Father's Day

by Simon Van Booy

  But he didn’t go away.

  “Go away,” she said again.

  But he just stood there, shuffling his feet. She could hear him outside her door, shuffling his feet, unable to say the words, but she knew.

  XXX

  THERE WERE PEOPLE out rowing on the lake, though some were just going in circles and laughing. Harvey said she wanted to be on the water too, so they handed over some identification, and an attendant walked them along a floating dock to a white boat.

  “Wow, you’re good at rowing, Dad,” Harvey said as Jason pulled them past the other boaters.

  Jason shook his head. “Who the hell makes a boat where you can’t see where you’re going?”

  “Uh sailors, Dad, for like, hundreds of years,” she said with a laugh. “Just look over your shoulder. It’s easy when you get used to it.”

  When they were in the middle of the lake, Jason brought the oars up onto the sides of the boat. Harvey reached into the bag for some lemon cake. There was a baseball hat stuffed into a side pocket, and Jason asked for it. Yellow writing on the front said TRIUMPH MOTORCYCLES.

  After eating the rest of their food, Harvey wanted to row. Jason hovered over her, but Harvey said she could do it by herself.

  Rowing was harder than she’d thought, and one of the oars kept skimming the surface of the water. When she turned to ask her father how she was doing, she noticed he was soaking wet.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!”

  “Keep practicing, Harvey.”

  By now, many of the other boaters had gone in; it was hot and there was little shade. When Jason had the oars again, Harvey took off one shoe and let her foot trail in the water. They were at the far end of the lake, where there were no attendants to say she couldn’t.

  Jason stared at her from under his cap. “Want to talk about the Peter Rabbit cup you got me?”

  Harvey’s eyes fell to her father’s hands on the oars. The wood was dark where water had soaked in, and she remembered the painting of an old man and a child in a rowboat, something she’d seen on a school trip to a museum. The girl had on a flowing, dirty dress and the man had a pipe in his mouth. In the boat was a net of fish. Harvey had wondered if any of the fish were still alive, and if the girl in the picture felt sorry for them. She wanted to know if the girl could swim, and thought how the dress would pull her down. Harvey’s teacher saw her looking and came over. “He loves that little girl so much,” the teacher said. “You can just tell.”

  The sun was so strong by midafternoon that Harvey felt somehow at a distance from her life. She hoped her father would drop the subject of the Peter Rabbit cup until later, when they were home in the shade with something cold to drink. But he kept asking.

  “It was the only cup in the set that didn’t get broken, all thanks to you,” she said weakly.

  After a few more strokes, they reached a bank. Jason took a rope at the front of the boat and attached it to a ring in the grass. “Let’s sit out of the heat for a while under those trees,” he said.

  “Can we do that, Dad?”

  “That’s why they put the ring and rope there,” he said.

  “But I don’t think those rings have been used for a long time,” Harvey pointed out, fingering the rusty circle. “I don’t know if we’re supposed to tie these boats up.”

  “They don’t care as long as we’re paying for the time.”

  The grass was a hard dark green and grew unevenly around the trunk of a gnarled tree. It felt good to lay down in the shade.

  “How did you know the Peter Rabbit cup came from a set?” her father wanted to know. He had taken the cup from the lunch bag and was holding it.

  Without sitting up, Harvey said her first dad had told her stories about his childhood, and one of the stories was about the Peter Rabbit cup.

  “It would have been better if he’d told you nothing,” Jason said.

  Harvey lifted her head to look at him. “If I’d known it would upset you,” she said, “I wouldn’t have put it in your Father’s Day box.”

  “It’s just ancient history, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “But it’s your ancient history, Dad. And it’s my story now too.”

  Jason sensed that she was trying to fit together all the different pieces of her life, and it reminded him that above all else, he was there to look after her.

  “Wanda told me that you’d see things differently with each new stage of your life. She was right about that, I guess.”

  A breeze rolled over the lake making ripples.

