He squinted up at me. “Curtis?”
It hadn’t occurred to me until then how I’d changed, but of course I had. I wasn’t a boy anymore; I was a man, and a middle-aged one at that. The years since Daniel died hadn’t been kind—the grief, the stress, the anger. Not to mention I hadn’t showered that morning in my quest to leave quietly, and I was wearing a wrinkled shirt that hadn’t been washed since Sacramento.
I took a step closer. “Hello.” I braced myself, because surely the barrage was coming: Where the hell have you been? And What have you done with your life? And Why are you here alone? Did she leave you, that artsy-fartsy girlfriend you brought to meet us? Surely he had years of pent-up anger waiting to be released on me, like air from a ruptured tire.
Instead, he propped himself up on one elbow, breathing hard, and said in a funny whistle that sounded as if it came from his nostril, rather than his throat, “My son.”
olivia
We stopped for gas, and for the millionth time that week, I used a public restroom stall that failed to meet cleanliness standards for anyone, anywhere. But somehow, it hardly bothered me now. Clumps of toilet paper on the floor? Wadded up towels in the sink? Strange smear along one wall? Bring it on, world. I’ve got bigger problems.
Mom handed me a spiral notebook and a two-pack of pens when I came out of the bathroom. “You probably won’t need this at all,” she said, almost shyly. “It’s just in case....”
Just in case all hell broke loose and I had time to write it all down? But I took the notebook gratefully, and once we were back on the road, I separated the plastic front from the cardboard backing to free the pens. I would be ready, just in case.
The closer we got to Chicago, the more ridiculous this whole plan seemed to me. I’d called Dad’s cell phone a dozen more times and each time it went right to voice mail, but for all we knew, his battery was dead and he had spent the day driving around Omaha and was even now back at the house, wondering where the hell we were. Mom seemed so certain, though, so determined to press on, despite torrential rain and all sorts of other odds stacked against us.
“Do you think maybe we should call the police or something?” I asked finally, after turning the words over in my mind.
Mom looked horrified. “And say what, exactly?”
“I don’t know...at least, they could put out some kind of APB for a white man in a green Explorer with California plates, who may or may not have a gun and may or may not decide to use it when he sees his monsterlike parents....” It sounded stupid even to me, and I was used to my own stupidity. Was Dad even in the Chicago area? Was I right about him having a gun?
Mom was quiet, probably because she was becoming used to my stupidity, too.
“Let’s say we don’t find Dad,” I continued, after a few more miles had ticked by. The rain had slowed considerably, but the roads were still wet, and the sky had changed from rain-darkness to regular evening-darkness. “What happens to me?”
“What do you mean? As far as...?”
“As far as my life goes.” It seemed like a fair question for an unfair situation. How could all of this be happening now, when I was only a year away from graduating high school—once I made up those two years of P.E., anyway—and starting my own life? I had no idea what that life might entail, and it was certainly not as prearranged and deliberate as Daniel’s post-high school life had been, but there must be something waiting for me. I thought about Sam Ellis in Lyman, who had probably packed up his display table for the day. Even his vague and not too promising plans were better than what I had.
“We don’t need to make any decisions right now. We’ve got at least until the end of the summer, and then...”
“What decisions? I mean, if something happens with Dad, there’s not really a decision to be made, is there?”
Mom was quiet, and I thought she might let the question just hang there, but finally she said, “I’m not going to force you to do anything you don’t want.”
I laughed. “Like pick one parent over the other, you mean? I think I already had to do that.”
Mom drove on, her lips pinched into a tight line. “I wish it could have been different,” she conceded finally.
I must have been feeling particularly hurtful or especially honest, because I didn’t let this go. “Well, it could have been different. If you’d stayed, that is.” My heart was thudding; where was all this sincerity coming from?
“It would have been different, but it would have been worse,” Mom said, obviously choosing her words. “We would have become the kind of parents who couldn’t even tolerate each other’s presence. We would have yelled at each other and smashed things. I would have become a person I couldn’t stand to see in the mirror. I pushed as hard as I thought I could, and if I had pushed harder, your dad would have hated me and probably himself. So, yes, I could have stayed, Olivia. But I hope you understand when I say that I just couldn’t, either.”
With my tongue, I caught a tear that had squeezed out of the corner of one eye and slithered down my cheek. “But we needed you,” I told her, my voice cracking. “We still need you, Dad and me. It’s not like we have anyone else in the world. I mean, you have everyone in Omaha who knows you! And plus, Dad’s a man—he considers other teachers his friends because he happens to see them outside of work once or twice a year. If I hadn’t stayed with him, he wouldn’t have had anyone.”
Mom reached into the door well and pulled out a pocket-sized pouch of Kleenex. It really was amazing how prepared she was for a spontaneous multistate road trip, even without a few days to prepare. She worked two tissues free and handed one to me.
“Liv, I really believed that if I left—if we left—it would force your dad to do something, to make some kind of change in his life. He was just stuck. I thought if I wasn’t there, he could finally move on.”
