The Good Father

by Wayne Grady

  “I like that.”

  “But I’m changing the ending.”

  She did eventually finish reading the script. It didn’t end the way she’d thought it would. It wasn’t Shakespeare, after all; it was Ibsen. Enemy of the People. When the councillors arrive at the property, the father gets into a fierce argument with them. Daphne envisions them as the men they spoke to in the café at the ferry dock. Honest, befuddled, plain-speaking men who’ve been treading water all their lives, trying to stay afloat in a sea of troubles, wife troubles, children troubles, equipment troubles, government troubles, tired of endlessly opposing everything, especially now that their children are grown and moving away. They’re fed up with the isolation, the deprivation, they see what it has cost them, and if they haven’t seen it themselves, their wives have certainly drawn their attention to it often enough. To hell with it. To hell with swollen prostates and pre-diabetes and morning coughing fits and forgetting to take their pills and where they put their goddamn keys. This resort is, ironically, their last chance to preserve their economic independence, of keeping their families together, of keeping their children and their grandchildren close, of being able to even think about retiring and maybe travelling to Vancouver or Seattle for a weekend, hell, maybe even Disneyland with the grandkids, is that too much to ask after fifty years of slinging lumber or gutting fish and keeping twenty-year-old trucks on the road, until their hands are so callused they can hardly roll a cigarette anymore? Is it?

  The father, of course, is appalled at the idea of his Shangri-La being turned into a tourist trap. He doesn’t even let the councillors past the wattle gate. A resort isn’t the answer to their prayers, he shouts at them, blocking the path, it’s the bait on the hook, the dead canary in the mineshaft. Is this why they came to Cortes Island, to take tourists out to gawk at whales, to see their kids wearing waiters’ uniforms and skin-tight miniskirts, mixing drinks for rich tax evaders from the States? To be laughed at because of the way they say “house” and because they don’t know what a bitcoin is? The father would have got along well with Gilean Douglas, come to think of it, the two of them would have dealt with those councillors. Have they forgotten about the covenants? Don’t they realize Crimson will never be able to run hydro or roads into the property, and that without those there can be no resort? If Gilean had been there she might have been able to avert a tragedy. She might have talked some sense into the daughter. As it is, the father is too angry to notice that the daughter doesn’t exactly have his back on this. Nor does he realize that she and Jimmy Crimson have, in fact, been meeting in the woods—Tom was right about that (of course he was, he’d read the script). She’s been experimenting not only with sex but with a variety of chemical inducements, and is a little off her head, a little unhinged. Daphne knows exactly what that’s like. The daughter never had much of a hold on reality in the first place, on the thin membrane that separates the painfully real from the painfully unreal, the inside of ourselves from the outside, and consequently after the councillors head back up the path, with Jimmy Crimson yelling obscenities and vowing never to come back, not even for his slut of a daughter, she runs into the workshop, grabs one of her father’s shiny chisels from the pegboard, runs out again, and stabs her father in the heart. Multiple times. When you want a job done properly, always use the right tool. Her father taught her that. In the last scene, she’s chasing after the councillors, running madly up the forest path in the dark, shouting, “Jimmy! Jimmy! It’s okay, you can have it now! Jimmy!”

  “Changing it how?” she asks. She didn’t like the way the script ended, but hadn’t said anything. It was Tom’s film.

  “She doesn’t kill her father,” says Tom. “She discovers that Jimmy has acquired the tree-cutting rights to the section of the island that Channel Rock is on. He’s planning to harvest the big trees, that’s why he wants the land. She tells her father, and together they save the property.”

  “That’s much better,” she says, smiling.

  “I don’t want the Jimmy Crimsons of the world to win,” Tom says. “I like the idea of Channel Rock staying as it is.”

  “Actually, I’m thinking of buying it.”

  “Buying—?”

