by Dan Chaon
“Well,” her father said. “Your damn phone’s always busy. How many boyfriends do you have, babygirl?” He tried to smile, tried to ease things a bit by evoking this old pet name from her childhood. But he knew that things were not as simple as that. The last time he’d stayed with her, they’d fought constantly; he’d left one night after an argument and hadn’t called her for almost two months.
The argument had been about her son, Luke. Her father thought she was spoiling him; she said that she didn’t dare to leave Luke alone with him because he drank so much. Each had hurt the other’s feelings, which was how it often was. Neither one could bear the other’s disapproval.
After a time, she goes to his room. He is sitting on the bed, smoking, and he looks at her balefully as he lifts his tumbler to his mouth. He has taken off his toupee and it lies beside him on the bed, like a fur cap. She could never have imagined him wearing a hairpiece; he has always been embarrassed and scornful of male vanity, but she sees that he is right to wear it. He is completely bald, except for a few fine tufts wisping here and there over his pinkish scalp, like the head of a four-month-old baby. Without the toupee, he looks awful—frightening, even.
He is going to live a while longer. The cancer, much to the doctors’ surprise, is gone. It is not merely in remission; as far as they can tell, it has completely left his body. Sometimes, he seems aware that something miraculous, or at least vaguely supernatural, has happened to him. But not often—more frequently, he seems frazzled, even haunted by his good fortune, and he turns even more fiercely toward his old habits.
“I brought your shoe,” she says. He looks at her, then down.
“I’m sorry I didn’t like your program,” he says. “I guess I didn’t understand it.”
“Well,” she says. “You’ve never been one for ambiguity.”
He frowns. He knows these “two-dollar words,” as he calls them—he has done crossword puzzles all his life—but he disapproves of people actually using them. He thinks it’s showing off.
“Ambiguity,” he says. “Is that what you call it?”
“Dad,” she says, quietly. “What’s wrong with you? You never used to … go off on little things like that. It’s not good.”
He shrugs. “I guess I’m just getting old. Old and cranky.” His hands shake as he puts the nub of a Raleigh cigarette to his lips, and she thinks of how badly she needs him to be normal and happy, to be an ordinary father. Don’t be this, she thinks urgently. She is a divorced woman with a thirteen-year-old son, and she works forty hours a week as an administrator at a charity organization, where all she thinks about is helping people, helping, helping, helping. She does not want him to need her, not right now. But she can see that he does. His eyes rest on her, gauging, hopeful.
“I don’t have anywhere to go, Colleen,” he says. “I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m sixty-two years old, and I’m damn tired of working construction.”
“Well,” she says. “You know that you can stay here.…” But she hesitates, because she knows it’s not true. He can’t stay here if he’s going to drink and smoke like this. He knows this, and his eyes deepen as he looks at her. She doesn’t love him as much as he’d hoped—she sees this in his eyes, sees him think it, struggling for a moment. Then he lifts his tumbler and tastes his drink again.
“That’s all right,” he says.
AGE 28
From time to time, she loses her temper. Like this one time, he pushed her, for no reason, teeth gritted: “Leave me alone!” he said, and that got to her. Oh, I’ll leave you alone, she thought. See what it’s like, see how you like to be alone.
She knows it is wrong, even as she presses her back to the bark of the tree that conceals her. It is a bad thing, but her anger buoys her, makes her breathing tight and slow. She isn’t hurting him, she thinks. She is teaching him a lesson.
It takes him a while to realize that she is gone. It is a warm day in early summer, a little breezy. From her hiding place, she can see the wobbly reflection of the sun and clouds floating in Luke’s inflatable swimming pool. Luke plays without noticing for some time. Then, as if he’s heard a sound, he stands straight and alert. “Mom,” he says. He scopes the yard and the roads and the pasture beyond. They live a few miles outside the small college town where she is studying for her master’s degree; the nearest neighbor is a mile away. “Mom?” he says again, but she doesn’t move. An army man drops from his hand into the grass, near where the hose makes a sinewy, snakelike curve through the lawn. “Mommy?” he says, more anxiously. Her heart beats, quick and light, as she presses herself into the shadows. She has the distinct, constricting pleasure of having disappeared—a pleasure that, since her divorce, has occupied her fantasies with odd frequency: to leave this life! To vanish and be free!
