After Visiting Friends (8 page)

And then I find this in the
Chicago Daily News
:

The
Today
obit claims that my father died “as he walked” in the 3900 block of North Pine Grove
after he had “just left the home of a friend.” In the
Daily News
obit, they report that my father died “while visiting friends.”

I’m sitting before the microfilm machine, squinting at the screen. Friends? Who are
these friends? And why have I never met them? And the 3900 block of North Pine Grove
is five miles away from the
Sun-Times
building.

#

Buttons pushed. A light flashes. Gears grind. My prints emerge. I put them in the
box beneath my bed and never mention my discovery to my mother. But I think about
it all the time.

#

And now, every night, instead of conjuring my father dying alone, now I see this alternate,
secret narrative: him, friends, far from home, late at night . . .

The week before I leave for college, I drive to the Cook County offices and buy a
copy of my father’s death certificate. On some level, I was trying to prove to myself
that he was indeed dead, because a part of me always believed that he simply ditched
out on us, faked it all. So when the clerk gives me the death certificate, I have
a small thought that he’s not dead at all—because his name is misspelled: Someone
has written
HANEY
, then at some point corrected their error by jamming in the missing “
I
.”

I go to a coffee shop across the street, get a booth in the corner, and study the
document for clues. The first thing I learn: My father didn’t die of a heart attack.
Also, contrary to what my mother has told me, he was, in fact, autopsied. The official
cause of death, as determined by the coroner: “Spontaneous rupture congenital (cerebral)
aneurysm, anterior communicating artery.”

Then there’s the fact of the hospital to where he was taken: “American—D.O.A.”

American Hospital—now Thorek Memorial Hospital—is on the city’s North Side, five miles
from his office. Not exactly the closest hospital for two cops to take a man they
find lying on the streets downtown. There are at least three hospitals that are closer.

The second curious thing is the time of death: 5:07 a.m.

My uncle was at our house less than two hours later. Which means he must have moved
pretty fast.

I hide the death certificate in the shoe box beneath my bed, along with the copies
of the obituaries, and then I do what I know best to do. I go silent.
Omertá
.

Until a few years ago, when I turned thirty-five.

For most of my life I have believed I was never going to outlive my father, that I
would never make it to thirty-six. I believed his sentence was my sentence. So when
I turned thirty-five, I cracked. My doctor called it a functioning breakdown.

That sounded about right.

During the week, I worked among the living. But the weekends I passed in solitude.
By day, I wandered the city in silence. At night, I sought out old-man bars, places
I knew I’d see no one and could drink alone late into the night. Every day, I had
it in my head that this day could be the day. And yet rather than energizing me, mortality
froze me. I wanted to live but felt powerless. I felt fate had already decided. I
was already locked in a box. Somehow my father had tricked me into taking his place.
My own Houdini.

Volunteers from the audience? Someone to test the box in which I will seal myself
and then escape? You, young man. Excellent. Step right up!

Somehow, he deceived me—then vanished. And I—I remained, trapped in my father’s box.

OLD HAUNTS

In August 2003, I go home for my grandmother’s birthday. But I am determined to do
some reporting as well. And question my mother.

My mother is the half-hugger. Whenever I see her, she can only give me a one-armed
hug. It’s like having that guy from
The Fugitive
for a mother.

I land at O’Hare in the early evening and call her. “Last American,” the only words
she says, even though this has been the drill for the past twenty years when I come
home at least three times a year and walk out to the curb and stand under the last
American Airlines sign and maybe ten minutes later the Regal pulls up. I hear the
tunk!
of the trunk popping as she sits inside. I drop my bag in the carpeted cube, note
that her emergency kit is still there: flares, Band-Aids, an orange distress flag
to hang on her antenna in case she is buried in a snowdrift—even though she has no
antenna.

I slam the trunk and walk around, open the door.

I lean over, peck her cheek.

“Hi.”

One arm goes around me, pats me on the shoulder.

“Hi.”

#

We drive the seven minutes home. Past my old high school.

Tackling sleds on the practice fields, silent in the setting sun.

#

We get to the house and don’t say much. She has a pizza for me from one of the take-out
places. She always does that for me. I pull a High Life from the refrigerator. She
always does that, too.

We don’t talk about much—work for me, the grandkids for her.

The silence kills me. I want to ask her about everything I’ve come to town for—but
I decide to wait. It’s late now—9:30.

I tell her good night.

As I close my bedroom door, I hear the banging—one of my mother’s routines. Each night
before she goes to bed, she dumps the ice cubes from the ice-cube maker into the kitchen
sink.

“I like to keep my ice fresh,” she says.

She never uses ice.

