Father of the Rain (37 page)

The phone rings. My heart does its usual throb. I’ve never quite given up hope that Jonathan will call. I reach it on the third ring.

“I’d like to speak to my wife, Daley.”

I look at Mrs. Bridgeton. She has the needle between her lips as she untangles a small knot within the small squares. The rounds of pink in her cheeks made me suspect that the phone made her heart pound, too. She’s a fine actress, though.

“Barbara,” I say, and watch her force a delay, then look up. “It’s for you.”

She stands and places her needlepoint in the hollow where her body has been beside my father. He watches her and she moves toward the little study where the phone is. I hand her the phone and shut the door on my way out.

My father’s fists are balled tight during the next play. After all the men on the field have fallen into another enormous pile, a commercial comes on.

“I’m going to have to get the number changed, you know,” he says. “He can’t be calling here.”

“Dad, you have to let them speak to each other.”

“No, she’s made her choice.”

“He must be pretty devastated right now. And if it leads to divorce, then everything will go smoother if they’re communicating well.”

“
If
it leads to divorce? She’s divorcing him, Daley. I think that’s pretty obvious.”

“You have to let her make her own decisions. You can’t force it.”

“You think she’s going to go back to him? Is that what you think?”

“I have no idea what she’ll do. But forty years of marriage shouldn’t be underestimated.”

When another commercial comes on, I say, “Don’t get derailed by this, Dad. Hold on and think about what you really want.”

“I know what I want. I know exactly what I want. And you need to butt the hell out.”

He clenches his furious face back on the game. Barbara opens the door and I go quickly into the kitchen and jangle the dogs’ leashes. They come scrambling in.

I hear my father blow. “You are not serious!” At first I think he’s hollering at a ref, but then I hear Mrs. Bridgeton murmuring something and my father screams back, “I don’t care if he’s turning a hundred and five!”

Before I can get the last leash hooked on a collar, Mrs. Bridgeton comes running in, wailing, “He’s my baby boy!” And then her body breaks into sobs.

I wait for them to subside. I really don’t want to be her confidante, and the dogs are scraping the door with their nails.

“I’m sorry, Daley.”

I hand her a paper towel.

“We have had Hatch’s thirty-fifth birthday party planned since last January,” she says. “We’re having this Boston band he loves come play, and some of his oldest friends are flying in, one even from Germany. Ben was just calling to see if I’d given the final numbers to the caterer. That’s all he wanted. But your father doesn’t believe me and he doesn’t want me to go to the party.” She breaks down again, her small frame trembling in slow motion.

“Of course you should go to the party. He’ll come around in the morning.” But I wasn’t sure about that. “He’ll come around to it eventually.”

“I don’t want to do anything to ruin what we have.”

What do they have? What could they possibly have built in five days? “You won’t.” I touch the white wool of her sweater. “You won’t.”

For the rest of the week there’s no more mention—in front of me, anyway—of the birthday party.

On Saturday my father’s team has a game in Allencaster. He won’t be back until six, he tells me.

At four, Barbara comes down in a navy blue dress and navy blue pumps. Above her left breast she has fastened a pin in the shape of a teddy bear. The gold plate has rubbed off of its feet and face. “Hatch gave this to me for Christmas when he was five years old. His father let him pick out anything in the store, and this is what he picked.” Her eyes fill and she speaks loudly, as if to stop the tears. “That was thirty years ago. Oh, Daley, I hope I’m doing the right thing.”

“What did Dad say before he left this afternoon?”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“Did you tell him you were going?”

“I was afraid to.” Worry settles over her.

“I’ll explain it to him. You go.”

She smiles uneasily. “Thank you, Daley. I won’t stay long. Just through dinner. Then I’ll leave the ball like Cinderella.”

Her analogy makes me even more certain she won’t want to come back.

When my father comes home he’s keyed up. His team won by twenty-six points. “You should have seen the last play. Unbelievable. Those kids were on fire today.” He looks around. “Barbara out getting dinner?”

I can’t tell if he’s faking it.

“It’s Hatch’s birthday.”

“What?” But it’s not a question. I always thought he had to be drunk to speak with such pure bile.

“Dad, she has a family.”

He sticks a finger, the one with the pencil lead stuck in the knuckle, out at me. “She knows exactly how I felt about this. Don’t defend her.”

“All right,” I say. It’s her battle, not mine. Better she learn earlier, rather than later, the kind of sacrifices my father requires.

He goes to his meeting and then eats dinner in front of the game. It was supposed to snow tonight but it’s raining instead, a hard cold rain that pelts against the windows in the den. I go to bed early, hoping to sleep through the night.

