The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

Joyce Carol Oates The Blind Man’s Sighted Daughters

From Fiction Magazine

“Has he ever talked about it with you?”

My sister lowered her voice as if fearful of being overheard for our father’s hearing had sharpened in his blindness. My sister who was fifty-two years old inclined her head in the disingenuous way she’d cultivated as a girl. Don’t tell me. I need to ask but don’t tell me.

Adding, unnecessarily, “He never has, with me. At least I wasn’t aware if he had.”

He, him were the ways in which we spoke of our elderly father in our lowered voices. He, him seemed more appropriate than such intimate words as Father, Dad.

Really there was no danger of him hearing us: we were in the front room of the house and the old man was at the rear of the house lying in a lounge chair facing a window through which winter sunshine streamed. He could not see the window, he could not see how dazzling white snow heaped outside the window as in a scene of Arctic desolation but he could probably see something of the light and he could feel the warmth of the sun on his face.

Sunning himself like a giant lizard. Almost, you could envy him.

He was eighty-one, he’d become almost totally blind over a period of years. A gradual dimming, fading. His condition was called macular degeneration: a hole in the center of his vision. Initially a pinprick, then it enlarges. You manage to see around it, as long as you can. By this time in the sixth year of his affliction the black hole had seemingly swallowed most of our father’s vision but he hadn’t entirely given up the effort of trying to see.

It was exhausting! For him, and for me.

Knowing yourself reduced to a blurred shape at the edge of a man’s vision. The sudden panic of one about to step off the edge of the earth.

I told my sister no. Dryly I told her I’d have been aware of it, if he had.

We knew what we meant by it. This was a code between us, to be murmured with a kind of thrilled shame.

Abigail was watching me closely. She’d been shaken by the deterioration of our father and it was possible, she blamed me. Her nostrils were pinched as if against a bad odor. Her forehead was pinched, her mouth. I wondered what she was seeing. Living with a blind man you gradually become invisible.

“What does he talk about with you, then?”

“Stay with us for a while, Abigail. Talk to him yourself. Then you’ll know.”

I spoke warmly. Hearing me you’d think A good heart! But Abigail knew this was a reproach. Something hot swept up into her face, she smiled quickly to acknowledge yes, all right, she deserved it. But she would bear it for my sake.

Don’t hate me! I had to save my own life.

I said, “He doesn’t talk. He thinks out loud. I guess you’d call it ‘thinking’ — a stream of words like TV, if you switched from channel to channel. Old quarrels. People who’ve been dead for fifty years. Men he’d had business dealings with, who’d ‘cheated’ him. Not us. He has no interest in us. Anything he did, caused to happen, in this house or out, no memory of it. Sometimes he speaks of ‘your mother.’ The worst days, he confuses me with her. He never asks about you. He never asks about me. He calls ‘He-len! He-len! ’ so he knows who I am. Though I could be a nurse’s aide, I suppose.” I paused, so that Abigail could laugh. Politely and nervously Abigail could laugh. I’d missed my calling as a TV comic: the kind who’s angry and deadpan and provokes laughter in others that’s the equivalent of turning a knife blade in their guts. “He asks me to read the newspapers to him, the worst news first, atrocities, suicide bombers, plane crashes, famines, killings and dismemberings in New Jersey, anything lurid to do with politicians or celebrities, he wants to be consoled that the world is a ridiculous hellhole, people are no damned good and the environment is poisoned to hell, only a fool would want to live much longer. I have to describe for him what’s on the TV screen, he can work the remote control for himself. He falls asleep and I switch off the damned set and the sudden silence wakes him and at first he doesn’t know where he is, maybe he’s dead? had another stroke? then he’s furious with me saying he hadn’t been asleep. ‘Trying to put something over on me,’ he says, ‘sneaky bitch like your mother—’ ”

“Oh, Helen. Stop.”

We were laughing together. Jamming our knuckles against our mouths like guilty children for if our father heard us immediately he would know we were laughing at him.

“Helen, you turn everything into a joke. I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Everything isn’t a joke, Abigail? Come on.”

“You’ve even begun to talk strangely. Your mouth—”

“My mow-th?”

