Oxygen (22 page)

He stops stirring and searches the vicinity of my face. “What for?”

“Well, I thought maybe I could help translate some of the medical stuff. Just make sure all your questions were answered.”

“Why do I need a translator to tell me I’m going blind?”

“Dad, macular degeneration doesn’t leave you completely blind. Most patients can still function…”

“Function? Can’t read, can’t drive, can’t find the damn tea bags, even. How is that functioning? That’s as blind as anybody carrying a white cane, far as I’m concerned.” He stares out toward the late afternoon sunlight streaming through the kitchen window, his hands curled limply around his tea. I wish I could slip off the prisms that warp his eyes and make them unreadable to me. Instead I reach across the space between us and cover his hand with mine, struck by how thick and gnarled his joints are, how thinly protected by his papery skin.

He turns his palm over and briefly squeezes my hand, grips it the way you might tighten the knot of an anchor line with one fierce tug before casting off to the open ocean. “Well. Nothing to be done.” He draws both hands back into his lap.

In the morning he is already sitting at the kitchen table when I come in. I pour a cup of coffee from the Mr. Coffee pot and walk to the windows, pull a little
U
in the aluminum blinds to look into the backyard, where the sun is still morning soft, rose and peach across the peeling wooden fence posts. The grass looks like a little boy’s unruly hair—tangled with thick budding blades. As a girl I loved it when Dad let the grass grow long so I could pop out the tiny elliptical seeds along the stems and sprinkle them as seasoning over my mud-and-leaf stews.

I let the shade flip back into place and take a sip of the coffee, go back to the sink to brew a new pot, twice as strong. Dad sits in slivers of sunlight shimming through the closed blinds, holding the handle of his empty coffee cup. Where the light falls I can see all the details of his skin, rough brown patches of seborrheic keratoses, mulberry-colored stains of ruptured capillaries, sparse white hair. Alternating slashes of shadow camouflage the flaws.

“Do you want more coffee? I made a fresh pot.”

He shakes his head. “No. I’ve been up since four. Can’t sleep anymore, it seems. Old age.”

“Your body makes less melatonin as you get older. Have you tried anything for it? Ambien sometimes…”

He waves the advice away like an annoying fly.

A mockingbird calls from the oak outside the back door, a sharp, impatient sound that defines his turf. I twirl the plastic wand that dangles from the end of the blinds and the gaps of sun flood together. “Do you remember the mockingbird that lived in the pecan tree in Dallas? Remember how he used to dive-bomb that orange tabby cat we had?” He looks at me but doesn’t contribute to my childhood memory. Was he aware we had a cat? “I can still see him crouched at the bottom of the tree and that bird would go straight for his head. Mom kept a bottle of hydrogen peroxide on the washer to swab his scalp—his ears were covered with nicks. What was that cat’s name?” His name was Chester, I know quite well.

Dad shrugs and keeps staring toward me, gazing somewhere over my left shoulder. I fight an urge to turn around. “It was Chester, I think. Do you remember Chester?” There is an unintended edge of accusation in my voice I find unsettling. “Listen, while I’m here, let me help out with things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Whatever you need. Shopping. Organizing. I could clean out some of your closets or shelves, get the place in better order. Maybe we should get you some pill dispensers to help keep your medications straight. You’re on a blood pressure pill, aren’t you? Do you still take that?”

He cocks his head at me as if I puzzled him. I go on. “And your ophthalmologist must have given you some vitamins, for the macular degeneration. Are you taking them? I read a study a few months ago that showed a benefit…”

“Marie? Can you stop being a doctor for a day or so here? If you don’t mind?”

I turn away from him and start scrubbing dishes. “Fine, Dad. I’m not trying to meddle. I just…I don’t know how many days I can be away from work and I want to be useful to you. I like being useful.”

“Don’t they know you’re on vacation?”

“Of course they do.” I keep my face toward the sink. “But we’ve been short-staffed this summer. I could get called back. Let’s at least go shopping for you. Get out of the house. When was the last time you were outside? Let’s make a list.” I dry my hands on the stained tea towel and go into his office at the front of the house, still so dark I have to turn on the light. The desk is heaped with articles about medieval city-states, academic journals, junk mail flyers and newspapers. The one on top is dated two months ago. I pull open the middle drawer to hunt down a blank notepad and crumpled papers and letters jam the uneven wooden slides. I jimmy out a ripped envelope from the electric company. The paper with Dad’s address showing through the cellophane window is bright pink.

“Dad, what’s this?” I say, all but storming back into the kitchen.

“What’s what?” he asks, scraping his chair back to stare at me.

