That year has been thoroughly dammed up behind decades of glossed chitchat about college courses and medical school applications, behind score cards filled with scientific trivia I could recite that finally gave me a notch up—a topic I understood and he didn’t. But just before my mother’s heart attack, as I sat diagramming the flow of blood through her heart to persuade her to have her valve replaced, she told me why my father broke that silence. She made it clear to him that, despite her love, she would leave him if he didn’t. I wasn’t yet mature enough to remind her that he was not the only one who had refused to speak.
32
The sun has edged far enough above the horizon to spark hot and yellow-orange across the grass, already steaming away morning dew and softening tar on streets and sidewalks. I close my father’s front door behind me and I’m almost blind in the gloomy living room with its perpetually drawn blinds and dark furniture. How can he live here and not become depressed? The smells inside this house hang like limp flags of age and decay—smells of household neglect, and my father’s physical decline, his unlaundered clothing, his unwashed body.
I dance-step down the hall around the creaking floorboards to Dad’s bedroom door. It hangs open, too swollen and warped with coats of paint to close anymore. He is lying on his back under the wheezing air conditioner, snoring away in stuttering gasps. The arch of his rib cage caves into the wide bowl of his pelvis. He can’t be eating enough. I can almost trace his skeleton under the bedsheet, practically see his heart beating through the thin cotton of his undershirt, rocking along in its seventy-ninth year inside a chest grown from the flexible balloon of a baby into broad-shouldered manhood, and now, finally, shriveled back into the spare bones and flesh of his old age.
His snore clogs into silence and I count the seconds, waiting to see if he’ll roll his tongue clear and gasp for air, or if, maybe, I should run to him and press my ear against his mouth, my fingers against his pulse. Then he curls onto his side and the irregular, staccatoed whoosh steadies into an unobstructed, rhythmic flow—fourteen breaths a minute, twenty thousand breaths a day. Could I count the breaths he has left in him? How low has the number dwindled from whatever seemingly infinite quantity he was allotted at birth? And how many breaths would he need to tell me, face-to-face, that he regrets the course of my life? How many breaths to elaborate on the prejudicial word fault when I point out that a woman can remain lovely and smart without the validating stamp of marriage? Or would any words beyond the secondhand apology he offered to Joe take every last breath he has?
The air conditioner has been off all night in my room; I’m clammy with perspiration even before I crawl across the bed and punch a button under the metal grill. The machine thuds once and shivers to life, and the fan cranks out a tepid stream of air. I open up my shirt and try to trap any coolness.
“Marie?” I hear Dad calling through the walls. “Marie? Is that you?”
I scramble back across the bed and up the hallway to his room, re-buttoning my shirt. “Yes, Dad. It’s me. I’m sorry I woke you up.”
“What time is it?”
“Early. It’s not even six thirty yet—go back to sleep.”
“You didn’t come home last night.”
“Joe and I had a lot to talk about. I thought it was too late to drive back, so I stayed there.”
He brings his hand up over his face and rubs his palm, dry and rough against the stubble on his cheeks. He exhales in a deep sigh and lies still, as if he is orienting himself to the task of living through another day. “Well, long as you’re all right.”
“I didn’t mean to worry you.” I shift in the doorway and twist my hair up off the back of my neck. “I guess I should have phoned. I’m not used to somebody waiting up for me.” I try to remember if he ever waited up for me in my early years of dating, listening and awake in his bed when my mother called out to be sure I locked the front door, to be sure I was safe.
He grasps the bedpost and pulls himself up to sit on the edge of the mattress, pauses to catch his breath. “Come sit with me a minute. Would you?”
I walk over and sit beside him on the sagging bed, self-conscious to be this close. The details of his room are lost in morning twilight. A fly is trapped behind the closed window blind, battering its wings against the glass pane in a desperate hum.