  She nods. “Channel Rock.” She thought she’d given up on the idea, but apparently she hasn’t, she only gave up on the idea of buying it to save the property. But now, thinking of the daughter in the film, she sees it as a way of saving herself, which is what environmentalism is really about. “It’s got covenants on it, but I agree with them. I figure I can get most of the money by selling my condo. It’s on the right side of False Creek and it’s half paid for, so I’d only need to come up with payments on about half a million.”

  “But…”

  “Don’t worry, Tom, I’ll let you use it for the film. I’ll stay in the cabin. You aren’t going to be using that.”

  “But what will you do up there? No Wi-Fi, no phone, you’ll go nuts.”

  “No, I won’t,” she says. “I’m going nuts here. And the island is getting Wi-Fi.”

  Until it does, she’ll tell Sandra and Elinor that she’ll check her email once a week when she goes into Manson’s Landing for groceries. Maybe she’ll make earrings, or grow sugar beets.

  “I appreciate your concern, Tom, but I’ll be fine.”

  Tom leans towards her, looks down at her hands, and watches them folding a brown bar napkin into ever tighter triangles. He puts his hand over hers and she stops folding and looks up at him. He does have a nice face.

  “But how will I see you?” he asks her.

  “You know where I’ll be,” she says.

  Daphne and Harry

  SPRING 2019

  When she is back on Cortes Island, after spending three weeks in Vancouver with Tom wrapping up the fentanyl documentary, Daphne showers in one of the guest cabins, makes herself a meal in the main house (rice and fish, she still isn’t eating red meat), and takes a pot of Bora Bora tea to the cabin, where she most often sleeps when Tom isn’t there. She chooses a book from the shelves that line what she calls the sea-wall, Siri Hustvedt’s The Summer Without Men, and lies on the bed. The first line, about the main character going into a state of brief reactive psychosis after her husband announced he was leaving her, makes her put the book down and think about how her life has changed since the days when it was ruled by drugs. She wonders if her subsequent life, the condo in Vancouver, this island, might be described as a state of prolonged reactive psychosis. She wonders why, of the five basic facial expressions babies are supposed to recognize at birth—anger, joy, disgust, pain, and fear—only one is pleasant.

  Working on the fentanyl documentary brought a lot of it back, as she knew it would, and she’s been unable to talk to Tom about it. He knows, of course—it had to come out after the interview with Sister Darlene—but not the extent of it, or how much it continues to worry her. Not that she’ll go back, there’s an AA group in Manson’s Landing, but the scars are still there. The mineral water, the spartan diet, the running, her minimalist life here at Channel Rock. She is careful to avoid stress, gets plenty of sleep, takes breaks in the middle of the day to read or work in the garden. It’s as though she’s in constant recovery. A person in recovery after a cancer operation no longer has cancer, but not so a person in recovery from addiction. That person never fully recovers. She remembers her father insisting that he wasn’t an addict. And herself thinking that everyone is addicted to something. The things we tell ourselves.

  After her father stopped drinking, when Elinor had left him for Sandra and he was diagnosed with stage-four colorectal cancer and given three months to live, tops, he talked about wine every day. Not about drinking, just about wine. During the three months Daphne spent with him in Toronto, “easing his passage,” as the palliative-care people put it, nearly everything they talked about came back to wine. They mapped out their trip through the Okanagan Valley, now destined ne
ver to happen, the vineyards they would visit, the different varietals he wanted her to try. They googled the domaines that had inns, the side routes, the restaurants with fabulous cellars. He told her about other places he’d known that had great cellars: the Hatley Inn, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, for example, which burned down in 2006, destroying its five-million-dollar wine collection. He told her that the entire basement of Le Sélect, a fine restaurant in Toronto, was a series of small, separate wine cellars, the temperature and humidity in each of them carefully controlled by a computer upstairs. He said that in Portugal, which has the highest per capita consumption of wine in the world, cirrhosis of the liver was virtually unknown. He told her that Brillat-Savarin, the great nineteenth-century French philosopher, maintained that la gourmandise saved France from economic ruin after the Napoleonic Wars, because the occupying European armies became so addicted to French cuisine that when peace came the Britons and the Teutons spent more money on French wine than the Treaty of Paris demanded from France in war reparations. He said there were limestone caves under England that were possibly, who knew?, connected underground to similar caves in France, filled with hundreds of thousands of bottles of French champagne, but that the largest wine cellar in the world was under the Milestii Mici winery, in the former Soviet republic of Moldova—a thirty-four-mile-long cave containing two million bottles of wine. Her memory of that time is that her father talked nonstop about wine for three months, and then died.