“These bills? From the electric company? Have you paid them yet?”

He takes them out of my hands, flips through them page after page. After a minute or two I take them away from him and sort through to retrieve the summary page. “They’re going to turn off your lights in another week if you don’t pay this. What about your water bill? And sewer bill? Have you just given up trying to keep on top of this stuff?” I feel like I’m dealing with a child. Was he thinking he would just hole up here until the house gradually went dead around him? I sit down at the table with the papers spilling off my lap and stare at the boomerangs dancing over the dingy Formica surface. How did such a ridiculous design ever get so popular?

After an empty minute of silence I look up at him, see him frowning out toward the green weedy lawn, the rotting fence, the caving garden shed, the leggy wands of my mother’s roses, grown amok. I press the heels of my hands into my eyes and let out a broken sigh.
I
am the blind child here. “Oh, Dad. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You can’t make out the numbers anymore, can you? I’ll call the electric company later today. Maybe we can get you set up on an autopayment or something.”

I scramble some eggs and cheese and we eat, patching together a safe conversation that doesn’t reach too far back or too far forward in either of our lives. His mind is still sharp. I can see that. I wonder if it is more painful to be so acutely alert to the progressive failures of your body, whether it would be easier to lose cognition before corporeal function. After we eat I strip down his bed and carry stale sheets and mildewed towels into the laundry closet. The linen cabinet is empty, so I begin a search for fresh bedding and wind up at the back of my parents’ walk-in closet. Twelve years after her death, all of my mother’s clothes and shoes and sweaters and nightgowns are still here. They look like she changed out of them last night, has slipped out only to run to the grocery store or a garden club meeting.

I remember asking her once, somewhere on the cusp of childhood and adolescence, when I was beginning my own search for reason, what happens to us when we die. She avoided the standard Catholic text my father would have given, and said she didn’t know for sure if there was a heaven or a hell, or whether we had to earn eternal life. But she did know that if heaven exists, we get there by being as kind to one another as we can be. And if there
isn’t
a God, then what matters most is that we are as kind to one another as we can be.

I pull my fingers down the length of her blue flannel robe, plunge my face into the lining of her woolen coat, place my hand deep into the sole of one shoe, where her sweat left a perfect imprint of her toes. And like some short circuit of memory triggered by her aromas I crumple to the floor in the dark cove beneath her hanging dresses and sob.

After a dinner of frozen lasagna (the stamped expiration date is at least within the last year), I shower in the same pink tub I bathed in twenty years ago, waiting impatiently for hot water to drizzle through the calcified pipes. We will need to have some safety rails put up in here if he doesn’t move.

The dimly lit hall leading to Lori’s bedroom is lined with photos. One of my father showing off his first car—he looked so limber and wavy-haired—these days only skin and gray stubble cover the interlocked plates of his skull; Lori in her bassinet as a newborn, me standing next to her on tiptoe to peer beneath the baby blanket; three pictures of Dad accepting handshakes and certificates from now long-dead senior faculty; a framed oval portrait of my grandmother holding my infant father on her lap. His new teeth bite on a heavy gold crucifix suspended from a chain around her neck. It’s the same crucifix he fastened around my mother’s neck as she lay in her casket, and finally buried with her. I want to ask him if he abandoned God because he believed his religion could never forgive me. Did he, at the end of one grueling year, choose me?

I hear him snoring through his partially closed door, grateful he’s fallen asleep before I came to say goodnight. His loneliness permeates everything in here—the faded slipcovers and dusty vase of crumbling dried flowers, the burned-out bulb in the side-table lamp. On every wall, from floor to ceiling, beneath the window ledges and above the fireplace mantel, are bookshelves. Bookshelves he used to stand in front of after dinner, running a finger along the leather and cloth and paper spines to pluck out the exact chapter or paragraph or single quotation that supported whatever discourse he had engaged my mother in, or lecture he was outlining on the Smith-Corona typewriter in his cluttered office. I would watch him sometimes, standing in the middle of the room, hands cocked on the back of his belt, looking over the rows and rows of titles, the chronologically cataloged stacks of journals and professional papers, his authored writings among them, searching the crowded and sagging shelves for no particular textbook or thesis or biography, but in unadulterated admiration of the accumulated wealth of human intellect bound up in the printed page.

