Father's Day

by Simon Van Booy

  “But I have a coffeemaker,” she said.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know how to work it. Deli coffee is good here.”

  “I can’t believe you went to the patisserie.”

  “I had to point at everything,” Jason said. “Because she doesn’t speak English.”

  “She doesn’t speak French either,” Harvey said. “It’s the owner’s wife, she’s Russian.”

  “I wanted to tell her that I work around food too—but nothing so beautiful as what she got in her shop.”

  “Well, I’m glad you didn’t go to the new boulanger on Caulaincourt,” Harvey said, dipping her croissant in the coffee. “Because it’s a total rip-off.”

  During breakfast they talked about Leon and Isobel, chuckling over what Isobel had said about blind people eating in the dark. When Harvey asked how her father had slept, he told her all about the red mountain trains of Switzerland.

  Harvey said it was early enough to see Notre Dame before the lines started forming, if they got ready quickly.

  “And don’t forget, you have to pick something else from your Father’s Day box.”

  When they had finished eating, Jason carried the breakfast plates into the kitchen and put them in the sink, as though they were back at home.

  Then he watched his daughter make coffee in her machine, and drank a cup in front of the television. It was mostly news programs and soccer, so Jason settled on something called Hélène et les Garcons, which seemed easy to follow because there were kids in it.

  When they passed the patisserie on the way to the Métro, the Russian woman who had served Jason was in the window setting out cakes.

  A train was arriving when they got to the platform, and most of the cars were empty because it was after rush hour. They almost missed their stop because Jason didn’t realize you have to open the doors yourself.

  They approached the cathedral from the north, passing the Hôtel de Ville, which Jason thought at first was Notre Dame. Harvey told him it wasn’t even a hotel.

  When stone walls and dark towers rose into view, Harvey told Jason that when Notre Dame was built, Paris was just straw-roofed houses and people pulling wagons through mud.

  When they arrived at the entrance, people were already waiting to go in, so Jason said he’d be happy just to walk around the outside. Then a thunder of bells announcing the hour changed his mind and he told Harvey that he wanted to hear them from inside.

  The line moved quickly. When they were almost through the main doors, a young couple sneaked in behind them. Jason felt anger rising in his stomach. He was about to say something when he realized that the girl, who was about Harvey’s age, was just copying her boyfriend. It would be something they looked back upon, he thought, when they were old and their lives had almost passed.

  Once inside, the line broke up and people took separate paths. Iron stands of lit candles illuminated carved faces, and signs everywhere asked visitors not to talk as they shuffled with cameras and backpacks beneath a glowing patchwork of stained-glass windows.

  Jason dropped some coins into a metal box marked MERCI, then took two candles from a wooden crate and gave one to Harvey. Behind the silent choir of lights was the wooden statue of a man holding hands with a young child in despair. The man was wearing a hat that looked like an acorn. There was an ax on his belt. The child’s face was twisted with crying, and one of his feet lifted off the ground as he pulled on the sleeve of the woodcutter.

  Jason said that Notre Dame was like being inside someone’s body, moving around under the ribs, and breathing in the musty air of old lungs. Then he remembered the bells, and they found a quiet pew from which to listen. But when the hour came and went, Jason and Harvey realized that you could only hear them from outside the cathedral.

  “That’s so weird,” Jason said. “I don’t get it.”

  Harvey said she felt safe inside the church.

  A hundred feet above their heads, a banner was strung across the ceiling. A distant figure in a small boat was rowing through a storm. Jason asked Harvey what the words meant.

  “It says, ‘Come,’” she told him, “‘for He has been calling you.’”

  “Who’s He? God?”

  “Or Jesus,” Harvey said.

  Jason looked at the banner again and nudged his daughter. “If that was Vincent in the picture—there’d be a fishing pole hanging off the side.”

  WHEN THEY WERE at the exit, Harvey turned quickly and went back inside the church. She stopped at one of the iron candle stands, took a few coins from her purse, and dropped them in the metal box. Then she lit a single candle and set it on the highest tier.