I’m on the verge of offering to make his breakfast or run a bath for him when he clears his throat and says, “I’m not going to drive anymore. If you or your sister could put the Buick up for sale, I would appreciate it. Lori can have it if she wants to drive it up to Fort Worth.” He is staring into the dark hallway beyond his bedroom door, not even trying to make out my features in the unforgiving shadows.
“Dad…”
He cuts me off with a wave of his hand. “I don’t want the liability anymore.”
“OK. All right. I’ll call Lori later this morning. How will you get your groceries?”
“There’s a bus at the corner. I can get that far.”
“Have you thought about a housekeeper? I could take care of that.”
He shakes his head and seems to sink heavier into the mattress. “Damn. I can hardly believe it”—this said to himself more than to me, and I can’t tell if he is surprised about succumbing to his infirmity, or the fact that the vast majority of his life is concluded, like the last toast at an elaborately planned party when it becomes clear that the anticipation has surpassed the event but sped by unappreciated. “Well. I suppose that would be best.”
He leans over to his bedside table and pulls out the drawer, groping through pill bottles and dried-up ballpoint pens and broken bits of cigar. I am about to get up to turn on the lamp when I remember that it would make little difference.
“You should have this,” he says, holding a silk embroidered lipstick case in his outstretched palm. In an Instamatic flash I see my mother snapping it open to angle the doll-sized mirror at her mouth and slip the gold cap off a tube of Passion Flower, sculpted into a creamy red Eiffel tower by her lips. Something smaller than a lipstick rattles in the box. Inside I find the diamond engagement ring my father gave to her on their tenth wedding anniversary, an apology for the academic poverty of their early years together. “Your mother would have liked you to have it.”
“Dad, are you sure? What about Lori?”
“I’ll give her your grandmother’s earrings. Besides, she’s got a ring.”
“Thank you. It’s beautiful. It reminds me of Mom.” I try to twist it onto my right ring finger. “I’ll have to have it sized.” I smile at him. “Are you just afraid I’ll never get my own?”
“I don’t know what your young man, Joe, is planning. I’d be giving this regardless.”
I shrug my shoulders and slip the ring onto my little finger. Even there it is tight. “Joe and I aren’t planning. We’re friends. Good friends.”
“Your mother was my friend.”
“Yes. You were the best of friends, weren’t you?” It’s true. And being able to share such an honest fact relaxes some of the strain between us. My mother’s love for both of us still has power. “It was a good thing to watch, growing up. A good model.”
He shifts his weight on the bed, bracing his hands on either side of him for support. Then he surprises me by saying what I couldn’t. “A good thing to watch, maybe. But better to have been included. I spent so much time deciphering the minds of dead men I wasn’t much good at listening to young girls. Left that to your mother.” He grips the cording on the mattress. I reach over and close my hand around his. The cool metal of his wedding ring is loose around his flesh, locked forever behind his burled knuckle.
“So. Here we are,” he says, a stutter of cracks running through his voice. He clears his throat. “I taught my students that there was usually a hell of a lot more to be discovered in what was omitted from a textual translation than in what was inscribed—typical of human nature, I’ve come to believe. Now I have to content myself with what I can hear, what people say or don’t
say in the few conversations I have these days.” He pauses, and grips my hand, the hard knots of his joints pressing my fingers together. “Why did you come?” he asks me, not sounding angry or taunting, but genuinely interested, willing to admit that we are awkward together.
I stumble for a minute. “It’s been a long time since I’ve visited.”
“Yes. It has been a long time,” he affirms.
I start to offer one of many justifications, but end up letting the sounds of the house fill the space between us. I’m suddenly afraid of what he wants to talk about. Everything I told Joe just a few hours ago rushes back at me. “I came here because I thought you needed help.” Strain makes me sound almost accusatory, as if I blamed him for aging. He doesn’t react, waiting for me to choose whether this will be an argument or a resolution. I say it again, genuinely now. “I want to help you, Dad.”