But every night she pounds the plastic tray against the side of the sink, and the
ice cubes clatter toward the drain’s black mouth. Maybe, for a moment, she’ll stare
at the dark outside, at the small oak outside her window that clings to its dead leaves
all through the long winter. Bark, dark as creosote’d field posts. Maybe looking,
too, at the fragile wood carving she keeps on her windowsill. Don Quixote. She got
it forever ago, a gift from someone I do not know. Long as I can remember, she has
stationed him there, astride his small beast. His helmet, broken. That was my fault.
Sometime when I was a boy, I was playing with Don Quixote and dropped him. Ever since,
I’ve never touched him and he’s never moved from that place above the drain where
she keeps him, standing sentry.

#  #  #

The next morning. I find her at the kitchen table in her Solitaire Chair. Her Crosswords
Chair. Her Jumble Chair. Head bowed, filling in the boxes, letter by letter. Words,
solved. Words as solutions.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

I pour my coffee, sit down perpendicular to her.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “That damn sump pump was going all night.”

My mother is obsessed with water levels. Her bedroom is above the sump pump. It churns
away in the basement, in the dark, through the night. Pushing her overflow down. Keeping
her safe.

“I don’t want a flood,” she tells me.

“You’re not going to have a flood.”

“Well,” she says—and she says that word in a way that’s so damning.

I go into her basement. I look at the hole, the dark water up to the stone lip. I
tell her everything’s fine, not believing a word of what I’m saying. I mean, do I
look like a sump-pump specialist? Like I can read water tables? But her? Twice a day,
she’s in the basement, looking for leaks.

“You don’t understand,” she says. “If it all came flooding in, it’s a disaster.” And
she descends. She doesn’t trust me. She stalks around, slippers and robe, flashlight
poking lazy streams of yellow light into her corners. Tracing the walls for signs
only she seems to know. Palms to the stone.

“We’re safe for another day,” she says when she reappears.

“Does anyone else have these problems?” I ask. “Your neighbors?”

“None of them run their pumps. Look out back at their plots. See the water sitting
there, rising up? I’m the one who pushes everything down.”

Her puzzle waits half completed. As a boy, I would find her crossword unfinished and
look to see if I could give her any words. To this day, she has me send her the puzzle
from the Sunday
Times
. I tear it out, then come Monday, drop it in the mail. No note. Just the puzzle.
If I forget, she calls me, late in the week, says, “I didn’t get your puzzle.”

She looks over at me now and says, “You know I have to ask you this, so don’t get
angry.”

“What?” And I know what she’s going to ask me. But I make her ask.

“Your boxes in the basement? Can you move those one of these days?”

Every time I’m home—the same question. When I moved to New York all those years ago,
I left six boxes in her basement. High school yearbooks. College papers. Some photos.
Battered apple crates from Thompson’s, where I weighed fruits and vegetables for picky
old women who always looked at me as though I were overcharging them. It was a good
job. The worst part was cleaning out the Garb-el on Sundays. The Garb-el was the trap—a
garbage disposal where we trimmed all the lettuces, dumped all our bruised and rotted
fruit. The trap was built into the floor of the back room, three feet by three feet
and just as deep. I had to get on my knees and dig all that muck out. The stench was
horrible. I’d pour in a jug of bleach, try and neutralize the muck. And I’d excavate
the peaty mess with the ice scooper I’d snatch out of the ice machine. It was all
good training. I learned early that sometimes you have to dig through garbage to get
anywhere.

When I left for New York at twenty-five, I went with two suitcases, nothing more.
I thought I’d be back in Chicago at the end of my six-month internship. So I asked
her, Can I put my boxes here? She said sure.

Her basement is enormous. And there is nothing in it, save for one small corner opposite
the sump pump where there is a metal storage rack. Her Christmas wrapping paper is
on it. Her suitcase for the trips she takes a few times a year, a cruise or a bus
tour through Europe. She loves bus tours in Europe. She has this whole system for
her vacations—months before she leaves, she starts sorting her clothes and underwear
into “good” and “not good.” The “not good” being frayed, worn, torn. She packs this
group for the trip. Each day, she wears a pair of the frayed underwear and then at
the end of that day leaves it in the garbage. “One less thing to pack for home,” she
says. “It’s great.”

And then there’s my six boxes. That’s it.

“You know I have to ask,” she says.

“Mom, there’s nothing in your basement.”

She tilts her head down, eyes back to her crosswords. Goes silent.

“I just don’t understand it, Mom.”

She doesn’t raise her eyes, even. Just the scratch of the pen adding letters to boxes.

“I’ll take them to UPS today.”

She looks up.

“No. Leave them. Just leave them. It’s fine.”

That’s what she always says when she’s decided our conversation is finished: Fine.
And then she gives the air a little horizontal slice with her hand. The thread, severed.