  “She was right about everything,” Harvey said. “Wanda’s amazing.”

  “We should send her a postcard from Paris. She’s retired now, you know?”

  “I told Wanda everything I could about you,” Harvey admitted. “That’s why she brought me to see you in the first place—because I told her you were special.”

  “She called me first,” Jason said. “Then she came to visit. Then she brought you.”

  “I remember,” Harvey said. “We were in the car. It was a station wagon, and there were all these paper towels on the seat next to me.”

  Harvey thought of Miss Bateman. Her late-night whispering phone calls. How young she must have been then.

  “It was raining, and the windows were fogged up. I was drawing a picture and it looked like a motorcycle. And then I thought of you, and I told Wanda everything my dad told me, but I also made a few things up. I knew it was dishonest, but I wanted her to feel what I felt, so I made things up. Is that okay, that I lied to Wanda?”

  “What did you tell Wanda about the Peter Rabbit cup?”

  “My dad said that your father came home one night, took all the birth china out of the living room cabinet, and smashed it under his boots. But then he realized there was a piece missing.”

  “That’s right,” Jason said softly. “Because I’d taken it the night before—just by chance.”

  Harvey moved closer to her father across the grass so she could hear. In the distance, a young family was splashing about. Their laughter mixing with the sound of water.

  “What else did you tell Wanda?”

  “Something about how you nursed my father back to health by making him take medicine from the Peter Rabbit cup. Is that true, Dad?”

  “Yes. But it’s not why the cup was missing.”

  “I wanted so much for Wanda to like you, so I just made things up.”

  Harvey handed her father a tissue to wipe the sweat on his face.

  “But you’d never met me.”

  “I just knew,” Harvey said, rearranging her skirt. “Weird, right?”

  AFTER SWEEPING OUT all the pieces with his arm and stomping on them in his work boots, Jason’s father had somehow managed to sneak Steve out of bed without his older son waking up.

  But then Jason opened his eyes and saw his brother’s covers pulled back.

  His father had never done anything to Steve before, but he was older now, had soft hairs over his lip; and was playing baseball and traveling to games on a bus with other boys.

  Jason looked through the crack in the door and saw his brother sitting on the carpet in his underwear. Steve was too young for his muscles to have any definition, and the tops of his arms and his back were covered in goose bumps.

  Their father kept saying he would sit there until admitting where the missing Peter Rabbit cup was. What remained of the set lay broken on the carpet between them, like the ruins of a once great city.

  When their father reached down and picked up a piece of the broken china as though he meant to throw it, Jason stepped out from behind the door and stood beside his brother. Before his father could say anything, Jason blurted out that Steve had done nothing—that he had borrowed the Peter Rabbit cup because he wanted to draw it for art class at school. When Jason looked down at his brother, his thighs were wet because he’d been crying.

  Their mother was awake now too, and watching from her bedroom doorway, watching everything in her robe. She had sa
ved up two years for that christening china; had wanted something she could pass down through the family. When their father noticed his wife behind him, he gestured toward the broken pieces, as though unveiling a work of art.

  “Look what they made me do,” he said. “Your best china.”

  It was the middle of the night.

  Then Steve just got up and ran into his room. Their father bolted after him, but Jason blocked his path.

  It was like bricks being dropped on his body from a height, but not once did he cry out or make a noise. Steve was listening and would not have been able to forget.

  The next morning their mother wouldn’t let Jason go to school in case the teachers said something. She was mad at them for not giving their father the Peter Rabbit cup. Over breakfast, she told Steve and Jason that it was unfair to gang up against their father. When Steve started bawling into his Lucky Charms, their mother just stood there. “You can cry all you want to, Steven, but that’s his food you’re eating, and this is his roof we all live under. Next time think about how you behave, and things like this won’t happen.” Then she knelt so her head was level with their eyes. “He’s a good man deep down,” she said. “I wish you could see that.”