And, more than that, as he begins to panic—there is a kind of tingly relief. For what if he hadn’t noticed that she was gone? What then?
She lets it go on too long, she knows. He is almost hysterical, and it takes a long time to get him calmed down—rocking him, his face hot against her shoulder, whispering: “What’s wrong? It’s okay. Don’t cry!” A kind of warm glow spreads through her. “I thought you wanted Mommy to go away,” she whispers—Horrible! Horrible!—she can sense that it is wrong, but she keeps on, running her hand through his hair, long-nailed, thin fingers: vampire fingers. “I thought you wanted Mommy to go away,” she murmurs. “Isn’t that what you said?” And then she begins to weep herself, with shame and fear.
AGE 21
She is just out of college, staying at her father’s house for a week or so, when the tornado hits. It is the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to her. Parts of the roof are whisked away. The windows implode, scattering shards of glass across the carpets, the beds, into the bathtub. Apparently, there had been a beehive in the upper rafters, because dark lines of honey have run down the kitchen walls.
Colleen and her father have been hidden in the cellar, among rows and rows of dusty jars: beets and green beans and applesauce that Colleen’s mother had canned, or that her grandmother had canned when her father was a boy. Some of the jars go as far back as 1940, their labels written in a faded, arthritic cursive. Her father has been planning to get rid of this stuff for as long as Colleen has been alive. She had been warned, as a child, never to open anything from the cellar. Her mother had heard of poisonous gas coming out of ancient, sealed containers.
She recalls this, sitting on the cool earthen floor that reminds her of childhood. As the storm roars overhead, she and her father huddle close together.
When they come up to see the world, after the howling has stopped, it is raining. There are no trees standing as far as they can see, only the flat prairie and branches and stumps everywhere, as if each tree had burst apart—as if, Colleen thinks poetically, there were some terrible force inside them that they finally could not contain.
“Jesus H. Christ,” her father keeps saying. He goes to the door of the house, and Colleen follows after him. The rain is falling into the kitchen, dripping off scraps of insulation that hang down like kudzu. Her father touches the kitchen wall and puts his finger to his mouth. “Honey!” he says, and laughs. The room is full of the smell of honey and the sound of water. She doesn’t know what to say. It is the house that both she and her father grew up in, and it is destroyed.
Her father finds his bottle of Jack Daniel’s under the kitchen sink; he finds ice, still hard, in the refrigerator’s freezer; and he pours them each a drink.
“At least the liquor’s okay,” Colleen’s father says. “There’s one blessing we can count.”
Colleen smiles nervously, but accepts the drink that’s offered to her. She had thought that this would be a rest period in her life—that it would be the last time she really lived at home, and that there would be a number of conversations with her father that would bring closure to this stage of her life. She had been a psychology major and was very fond of closure. She likes to think o
f her life in segments, each one organized, analyzed, labeled, stowed away for later reflection: another stage along her personal journey. Nevertheless, a tornado seems a melodramatic way to end things. She would have preferred some small, epiphanic moment.
Her father settles into the kitchen chair beside her, leaning back. The sky is beginning to clear; cicadas buzz from the dark boughs strewn about the lawn. Through the hole in the roof, they can see a piece of the evening sky. The constellations are beginning to fade into view.
“Well,” her father says. He puts his palm on top of her hand, then removes it. He sighs. “Now what?”
AGE 14
“Here’s babygirl, with her nose in a book!” Colleen’s father crows. “As usual!”