  As she lies on the narrow cabin bed, she imagines he is there with her, that it’s her father who is lying on the bed—that he was there all the time, waiting for her to return—and she’s sitting in the swivel chair by the desk, and they are talking. She wants to ask him what he thought about when he was dying, what interested him, or frightened him, whether he missed her mother, or her, or their old life in White Falls. She’s not as desperate to know as she once was, but she’s still curious. At first he’s evasive, as though she’s poking at old wounds he decided to carry with him to the grave, or maybe at things he isn’t allowed to talk about. But she persists, the way she was never able to do when he was alive. She feels this is her last chance, that after this conversation he’ll get up off the bed, walk out of the cabin, and she’ll never see him again. She has always felt like that. After every awkward conversation she steeled herself for his disappearing from her life forever. This time, though, the prospect doesn’t deter her.

  “I never did walk away, though, did I?” he says, turning his head to look up at her.

  “No, but you made me feel that you would.”

  “I walked away, but I didn’t disappear.”

  “No, you didn’t walk away, but you disappeared.”

  “You’re the one who walked away. You estranged yourself from me.”

  “I know. It’s called ghosting. I ghosted you.”

  “Hoo, that’s a good one. It’s a thing now, is it? Ghosting?”

  “Is that what you were thinking about that night?” she asks him. “That I abandoned you?”

  “You mean the night I died?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Just before.”

  “You were there.”

  “Actually, I wasn’t. I was out running.”

  “I was thinking about you.”

  “You were?” She doesn’t believe that. That’s just what people say.

  “I was thinking about you staying downstairs in the granny flat.”

  “Flat? You never called it a flat, you called it an apartment. That’s a much better word for it: I was downstairs, apart in my apartment.”

  “And you woke up wondering what had happened. It was only the wind shaking the house, rattling the windows. You lay awake, listening to the house, too anxious to sleep, too tired to turn on a light and read your book—I think it was Katherine Mansfield. I knew I was exhausting you, depleting you. So much work, looking after me all those months as I lay dying.”

  “Just three, it wasn’t so bad. And I enjoyed reconnecting with Elinor and Sandra.”

  Actually, she remembers, it was bad. Not just the physical aspects, the bedpans, the leakages and seepages, at least they were things she could deal with, get through, rest from. It was the psychological side of it, looking after someone you knew was not going to get better, seeing a person you love slip inexorably from being a competent, functioning human being into a helpless, semi-conscious, child-like object. Plus there was the pain of self-knowledge, that she was looking after someone she’d once put through hell even while professing love for him, because she was going through hell and wanted a little company, and she knew he would go on loving her anyway.

  Well, it was a little deeper than that, Daphne, give yourself some credit. You were pretty sure at the time that the hell you were going through was a special gift from your dad and Elinor. Inadvertent, maybe, but did that excuse it? You knew you were too damned sensitive, but he could be damned insensitive. Even on his deathbed, all that talk about wine, did it never occur to him that, given your history with alcohol, you might be finding it a bit hard to listen to? Wasn’t it like doing the opioid documentary with Tom, except Tom didn’t know about your history with opioids? So much forgiveness was necessary, so much overlooking of hurt, so much emphasis on intentionality, when what you really wanted to do was lash out. That was love.