  When they were outside, Jason asked whom it was for, but she wouldn’t say.

  The streets leading away from the cathedral toward the Latin Quarter were crowded. In some places it was hard to walk, as people had bunched up, waiting for a sign to cross rue du Petit Pont.

  After twenty minutes of walking, they stopped at a Quick hamburger restaurant on the corner of Boulevard San Michel. Jason said they should sit side by side in the window. The restaurant was busy with tourists, but the staff spoke English and Spanish, and the lines moved quickly. Harvey warned her father that the fries didn’t come salted, so he should pick up a few packets with the straws and napkins.

  “Why don’t you get us a place to sit?” she said. “I’ll get the burgers.”

  Jason handed her a twenty-euro note and looked around for empty seats. He imagined finding a table at the same time as a gang of French thugs. But then when he got to the front window, there were plenty of empty seats, and the thugs he’d imagined were a pair of teenage boys laughing at something on their cell phones.

  Harvey appeared a few minutes later with their burgers and a Sprite for Jason. They chewed in silence, watching people go by outside. Then Jason asked Harvey what she would do if two people cut the line in front of her.

  She thought about it for a moment. “I wouldn’t do anything,” she said. “Because it doesn’t matter.”

  “But if you got there first . . .” Jason said. “They have no right to push in, right? It’s not fair.”

  “I guess so. But it’s just a line for fast food. It’s not like we’re starving and they’re giving out the last few pieces of bread on earth.”

  “What would you do then?” he said.

  “Then I’d probably fight,” Harvey said. “Unless they had a baby to feed or kids. Then I’d just let them have it.”

  Jason laughed, and the aggression that had begun to manifest outside Notre Dame quickly broke apart. “You always know the right thing to do, Harvey,” he said. “I wish I was more like you.”

  WHEN THEY GOT to the Luxembourg Garden after lunch, people were sitting on green metal chairs with ice cream cones. Jason asked Harvey if she wanted a cone, then dragged together a pair of chairs for them to sit on.

  On a patch of grass near an overflowing trash can, a man about Jason’s age in torn clothes was pretending to do martial arts. Jason watched as he waited in line at the ice cream stand, as the man raised his fist to an invisible enemy, then threw his leg out to one side with a cry. When he started jumping in the air and punching at the same time, people turned and laughed. Next to the man was a metal shopping cart with a rolled-up sleeping bag, portable radio, several pairs of shoes, a tennis racket, and a stack of flattened boxes and old blankets.

  Harvey had been watching the man too, and when Jason got back with the ice creams, she asked him what it’s like to beat someone up.

  “It feels like the right thing to do,” he said. “Until you actually do it.”

  “I wonder if I’ll ever get into a fight,” Harvey said.

  “People don’t fight like they used to,” Jason said. “When I was growing up, it seemed like everyone was fighting. Your generation is different. Kids today fight with themselves more than with other kids.”

  When they finished eating, Jason saw that the line at the ice cream stand was gone, so he bought another cone
and took it over to the man doing martial arts.

  DOWN BY THE fountain, children were sailing wooden boats on a pond.

  Harvey and her father watched. Then Jason went to the shed where you could rent them, and returned holding a blue boat with NO. 15 printed on the sail. He handed Harvey the cane that came with it. “You can push off first,” he said.

  Part of the fun was seeing if you could get to the other side of the small lake before the boat did. Harvey challenged her father to a race, but he kept holding her arms, so it wasn’t fair.

  After half an hour, Harvey returned the boat, and they found an empty bench under some lush, wide-leafed trees.

  “All we do in Paris is eat and sit down,” Jason said.

  “Well, tomorrow we’re going to my office, Dad. I want to introduce you to my boss, Sophie, and show you what I’ve been working on. It’s like being at art school, but the deadlines are tighter, and the client is in charge of how the finished product looks. Which is a bit sad, as they usually have bad taste.”

  “But you get paid,” Jason said. “That’s important.”