I felt it twist. Like wringing a rag. Had I been doing this unconsciously? Did I do it bringing our father to the medical clinic, speaking with doctors, staff? Buying groceries, buying gasoline, at the drugstore getting prescriptions filled? Mirrors had become so leprous-looking in this house, I hadn’t been able to see my reflection for months.

“He’s the one who had the stroke, Abigail. Not me. My mow-th is as normal as yours.”

Earlier in the day when Abigail had arrived for her visit, she had looked extremely normal: the kind of woman, middle-aged but youthful, I sometimes observed, disliking, envious, in public places. She’d embraced me, the younger sister, with a cry like a stricken bird, hugged me tight against her as if she’d meant it. Oh she’d missed me, Oh I’d lost so much weight, Oh oh oh! she was sorry for having been out of touch for so long. She’d been an attractive well-groomed woman stepping into this house at 2:00 P.M. and now at 6:30 P.M. she looked as if she’d been bargain-shopping at Wal-Mart on Discount Saturday. She looked as if she could use a good stiff drink but I never kept hard liquor in the house, not even beer or wine. The old man would find it and drink himself into a coma. Or maybe, I would.

Abigail wiped at her eyes with a tissue. I was touched to see that coming to visit Sparta, driving the width of New York State from Peekskill, New York, she’d taken time to apply eye makeup.

“I wish you’d warned me, Helen. You might have.”

Warned her about what? The old man wasn’t so bad — was he?

“And I’m worried about you, too.”

“Me! I can worry about myself, thank you.”

“No. Obviously not. You don’t look well, you must have lost twenty pounds. The way the house looks, and smells...”

Abigail’s nostrils pinched primly. I was hurt, and I was offended. “Smells! It does not.”

Though it was true: I’d tried to give our father a sponge bath that morning in preparation for Abigail’s visit but he’d refused to let me near him. Couldn’t have said when exactly he’d been bathed by me, or shaved. Or when I’d showered, myself. Or changed my underwear which I wore to bed in cold weather, with wool socks, beneath an old flannel nightgown.

But I’d wetted my hair and combed it. Smeared plum-colored lipstick on my mouth. In a shadowy mirror there was no face behind the mouth but the mouth was smiling.

“... should be moved to an assisted care facility, Helen. That’s why I’ve come, have you forgotten? Oh, please listen!”

I was listening. I saw my sister’s mouth move and I was listening but somehow I seemed to have lost the knack of comprehending words in a coherent sequence as you lose the knack of comprehending a foreign language you have not heard or spoken in some time.

When Abigail called me and static interfered, I hadn’t any choice but to quietly hang up. But when someone is speaking to you from a few feet away, you have not that option.

The power I’d been exerting over my sister just a few minutes ago to make her laugh against her will had faded rapidly. I didn’t know how I’d lost it, I resented this too.

“... six-month leave, you said? Unpaid? Aren’t the six months up by now, Helen? Have you made new arrangements?”

I thought that I had, yes. I told my sister this.

I’d taken the leave because caring for our father had begun to require more and more time. There was the vague idea too, at least initially, that I would be preparing for the next phase of the old man’s life which would be an assisted care facility. I had put off speaking to him about the prospect. Until Abigail mentioned it, I may have forgotten.

Scattered through the house were glossy brochures from such places. Deer Meadow Manor, Rosewood Manor, Cedar Brook Hall. Abigail had pushed some aside, sitting on the sofa.

She was saying in a brisk voice, having recovered some of her poise, that she would take time off, too. (My sister was a well-paid administrator at a science research institute in Peekskill.) She would help in the “move” of course. And after our father was “settled in” the new residence we would have the entire house cleaned, and painted, repairs made to the roof, then we’d put the house “on the market”... “Helen? Are you listening?”

Half-consciously I’d been listening for his uplifted voice at the rear of the house. It did seem time about now for him to call He-len? Sometimes the voice was raw and aggrieved, sometimes the voice was uncertain, wavering. Sometimes the voice was angry. And sometimes pleading like the voice of a lost child. He-len!

I lowered my own voice that had gone slightly hoarse from not being used much. I said, “Each day I think of it. Already when I wake in the morning the thought is with me.”

“What thought?”

