I touch the metal bar at the side of his bed. “Yes, you are.”
His head moves in quicker jerks. He lifts his arm with the tubes coming out. His first finger tries to separate from the others and touch the mattress.
“No, Dad, you’re not going down.”
His eyes widen, as if he’s surprised to be understood, and he nods.
“You’re going up. You’re going to pull out of this.”
He shuts his eyes. His hand twitches. And then he moans. “Ay ay ow.” Way way down. To hell, he means.
“No, Dad, you’re not going to hell.”
“Daley!” Barbara says.
My father grunts. His eyes stay shut. His mouth opens and he begins to snore.
“What on earth was that about?” She is not pleased.
“He can talk.”
“It’s just babble. He’s certainly not talking about hell, for God’s sake.” She is irritated, questioning already her decision to have had Hatch call me.
My head is pulled back to my father. I need to keep watching him. It feels unnatural to look at or listen to Barbara when he is in the room. I put my hands back on the metal railing and lean in. At the clink of my ring against the bar, his eyes open again right on me. My pulse quickens. I am scared, too.
“Hi, Dad.” It feels strange to say the word Dad again.
“Leh ma tehsumm.” Let me tell you something.
I bend down. “Tell me.”
I feel Barbara watching.
His face is a maze of thin lines in every direction. Drool spills down one side of his chin. His mouth closes then opens slowly. “Espays. Airna seva dray hee.” This place. They’re not serving drinks here. “Godagedashekango.” We gotta get the check and go.
“What’s he saying?”
“Gogehalmury.” Go get Hal Murry.
“Hal Murry?” I ask Barbara.
“What?”
“He wants me to go get Hal Murry. Is that his doctor?”
“God, no. Hal Murry. He wouldn’t have mentioned him.”
I wait for her to realize the improbability of me coming up with the name Hal Murry on my own.
“He’s the new manager at the Mainsail. Your father can’t stand him.”
“Is paysino goo.”
“Dad, this place is good for you right now. While you get better.”
He jerks his head. “Inahn goo shay.”
“You’re not in good shape now, but you will be. You’re on the upswing.” I’m not sure this is true. I have come, after all, to say goodbye. But he was supposed to be unconscious and dying. He doesn’t seem to be dying now.
“Na. Na. Dow.” He tries to point his finger again and winces.
“Gardiner, don’t try to move. Stay still.” Barbara turns toward the nurses’ station. “I’m going to go find somebody. He’s agitated again.”
He watches Barbara speaking and then, when she leaves, bunches his eyebrow hairs together. Who the hell is that? he is asking.
“Barbara,” I say quietly
“Wha she doo hee?”
“She’s your wife, Dad.”
“Ma wife? Ahm mar to Barba Bidgeta?”
“Shhh, Dad, she’ll hear you,” I say playfully, and his mouth curls up on one side.
“Is na posseb.”
Barbara comes back with a nurse who checks all his tubes and the machines they are attached to. There seem to be many liquids going in to him. One bag is sucked nearly empty. She produces a full one from her pocket and replaces it.
“You want to sit up a bit more, Mr. Amory?” she asks. She is a large woman, my age, with deep brown skin and a southwestern accent. Texas, maybe. How has she ended up here in this strange corner of the country?
“Uh-huh.”
She pushes a button on the side of the bed for a few seconds, and the bed goes up but my father sinks down. So she hoists him up easily and he hollers out, right in her ear.
“No screaming, you big baby,” she says. “You’re going to damage my eardrum and I’m going to have to sue your you-know-what.”
“I’ll sue you first,” my father says, but the nurse can’t understand him.
“That’s his favorite,” Barbara says when she leaves. “He’s very good with her. Gardiner, can you see this necklace I’m wearing?”
“Ya.”
“Do you remember giving it to me?”
“Na.”
“You gave it to me after you got out of the hospital the last time. Do you remember why?”
“Na.”
“Because you said I took such good care of you.”
My father nods, then looks at me hard. I know what he’s saying. I can hear him clear as a belclass="underline" Yeah, she took such good care of me, look where I am now, with tubes up my nose and out my ass.
I drove straight from Myrtle Street to Julie’s that night, with a torn rotator cuff and three sprained ribs. I washed down Tylenol with coffee and got there in thirty-six hours. She took me to the hospital and then back to her apartment. We can find some humor in it now — the wounded bird I was, my months on her couch, my tears in public places. And Michael, the unapproachable mountain bike man, tells it from his perspective, how he was just summoning the nerve to ask out the introverted professor (“one of my many, many misperceptions,” he’ll say) when suddenly below him there was talking and crying every night. He assumed her girlfriend had moved in, and it took us a while to correct this impression. I took a job leading tours through Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde and other sites of the Ancestral Puebloans. I walked through those villages built into the cliffs, trying to re-create for my audiences — groups of retirees, schoolchildren, and teachers — a sense of the real lives that were once lived there. I often overheard a pitying remark about how different life was for them, how basic their needs, how narrow their world. But the more I climbed through the carefully laid-out houses and imagined the families who once ate and slept in them, the more I felt how little the difference, how simple our real needs still are: food, water, shelter, kindness. I loved trying to make that world come back alive for people, especially for the kids, whose imaginations were still so open. When it was time for Michael to move in with Julie, I moved a block away. For four years my social life was Julie and Michael, just as Julie’s had once been me and Jonathan. Occasionally they asked someone else over for dinner, a colleague of theirs, but it never took, not for any of us. We had our rhythm. A new person always threw us off. Julie says that when she told me they were getting married, I looked like someone who was trying to be cheerful while my leg was being sawed off. I just couldn’t understand why they wanted to ruin a great relationship with marriage.
I used to sit at my computer and stare at Jonathan’s address online:
1129 Trowbridge Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19104
There he was. He was there. He’d made it home again. I had his phone number, too, but when I thought of calling, all I could imagine was him straining to get off the phone. Julie wanted to invite him to the wedding but I couldn’t risk having to meet a girlfriend or a wife, see photos of a little baby. But then, without telling her, I put an invitation in the mail. I knew where she kept the RSVP cards people sent back; he never responded.
Julie and her father argued about the ceremony. Alex disapproved of the bridesmaids, the poetry, and homemade vows. He took a sudden interest in Orthodox rituals. He wanted her to circle the chuppah seven times and to enter it alone with her face fully covered. He wanted the rabbi to read the traditional wedding contract in Aramaic. She said it would take forty-five minutes and was nothing but a pre-nup, all about how many cows Michael would have to pay to divorce her. At least, Alex insisted, Michael would smash a glass as a warning against excessive joy. “I want excessive joy!” I heard her scream at him.