Ten hours. I can do this. I can say something. “Dad, I’m worried you’re going to drink yourself to death.”
He slams the glass on the counter of the bar. “You know what, Day-lee. Just go off to college — again. For the third decade. Spend your whole life in college. Don’t grow up. And take all your faux concern for me with you.”
“It’s not faux, Dad.” I’m surprised he has that word in his vocabulary.
“Yeah, well,” he mutters, going through his rites at the bar and returning with an exceptionally full glass, “you know why I drink? You know why? I drink because of people like you, people who think they are so perfect, who think they have all the ans—”
“I do not think I am perfect. By any means.”
“Good, because you are not perfect. You’re a disaster. You’re an embarrassment. You and your brother.” He puts his hands on his head as if they can stop his thoughts of us. And then he looks right at me with his yellow eyes. “You two are everything I’m ashamed of.”
I put down my knife and fork. I’m done taking this shit. “And you should be ashamed. You should be dying of shame. Because your two children didn’t get a father. They got a monster. They got a drunk, ignorant bigot who poisoned them with pure bile.” My argument begins to form itself. I have so much proof. I’m going to shove all my memories in his face.
He laughs. No, he doesn’t laugh, but there is no word for the noise my father makes when he is surprised and furious at the same time. “You know something. You turned out worse than your mother, you little bitch.”
The mention of my mother, his first since she died nine years ago, slits my vocal cords clean through. All I can do is get myself out of the room and up the stairs.
I cry on my bed with the despair of a child. I keep telling myself to get up and drive away. But I can’t. I feel pinned down by the weight of all the years and insults. I can hear him downstairs, doing the dishes, letting the dogs out, letting them back in. It’s a normal night for him. A quart of vodka, a vicious argument. He probably feels damn good, like he’s just played two sets of tennis. I worry he might even try to say good night to me, so I hoist myself up long enough to lock the bedroom door. The feel of the lock in my fingers is so familiar to me. It’s a little silver macaroni-shaped thing with a deep solid thunk when the thick tongue falls into place. I can practically feel my mother on the other side of the door, pleading with me to come down and say hello to Cousin Grace who’s come up from Westport. But I don’t want to. I’ve just gotten out the big wicker picnic basket of Barbies and their camper from the closet and am settling in for the afternoon. I do not want to have tea with Cousin Grace.
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.
12
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.”