He turns to look at me. “You’re very like your mother, you know. She was a caretaker. I never fully figured out why she married such a solitary type. You also came here, I believe, to leave something behind. Whatever that is, it’s your own business to tell or not to tell.”
“Did Joe say something to you?”
“Not a word. You left your portable phone here—I found it at the bottom of one of the grocery sacks.” It must have fallen out of my purse when I dropped the bag. I had managed to go half a day without checking messages—a reprieve granted by knowing Marsallis won’t meet with the district attorney for another three days.
“Did it ring?”
He nods his head. “I did not intend to pry into your affairs, but the fourth time it went off I opened it.”
“You answered it?”
“I didn’t know I was answering it. I opened it to try and shut the thing off and someone started talking. A man named Charles Marshalls asked me to have you call him back.”
“Marsallis. Did he say why?” My heart rate has skipped ahead so fast I feel short of breath.
“I told him you were out for the evening and he said you should be at his office as early as possible on Monday morning.”
“And he didn’t say anything else?”
“I got the impression he expected you to know.”
Without even processing the possibility that this might mean good news, tears begin to run down my cheeks. I let them fall onto my neck so my father won’t be aware of me wiping them away. I swallow to steady my voice and ask him, “Is that how you knew something was wrong?”
He shakes his head. “I’ve heard it in everything you haven’t talked about since you got here. Like I said, I’m learning to listen the same way I used to read.” He stretches across to the bedside table and pulls a Kleenex out of a box, steadying himself against the bedpost. He pushes himself upright again and folds the tissue into my hand. “If it helps you at all, I’d like to listen. I am past due on that account.”
I blot my face with the Kleenex and clench my teeth to bite back more tears. My father waits for me; his breath almost imperceptibly rocks the mattress. Minutes of silence pass before I begin to talk. “I’m involved in a malpractice suit. Somebody died in the operating room, a little girl.” He doesn’t say anything until I’ve told him the entire story. For once it’s almost cathartic to dictate the whole thing from start to finish without the constant interruptions and provocative questions of a deposition. Not that there is a finish—I have almost begun to define my life by everything being taken away, like a handprint in the dust. Even when I tell him about the criminal charge that I’m convinced must be waiting for me on Marsallis’s desk right now he only takes in a deeper breath.
At the end we both sit quietly on the edge of the bed. I am wrung out by the retelling of it all, and the crashing of memories through this house, and the lack of sleep.
“Are you all right?” he asks me.
“Oh, I don’t think the whole thing will be settled for months. Regardless of the criminal charge.”
“I meant now. Are you holding up right now?”
I don’t have an answer for him. Daylight slices through the window blinds. The ticks and sighs of the house have submerged beneath street traffic and dogs and neighborhood kids. My father starts to say something else, and stops himself. Then he blurts, “Joe is an interesting character,” as if changing the subject is the only safe reaction.
“He is interesting. And certainly a character.”
“He was there that day. The day the girl died?”
“He was working that morning. He’d already gone home by the time her operation started.”
“He had nothing to do with her care, then?”
“No. I mean, he helped me get ready for her case, but he’ll be fine—the lawyers barely even questioned him. I’m glad you like him.”
“To be specific, I said he was interesting. Don’t know whether I like him.”
I wait for him to go on, but he doesn’t offer any more. “Did he say anything to you about the lawsuit?” I ask.
“No. But I think he could have.” He pauses for a breath and adds, “He strikes me as a man who says a lot less than he says.”
“What do you mean?” I look at him, but he is staring off into the still dark hallway.
He shakes his head and lowers his voice. “Nothing. I don’t know what I mean. At my age that’s often the case.” He sighs and lifts his shoulders, brings a hand up to rub over his face and scratch the back of his neck. The intersecting ellipses of his biceps and deltoid stand out beneath the slack skin of his arm. I have a momentary flash of him as a young father hoisting Lori or me in an arc over his head—the threat of falling had been a game in those strong arms. Did he feel betrayed when we outgrew his ability to heft and carry us, when protecting us became a task of conversation, and we turned to our mother?