These books, these words—
these
were his connection to the world. Every evening he was locked to his desk in reclusive silence, dissecting and digesting and rearticulating some translated parchment or fragment of doctrine he’d scavenged from a dead society, while his living daughters saw only the frown of his intellectual tangle, saw his eyebrows knot together as he unraveled some bit of historical minutiae, saw only a vague recognition of our own dilemmas if we interrupted him with our personal quandaries. His life was inside his mind and inside these books. Maybe he loved the words in these books more than us, or maybe these books were the tactile offering of his hidden mind, the only offering he knew how to give. My mother understood that, I’m beginning to realize. My mother understood that this was not a man of spoken and physical displays of love. These books, letters printed black against white, were the link between his internal world and the world our small family shared. And now he can’t read them.

A small mountain
of soggy paper towels is growing in the middle of the floor and still the white weave turns brown after each swipe of the kitchen cabinets. I climb onto a chair to dislodge the bottles of Worcestershire and A-1 steak sauce and cooking sherry that are glued to the wood in a gum of spilled syrup. Scraps of the newspapers my mother had used to line the shelves chip off in a time warp of advertisements for Bee Gees music and campaign speeches for Jimmy Carter. The telephone rings again, the third time in half an hour, and I look over my shoulder at Dad. He turns up the volume on the television set and continues eating his tuna fish.

“Dad, do you want me to answer your phone?”

“I have an answering machine to answer the phone. I’m eating my lunch.”

I jump down from the chair and reach over to pick up the receiver just before it clicks into the recording. “Hello?”

“Hello.” There is a pause. “I found you.”

“Hang on for a minute.” I put the receiver down and say to Dad, “Could you hang this up after I pick up in the bedroom?” He seems to be dissecting his tuna salad, searching for some palatable bit of celery or egg, and then I realize that his eyes are directed at a blank space beyond his plate, and he’s sorting through the mixed textures of food with his fingertips.

I run into the bedroom and take the receiver off the hook, then back to the kitchen to hang up that receiver, then back to the bedroom. “OK. You could have called me on my cell.”

“You didn’t answer it.”

“You could have left a message.”

“I guess I didn’t think you’d return it.”

“So how did you find me here?”

“You weren’t at any of the first thirteen Heatons in Houston that I called.” Joe gives me a minute to respond before asking, “Why? Were you hoping I
wouldn’t
find you?”

I sit down on the edge of the bed. “Oh, not you in particular.”

He laughs at this. “Glad I wasn’t singled out. I thought maybe you’d gone to your sister’s, but I didn’t know her last name. Easier to start with your father.”

“Would have been even easier to just knock on my door when you left the cake.”

“Torte. So you got it.”

“I got it.”

Neither of us says anything then; each waits for the other to start some thread of conversation. I hear him breathing, a rhythm of small waves washing down thousands of miles of telephone line. Finally Joe says, “Should I hang up yet? Or should I just shoot myself?” He adds this last bit in the hick Ozark drawl he always teases me with.

“Well, if you shoot yourself, leave me your record collection. I can sell it to pay my legal fees.”

“This will be long over before my record collection is worth that much. Did you meet the new lawyer yet?”

“Just before I left town. He’s nicer than Donnelly, I think. Not sure that’s a good thing in a defense attorney, though.”

“I was wondering why you’d left so quickly. Everything OK?”

I twist the phone cord through my fingers. “Why? Have you heard something?”

“No,” he says, almost too quickly. Then more gently: “Just offering to listen if you need to talk.”

“Thanks. I’m OK. Tolerable, as Dad would say. How are
you
, now that you tracked me down?”

“Lonely. I was supposed to go on a bike trip this week with Katz, but he bagged out on it.”

“What happened?”

“Some piddly-ass plans his wife made without even talking to him. She went into early labor.”

“Oh wow! I didn’t know Katz was having another baby. Is she all right?”

“She’s fine. I think she’s thirty-four weeks, so they’re not too worried. But now I have a week’s worth of gear packed in my panniers and no place to go. Which, coincidentally, ties in with your covetous designs on my records.”

“How so?”

“I found a guy on eBay who’s selling three hundred albums he found in his dead father’s attic. Mainly Blue Note.”

I turn over onto my stomach bunching a pillow under my chest, holding the phone up to my ear on one propped elbow. “And you got them?”

“Thanks to a good bottle of single-malt Scotch to lubricate my bidding frenzy, I did indeed. I’m flying to New Orleans to pick them up.”

“Why can’t he just ship them?”

“I haven’t flown any long trips since I went to Toronto last fall. Besides, if you knew what I paid you’d know why I want to pick them up in person. At any rate, I thought I could stop over in Houston for a night on the way back.”

I sit up again and push the bedroom door closed with my foot. When I don’t answer immediately he asks, “Marie? Are you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“I won’t come if you don’t want me to.”

I take in a deep breath. “Come. You should come. It would be good to see you.”