by Robin Romm
My father sits on the sofa, reading the paper. Pico rests near his legs, Lila near the empty fireplace. I get on the floor and put my head on Lila’s wiry chest. She lifts her head to glance at me, deeply exhausted, the white hairs around her nose spreading out toward her eyes. Then she puts her heavy head back down.
“What do you think the deal is with that Gracie character?” my dad says, putting the paper aside.
“I know,” I say, rolling off the dog’s chest. “Where’d she come from?”
“Isn’t there a play about this?” my father asks. “She’s going to fool us all into thinking she’s one of us, then she’s going to steal the dogs. Or the cars.”
“Or something,” I say. “Mom seems to like her.”
“Yeah,” he says, gazing at the lamp in the corner of the room. “She does, doesn’t she?”
When my mother likes something, my father is amazed. He’ll buy raspberry soda and she’ll slink off to finish the bottle and he’ll come into my room to report that she liked it! She liked it!
But maybe this is the right way to deal with the dying: She likes cream puffs? We’ll bring her cream puffs. She wants to yell at us for renting another movie with a dying woman in it (it didn’t say it on the box, we checked!), then yell away! It’s her world; we’re just hanging around, trying to keep it turning.
My father puts the newspaper down. Pico stares at him, his eyes little machines of want.
“Pico’s so passionate,” my father says, looking back at the dog. “I love Pico.”
The glass door opens. My mother slowly moves over the threshold, Gracie behind her.
“I’m going to take the dogs out,” my father says.
“I’m going to lie down for a bit,” my mother says, making her way down the hallway. I follow her and shut the door. She sits on her big turquoise bed.
“Can you hook up the bipap?” she says, lifting the mask. Once she straps that monster on, she’ll be unable to talk.
“How are you?” I ask. She hates being asked this. She’s told me this over and over again. “I’m peachy keen!” she’ll say. “Never better! Why? Do I look sick?”
“Fine,” she says. “Tired.”
“The sandwiches were good,” I say. She fiddles with the dial of the bipap machine. “So what’s the deal with Gracie?” I ask. My mother looks up at me, surprised. Her eyebrows are thin from the drugs and when she raises them, they get lost in the flesh of her forehead.
“She’s a lovely girl,” my mother says. “She grew up in Wisconsin. Her father’s an orthodontist.”
“So how’d she wind up here?” I ask.
My mother shrugs. “Switch the tubes for me.” And in a fast pull-strap motion, she’s got the mask secured. The little motor in the gray box begins to sing. I go to the compressor and pull the tubing in.
The house is silent. My grandmother’s oil paintings of forests and sunsets line the stairwell to my bedroom.
“Oh!” says Gracie, putting down the porcelain box that sits by my bed. “I didn’t hear you.”
She looks guilty. My dad’s right. We’ll turn around to get the milk out of the fridge and off she’ll go with the checkbooks, the credit cards, my mother’s wedding ring.
“I was looking for my bracelet,” she says.
“Well. It’s not here,” I say. “Maybe check the bathroom.”
“Yeah, good idea.” Gracie fidgets and begins to smooth the bedspread with the side of her hand. When she finishes that, she studies her fingers as if a secret scroll might be hidden in her nail bed. “Your mom’s great,” she says. “Such a fighter.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“My mom’s dead,” she says. Her eyes transform, full of tears.
“I’m sorry,” I say, but it comes out made of rocks. She’s wearing my earrings.
Gracie follows my gaze. Her hands fly to her ears.
“I’m sorry,” she says, wincing. “I was just trying them on—they’re very pretty.”
“Hard to resist,” I say. “Maybe it’s not a good idea for you to stay here. Can we get you a room in town for the night?”
Gracie crumples sideways onto the bed. She’s a real faucet now, getting mascara on my pale yellow pillows. I struggle to think of what words to toss in the silence that will open up between us, but I’m saved when she begins an energetic round of sobs. She sounds like a goose.
