When we got back to the room, Davis was telling Grandpa the story of how he had been arrested while walking down the street in his underwear with no idea how he had gotten that way.
Davis seemed kind of embarrassed when he realized we were there. “It’s his favorite story. I thought it might cheer him up a bit.”
If it did, you sure couldn’t tell. Grandpa hadn’t moved a muscle. But they say it’s good to talk to a person in a coma, because we can’t be sure exactly what they do and don’t hear, so if it was Grandpa’s favorite story, I was all for it.
When Davis had to head off for work, my dad suggested I go back to the house and hang out there; he’d be there in a few more hours.
As we were heading to the car across the parking lot Davis kept saying, “I just can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it.” Davis had known my grandfather for just a little over a year, but Grandpa had such a big effect on his life. By now I had come to the conclusion that Davis was a really cool guy, very gentle. I was glad he had gotten himself straightened out—I guess my grandfather was a pretty good judge of character.
I stopped where I was in the parking lot, right before we got to the car. “Actually, Davis,” I said, “I’m gonna hang out here.”
When Davis drove away I felt very alone. I didn’t go back in right away; I just wandered around outside the building. I plucked some small leaves from the shrubs lining the parking lot, then peeled them down the vein in their center. I used to do that a lot when I was a little kid, trying to get them peeled perfectly. It was an activity that took all of your attention and none of it at the same time. Some cars arrived, some left. I wondered if any people had died inside the hospital since I had gotten there a few hours earlier. I had never really been around death, and now it felt all around me.
Back inside I had to wait a long time for the elevator. When I finally got in, I went to push the third-floor button, but at the last second I saw the sign for the maternity ward on the fifth floor, and I pushed that instead.
Now this was a happy floor—a whole different world from the third floor. There were people smiling in the hallway, old people and young kids; folks carrying balloons, flowers, stuffed animals—there was a general happy energy. I acted as if I knew just where I was going, even though I had no idea, until at the end of the hall I found the room with the massive window where they keep the newborn babies. Six of them lay in little Plexiglas bassinets, all swaddled up. Four were asleep, one was screaming his head off, and the last one was staring off like a tiny, serious alien, maybe looking out through the folds of this plane of reality to that other realm, from whence he had just emerged. For some reason I thought about those stories you always hear about babies who are switched at birth. I hoped all these little guys had been tagged properly and didn’t end up with the wrong parents, only to discover years later that there had been some mix-up, explaining why they alone had red hair in a family of dark-eyed Italians. Life is difficult enough without that kind of screwup.
A man came up next to me and practically pressed his face against the glass. I sneaked a peek at him out of the corner of my eye and saw that he had the biggest grin, and tears were streaming down his cheeks. The look of love. It was difficult, standing there in the presence of such unguarded adoration, to imagine how it could all get so far off track later on.
I wondered if my dad had gone to the hospital to see Thomas when he was born. Did he have tears streaming down his cheeks? What did he feel looking through the glass? I started to get angry at him all over again.
Eventually, I found the stairs and walked down to the third floor. The hallway was as quiet as before, the atmosphere just as heavy. Grandpa’s door was slightly ajar. I thought I could hear my father’s voice, whispering. I figured he was talking to Angela, but as I pushed the door, I saw that he was alone with my grandfather. I was about to announce my presence, but I stopped.
I couldn’t exactly understand what my father was saying at first, but I definitely heard him say, “I’m sorry, Dad.” The first part of the next sentence was lost to me as well, but it ended with, “. . . I couldn’t be the son you wanted.” I stayed back by the door. He said something about them not being a “good fit.” He sniffled and then cleared his throat. Was my dad crying? He cleared his throat again, and I heard him say, “A lot of my best qualities come from you. You need to know that. I wish things had been different between us, but that doesn’t matter anymore. It just doesn’t matter.” From behind, I could see him wipe his eyes. “It’s all okay now,” he whispered. “None of that matters.” He breathed out heavily. “I love you, Dad,” he said through the end of his sigh. Then he said it again. “I love you.” He was rocking forward and back slightly now. He whispered something to my grandfather about not being afraid and that he was free. He said that my grandfather was clear, or something like that. He repeated that a few times, “You’re all clear here, Dad, you’re clear.” I know I shouldn’t have stayed and listened as long as I did, but I had never seen anything like it in my life.
All the anger I had felt for my father upstairs in the maternity ward was gone. I don’t pray a lot but I asked God—if there was a God—to let Grandpa hear what my dad was saying. I crept back out the door.
I was standing in the hall when my father came out of the room a few minutes later. His eyes were red.
“Lucy,” he said. “I thought you went back with Davis.”
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “I changed my mind.”
“What have you been doing all this time?” He blew his nose into some tissues.
“Just hanging around.”
“Let me find Angela. She went for some air. Then I’ll take you.”
“I’ll hang out with Grandpa till you get back.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Of course. I’m not six.”
“I know, Lucy. It’s just . . .” He didn’t finish his sentence. “You’re right, talk to him. He’ll like to hear your voice right about now, I’m sure.”
