three years in a row, a team called the Acorns.

“You remember that coach for the Pirates, big guy, big paunch?” he says to my father, looking at him intensely through the rearview mirror.