She is stretched out on her bed and looks up sternly, closing the book quickly over her index finger, hoping maybe that he will let her alone. But it is not likely. He is standing in the doorway, in a clownish, eager mood. He does a weird little dance, hoping to amuse her, and she is terribly embarrassed of him. Still, kindly, she smiles.
“What good is sitting alone in your room,” he sings, and capers around. She leans her cheek against her hand, watching him.
“Dad,” she says. “Settle down.” She takes a tone with him as if he is a little boy, which has become their mode, the roles they act out for one another. Her mother has been dead for a little over a year, and this is how things go. They have accepted that she is smarter than he, more capable. They have accepted that things must somehow continue on, and that she will leave him soon. He says that she is destined for great things. She will go on to college, and become educated; she will travel all over the world, as he himself wanted to; she will follow her dreams. They don’t talk about it, but she can see it—in the morning, as he sits hunched over his crossword puzzle, sipping coffee; after dinner, as he sits, watching the news, rubbing salve onto his feet, which are pale and delicate, the toes beginning to curve into the shape of his workboot. She can feel the weight of it as he stands in her doorway, looking in, trying to get her attention. He dances for a moment, and then he stands there, arms loose at his sides, waiting.
“Do you want to go out to Dairy Queen and get a sundae?” he says, and she looks regretfully down at her book, where the hobbit Frodo is perhaps dead, in the tower of Cirith Ungol.
“Okay,” she says.
She is a pretty girl. Older boys have asked her out on dates, juniors and seniors, though she is just a freshman, and she is flattered, she takes note, though she always turns them down. Her hair is long, the color of wheat, and her father likes to touch it, to run the tips of his fingers over it, very lightly. These days, he only touches her hair very rarely, such as when she’s sitting beside him in the pickup and he stretches his arm across the length of the seat. His hand brushes the back of her head, as if casually. He believes that she is too old to have her father touch her hair. He will kiss her only on her cheek.
Their little house is just beyond the outskirts of town, and as they drive through the dark toward Dairy Queen, she wonders if she will ever not be lonely. Perhaps, she thinks, being lonely is a part of her, like the color of her eyes and skin, something in her genes.
Her father begins humming as he drives. The dashboard light makes his face eerie and craggy with shadows, and his humming seems to come from nowhere: some old, terribly sad song—Hank Williams, Jim Reeves, something that almost scares her.
AGE 7
On Saturday after supper, Colleen’s father asks her if she’d like to go on over and see his place of employment. He tilts his head back, draining his beer. He smiles as he does this, and it makes him look sly and proud. “It’s a nice night,” he says. “What do you say, babygirl?” He seems not to notice as Colleen’s mother reaches between his forearms to take his plate. He is not inviting her.
Colleen is not sure what is going on between them. It is an old story, though, extending back in time to things that happened before Colleen was born—things Colleen’s mother should have gotten, things she is still owed. Every once in a while, it begins to build up. Colleen can feel the heat in her mother’s silences.
But her father doesn’t appear to notice. He gives Colleen’s hair a playful tug and makes a face at her. “I’m only taking you, babygirl, because you’re my favorite daughter.”
Colleen, who is sensitive about being teased, says: “I’m your only daughter.”
“You’re right,” her father says. “But you know what? Even if I had a hundred daughters, you’d still be my favorite.”
Colleen’s mother looks at him grimly. “Don’t keep her up too late,” she says.
Colleen’s father works for the Department of Roads, and he drives her out to a place where a new highway is being built. The road is lined with stacks of materials, some of them almost as tall as houses, and with heavy machinery, which looks sinister and hulking in the dusk. Her father stops his pickup near one of these machines, a steamroller, which she has seen before only in cartoons. He wants to show her something, he says.
Just at the edge of the place where the road stops, they are building a bridge. The bridge will span a creek, a tiny trickle of water where she and her father occasionally come to fish. Every few years or so, the creek has been known to flood, and so it has been decided that the bridge will be built high above it. The bridge, her father says, will be sixty feet off the ground.