“ ‘This day might be it. His last.’ ”

Abigail stared at me. For a long moment she seemed unable to speak.

“And how — how — how do you feel, Helen? Thinking such a thought?”

“Anxious. Excited. Hopeful.”

“ ‘Hopeful.’ ”

Abigail didn’t seem to be challenging me nor even questioning me only just trying out the word.

At the rear of the house the voice lifted querulously: “He-len?”

November 1967. In the night the temperature dropped below zero, the bodies had frozen together. Not in each other’s arms but crushed together bloodied and broken in shattered glass in the front seat of the wrecked vehicle that seemed to have skidded off the road to plunge down an embankment above the Chautauqua River north of Sparta. The vehicle was a new-model Dodge sedan that had capsized in underbrush on the riverbank, thirty feet below the roadway. If the car hadn’t capsized it would have rolled forward and broken through the ice to be submerged in fifteen feet of water, by morning a crust of ice might have formed above it. If snow had continued to fall heavily through the night the car’s tracks might have been hidden from view, covered in snow.

The Dodge sedan was registered to the dead man behind the wheel whose name was Henry Claver. The dead woman was not Henry Claver’s wife but another man’s wife, a woman known to our father Lyle Sebera. She’d been his receptionist at Sebera Construction for several years and it would be said that she and our father had been “involved” for most of this time. Since her separation from her husband, the woman and her five-year-old son had been living in a brick row house in downtown Sparta that was one of several properties owned by Lyle Sebera and it would be said that on those occasions when her estranged husband came to take the boy away for the weekend, to Buffalo where he was now living, Lyle Sebera was a “frequent” visitor in that house.

The woman’s name was Lenora McDermid. This was not a name that would be uttered in our house, ever.

That night he’d come home late. By eight o’clock our mother had several times called his office for it was her belief that he was working late. Though possibly he’d been traveling that day, and had neglected to tell her. Our mother was not a woman to ask very many questions of her husband who was not a man of whom a wife might comfortably ask questions.

By eight o’clock my sister and I had eaten dinner and cleaned away our places at the table. Our mother did not eat with us and afterward remained in the kitchen alone. She would call our father’s number at Sebera Construction for this was the only number she had for our father. This was an era before voice mail when you called a number and when it rang unanswered you had no choice but to hang up and call again and later you might call again listening helplessly to a phone ringing unanswered.

Where is Daddy? was not a question my sister and I were in the habit of asking.

That night he was working late, very likely. He’d gone to check a building site. There were often business trips: Yewville, Port Oriskany, Buffalo. Lyle Sebera thought nothing of driving ninety miles round-trip in a single day. Possibly there were financial problems at this time in our father’s business but we were not meant to know of such problems as we were not meant to know of any aspect of our father’s life guarded by him as zealously as the large cluttered lot behind Sebera Construction was guarded by a fierce German shepherd inside a ten-foot chain-link fence. Some of the problems of which we weren’t to know had to do with bank loans, mortgages on investment properties owned by Lyle Sebera in partnership with another Sparta resident whose name was not Claver but the man named Claver was a former business associate of Lyle Sebera’s partner whose name was Litz.

McDermid, Claver, Litz. Names not to be uttered in our house.

Yet we knew of these names, that were not spoken in our house or in our earshot. Though no newspapers containing these names were allowed in the house and we were not allowed to watch TV news.

Abigail was thirteen and I was ten. We were in eighth grade and in fifth grade. Quiet girls, obedient, believed to be well-mannered because we were shy. We’d been trained not to test our mother’s patience and we had hardly needed to be trained not to displease our father. Yet we scavenged neighbors’ trash cans in the alley that ran behind our houses searching for forbidden knowledge. Eager, in fear of being seen, we pawed at newspaper pages smelling of garbage, damp pulp paper that left newsprint on our fingers. “Oh! Look,” Abigail whispered pointing at a photograph on the front page of the Sparta Journal, of a dark-haired, squinting man with a familiar face.

We were squatting beside trash cans in the alley. Dogs had defiled the snow here. There was a rancid smell of garbage, we swallowed hard to keep from gagging. “ ‘Double homicide.’ ” Our lips moved numbly. In the cold still air our breaths steamed. “ ‘Bludgeoned.’ ”

Bludgeoned! I seemed to know what this word meant. This was a word that carried its meaning in its sound.