  In the background, they could hear the roll of children’s laughter. School had ended for the day, and the Luxembourg playgrounds were filling up.

  Jason asked if it was a good time to open the present he had brought from his Father’s Day box. The item he had picked out was very small, and he thought it might be a token from Chuck E. Cheese’s—to signify all the birthday parties, the games they’d lost and won, and the tickets exchanged for things now forgotten. Jason remembered Harvey’s school friends lined up at the long colored tables, chewing hot dogs with their mouths open. Parents waiting in small groups with their coats on.

  Harvey said there was one more place she wanted to take him, and he could open his present there. Around the bench, the uncut grass was wet from rain that morning. Jason could smell it and could smell the trees.

  The Avenue de la Grand Armée was only a few Métro stops from the Latin Quarter. Harvey explained that this was where Parisians came to browse for new scooters and motorcycles. She kept saying she wanted to buy him a mug from his favorite motorcycle shop, or a key chain, or sweatshirt, or a hat.

  The first store they went into sold Royal Enfield bikes, which Jason said were modeled on famous editions from England in the 1950s, but that the engines were too small to really do anything with. The shop was small too, and most of the bikes were kept outside on the sidewalk with films of plastic over the seats.

  “Remember the skull I painted on the gas tank for your birthday, Dad?”

  When Vincent and his wife would come over on Saturday nights to watch movies and eat pizza, Jason sometimes took the gas tank down from the shelf to show it off. Harvey had painted a skull with her name above it.

  The next shop they went into sold Italian bikes that were mostly red and black, with wide back tires and shallow treads.

  “These are fast bikes,” Jason told her. “Dangerous bikes—which means you can always get parts for them, because so many get wrecked by inexperienced riders.”

  Harvey told him to pick something out. “I’m working now, Dad,” she said. “So if you see a jacket or some awesome boots, or if there’s a bike you just love, let me buy it for you.”

  “That’s wild,” Jason said. “You win the lottery or something Harv?”

  In another shop, the salesman asked Jason if he wanted to sit on their latest café racer, but he politely said no.

  “Go on, Dad,” Harvey insisted, then noticed the bike was in a narrow space, and it would have been impossible for him to get his leg over.

  When they were back on the street, Jason bought two apples from a fruit stand, and they ate them walking.

  “When I think of all the bits I welded together,” he said, “it’s amazing my bikes even ran.”

  “Why don’t you get one of these new bikes, Dad?” Harvey said. “I’ll buy it for you. Come on.”

  Jason laughed and smoothed the back of his ponytail.

  “You should wear your hair down sometimes, Dad,” Harvey told him.

  “I’ve gotten too lazy in my old age to fuss with it.”

  Putting his hair in a ponytail was something new. One night, drying it in the mirror after a bath, Jason couldn’t believe how much it had thinned—more medieval than metal, he thought. And in a ponytail, no one could tell he was slowly going bald.

  Near the Métro, Harvey said they should find somewhere for Jason to open his Father’s Day gift, so they kept walking until there was an empty bench.

  The gift wasn’t a token from Chuck E. Cheese’s but a poker-chip key chain. Jason sniffed it. The original one had reeked of oil.

  “So you finally figured it out, huh, Harvey?”

  He could see from her tears that she had.

  When it all happened, she had been so angry—so disappointed in him.

  She felt he’d let her down. But now she understood.

  Now she understood what had happened.

  XXXVI

  FOR HARVEY’S NINTH birthday, Jason got tickets for The Lion King on Broadway. Harvey had seen the commercials on TV and said it was her dream. The plan was to go into the city by train, then have McDonald’s after the show.

  Jason was going to pick her up from school at recess, then drive to the Long Island Rail Road station. Her fourth-grade teacher, Miss Hills, said she wished that more parents were into theater. Jason had never been to a live show with people acting, and he wondered if it would be anything like TV. He called the box office several times to make sure their seats would be near the front so Harvey could see everything.