I feel my body go still. I don’t care about Gracie, why she’s here, what she wants. And I don’t care about her mother. “How’d she die?” I ask. Gracie struggles to calm. She swipes at her nose and takes a big, slobbery breath. “She drowned,” she says. “She left my father in Madison and was living in some women’s colony near Junction City and something happened, I guess she went skinny-dipping in the river.” She reaches over for a tissue—all our rooms have boxes of tissues now. Aside from a little snot and a smear of black beneath her eyes, she still looks good, like she’s made out of velvet or suede, not skin. The salt from her tears makes her eyes an even more outlandish shade of green.
“They never found the body?” I ask. This is one of my fantasies, that we’ll wake up one day and my mother will have vanished. There’ll be no body, no clues. And instead of being nowhere, she’ll be everywhere, in everything.
“No, it washed up downriver near a farm,” Gracie says. “The police called us.”
Everyone dies, I’m tempted to tell her. It’s all part of life’s mysterious cycle. She takes another tissue.
“There’s whiskey upstairs,” I tell her.
Both of us walk slowly, our bare feet soft on the wood. I pour two shots in the tall glasses.
“Ice?” I ask.
“No, neat,” she says, holding out her hand.
I pluck the list of donation possibilities from beneath the fruit bowl, where it seems to have landed permanently, gathering smudges and grease stains. All over the margins, my father’s boxy writing lists numbers, organizations, people who’d help administer grants. I fold it in half and toss it in the recycle box at the end of the bar.
We stare at the refrigerator. I want to ask what she did the moment she found out. Did she drive? Did she sink to the carpet and cry? But I look at her ears, still a faint pink from yanking the earrings out, I think of her drifting on the wave toward shore, and I don’t ask.
My mother comes into the kitchen, arranging her tubes. The creases from the bipap mask make her face look even more childlike. She glances at Gracie and the delight from this afternoon is gone; in its place is a flat, drugged fog. Gracie presses herself nervously against the counter’s edge.
“Can’t sleep?” I ask. A lighthouse down the coast tosses silver-white beams over the water. They dive and quiver, then disappear. The refrigerator kicks into a low rumble. Gracie rubs her palms over her hips, then turns and reaches for another glass. She pours my mother a shot. I start to object. She’s not supposed to drink.
Gracie holds up her glass. “To arriving,” she says.
My mother holds up the amber liquid with those magenta nails and seems to see something in it.
LOST AND FOUND
THE FIRST IMAGE THAT COMES TO ME IS NOT THE ONE I might expect—my father lying naked in the desert, wrapped in nothing but a dirty sheet. Instead it’s a moment indistinguishable from so many moments: my father’s thick steak of a body standing in my dim living room, the television blaring, his mind reeling, his life a set of cards stamped in symbols known only to him.
But let me start at the beginning.
I was out walking the dog in the hot Arizona morning, tumbleweeds and cacti punctuating the barren landscape. I liked the emptiness of this particular road. No cars whooshed by, no other dog walkers walked. I could wake up, put on my shorts, and wander for miles without seeing anyone. My dog trotted dutifully beside me, but he didn’t like to walk. I was the one who liked spending my mornings out here, the sun on our shoulders, the dusty desert air in our ears.
The dog hadn’t shown interest in chasing jackrabbits—or
anything, for that matter—in a number of years. I held his leash loosely, looped over my thumb. The leash was just part of the ritual, not a means of establishing control. But the day it happened, the day we found him, the dog became bizarrely animated, tugging wildly and leading me off the gravel road, into the sand and sagebrush, whining and gulping. Surprised, I fumbled for control, lost it, and followed him partly out of curiosity, partly because my thumb had become painfully entangled in the leash.
We walked a short distance to a patch of scraggly desert brush and there he was, a full-grown man, curled like a fetus, lying naked on a sheet beneath the paltry shade of a damaged cactus. His eyes were closed in blissful delirium, his fists balled like a child’s. He was humming faintly, starving, near death, and a note hung from his foot on a decaying piece of twine.
This is your father, the note read. Do as you will.
“My father!” I said to the dog. The dog looked up at me, sad and patient, and tugged back in the direction of the car. I wrapped my father as best I could in the sheet and dragged him behind us.