I went in. The chair was still warm from my dad.
“Hi Grandpa,” I said and waved at him. The other day we had been laughing and chatting about nothing at all, and now it was like he was already dead. I felt guilty thinking that, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I didn’t know what to do or say, and then suddenly I just started humming this song my mother used to sing me when I was a little kid. I couldn’t remember the words at first, so I just hummed softly. Then in a rush all the words came back and I was singing, “As he strolled along, he sang a song of a land of milk and honey.” I wasn’t exactly belting it out the way Julie might, but I hoped Grandpa was enjoying it. “Where a bum can stay for many a day, and he don’t need any money. Ohhh, the buzzzzzin’ of the bees . . .” That was my favorite line. I could still hear the way my mother used to make a buzzing sound when she sang about those buzzzzzin’ bees. I started to laugh at that and then I was crying at the same time. I was sad about Grandpa, of course, but also about my mother, and all those times when I was a kid and didn’t realize how nice my life had been.
Angela planned to stay overnight at the hospital with my grandfather, so my dad and I headed home. Since there was still nothing much at the house to eat, we walked into town for dinner. We tried the fish and chips place. The fish was not terrible, for fish, and the fries were delicious, firm and tasty. Night had fallen pretty hard by the time we were done. There were only streetlights on the corners once we got off the main street and we didn’t have a flashlight. It got very dark very fast between the lights.
“Is Grandpa going to die soon?” I asked in the blackness.
“I think so, Lucy, yes,” my father said.
It was not a surprise, given the way the day had unfolded, but still, the news hit hard. My dad had a difficult time getting through the sentence without choking up, and I had a difficult time not bawling right there in the gutter. I was glad it was so dark. When we got back to the house we turned on the TV for a while and the
n went to bed.
After a few hours I woke up. That was unusual for me. Sometimes it takes a long time for me to get to sleep, but once I’m out, I usually stay out till morning. The house was quiet and I just lay there in the dark for a while. That spot between my shoulders was at me again—feeling all vulnerable. But truth be told, I think all of me was feeling pretty vulnerable at this point. When a long time had passed and I was still wide-awake, I went out in the hallway and saw that a light was on downstairs, shining from the direction of the dining room or the kitchen. I started down the creaking steps, my hand on the banister.
My dad was sitting in the kitchen, at the table. He had a cup of tea in his hand.
“Lucy,” he said. “What are you doing up?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged and took one of the other chairs at the table, across from him. The floor was cold under my feet.
“Do you want a cup of herbal tea?”
“No thanks.”
“It’s funny,” he said. “I’ve never been so tired in my life, and I just can’t sleep.”
Neither one of us said anything for a little while.
“Do you want some cereal? I think it’s all we have. I’ve got to go shopping tomorrow.”
“How long do you think we’ll stay here?”
“I’m not sure, Lucy.”
You could hear the cow clock ticking above the hum of the refrigerator.
“I want to thank you, Lucy.”
“Me? For what?”
“If you hadn’t come up here”—then he cut himself off and gave me a stern look that I wasn’t sure was real or play. “And we haven’t even talked about that yet.” Then he relaxed again. “Then no one would have been here. With Angela away he needed someone. And now . . .” He shook his head a little. “It’s been important.”
He started to get choked up.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Why? Don’t be.” It was a little weird to see my dad start to cry; it’s not something I had a lot of experience with in my life, and now I’d seen it several times in a day.
“I’m surprised,” he started to say, then he had to stop again. He took a deep breath and kind of shook his head. “I’m surprised how emotional I’ve been about it. I mean, we didn’t exactly get along very well, and I hadn’t seen him much, as you know.”
“If you can’t cry about your dad almost dying, what can you cry about?” I said.
My dad laughed. Then I laughed too. I hadn’t intended to be funny, but I guess it came out that way a little. Then I burst out crying.
“Lucy, what is it?” He reached across the table toward me.
I leaned back, away from him. “I think it might be my fault,” I said through my tears, which were starting to come fast and furious. Maybe it was his crying that had triggered mine, but this had been on my mind for days now.
“What is? What’s your fault?”
“Grandpa’s stroke.” I started to breathe heavily. “Him going to die.”
“How could that possibly be your fault, sweetheart?”
“He ate the ice cream.” It was difficult to talk in sentences. “He told me . . . he wasn’t allowed to eat any.” I was almost hyperventilating now.
“Lucy, sweetheart, calm down. It’s okay; what ice cream?” My dad pulled his chair over and he had his hand on my back. “It’s okay, just take a deep breath.”
I tried to calm my breathing for a while. I was still crying hard. “We were at the restaurant and I had ice cream for dessert and he said that his doctor forbid him to eat ice cream anymore. That the dairy was bad for him. Well, he could tell I was disappointed.”
“Why?”
“Remember when we came up here? We went to that ice cream place that night when it was raining and he ate that giant hot-fudge sundae?”
He smiled faintly. “I forgot about that.”