  THEY ROWED BACK across the lake toward the palace in silence.

  Harvey kicked off her shoes again and trailed both feet in the brown-tinted water. When the assistant came to moor the boat, he was in good spirits because it was almost closing. The other attendants were smoking cigarettes and gesturing to some Italian students trying to paddle back with their hands.

  Everyone was moving toward the exit, and the sun cast long shadows over the statues and the fountains where people had been posing for photographs.

  As they reached the edge of the gardens, near where they had entered, Harvey’s eye was drawn by motion to one of the borders. A bird was mincing on the gravel, trying to take flight on a single wing. The other wing was spread out on the gravel, covered in dust. The bird’s chest heaved with each effort. It knew that Harvey and her father were there but did not look at them.

  “What should we do?” Harvey said. “I think its wing is broken.”

  DURING THEIR SECOND full summer together, Harvey got addicted to a show on National Geographic Juniors. It showed kids curing animals or rescuing them or saving their lives by learning how they ate and made homes. There was a seal cub that washed up in Florida, her parents the victims of a boat propeller. No one had known what to do until the National Geographic Juniors arrived in a Jeep with their logo on the side, and hoisted the seal into a bathtub on the back of a truck.

  Jason and Harvey watched the show every week, as the seal grew up and became more accustomed to her new surroundings. The National Geographic Juniors team named the seal Salad. Eventually though, Salad would have to go back in the sea. Everyone knew that. But for now she was safe living on a bed of wet towels at the aquatic center.

  After the first show, Harvey told Jason she wanted to be a National Geographic Junior.

  “I thought you wanted to work at Jiffy Lube?” Jason said.

  A week later, he was passing Harvey’s bedroom when he heard voices.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, Gordon—but you’ve got fleas, and you won’t be able to sleep with the others tonight . . .”

  Later, instead of just brushing her teeth and going into bed, Harvey insisted on taking Jason on a tour of the hospital in her bedroom, describing each animal’s condition, and explaining why he or she had been arranged in a particular box with blankets made from folded squares of toilet tissue.

  “I like the camel,” Jason said, patting its head. “Hey, Gordon.”

  “Please don’t disturb him,” Harvey said. “Gordon is very ill.”

  “I thought he had fleas . . .”

  “No, he has cancer from smoking.”

  WHEN SHE GOT into bed, Jason watched her pull the sheets up. But instead of saying good night and turning over, she just lay with her eyes open.

  “You’ve never really tucked me in before,” she said.

  “Tucked you in?”

  “Mom and Dad used to tuck me in.”

  “You mean tuck the sides of the sheets?”

  “That’s how it starts,” she said. “I’ll show you . . .”

  Jason found the edge of the blanket and forced it under the mattress.

  “Now pat the covers down,” Harvey said. “And make sure the kid inside is sort of trapped.”

  When it was done, Jason watched Harvey get comfortable under the tight sheets.

  “Now,” Harvey said, “lean down and pretend to give the child a hug. That’s the last bit.”

  “Pretend to give you a hug?”

  “Or a real one, it’s up to you.”

  WHEN THEY SPOTTED an official palace gardener digging in the soil beside a wheelbarrow, Jason went over and beckoned him to follow. When he saw Harvey and the bird on the gravel, he shook his head, and Jason could tell there was nothing to be done.

  When Harvey spoke to the gardener in French, he pointed up at the small mounds of dirt beneath the window ledges. He explained the problem to Harvey, and she translated it for her father: “The nests are too high,” she said. “And even if he could reach them, the other birds would reject the injured one.”

  They all looked at the bird, which was sucking up pieces of gravel and spitting them out.

  “It is the nature,” the gardener said in English, smoothing the front of his apron.

  Then Harvey spoke to him in French again.

  “Oui, Madame,” the gardener replied, putting on his gloves.

  “I asked him to move it away from the sun,” she told her father.

  “Maybe give him a worm too,” Jason said. “That’s what I’d want.”

