The Distant Land of My Father (49 page)

debt

MY FATHER’S ASSURANCES ASIDE
, I worried about him after that. I worried when he came inside short of breath, and I worried when I looked outside and saw how much trimming and weeding and raking and pruning he’d done. I worried when his energy seemed low, when he turned down an invitation for lunch at New Moon, when I called him and he wasn’t home. I worried late at night when I couldn’t get to sleep and early in the morning, when I woke before Jack and the girls.

A few months after our conversation about the will, I took Eve and Heather to the beach. It was a Saturday in June, the first summery day of the year. Jack had made plans to golf at Brookside with his father, so the girls and I took off alone for a day at San Clemente.

When we got home, Jack’s car was in the driveway, and the girls climbed out of the station wagon and ran into the house, calling for him, eager to tell him about our day. I followed after them, happy to have him home so early, and the three of us tramped into the kitchen, trailing sand.

Jack was sitting at the kitchen table. The girls ran to him and he hugged them, but he was looking at me over their heads. I thought how handsome he looked, and how beautiful his blue eyes were, and how lucky I was, and then I noticed the serious anxiousness in his expression and I stood still and said, “What is it?” only half-trying to sound casual.

He nodded as though I’d guessed something, and he told the girls they could go outside and rinse the sand off with the hose. Heather stood next to him, and he pulled her T-shirt off, not bothering about the sand, which crumbled around his feet. Eve looked back and forth between us suspiciously; she had caught the tone of my voice and was alert at the unexpected, the way she always was at anything out of the ordinary.

“It’s all right,” Jack said, and he grinned at her and tickled her belly. “Go squirt your sister with the hose.”

She nodded knowingly, as though she were aware of the bribe but accepted it. Then she took Heather’s hand and led her outside.

“What is it?” I said.

“He’s not feeling well,” Jack said. “I think it’s his stomach. He wasn’t very specific.”

My father had called an hour or so earlier, Jack said. He didn’t sound good, but when Jack asked what the matter was, my father tried to laugh it off. “Some stomach thing,” he said. “You know how it goes. The parts start to give out after a while.”

Jack had tried to be casual. “So they say,” he’d answered.

And then there was a pause, and my father said, “Is she around?”

It was his voice, Jack said, that worried him. He sounded afraid, a first.

“Well, shoot, she’s not,” Jack had said, not missing a beat, though he knew something was wrong. This was not my father’s usual call. He never talked about his health; he never told you if something was wrong. “She’s at the beach with the girls,” he told him, and when my father didn’t respond, he added, “What can I do?”

Another pause, and then my father said that he’d call back later, and he hung up.

But by the time I called, my father said he was fine—a false alarm, he said, just some indigestion or something. He still sounded odd, but there was no convincing him to come over, or to let me drive over and pick him up, or to see a doctor on Monday.

“Why are you being so stubborn?” I said finally.

He laughed. “Anna, you’re about fifty years too late if you want to change me.” He paused and said, “I know your intentions are good. But I’m fine. I just wasn’t feeling so good and I got a little worried, but it’s passed and I’m right as rain. Stop worrying and take care of those girls of yours.”

I took his advice and tried to stop worrying, and for a long time, my father gave me no reason for concern. For the next two years, he continued to come over every Thursday and whenever else I asked him to. The girls were crazy about him, Jack’s family entertained and intrigued, and little by little, even my grandmother seemed to lose her reservations. He was something I’d never expected—part of our family—and I came to consider both of us lucky.

On a warm, clear day in May of 1961, he came over a little later than usual, around ten in the morning. Eve was six and a half and lonesome for kindergarten. She’d had chicken pox, and the last few bumps were keeping her home. Heather was almost five and determined to contract the pox, which she seemed to consider a rite of passage, since it had made its way through most of Eve’s kindergarten class. Heather hardly let her sister out of her sight. She drank from her cup, snuggled with her in front of the TV, did everything she could to expose herself to germs. So far her efforts hadn’t paid off, and both girls were tired of the whole affair.

My father had shown up just in time. When he knocked at the door and said he had something special, all three of us were hopeful.

What he had was ladybugs. He held a small cloth bag, and inside were twenty-five of them, and when he showed it to the girls, they shrieked and called for me. He said they were the best control, live or otherwise, for aphids, which were threatening to harm his beloved roses, and that Eve and Heather—”my beautiful assistants,” he called them—could help him scatter the ladybugs.

The three of them tramped outside and I watched from the kitchen window as my father opened the bag. “Now, there’s no guarantee that they’ll stay put,” I heard him say, “but I’ve just got a feeling that they’ll do the trick.” From the window, I saw him lean over his roses, the girls mimicking his stance and concern. Eve, always careful, hovered over the roses carefully, as though if she got too close, she might inhibit the ladybugs and even the roses’ growth. Not Heather. She seemed to have strong ideas about which ladybugs should be where, and began moving them around, trying to create little families, until my father talked her into just leaving them alone.

The girls stayed close to him for the rest of the morning. I caught glimpses of them from inside as I paid the bills and changed the sheets and folded laundry and picked up toys. I could hear Heather questioning my father about everything he was doing, her voice high and insistent with curiosity: “But why, Pop?
Why?
” And then I’d hear the low tones of my father’s voice, explaining, the breeze carrying away most of his words, so that only a few made it inside:
aphids, roses, pests, harm. Vigilance, reward, full bloom.