At home, the dog slept fitfully, twitching and snorting on the rug near the door. I rubbed ointment into my father’s burned skin as he slept on the sofa. In his delirium he cooed and reached for my face. The touch of his hand was like the leg of a large dry insect.
For a while I sat on a chair, watching my father sleep. His eyes were set far apart in his face like a lizard’s. Deep lines stamped his sweaty brow. His skin was burned, but the color beneath the burn was peach, nothing like my own olive skin.
As he slept, I began to grow nervous. That unblinking desert sky left no room for doubt; but here in my living room, dark clouds gathered. What does a person do with a found father? It’s easy to lose a father. They get sick, they get old, they die, they abandon. But no one ever finds a father—or at least this sort of thing is infrequent. I had no books on the subject, no similarly situated friends to ask for advice.
Would I have to take care of him? Dress him in a blue uniform and send him up the street to the French Immersion School? Or would he awake with a profession? A lawyer, maybe. Maybe a dentist. It’d be nice if he were very wealthy.
I grew anxious for something to do. While he slept, I ran to the store to buy him something to drink. He seemed so parched and leathery, dried up like jerky in the hot desert sun. But what should I buy him? Seltzer? Beer? Juice? Milk? I couldn’t decide. I bought every beverage in the beverage aisle. Apple juice to zinfandel. After all, it’s not every day you find your father.
When I returned to the house, there he was, sitting upright, rubbing his eyes. Blue blue eyes the color of cornflowers.
“Father?” I set the bags down on the beat-up floor. He squinted at me, stretched his arms up into the air, extended his legs out in front of him so that his knees popped.
“Excuse me,” he said, and tugged a blanket from the arm of the sofa. With it wrapped like a towel around him, he got up and found the bathroom.
I filled the kitchen with the beverage bottles. Lined them up on the counter by color. Wine and berry coolers. Orange and carrot juices. Coffee and root beer. The shower ran for quite a while.
“Can you find something for me to wear?” he called from the bathroom. I paused, looked at the bottles sparkling in the light.
Under my bed, where I keep journals and old letters and sweaters that I never wear, I also keep the clothes that Duncan left tangled in the sheets of the bed. They were all I had left of Duncan, except for a slow-moving sadness. I probably should have tossed them, but I liked the way that Duncan smelled; the clothes were more potpourri than memorabilia. Two pairs of hospital scrub pants, one T-shirt with a faded monkey on the front, a pair of argyle socks with a hole in the toe, and one pair of plaid boxer shorts. I gathered the clothes and slipped them through a crack in the bathroom door.
He emerged freshened, head erect, dressed in the monkey T-shirt and scrubs.
“I feel like a new man,” he said. “A new man indeed.” I smiled at him, but he looked at his outfit instead.
“Would you like something to drink?” I asked.
“Actually,” he said, “I’d love to go to a café. I’d like to get out and about.”
“Do you want company?” I asked. I imagined the two of us, wide-eyed, drinking coffee out of heavy white mugs and talking all morning. We would clarify what the past twenty-six years—
“No,” he said. “Don’t you bother. I’m up for a solo tour.”
The dog woke from where he was sleeping in the corner of the room and looked at me with ancient, patient eyes.
“All right,” I said, trying to mask my hurt. “There’s a lunch counter two blocks away.” I drew him a map. He smiled and nodded. His dark, wet-looking eyelashes lent the only softness to his square face. I caught myself trying to memorize them—the black fringe around his cornflower eyes. What if he never returned? Would I be able to explain what he looked like? He reached out for the map, gently tugged it from my hands.
“Do you think I can borrow a few bucks?” he asked. I handed him the bills in my wallet. He winked and walked out the door.
It took a long time to adjust to him. I took him shopping for new clothes. We had very different tastes and this proved troublesome. “It’s my money,” I insisted when he wanted the silk American-flag boxer shorts. He made short, snippy exhalations and then, “I’ll pay you back.”