The skeleton of the bridge is already in place. She can see it as they walk toward the slope that leads down to the creek. Girders and support beams of steel and cement stretch over the valley that her father tells her was made by the creek—over hundreds of years, the flowing water had worn this big groove into the earth. They have cleared earth where buffalo and Indians used to roam, he says, and then he sings: “Home, home on the range.”
She is only vaguely interested in this until they come to the edge of the bridge. It is high in the air, and she balks when her father begins to walk across one of the girders. He stretches his arms out for balance, putting his one foot carefully in front of the other, heel to toe, like a tightrope walker. He turns to look over his shoulder at her, grinning. He points down. “There’s a net!” he calls. “Just like at the circus!”
And then, without warning, he spreads his arms wide and falls. She does not scream, but something like air, only harder, rises in her throat for a moment. Her father’s body tilts through the air, pitching heavily, though his arms are spread out like wings. When he hits the net, he bounces, like someone on a trampoline. “Boing!” he cries, and then he sits up.
“Damn!” he calls up to her. “I’ve always wanted to do that! That was fun!” She watches as he crawls, spiderlike, across the thick ropes of net, up toward where she is standing, waiting for him. The moon is bright enough that she can see.
“Do you want to try it?” her father says, and she hangs back until he puts his hand to her cheek. He strokes her hair, and their eyes meet. “Don’t be afraid, babygirl,” he says. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you. You know that. Nothing bad will ever happen to babygirl.”
“I know,” she says. And after a moment, she follows him out onto the beam above the net, cautiously at first, then more firmly. For she does want to try it. She wants to fly like that, her long hair floating in the air like a mermaid’s. She wants to hit the net and bounce up, her stomach full of butterflies.
“You’re not afraid, are you?” her father says. “Because if you’re afraid, you don’t have to do it.”
“No,” she says. “I want to.”
Her father smiles at her. She does not understand the look in his eyes when he clasps her hand. She doesn’t think she will ever understand it, though for years and years she will dream of it, though it might be the last thing she sees before she dies.
“This is something you’re never going to forget, babygirl,” he says. And then they plunge backwards into the air.
BURN WITH ME
After my Uncle Stu killed himself, my father started to go downhill aga
in. He gave up on his vows about not smoking in the house, and then he started to drink late into the night. He was writing poetry, he said, though I thought he’d gotten past that phase years ago. He had a filmy gleam in his eyes when he talked about it, and that worried me. But I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t as if I could sit down for a heart-to-heart and ask him: “Dad, now tell me honestly. You’re not thinking of harming yourself, are you?” It wasn’t as if I could just drop it into conversation: “Oh, by the way, please don’t commit suicide while I’m out. That would upset me.”
Instead, I had the idea that we should take a trip together. “Why don’t we drive out to Nebraska before I leave,” I said, and he got enthusiastic for the first time in a while. Nebraska was the place of his birth, and his remaining relatives still lived there. He had the kind of sentimental attachment to Nebraska that some immigrants have to their mother country, and I think he was touched that I had thought of it. “It’s a nice gesture,” he said.
He knew that I wouldn’t be living at home for much longer. I played bass in a band—The Flagrants, we called ourselves—and in a few months we would be leaving for a tour of Japan and the Far East, after which we were scheduled to go into the studio to cut a full-length CD. I didn’t know where I’d end up after that, but it was pretty clear that I wouldn’t be living with my father again.
It was a three-day drive from New York to Nebraska, and I sat there as we hurtled down the interstate in the gray Volvo, trying to think of the sort of conversations fathers and sons might have at such a point in their lives. But I couldn’t think of anything—silence spreading through Pennsylvania and Ohio, sleeping through Indiana, listening to demo tapes on headphones through Illinois, since our lead singer, Zed, had yelled about my missing two weeks of sessions, fingering along to the various songs as my father watched me surreptitiously with those tired, blank eyes. I gave him a smile and pretended to jam on my imaginary guitar.