At around one, I noticed that things had gotten quiet outside, and I looked out the window to see where everyone had gone. My father was lying on the grass on his back. Heather and Eve stood on either side of him, leaning over him, peering at his face. It was a game they played often: he would lie down on the grass and pretend to fall right to sleep, while the girls whispered over him, trying to decide if he was really awake. But it worried me that day, and I called to them, and when my father stood up, I felt a rush of relief that surprised me.

They came inside for lunch then, and I sent Eve and Heather to the bathroom to wash their hands. I was making tuna sandwiches, and my father leaned against the counter, watching me spread tuna on raisin bread. He was breathing hard, and I said, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just a little winded.”

And then he collapsed.

He fell first onto one knee, then to the tile floor, his body and then his head hitting with a horrible thump. I screamed and dropped the bowl I was holding, then I knelt next to him and held his face between my hands, and I knew that he was unconscious. I grabbed the phone from the counter and dialed the operator. “My father,” I said, “my father,” and I didn’t know what to say next.

“Do you need an ambulance?” the operator asked, and I nodded, then managed to blurt out our address. She read it back to me and said someone would be there in minutes.

And then I hung up and saw the girls standing in the doorway staring at my father, their eyes wide. Eve’s chin was trembling; she looked terrified. Heather looked perplexed, as if she was just waiting for me to explain.

“Pop?” she said softly.

I looked at Eve. “Run to Mrs. Porter’s and tell her to come quick. Can you do that?”

Eve stared at me blankly.

“Mrs. Porter,” I said. Sally Porter was the neighbor two doors down. I didn’t know her well, but I knew she’d been a nurse before her children were born. “Get Mrs. Porter.”

Still a blank look. I remembered the oak tree with the knothole in the Porters’ front yard. “The house with the tree with the secret hiding place,” I said frantically, and she nodded. “Go to the house with the secret hiding place. Take Heather with you. Tell Mrs. Porter to come quickly.”

Eve nodded hard, then took Heather’s hand and said, “Run!” and the two of them hurried out of the house.

I turned back to my father. His breathing was labored, and his body jerked. I put my hand on his chest and felt a heartbeat. “You’re all right,” I whispered, “your heart’s beating, and you’re all right, you’re all right.” I rested my hand on his chest and felt his body working to breathe. I stroked his hair and I whispered, “It’s Anna, Dad. I’m right here with you.” I leaned close to him and put my cheek against his, which was too cool.

“Please,” I said. “Please don’t die yet.”

As if on cue, my father stopped breathing.

I looked at the clock, then back at my father. It seemed as though Eve and Heather had been gone for an hour. I had no idea what to do for him. I had never felt so useless.

A minute passed. I kept talking to him and stroking his face and holding his hand. And then, finally, I heard hurried footsteps in the living room, and Sally burst into the kitchen. “Oh, my God,” she said. I looked at her, then at the clock. He had not breathed for two minutes.

“Can you do something?” I said.
“Can you please do something?”

Sally knelt next to him and put her hand on his wrist. “He doesn’t have a pulse,” she said, “I don’t know,” and then she placed her hands on my father’s sternum and began to press down, counting each push. The scene was nightmarish and grotesque, and I thought of my daughters.

“The girls,” I said.

She was pressing and counting. When she reached fifteen, she said, “They’re at my house. Doug’s home. Don’t worry.” And then she breathed into my father’s mouth, and I thought,
Make this work.

She was starting to press and count again when we heard the ambulance. There was a lot of noise in the living room, clattering and running and urgent voices, and three men appeared with a stretcher. They asked hurried questions that Sally answered in words I didn’t understand. I did understand the grimness in their expressions and in her voice. I leaned against the refrigerator, wanting to give them room, and I saw, on the counter, my father’s leather gardening gloves, fresh with dirt. He had taken them off twenty minutes ago.

The men lifted my father onto the stretcher, then said I could ride with them, and I nodded, and asked Sally to call Jack, and said his number was next to the phone. She was crying, and I thought,
Why is she crying?
And I looked at her and knew that my father was gone.

At the hospital, a nurse told me to wait, and she asked if I needed to call anyone. I said my husband would be here soon, then I sat down on a dark blue scratchy couch. I held my head in my hands and tried to will Jack there.

I didn’t wait long. A man who introduced himself as Dr. Pearson came within the half hour and told me what I’d known in my heart: that my father was dead. He had died shortly after reaching the hospital of cardiac arrest, probably caused by ventricular fibrillation, very rapid irregular contractions of the muscle fibers of one of the lower chambers of the heart. He had never regained consciousness.

I listened carefully, wanting to understand what had gone on in his body—what had gone wrong, and why. I found myself repeating some of Dr. Pearson’s phrases:
myocardial infarction, ischemia, ventricular fibrillation, cardiac arrest, sudden death.
A part of me wanted to sit down with him and have him explain everything in detail, so thoroughly that it all made sense, moment by moment. I wanted causes and events, reasons why, a sense of order.

But when Dr. Pearson finished his explanation of my father’s death, I couldn’t say what I wanted. I found him watching me carefully. I was waiting for him to tell me something useful.