He got a job changing oil at the garage down the street. No one there seemed to care if he came from Arizona aristocracy or a hole in the center of the earth. No one asked questions and no one expected answers. He brought home his meager salary and I turned my office into a bedroom for him.
We didn’t talk much. At first, I didn’t want to pry. Maybe I feared he’d leave if I asked difficult questions, or maybe I just feared what I’d find out. Soon we settled into the rhythms of cohabitation, and the questions I had at first dissolved into the tickings of daily life. He left for work in the early morning, before I woke. I’d hear him rattle things in the refrigerator, clank around in the silverware drawer. He returned in the late afternoons and tromped around, car grease on his chin, leaving dark oily footprints on my white tiled floor. Beer in hand, he’d head into the living room to watch television.
“Did you see this?” my father called from the sofa. I’d bought the sofa only months before and already it was beyond repair, the black smudges as deep as the batting.
“What?” I called from my computer in the kitchen.
“This show,” he cried. “It’s so crazy! They just torture these people while they have to answer questions and if they can answer the question anyway—”
“I don’t care,” I called back.
A tiny silence and then, “No need to be rude.”
“Who’s being rude?” I asked.
“Well, I think you are,” he said.
I tried to type louder.
“Maybe I should try to win at a game show,” he yelled.
I stopped typing. My computer was missing a pixel and a line bisected the screen.
“Did you hear me?” he asked.
“Yes,” I called back. “Yes, I heard you but I’m trying to work.”
“Well, excuuuuuuse me,” he called.
Duncan never knew his father. This attracted us to each other at first. I could sit in the big bowl of loss inside of him, and then he could sit in mine. I knew nothing about my father, though, and Duncan knew everything about his.
Duncan’s father was a psychotherapist who kept meticulous journals about his life. “Today,” the journals read, “I woke and walked Mercy [the dog] through the neighborhood, thinking about the baby asleep at home.” Each day was recorded carefully and revealed a boring pattern like the day before. Duncan read and reread the journals. He found them entrancing. To me, they were proof of how boring most people’s lives are. To Duncan, they were the pieces of the puzzle, the clues to his father’s suicide.
The journals had a lot to do with why Duncan and I split
up. I couldn’t listen to him read them anymore. We went on a trip to northern California. I wanted to see the ocean, the way it would break on the cliffs and spatter up into the sky. Duncan wanted to sit on the cliffs and read his father’s journals. “Today,” he read, “after walking Mercy, I returned home to reread my notes about patient 106.”
“Don’t you ever get bored with that?” I asked. Duncan jutted his chin and raised his eyebrows. “No. I’m sorry if I’m boring you.”
“It’s just that we’ve read this part already.”
“This is all I have left of him,” Duncan said. “I think that should matter to you.”
The waves crashed against the cliffs and sent foam into the sky but it didn’t seem magical, like the image in my mind. Just water spraying up from the ocean and then falling back onto the rocks.
The truth is, it didn’t really matter to me. The journals, Duncan’s feeling of abandonment, the way he cried when we fought, as if I was dying. He used to reach for me when I was angry, his fingers pulling me toward him. He’d hold on to me as if I were a buoy and I would feel a little bit claustrophobic. I loved him, but I didn’t really understand that sort of grief.
I never mourned the loss of my father. My mother didn’t talk about him, and by the time I was old enough to confront her, she was dying. He was a forest fire that burned before I was born. I had no clues, no puzzle pieces to spend my life putting together. Just a clean, sharp hole. Duncan did not have this clarity; he lived amidst a dark bloody thing full of roots and broken teeth.
Eventually Duncan started spending a lot of time with a girl named Lucy whose parents had died in a car wreck when she was young. I felt Duncan drifting away and I couldn’t stop him. I’m not even sure I wanted to stop him. I watched his eyes fill with distraction, muddy with small dishonesties that soon became large ones. And then, one day, he was gone.
I often wondered what it would have been like if Duncan and I were still together the day I found my father. Would it have given us hope—hope that our lives would be full of such unexpected fortune? Would he have been jealous? Or would he have seen impending gloom hanging low on the horizon?