“I don’t want blood on my hands. I don’t want to hear that my father shot himself while I drove to California.”
“That’s just Garvey being hyperbolic.”
“He needs my help.”
“I don’t think you’ve spoken to your father since I’ve known you.”
“Probably not.”
“But within seconds you’ve decided to fly off in the wrong direction to a man who’s not even a part of your life.”
“Garvey needs help.”
“Are you going to tell your father you’re moving in with a black man?”
“Not if there are any knives around.”
He doesn’t smile. “Don’t do this. Don’t go back there.”
He’s still trying to persuade me to head west when I squeeze into my car the next afternoon.
We’re tired. We’ve argued in circles since last night. And now I’m doing it — I’m about to drive away in the wrong direction.
“Daley,” he says. He squats beside the open car door and holds my hands. It’s still the same feeling from the general store, every time our hands touch. “Please be careful.” He, too, has an uneasy relationship with the future. We understand each other in that way.
“I’ll be fine.”
“Your father has a lot of power.”
“You’re confusing me with Julie. My father has no power over me. He wasn’t even a father.” I see he is scared for me, far more scared than I am. Clearly I’ve told him too much.
“He still has the power to hurt you.”
“No, he doesn’t. It’s all scar tissue now.”
“I’ll be at the yellow door a week from Monday,” he says, kissing me one last time.
“I’ll see you through the sea glass window.”
And then I start the Datsun and drive east.
10
You can’t get to my father’s house from the highway without passing the Water Street Apartments. I didn’t mean to come here first. I meant to go straight to Dad’s, but I find myself peering into my bedroom window. It’s someone’s home office now, with two computers, a fax machine, and a leather swivel chair. The posters of Robert Redford, Billy Jack, and the Fonz are gone. Paul would have taken them down when he moved out the summer after my mother died. I’m certain he’s rolled them up neatly in tubes; he’s saved everything for Garvey and me in storage somewhere.
My mother died instantly. People tried to comfort us with that. But to whom was that a comfort? To me? I would have liked to see her one last time, no matter how crushed her body was; I would have liked to say goodbye, even if she couldn’t have heard me. Was it a comfort to her? Who would choose to die instantly, without a chance to process the transition? But then, I don’t like to be startled. I don’t like to be surprised. She and Paul had eaten dinner in Boston, he’d gone to get the car, she’d decided to cross Tremont to make it easier for him to pick her up, and a car had struck her. The driver had had a few drinks in him; my mother was prone to daydreaming. It’s hard to say what really happened. No one claimed to have seen.
I walk around to the living room windows. The current tenants have a sofa where we had one, a large dining table where our small one was. I’d been in my dorm room when Paul called. I was a sophomore in college. My roommate was dating a hockey player who’d just gotten back from a game. His shoulder pads were leaning against the wall by the phone. Paul was crying. The inside of the pads were streaked with filth. I just talked to her last night. I think I told this to Paul many times. It might have been the only thing I said. I couldn’t think of anything else. It was the only thing that made sense. Garvey came and got me a few hours later.
I often try to remember my mother’s funeral. It was at the little Episcopalian church she used to take me to before she left my father. I can remember those Sundays: my blue velvet coat, the white gloves, and my mother’s long prayers on her knees on needlepoint cushions. I don’t think she went to church after she left him. I don’t think she needed to. But I can’t recall the funeral. I don’t know what was said. All I remember about that day, that whole week, was my father’s absence.
Garvey thought my expectations were ridiculous. “You’re going to make yourself sick your whole life if you think he’s ever going to behave like a father to you,” he told me as we lay on the twin beds in my room after the funeral. “We’re basically orphans now. Get used to it.” But I could not.
I think I believed that with my mother dead the barrier between me and my father would fall magically away. I spent the second half of my sophomore year of college waiting for him to call me. I took a job that summer in a restaurant in Rhode Island and sent him my new number on a postcard, and he never called it. I didn’t visit him before I went back to school. I spent Christmas with a friend’s family. And then, spring break of my junior year, I took a bus to Boston and a train to Ashing and appeared at the kitchen door where he was feeding the dogs. “Well, well,” he said. “You pregnant or broke or both?” I stayed the night. It was just the three of us. Catherine made a roast. As they got drunk, then drunker, I waited for them to slip and make a jab about my mother, the way they always did. I waited to catch them. I was going to make a scene. A huge hair-pulling scene. For God’s sake, she’s dead. Can’t you leave her alone now? But they never mentioned her. He hugged me goodbye at the train the next day. “You’s a good kid for visiting,” he said. I spent the rest of the break off campus, in a friend’s empty apartment, alone, sobbing. I had held off the grief with anger towards my father, but now I was blindsided by it, terrified by the sudden gaping hole of my mother’s absence. She was my ballast, my counterweight to the downward pull of Myrtle Street, and she was gone.
I take one last look at the apartment. My mother’s toes used to snap when she walked barefoot. Alone in the bathroom she talked out loud and made herself laugh. I was unhappy when we lived here together. I ricocheted from this apartment to my father’s house for seven years, until I went to college. I was never able to please either household. At my father’s I was too bookish, too liberal, too much like my mother; at my mother’s I was moody, mercurial, and under-achieving in school. I’m sorry she can’t know me now. My daughter is a tenured professor at Berkeley, she might have been able to say in a few years. She would have liked that. She would have liked Jonathan.
I continue on toward Myrtle Street. The BMW in the bank parking lot might be Catherine’s. She’ll go back to him. I feel sure of it. She just needs a few days to cool off. I cross the railroad tracks and head up the hill. The houses are larger on this side of town, big clapboard Capes and Colonials with wraparound porches and pots of daisies on the wide steps before their front doors. There are hammocks and swing sets and lacrosse goals in the long green yards. The harbor glitters behind them. I can smell the salt in the air. It’s heavy, humid air. I need sleep. Garvey will have to let me have some when I get there.
I park next to Garvey’s van. It’s one of the small ones. He has his own moving company now, a fleet of six trucks with flying refrigerators painted all over them. The dogs go berserk at the sight of my car, the three of them, a tan one, a black one, and an auburn one, chasing it and then positioning themselves in front of the car door, their legs and chests motionless as statues, their mouths and throats furious at the foreign invasion. They make a ridiculous racket. The older I get, the more my father’s dogs exhaust me.
“Calm down,” I tell them coldly as they triple-team me all the way up the path. They are big dogs, retrievers of some kind. Something stirs on the porch. A little white and brown thing. A bunny? Then it bounds down the steps, or it tries to bound, but it ends up moving sideways, its hind legs stronger and braver than those in front. It runs right at me with no barking, then scrapes all its little paws at my jeans as if trying to climb straight up. The other dogs stop barking to watch.