“Really? That’s what I remembered most. I remembered how much he liked that ice cream, and the way it dripped on his chin and how you were so sweet and gave him a napkin.”
My father nodded a little as if he were trying to remember.
“So I was looking forward to having some ice cream with him, then he said he couldn’t, but then he could see how disappointed I was, so he ordered some anyway and ate it. Then he ate mint ice cream at the sushi place. I poisoned him. It was my fault.” I was staring at my father now. My cheeks were soaked with tears. My dad was looking back at me.
“Shhh,” he said softly. “Shhh. Lucy, now you listen to me. There is no possible way that eating a bowl of ice cream caused Grandpa’s stroke. It had been building up for a long time. It’s just one of those things that happen in life sometimes. You heard the doctor say how high his blood pressure had been. An ice cream he had with you had nothing to do with it. Believe me.”
I guess I knew he was right, and now that I’d said it out loud it did seem kind of silly. But it sure had been messing with my head for a while. I leaned back away from my father and sat there for a minute, looking at my hands in my lap. I could tell my dad was still looking at me, but I couldn’t look back at him. He got up and went to the bathroom and came back with some toilet paper. He gave some of it to me to wipe my face and blow my nose. He did the same with the rest.
“Well, look at us,” he said standing over me. “A lot of snot.” He kind of forced a chuckle, and I forced a little one back.
“Gross, Dad.” And we both went up to bed.
When I woke up my room was very bright, and the birds were not singing nearly as much as usual. It must have been late morning. I found my dad at the kitchen table in the same spot he had been in the night before. At least his clothes were changed and he’d had a shower. My grandfather had died.
21
I had to call Simon. Suddenly it was urgent for me to hear his voice. I hadn’t even been gone a week, but too much had happened. Part of me wondered if he’d already started to forget about me. Or at least give up on me.
He hadn’t.
“Hey, hey-O!” he shouted into the phone. As naturally cool as Simon is, his goofy side is what I find most endearing. I’ve never been so relieved in my life to hear someone so happy to hear my stupid voice. I just started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” he asked me.
Finally I had to calm down and tell him that nothing was funny, in fact, things were the opposite of funny—that I was shrouded in death up here in Maine.
Simon was super sympathetic. Both his grandfathers had died, so he knew something about what I was going through.
“Maybe I should come up on the bus,” he said.
I could literally feel my heart slam against my chest, but I told him not to. I don’t know why I said that, except that my parents would be there and I didn’t think I could handle all that.
Then Simon told me that he’d been back to Thomas’s place. He liked how quiet it was over there and he’d gone to the park across from the apartment just to hang out.
“He saw me and came out with a boomerang.”
“Did his mother know?” I asked.
“I guess. She called him from the window after a while.”
“Was she mad?”
“I don’t think so, why?”
Simon couldn’t see me shrug.
“He started calling me the ‘Sime-ster.’ ”
“The what?” I squealed.
“I know, right? He’s a funny kid.”
“If you say so.”
“It was the first time I’ve ever used a boomerang where it actually worked. I chucked it and it circled around and came back to me. Not exactly right to me, but pretty close. It was very cool. Thomas is a pro at it.”
I wasn’t entirely sure if I was glad that Simon had seen Thomas again.
My mother and sister were coming up on a flight the next morning. Meantime, my father had to drive Angela over to the funeral home to make arrangements. When they came back a close friend of Angela’s named Monique was with them. Apparently Monique lived a fe
w blocks away. Angela called her a spiritual sister. A few other people arrived at the house. Friends of my grandfather came by to see Angela and to try and understand what had happened so quickly. All day long there seemed to be some new person in the kitchen, leaning against the counter or sitting at the table—everybody shaking their heads, talking softly.
Everyone assumed my dad and I were just the relatives who had come up for the funeral. No one knew that I had been there, that I had been the closest person to my grandfather during those final few days.
At one point I slipped into the kitchen, opened the cabinet under the sink, and found a large green garbage bag. I went outside and picked up the rake that was still lying where my grandfather had tossed it down and gathered up the little piles of gutter glop we had left behind. I dumped them in the garbage bag and deposited it at the curb.
Back inside, an old man with the biggest, fullest head of white hair I had ever seen kept the coffeepot percolating—that seemed to be his job, refilling everyone’s cup. Davis hung out on the front stoop. He didn’t come in at all, but he stayed there all day. Occasionally I went out to hang with him. He was very quiet. He didn’t mention anything, but I think he was glad I came out as often as I did. My dad shook everyone’s hand who came in.
It was a strange day all around. Time behaved very weirdly. I would glance at the clock and couldn’t believe that only two minutes had gone by since the last time I had looked. I would swear it had been hours. Once, while a few people were at the kitchen table talking, I got up on a chair to check that the cow clock above the stove hadn’t stopped, even though I could hear it ticking. I thought maybe the hands were stuck. Then later, one minute it was bright daylight and the next it was pitch-black night outside. I was glad to see the day come to an end.
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