  The night before the show, Harvey complained of feeling tired and went to bed early. When Jason checked on her later, he noticed she was burning up. He opened the window to let cool air fill the room.

  He set his alarm for earlier than usual, so he’d have time to cook a big breakfast: sausages, eggs, bacon, baked beans, toast, and pancakes, all Harvey’s favorite things.

  It was still dark when he got up, and the first thing he did was make coffee. Then he heated some oil in the pan and dropped the sausages in one by one.

  When everything was cooked, he made up a birthday tray with chocolate milk, SpongeBob napkins, birthday cards (from him, Wanda, and Duncan), and a small bear he got on sale at Party City.

  Harvey was already awake when Jason pushed open the door with his foot.

  “I don’t feel good,” she said.

  Then she smelled what was on the tray and ran to the bathroom. But there wasn’t anything in her stomach, so it was just muscles pinching and the dry growl from her throat.

  Jason carried Harvey back to bed and propped her up with the pillows. Then he filled a glass with cold water, but she wouldn’t drink anything, so he just sat with her.

  Before he took the tray back to the kitchen, Harvey asked if she could have the bear. “Sorry I ruined breakfast, Dad.”

  While Jason was in the kitchen covering the food, he remembered a thermometer in the first-aid kit Wanda had left in the laundry closet. He carried the box into Harvey’s room, read the instructions, then told Harvey to keep it under her tongue without moving. After a few minutes, the thermometer beeped and Jason took it out. It read 104.6.

  “What shall we name him?” Harvey said weakly, touching the bear’s nose.

  Jason was still looking at the number on the thermometer. He imagined her eyes lolling back as the fever spread to her brain, then rushing her out to the car, tearing through traffic, her limp body rolling around on the backseat. He saw the hospital staff in their baggy green pants and rubber shoes, imagined yelling at them as machines and wires were attached to keep her alive.

  He took up Harvey’s hand and stroked it. Her face was red from vomiting, and the bedclothes were hot because she was sweating.

  When he tried Wanda, her phone rang a few times, then went to voice mail. It was too early to call Social Services, so Jason went online and typed in Harvey’s symptoms. But there were too ma
ny things to choose from, and when he typed her temperature into Google, a message flashed on the screen:

  IF YOU HAVE A FEVER OVER 103.5 F

  PLEASE SEEK PROMPT MEDICAL ATTENTION

  When Jason checked on Harvey again, she asked if they were still going to The Lion King and McDonald’s.

  Jason had saved up for the tickets. He had played over their trip to the city so many times in his mind that he’d witnessed a thousand shows, and was prepared for any crisis—except the one that was actually happening.

  When he took her temperature again, it was even higher. He rushed into the kitchen and filled a bowl with ice, but when he got to Harvey’s bedside she was throwing up again, though it was just the sound and her tongue coming out.

  Shit, fucking holy shit, Jason said. And underneath panic, the sting of his loneliness. The truth that he had no one to turn to.

  When she couldn’t keep her eyes open, Jason went into the hall and grabbed his jacket and motorcycle boots. He combed his hair quickly in the mirror and told Harvey to sit tight.

  “Don’t leave me,” she said, starting to cry. “Please, Dad!”

  “I ain’t leaving you, kid. I’m going for help.”

  The air outside felt good and he gulped it down. He jogged quickly up the neighbors’ driveway, then bounded onto the porch, knocking his head on a hanging basket. When he couldn’t find a doorbell, he banged with the side of his fist.

  A moment later, a shape appeared behind the glass. Jason heard the security chain being attached, then a teenage boy appeared through the crack.

  “Where’s your mom?” Jason said.

  “Mama!” the boy shouted.

  Jason wondered why he was still in his pajamas and not in school.

  “Who is it?” came a woman’s voice from somewhere in the house. Jason could hear the sound of dishes being stacked.

  “The guy from next door!”

  The sounds abruptly ceased, and over the boy’s head Jason saw his mother rushing down the hall in her slippers. She closed the door to release the chain and stood in front of her son. “Can I help you, mister?”