I wake up past midnight to banging and go out into the hallway. All the lights are out, my father’s bedroom door ajar, like it used to be before Barbara moved in. I can’t hear him snoring. The banging is coming from the kitchen. I go down the back stairs quietly, keeping all the lights off.

Barbara is on the porch, both hands pounding against the panes of the back door.

“Daley!” I hear her cry out in relief. “Daley.” She rests her forehead on the glass.

I haven’t made it halfway across the kitchen to her when I hear my father hiss, “You let her in and I put you both out.”

I can just barely make out the outline of him in his pajama bottoms, fists clenched, hovering in the doorway of the pantry where she can’t see him.

“Jesus Christ, Dad,” I say, and keep moving. Barbara is pressed against the door, crying, the teddy bear brooch clanking against the glass. Behind her are her two hardshell suitcases, getting soaked in the rain. My father must have put them out there before he locked the door.

I reach the doorknob. It is cold. Mrs. Bridgeton moans, “Oh, Daley,” and I start to turn it and she screams and then my grip is not enough. I am smashed against the wall: head, shoulder, hip. And then I’m on the floor. My whole left side aches, the shoulder
wrenched. There’s no one through the glass of the door anymore. It’s possible I’ve been unconscious.

I notice my father, crouched beside me. “You okay there?”

I nod.

“You sure?”

I nod again.

He helps me upstairs. He pulls down the covers so I can get into bed. He sits beside me, near my knees. My ear is throbbing. My shoulder is on fire. I don’t want him to know this. I can smell his humid metallic nighttime smell from childhood. I can smell it now, the exact same smell, coming off of him like a steam.

He pats my thigh through the covers. “Well, we dodged that bullet,” he says.

“Good night, Dad,” I say evenly. It’s important to give the impression of calm.

He doesn’t move. He strokes my thigh. I shut my eyes and, after a few minutes, make my breathing heavier. He gets up then and goes down the hallway to his room.

I wait. I keep waiting. Physical pain is a relief at this point. It blots out everything else. His first snores are weak and uneven. Soon they even out to the steady thrum you can hear all over the house.

It doesn’t take long to put all my stuff in garbage bags. It hurts and I have to carry them one at a time with my left arm to the car, but it’s all done in half an hour.

Barbara’s suitcases are still on the porch, but her car is gone.

I pass through the kitchen with my last bag. I look at the kitchen table. I have no note for him.

My daughter is speaking in an English accent, which means she is either a queen or the head of an orphanage.

“You must try to look people in the eye when they speak to you,” she says imperiously to her little brother. “They only mean well.” She has heard that from me, the encouragement to make eye contact. It’s like listening in on their dreams; tiny fragments of their lives are stitched carefully into the story.

“Not witches. Green-faced witches don’t mean well,” Jeremy says. It’s been a few years, but he still hasn’t recovered from seeing
The Wizard of Oz
at his grandmother’s house.

“Not always. But people do.”

“Yes.”

“M’lady,” she whispers.

“Yes, m’lady.”

They clatter through the kitchen solemnly, Lena wearing my high-heeled sandals and black wool skirt as a cape, Jeremy with an elaborate duct tape belt and a walking stick from the yard. I’m not allowed to acknowledge them.

The phone rings, and a formal voice asks for Daley Amory.

“Speaking.” I wait for the sales pitch. But there is a long pause instead.

“It’s Hatch. Hatch Bridgeton.” He says his name like it is a small joke between us.

“Oh.” My father must be dead.

The children, sensitive to my tones of voice, stop their game.

“Your dad had a stroke. A big one. They can’t stabilize him.”

I got an invitation to Hatch’s wedding and, six years later, a group email about his divorce. I sent my regrets and a ceramic bowl for the wedding, and a short but I hoped sympathetic reply to the email. Other than that, I’ve had no contact with him in all the years that we’ve been stepbrother and sister.

“Are you there now?” I ask.

“I am. But I’m flying home tomorrow. I’ve been here a week and things are falling apart at work.”

“A week?”

I can feel him struggle for a way to explain the seven days between my father’s stroke and this phone call. But I know he’s just been following instructions. “I left a message for Garvey, too. They don’t think he’ll make it through the weekend.”

“I’m not sure,” I say.

“I understand. Scott and Carly are sitting this one out, too.”

In my mind, Carly and Scott are still skipping stones on their beach in Ashing on Thanksgiving Day. But life has lurched on for them, as it has for us all.

