by Lily King
“There’s a TV right there,” Garvey says, pointing up. The screen is split three ways, with John McCain getting into a black SUV, Hillary making a speech to a huge crowd, and Obama springing up the metal steps of his airplane with the big O sunrise on it. “I guess I don’t have to ask who you guys are for.”
I wait for Jonathan to react. He lets Garvey get away with a lot, but this assumption is a particular vexation of his.
“We’re one of those families they interview on local news shows, split right down the middle,” he says.
“Daley’s always had that dyke side,” Garvey says. “I should have warned you.”
“Could you watch your mouth, please?” I tell him, a perpetual refrain when he’s around. “And I’m the Obama supporter, thank you very much.”
“You’re for Hillary?” Garvey asks Jonathan.
Jonathan is used to this. He has condensed his response. “He can’t win. She can. She has the party behind her and she knows how to play hardball.”
“They did find in medical examinations that she has one more testicle than he does,” Garvey says. Lena and Jeremy are perplexed. I need to carry earplugs. “I don’t know, man,” he continues, serious now. “I think you’re underestimating him. This guy knows how to play the game.”
“But in the game, the real game, there’s no room for a man of color.”
“Have you seen the crowds he draws?”
“Hillary is beating him fifty to twenty in the polls.”
“Not for long.”
“If he wins the nomination, we’ll get to see how deeply racist this country really is. The guy doesn’t have a prayer.”
“He’s going to be our next president.”
“And then everyone can dust off their hands and forget about the black poverty rate and that one in nine young black men are in prison. We’ll be post-racial. Have you heard that one yet?”
“Man, and I thought I was cynical,” Garvey says. “I bet your mother doesn’t share your sentiments.” He and Jonathan’s mother have become good friends over all the holidays we’ve spent together.
Jonathan laughs. “No, she does not. My mother is the biggest pie-in-the-sky dreamer there is. She’s walking door-to-door with her Obama pamphlets right now, I’m sure.”
“Our mother used to do that,” Garvey said. “Remember all the rallies she dragged us to?”
I shake my head. Garvey often remembers me into his youth, but most of the time I was home with Nora.
“I’d vote for Obama,” Barbara says.
Garvey pats her hand. “I think you need to lay off the hard stuff in the morning, Barbara.”
“I like him. I like his smile.”
“Well, he’s got the white vote at this table,” Garvey says. “It’s the black vote that’s going to be the bitch.”
At quarter of twelve we move over into the ICU waiting room. Jeremy brought a deck of cards, and Jonathan and Garvey play War with him and Lena on the floor. Garvey introduces all sorts of new rules and strategies, allowing for alliances, pacts, spies, and explosives. They make a great deal of noise with all the bombing and the laughing, but we have the place to ourselves. I sit on a flowered couch with Barbara, and when I notice she is crying I pat her arm.
At one-fifteen the doctor comes out. They have gotten his blood oxygen saturation levels up a little bit. He’s still sedated, but we can go in, two at a time, briefly.
Barbara urges Garvey and me in first. “He’ll want to see you. He’ll want to know you’re both here.” Will he? Or are we all just pretending, playing the parts we’re supposed to play?
He’s in the same room. His bed has been lowered flat, which makes him look more seriously ill. There’s a tube now coming out of the side of his mouth, taped to his cheek, and a thinner one coming out of his nose. He’s asleep, not rattling anymore. The machine breathes for him, pshhhh, click, pshhhh, click. Garvey stops halfway to the bed.
“Shit.” He looks back at me.
“I know,” I say.
I let him have my chair. He sits tentatively and does not lean forward. He watches my father, his father, for a long time. It is strange to have all our DNA in the same room: our big ears, our bony knees, our brittle defensive humor. And our father lying there, the gash in his children’s heart.
Garvey opens his mouth to say something, then stands up. “I can’t do this, Daley. I don’t know why I’m in this room.”
“Sit down. It will come to you.”
“I doubt it.” But he sits.
We both watch his mechanical breaths.
Garvey starts laughing. “Do you remember Libby Moffet?”
I see a chunky teenager doing a swan dive. “Who used to babysit for the Tabors?”
“Yes, her. I was home one time and went up to see Dad and Catherine but they were out and she was babysitting Elyse.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You weren’t there. You were at camp.”
“I never went to camp.”
“Then you must have been down at Goodale’s snorting coke with the stockboy. So they come home, Libby and I have fallen asleep after having sex in their bed, and Dad is ripshit. He wants to fight me. And I tell him he’s too drunk and I’ll come back the next morning for a fair fight. So I come back the next day, right at eight like we said, and Dad’s just sitting there on the top step of the back porch. He’s got tears in his eyes.” Garvey has told me this story before, I realize now, but I let him continue. “It was the morning Gus Barlow shot himself. Remember that? Dad had just heard. He made me promise I’d never do anything that stupid.”
He never told me that part, about the promise.
“Keeping that promise hasn’t always been easy, to be honest with you. He really looks like crap, doesn’t he? He looks like he’s aged fifty years since I last saw him. How old is he? Are you sure this is our father?” He pretends to stand to get a nurse.
“He’s seventy-six.”
“He looks ninety-six.”
“Hard living.”
“Yeah, it was rough, all those days at the Ashing Tennis and Sail, all those nights of martinis on the rocks and filet mignon.”