Not for the first time, I felt like the frayed rope used for a game of tug of war—Mom pulling from one side and Dad pulling from the other. “Well, that didn’t happen,” I said, knowing I was twisting the knife a little harder. “You gave him almost three years, and now, look.”
Mom blew her nose loudly and reached for another tissue. She said something that sounded like “damn,” but it couldn’t have been—because the apocalypse would really have to be upon us for my mother to swear.
“What did you say?”
Through her tears, I detected just the tiniest hint of a smile in Mom’s voice. “I said, damn it. Damn it, Liv. We’re going to find your father and set this all straight.”
curtis
Looking at my father in his hospital bed, I realized how connected they were in my mind—my father, my son. They had always been linked. Because of the horror that had been my childhood, I’d tried to love Daniel even more—with a love tainted by all the ways my father hadn’t loved me. Everything I’d done right over the years had been a stab at him. Look what I can do without you. Look what I can do better than you.
Still, my father seemed convinced that I had come to see him in his final moments, as if I’d simply been waiting in the wings for the right opportunity to appear. The effort of communicating with me exhausted him; he sank into an instant, deep sleep and then woke a few minutes later, demanding to know who I was. A minute later he was asleep again, his chest rising and falling irregularly.
He was dying—a nurse confirmed this for me in the hallway. He was in the final stages of liver disease, and would soon be moved to a hospice facility. One day soon, I realized, my mother would come to visit him, and the bed would be empty.
“I understand you’re his son,” the nurse said, patting my arm sympathetically.
I recoiled, unable to accept that fact even now. I’d never changed my name, after all—it seemed more trouble than it was worth. But a name was all I was willing to share with him, as if we were two John Smit
hs, linked by a random label. To the nurse I said only, “I thought he had quit drinking.”
Again the sympathetic smile. “The trouble is, once the damage is done, it’s done.”
This made sense. The part of me that was still a teacher—that should have been preparing lessons for Monday, like it was any ordinary weekend—stored this in my mind for a future lesson, like a public service announcement. The drinking you do today causes harm you can’t undo tomorrow.
“Will you be back in the morning, Mr. Kaufman? You could meet with his doctor, and there are some papers that need to be signed....”
I shook my head, absolving myself of all responsibility. “No, I can’t sign anything. I don’t know my dad’s wishes. His wife—my mother—knows about all of that.”
The nurse stepped back, a look of faint disgust on her face. What kind of son won’t help his father in his final moments?
I’m not really the son, I wanted to say. I was an imposter, a fraud, an apparition that had appeared out of a Chicago mist and would disappear into it again. As a child, I’d wished I’d been adopted, chosen by some loving couple or other, instead of born as a mistake into a family that had never wanted me. He hadn’t been a father, so I wasn’t really his son. I was free to simply walk away on my own.
Mom was there suddenly, her mass filling the doorway. “He’s asking for you,” she said simply.
I looked at my watch, making the calculations. The stop in Chicago had put me hours off course. I’d be arriving in Ohio too early on Monday, when Robert Saenz was dreaming his sweet just-released-from-prison dreams. I had planned on daylight. I had planned on seeing the look on his face.
I stepped again into my father’s hospital room, maneuvering around the curtain and the cart at his bedside. He was propped into a sitting position, still wheezing from the effort of movement. His abdomen was oddly extended, as if a tumor or pregnancy lurked beneath the thin pajamas.
I had a sudden flashback of Kathleen in the hospital for Daniel’s birth. It had been a twelve-hour labor, culminating in screams and spasms that ripped through her body, as if we were on the set of a horror film. Where she’d gripped my arm, raised red welts had appeared. Later, when the doctor was attending to Kathleen, when Daniel had been cleaned and weighed and measured, the nurse handed him to me. I’d looked at his tiny body, bundled in a blue blanket, and thought: my son. The next thought had been of my father, who hadn’t crossed my mind in years. What had he been like at my birth? Had there been even a single moment of fatherly pride when he glanced at me, his heart expanding like a balloon slowly inflating inside him? Had he promised to be the best father he could be, to give his son a good life? Or had he been in a bar across the street, bitching about hospital bills and the cost of diapers and all the ways my birth was going to set him back?
He looked so helpless in the hospital bed now, exhausted as if he’d been running for miles, but the specter of my father as the strong man, the villain, had loomed large over the years of my own parenthood. When Daniel had spilled a tumbler of milk at dinner, I ordered myself: Don’t react like your father would. Instead, I righted the glass, swabbed up the mess with a wad of napkins and set a new cup of milk in front of him. When Olivia screamed as a baby—which she did almost constantly, with the lungs of a trained opera singer—I didn’t scream back at her, or leave her to cry. I’d bundled her up and brought her to the car for long drives in and around Sacramento, trying out one CD after another to lull her into silence. Her hands-down favorite was Crosby, Stills & Nash, but she didn’t always fall asleep; sometimes, when I looked in the mirror, she had seemed to be listening to the music.