I take his hand again. “I’m sorry I’ve got to leave like this. I’ll talk to Lori. We’ll get the housekeeper figured out, and the car. I’ll try and get back as soon as all this gets settled.”
“Well. Some things don’t ever get settled. You just make a place for them. Learn to let them sit there with you, side by side with the good.”
33
On a fading Sunday afternoon in August, First Lutheran echoes of escaping employees. I sometimes wonder if Seattle’s spectacularly brief summertime doesn’t suppress disease until the rains return. Despite threatening skies the offices and lounges are deserted but for the emergency staff. As I’d hoped, I run into no familiar faces on my way into the mailroom.
Envelopes and flyers are so crammed into my box I have to seesaw a thick cardboard mailer out to decompress the lot, uncorking a drift of paper. I sit in the midst of the pile and pull the recycling bin beside me. It’s a treasure hunt to find the fragments of information that matter. Ads for anesthesia equipment and conferences and journals and textbooks, newsletters from city and county and national and international societies, solicitations from investment brokers and real estate agents and political lobbyists. Call schedules and vacation schedules and committee schedules—meetings that have come and gone in my absence like seasonal birds winging over the landscape, mattering only for the moment. The more I get, the less I read.
Resting on top of a mound of new Medicare guidelines is the slip of white paper I’m looking for, folded and stapled and addressed to me in the cursive script of a human hand. I pull it open and read a jotted note from Matt Corchoran, First Lutheran’s pharmacist, asking me to stop by his office to discuss the matter I’d called him about before leaving Houston.
The pharmacy office is tucked into a windowless closet of space behind the cavernous storage rooms of surgical equipment. Matt’s office door is split, Dutch style, and from down the hall I see the bottom half closed; the glow from his computer monitor illuminates the close walls and ceiling like a huge aquarium. The top of his balding head bobs above the lower door. He sees me and jumps, as if discovered among secrets, then laughs at his own startle.
“Dr. Heaton. I get so used to being alone back here on the w
eekends—only chance I have to work in peace. I didn’t even hear you walk up.”
“Hi, Matt.” We fall into the hierarchy of address so common in the medical world, a taboo against using doctors’ first names even after years of working together. “I got your note. That was quick—thank you. I hope you didn’t spend your whole Saturday reviewing files for me.”
“No problem. Have a seat.” He wedges open the door and I squeeze around it to reach a blue plastic chair tucked beside him under the narrow Formica desk. “Sorry—they keep promising me a new office when we remodel the ORs, but equipment gets more space than people around here.” His Midwestern vowels protrude unabashedly into his language. They suit him in a way, straightforward and methodical—a man used to the meticulous measuring and counting of chemicals. He opens a dented metal file drawer and flicks through cardboard folders until he plucks one forth, stuffed with the pharmacy’s copies of all the anesthesia records I’ve turned in over the last several months. These yellow pages, filled with blurred blue carbon check marks and numerals, are the third sheet of a triplicate form divided among the patient’s chart, the billing clerks and this office. My name is typed across the folder’s plastic tab. It is chilly in here and I tuck my hands in between my knees.
“I looked through them,” he says.
Of course; he must have reviewed the records himself, at least cursorily. I should have guessed he’d do that. I nod at him, finding it hard to look him in the eye. “I know it’s an odd request. With my leave of absence, I just…maybe I’ve had too much time to worry about details lately. I thought I should go over everything.”
He gives me an understanding smile that almost immediately tightens to a professionally polite mask. “I came up with some discrepancies.” He glances up at me over the open folder in his lap. “We almost always find a couple, you know—usually just a recording error in dosing or dilution.” Seven years ago when I started at First Lutheran I’d had a similar conversation with Matt after I mistakenly wrote the number of milligrams of Dilaudid I’d given to a patient on the wrong line of my anesthesia record, and his rigid cross-checking had flagged the gap between drugs used and drugs returned.
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