“I think he doesn’t have much of an infrastructure, with all that alcohol.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Maybe we should tell him our best memory of him and then say goodbye.”
He laughs and shakes his head and wipes his face with both hands slowly. “All right. You go first.”
I thought I would tell the story about running around the pool naked with him. I’ve never been able to erase the joy and flight and love from that moment, no matter how hard I try. It was a memory I clung to for so long after my parents divorced. But instead I say, “I liked holding your hand yesterday, Dad.”
Garvey waits for me to say more and when I don’t, he laughs. “Huh. That’s an awfully recent memory.” He turns to my father. “I like the way you just let go of that drool down your chin, Dad. It was very beautiful and truthful to me.”
“Shut up and go.”
“I’m going to tell you my memory now, Dad. Are you listening? When I was a wee lad of six and seven and eight, you used to drive me to peewee hockey. Remember that? Practices were at five in the morning, five mornings a week. You didn’t play hockey, didn’t even like hockey much. But you’d wake me up at four-fifteen and we’d make the drive all the way to the rink in Burnham. We’d stop at Dunkin’ Donuts and you’d get a black coffee and I’d get a hot chocolate and the rest of the way we’d polish off a few crullers each. It was always freezing cold, and the heat in the station wagon wouldn’t kick in till we were nearly there. We talked and I have no clue what we said, and then we’d pull into the parking lot and I’d go in one door and you’d go in another and I’d be on the ice for an hour and a half and you’d be in the stands stomping your feet and breathing in your hands to stay warm. You’d have to work a full day after that at a job we all knew you hated and I never became much of a hockey pl
ayer, but you never complained. You complained about a hell of a lot of other things, but never about that.”
I put my hand on Garvey’s back and he leans his chin on Dad’s metal railing and doesn’t say anything more for a long time.
We drive back home that evening. My father is transferred out of the ICU five days later, spends eight more days in the hospital, and then is moved to a rehabilitation center in Lynn. Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, my father would say, if he could remember it, you never come out the way you went in. In June he is able to move back to his house in Ashing.
I suppose it happens often enough. People rush to someone’s deathbed and then they don’t die. Life, sometimes amazingly, lurches on.
My father’s memory never comes back in full. He seems only to have a loose handle on the present. It feels like a play, like one of my children’s make-believe stories, the last months of his life, in which I call him and his voice lights up and before I can ask how he is, he asks me how I’m doing and how the kids are, calling them by name. Sometimes he doesn’t remember we live in Philadelphia, but he always asks if we’ve gotten a dog yet. We do finally get one, a thick-haired, big-headed puppy, and this pleases him. He is always kind to me on the phone, but occasionally he lifts his mouth away from the receiver and uses his scraped voice to hurl a string of swears at someone, Barbara or the nurse they’ve hired to help him get around. Barbara says he gets frustrated that he can’t do the things he used to do. She says this as if it’s new, this quick, vulgar temper. She would like me to visit, but I prefer the polite phone calls.
The last of our conversations is on election night. Jonathan and I stay home to watch the returns. He doesn’t want to watch the results with anyone else. His mother is having a “victory party” across town, but he thinks it’s tempting fate and refuses to go. I’ve never known him to be superstitious, but in the days leading up to November fourth, everything to him is unlucky, inauspicious. Since Iowa, we have both devoted our time to the Obama campaign, making calls at night, dragging our children door-to-door on weekends. He has had to eat all his words. Garvey has made sure of that.
When the first results come in and Virginia and Indiana look like they are going for McCain, Jonathan threatens to shut off the TV.
“You see? You see? It’s all been a naive fantasy that this guy could win in this country!”
Lena and Jeremy tell him to sit down and hush up. I hold his hand. I pray. I have started praying, short little flares of petition and gratitude. It’s hard not to believe in something when your heart gets stuffed full. And then they go, one by one: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, all for Obama. When he is declared the next president of the United States, we all leap up at the same time, as if someone has yanked us up, and fall into each other, arms tangled, and for that moment we are one organism, whole, bound in awe. I can barely believe this is our world. Jonathan holds me hard, long after the kids have let go, his body shaking, and even Jeremy doesn’t try to pry us apart. “It feels so good,” he moans. We are still crying, and I send up a flare of deepest thanks. I hold my husband. I feel so close to him, a part of him, and yet I feel, too, how separate our experience of this moment really is. I have become closer, and more apart, from him, from Lena and Jeremy, on this night.
The phone rings a few minutes later. I figure it’s Jonathan’s mother or one of his brothers, or Garvey, or Julie and Michael.
“You up?” His speech is better, as if he has just two marbles in his mouth instead of ten.
“We are definitely up.”
“Jonathan there?”
“Right here.”
“Kids too?”
“Yup.”
“Good. They should be.”
“It’s late.”
“Nearly eleven-thirty. I gotta get some sleep for chrissake. You stay out of trouble, okay?”
“You too, Dad.”
“I can’t get into trouble anymore.”
“That’s probably a good thing.”
“That Jeremy. You tell him he could be president one day.”
“Or Lena.”
He laughs. “Or Lena. Christ. Isn’t that something.”
“It is something, Dad. It really is.”
Three days later it’s Barbara who calls. Another stroke.
He was quiet when he went, she says. He didn’t make a sound.