That was my parenting guide, then: whatever your father did, do the opposite. I didn’t spank—although Kathleen had, now and then. I encouraged them in school; when Daniel showed promise on the piano, I gave myself over to the thousands of hours of practices, recitals, the drives from one venue to another, the financial sacrifices. When Kathleen and I went out, I ordered a glass of wine with dinner and stopped there. Not that I didn’t trust myself—I had in my father the best possible deterrent from the life of an alcoholic—but I couldn’t take a sip without seeing my father and his omnipresent bottle of whiskey. It had been his hand at the end of my arm, holding the tumbler between finger and thumb.
“You came to see me,” my father whistled, a repeat of the conversation we had already had. I neither confirmed nor denied this, just stared down at him. His hand, the skin papery thin like the husk of an onion, rose and fell on his bed sheet. He might have been trying to reach for me, but I didn’t move closer. “I didn’t know if you would. I didn’t think I deserved that much.”
“I’m not sure you do,” I said, loud enough for him to hear, soft enough so that my voice wouldn’t travel to the hallway.
The man I had known all those years ago would have taken that statement as a challenge. He wouldn’t have hesitated to crack me across the face with a fist that was always ready to fly, that somehow did not require a big windup. He might have pulled me by my hair, even coming away with a small clump in his fist. But the man in the hospital bed made no move at all, except to give me the faintest of smiles.
“That’s my boy,” he whispered, and closed his eyes.
My mother was standing beside me, I realized, and had probably been standing there since I returned to the room. She reached out to adjust the bedding, pulling a sheet over my father’s chest, closer to his chin. There was something genuinely tender in her touch, not just efficient and practical. “I think it’s just too bad,” she murmured. “It’s too bad you never got to really know each other.”
My throat was too tight for words. I had really known my father, but I knew that he hadn’t ever known me. He hadn’t bothered. He’d never intended to be a father; I knew because he had said this, yelled it, sneered it, sighed it. He hadn’t wanted a child; over the years he’d accused my mother of tricking him into becoming a father. If abortion had been a legal option at the time, he would have insisted on it, I was sure. He would have driven my mother to the clinic and waited in the car, taking regular sips from a flask. He had probably made sure, one way or another, that it never happened again.
But there I was—the child he never wanted.
Although it grew harder to tell over the years, as my father’s body became more and more ravaged by alcohol and general bad health, I was clearly his son. I had the same brown hair, now growing thin; the same blue eyes, pale skin, cleft chins. We each topped six feet—although he looked shorter in the hospital bed, as if age had compressed his height.
Mom was wrong—I had known him, as much as a child can know a parent. I knew him in the clinical sense—as the person who had half carried, half dragged him, one of his arms draped over my shoulder, to bed at night. I had wiped up his vomit while Mom murmured that it was a shame he was so sick. I had known him as the man who fought and was thrown in jail and somehow bailed out, who came out of the precinct not even slightly chastened, claiming he had been the victim, it was a setup, and he was going to catch the son of a bitch.... I knew him as the man who didn’t bring me to school or pick me up, who never attended a single parent conference, who wasn’t there on senior scholarship night, who never once told me I was a good kid, that he was proud of me. A man who had let me graduate college and get married and live an entirely new life without ever expressing the smallest interest in who I had become.
As I’d seen it when I was in high school, I had two choices: to leave or to stay. To leave was to escape, to make my own way in life. To stay was to know that one of us would kill the other. He might go for me in a drunken rage, a lashing out spawned by nothing, or I might go for him, finally so disgusted by his very existence that one more second of life with him was intolerable. It wasn’t even a question; I left in the nick of time. I had started to dream about it, to fantasize about the details—my hands around his neck, my hands at his bac
k, pushing him down the stairs.
It wasn’t too late, I told myself now. If my mother would leave the room, it could be done in only a few seconds—a pillow over his face, pressed down. Why not? By buying a gun, by taking this trip, I had crossed that line already, the one that divides right from wrong. I was planning to kill one man; what was one more? My father’s eyes were already closed, his eyelids a pale, babyish purple. He didn’t deserve it any less just because he was weak, just because he was close to that end without my help. But the fight must have gone out of me, or maybe I was just saving the fight for something else, for the cause that mattered more.
“How long are you going to stay?” Mom’s voice shook me from my dark reverie. It was easy to forget she was there, like forgetting the color of the wallpaper.
“Not much longer,” I said.
My father’s eyelids fluttered open again. He held my gaze, and I didn’t look away. Now was the chance—too late—for him to know me. I was a man now, and I’d become a man without his help. I was not only his equal, but his superior—the stronger man, not the boy who hid in the closet with a flashlight, who shut himself in the bathroom and prayed that the lock held. Without saying anything, my father seemed to acknowledge this. The look he gave me approached respect.
“You have a boy?” he croaked. It took me a moment to understand his question, and not only for the diminished quality of his voice. I nodded hesitantly, not correcting the present tense. What was the point? My son—the grandson you never knew anything about—is dead. It seemed like blasphemy to introduce Daniel that way, as a person who was no longer alive.
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