In the fifteen years since I last saw my father, I have spoken to him once. It was the night the Red Sox won the Series and broke the curse. I knew he’d be up. I didn’t think about it. I just dialed the number. Barbara answered and I surprised her. She didn’t know what tone to use with me. She told me to hang on and covered the phone. I could hear him refuse, and Barbara insist. I felt her try to seal the holes of the phone’s receiver more securely, heard his voice rising and snapping, and then a sudden, “Hello there,” fake, and drunk as hell.

“I won’t keep you on long, Dad. I’m just calling because of the Red Sox. I couldn’t help thinking of you.”

“What? Oh, yeah. Wasn’t that something?” He kept his voice flat. He wasn’t going to celebrate with me, not even for a second. “Listen, I gotta go.”

“All right.”

“Yup,” he said, and hung up.

Barbara is waiting for me at the hospital in Allencaster, which is fancier now: revolving doors and a glass-domed lobby with an enormous information desk. She is smaller, crumpled. There are black hollows around her eyes, as if the sockets are receding to the back of her head. Her squat forehead is even more foreshortened, the wrinkles thick and deep. I don’t know if this transformation has occurred over the last fifteen years with my father or just in the past sleepless week.

“Oh, Daley, I’m so glad you’ve come.” She is tiny in my arms. She tries to say more but her chest shudders, like my children just before they throw up.

“It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” I stroke the coarse hair at the back of her head.

We don’t always like our children, Daley, but we do always love them
, she wrote me after she married my father. She hoped I would come visit them. She’d redone the kitchen. When I didn’t answer that card, or the next, or the next, she wrote a fiercer one. I’d always been a rude and spoiled child, she said. She vividly remembered seeing me at a Christmas pageant when I was five or six and complimenting me on my pretty velvet dress and I turned away with my nose in the air. Julie told me to stop reading the cards. They always had a little tender flower on the front, or a baby animal. She begged me to burn them unopened. I lived with her then, in New Mexico. She saw the pain they brought on, the time it took me to recover from one. It wasn’t Barbara’s attacks on my character that hurt; it was the passing references to my
father, the portrait of his life with her that she unwittingly depicted for me. He’d gone back to work for Hugh. He wasn’t coaching the “derelicts” at the youth center anymore. They’d been to a party and he’d had everyone in stitches when he snuck upstairs and came down in a kimono and slashes of eyeliner.

“How is he today?” I ask her, as if we are just picking up from yesterday.

“They’ve stabilized his heart rate. They still can’t get his blood pressure down and he was very agitated last night. But they took off his restraints this morning, so that’s good.”

“Restraints?”

“He wasn’t being cooperative with the nurses.”

“I thought he was unconscious,” I say, trying to hide my uneasy surprise.

“He’s in and out.”

“Is he talking?” Hatch told me he couldn’t speak. I wouldn’t have come if I thought he could say something to me.

“No. Nothing coherent. Just babble.”

I follow her down hallways. The walls are hung with harbor and beach scenes. She stops at a pair of double doors and puts her palm under a dispenser on the wall. I do the same. Antibacterial lotion squirts out automatically. I rub it over my hands as we go through the doors. The lotion is cold then evaporates. The whole place smells of it. There is a bank of desks and opposite them a row of cubicles. Most of the curtains are open. In the first one is a black man with wires attached all over his bare chest by round adhesives that are not his skin color. In the second a white woman is sitting up, opening her mouth for Jell-O that a nurse feeds her. TVs are blaring: news, sitcoms, the Animal Channel. Two nurses are typing at computers. There is the smell of old cooked eggs. I am aware of everything, as if each pore of my skin is a receptor, waiting for the sign of my father. He is there, in the third cubicle. I feel like I am floating slightly, carrying
less than my whole self. I follow Barbara’s coat toward his bed. He is a long log under the covers with arms and a head sticking out. The arms are covered in wide black bruises with green centers. Everywhere else his skin is gray and loose. It hangs off his neck like fabric, and the features of his face, always pronounced and angular, are exaggerated now like a bad caricature. His straight bony nose has a bend in it, and his big ears now have enormous earlobes to match, with a crease in the middle, as if they have just been unfolded. His hair has gone past white to yellow, though his eyebrows are a bright silver, as wiry and abundant as they have always been. A tube is attached to the cartilage between his nostrils but he is breathing through his mouth loudly. At the opening of his hospital gown I can see wires attached to his chest too, the healthy peach of the adhesives no more able to match his gray skin than his neighbor’s. His hands at the ends of the bruised arms lie on either side of him, healthier looking than the rest of him, both curled slightly but not closed, as if holding things: a tennis racquet, a drink.