  She no longer thinks of love as an emotion, because emotions come and go; it’s more a state of being, a country to which you emigrate, apply for temporary residency, rent don’t buy, learn a bit of the language, abide by the rules, hope for the best.

  “I was dying,” her father says, “and you didn’t know how to feel about that. Oh, sad, yes, of course you were sad, but you were sad when your cat died, you were sad when Elinor left me. You were lying there thinking that sad didn’t cover it.”

  “You’re right, I felt sad, and I needed to feel more than sad. I wanted to rage against the dying of the light. I wanted to shout ‘Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes.’ But all I did was ask how you were feeling, give you your morphine and ask if you’d like some tea. I thought I was just tired.”

  “That was grief. Pain depletes you. It’s like a death.”

  “Is it?”

  “It spreads you so thin your corporeal self barely exists. You’re a ghost.”

  “We’ve never talked about those months before you rescued me.”

  “You always hated that basement apartment.”

  “You knew that?”

  “I thought you’d eventually come to like it. That night it was pitch-black, pre-electricity black. I know; I slept there a few times myself. Not even a strip of light under the door, no faint glow from a TV monitor or router. If you wanted to see anything you had to get up and go into the living room, where I kept wine in a cooler that had a digital temperature readout.”

  “A great place for an addict.”

  “The more you thought about darkness, the more it became an oppressive presence in the room. All the furniture seemed to have been carved out of it, as Mansfield put it. You couldn’t tell if your eyes were open or closed. You put your hand out in front of you and you couldn’t see if it was there or not, it felt like it wasn’t. Maybe it wasn’t the room, maybe you’d gone blind. You opened your eyes as wide as you possibly could and waited for them to adjust, but they never did. In fact the room got darker. I thought that, when I slept in that room. And I’ve thought about it more since.”

  “When did you sleep in the basement?”

  “After Elinor left. Sometimes I didn’t feel like climbing all those stairs to sleep in our old bed. It was quiet down there, and cool in the summer. As you know. And sometimes, after I was diagnosed, I even welcomed the darkness. The city is never dark. Or quiet. I realized that again when I slept in the living room those last few months, in that horrid hospital bed.”

  “I’m sorry about that, I thought it would be more comfortable.
”

  “See? You thought I’d come to like it. No deathbed is comfortable. I lay there thinking about you searching in the darkness for something that would take you to the other side of grief. To anger, maybe. That’s what I found, usually, when I thought about what I was really feeling. Anger and guilt. I mined the past for nuggets of anger and hurt. When you do that you find plenty, especially lying in the dark, in the middle of the night. We scatter anger around like seeds, don’t we, like a dog shaking water off its coat.”

  “I think I’ve grown past that. That dog is asleep. But I felt pretty bad down there when I was thirteen, fourteen. What if there were a fire! Or the hot-water tank exploded?”

  “I thought Elinor would be uncomfortable with you in the room next to us. I was wrong about that; Elinor loved you and wanted you near us. It was just me. I also thought your mother wouldn’t want you to start thinking of me and Elinor as your parents and run to our bed when you woke up from a bad dream. But of course your mother just wanted you to be happy. I know that now. But to oblige Elinor, to oblige your mother, to oblige myself, I let you down.”

  “Your concern was always for everyone but me. Even your students came first.”

  “My students. Winston and I talked about that when I was in Vancouver. My students were a generation between mine and yours. I thought, not consciously, maybe, but at some level, I thought that if I taught them well they would halt the mess my generation had made of the world and make your life a little better.”

  “Dad, that is such bullshit. I’m calling you out on that.”

  “All right, then, maybe I was testing everyone: the person who loved me most would complain the least.”

  “Better, but I still don’t buy it.”

  “Or maybe I had complete confidence in you, and I was testing myself.”

  “The truth is, you weren’t thinking about me at all. And that’s okay, I can live with that. You had a lot to deal with. Mom and the mayor, your job at the college, our future as a family. I wasn’t a problem that needed to be solved. I was just a ten-year-old kid.”