  The bird seemed to know it had been in an accident and was dying. It had stopped trying to move, and on the surface of its round black eye were tiny, identical versions of Harvey and her father standing side by side.

  “I know it’s silly,” Harvey said, “but I feel like crying. I want to cry.”

  “It’s not silly,” Jason said, putting his arm around her.

  When they were past the gift shop, Harvey pointed out the lines of people trudging back to the subway and said they should find a taxi, because she didn’t feel like getting on a train and fighting for a seat.

  Outside the gates, a line of cabs stood waiting. When the driver saw them, he started the engine.

  “Hot,” he said as they got in. “Too hot.”

  A few minutes into the journey, Jason looked around for the lunch bag and realized he’d left it on the grass back at the palace.

  Harvey was annoyed. “Don’t tell me the Peter Rabbit cup was in there! That was one of your presents . . .”

  Jason said he was sorry, but after a while Harvey realized that it didn’t matter, that someone would find it, and the story of their afternoon on the lake at Versailles would be as much a mystery to the new owner as the story of the person who had made the cup in an English factory decades ago, on a morning or an afternoon, in summer or in winter, painting the rabbits with a small brush before stopping to eat something—perhaps even going outside where there were real rabbits, and a war had not long ago been fought and won.

  XXXI

  WHEN THEY WERE halfway back to Paris, Harvey’s cell phone vibrated. Her tutor, Leon, wanted to know if she could bring her father over for dinner. One of his students had canceled and the evening was open.

  Leon’s apartment was on a busy, narrow street near a well-known bakery, and when they got there, people were lining up for their evening baguettes.

  Harvey rang the buzzer. After a click, she pushed on a wooden door that led into a courtyard of recycling bins, children’s toys, and plants in pots. At the bottom of a staircase was a purple tricycle, which Jason had difficulty stepping over.

  Leon’s daughter, Isobel, met them at the door. She flung her arms around Harvey, then looked up at Jason. “Alloo,” she said, and ran away
.

  Leon was wearing an apron, and there was classical music on the radio. “It’s so wonderful you could come,” he said. “It’s a joy for me that you are both here.”

  Harvey led her father into the sitting room while Leon made drinks. In the oven was a mound of paella crowned with giant crayfish. Leon said that the electricity kept going off and he was having a hard time getting anything prepared.

  Isobel perched on a wooden chair opposite Jason with her knees pulled up. She was in her socks and had pumped floral room spray onto her shirt.

  “Don’t ask what’s for dinner,” Isobel said, puffing her cheeks out as though she were about to get sick.

  Jason chuckled. “That bad, huh?”

  They could hear Leon hitting the side of a pot, then something drop into a pan of hot oil.

  When they gathered at the table, Isobel watched her father serve the paella and made retching sounds whenever his tongs touched the crayfish. Leon said something to her in French, and she stared silently at the single slice of microwave pizza on her plate.

  Over dinner, Jason told stories about Harvey growing up. Whenever he finished speaking, Isobel would make a rolling motion with her hand and say, “Keep going, please . . .”

  Then everything went dark, and the classical music coming from the radio ceased. Leon apologized and said he would have to reset the fuse box in the cellar.

  “But there are spiders down there,” Isobel said. “What if you don’t come back?”

  “We can’t eat in the dark,” her father told her.

  “Blind people do,” Isobel said gleefully. “Every day of their lives.”

  THE MOMENT THE lights went off, Harvey screamed and dropped her spoon. Jason said it was a power cut because everyone on Long Island was running their air conditioners.

  Harvey wanted to know what a power cut was, and if they would have to live in the dark for the rest of their lives.

  When Jason went to find a flashlight, Harvey panicked. “Help!” she cried. “Where are you? Help! Don’t leave me alone!”

  For a moment there was no sound or movement. Then she felt Jason’s hand on the top of her head. “Wherever I go,” he said very quietly, “we go.”