On the same page were photographs of the dead woman Lenora McDermid and the dead man Henry Claver. The woman was smiling which seemed wrong because she was dead. She was younger than our mother and much prettier than our mother but her lipstick was so dark her mouth looked like a black wound. The man was our father’s age and frowning the way our father frowned if he’d heard something he had not liked. McDermid, Claver had not died in the car wreck but had been “bludgeoned to death” with a weapon like a tire iron and Claver’s car had been pushed over the edge of the embankment to make it seem like an accident.

I was staring at the blurry photograph Abigail had pointed out.

“Is that Daddy? No.”

“Silly! Of course it’s Daddy.”

In those years we called our father “Daddy.” We called our mother “Mommy.” We must have been instructed in this, we could not have thought of such names by ourselves.

The picture was of a man like Daddy but I did not think it was Daddy. He had heavy eyebrows and a heavy jaw and he was squinting at the camera. His hair was thick and dark lifting from his forehead like a rooster’s comb but Daddy’s hair was not like that now.

“It isn’t. Not Daddy.”

“Stupid, it says ‘Sebera’ right there. It is.”

Abigail slapped the wet newspaper in my hands and ripped it. She nudged me with her fist to topple me over into the yellow-stained snow. Still I cried, “It is not it is not him.”

Other men were questioned in the double homicide. Other men had been involved with both the dead man and the dead woman and one of these was the dead woman’s estranged husband Gerald McDermid whose photograph would also appear in the newspapers we were forbidden to see. Later, Gerald McDermid would be arrested by Sparta police and charged with the double homicide but by spring of 1968 these charges were dropped for insufficient evidence. McDermid’s relatives insisted that he’d been with them in Buffalo, he’d brought the child with him for the weekend. No one else was ever arrested. Gradually the names McDermid, Claver disappeared from the newspapers and the name Sebera would never appear again, ever.

This was a fact: Lyle Sebera had been questioned by police and released. He had never been arrested like Gerald McDermid. Our mother’s relatives meant to comfort her as they meant to comfort themselves pointing out this fact in murmured conversations just beyond earshot of my sister Abigail and me. Yes but. Lyle was never. The other one, the husband. He was the one!

Our mother had been questioned by police also, more than once. We had no idea what she told them. My sister Abigail and I were not questioned, we were too young.

When had we heard Daddy come home that night? — maybe we had not heard him at all. Maybe it was windy, snowy. Maybe we’d fallen asleep. Maybe it was some other night we remembered. Or maybe that was a night he’d come home for supper by six-thirty which was when my mother had expected him. Memories are confusing, when one memory is stronger than other memories it is the strong memory that prevails.

Daddy! Dad-dy. For there was this to remember, that Daddy could be impatient and angry but Daddy could make your heart lift, also. Daddy brought us presents, Daddy called me Funny Face. Daddy was gone, and Daddy came back, and Daddy whistled for us saying, Hey you two you’re my girls, you know that, eh? in his two arms lifting us both so we squealed. Who’s Daddy’s special girl, Daddy would ask, who loves Daddy best, and Abigail would say, Me! and Helen would say, Me! Me, Daddy! until at last Abigail was too old and held back stiff and embarrassed but Helen was still a little girl, eager to hug and kiss Daddy for there was no one like Daddy, ever. The stubble-jaws he called The Grizzly, here’s The Grizzly come for a kiss, and Daddy’s sweet-strong breath, you shut your eyes feeling dizzy. So maybe it had been one of those nights and Daddy had come home in time for supper and was home all that night as Mommy said. For there were many nights. You could not possibly keep them straight. Our mother spoke sharply to us for it was a school night, we were not to watch TV but do our homework and at 9:30 P.M. go upstairs to bed. And she would check us there, to see. In our beds in the darkened room beneath the eaves except there came headlights against the blind drawn over the window and faint ghost-shapes moving across the ceiling in a way to be confused with crawling things in dreams and these dreams to be confused with wakefulness. Are you asleep? one of us would ask and the other would giggle Yes! Except not that night for we were frightened. Lying very still on our backs beneath the covers, arms against our sides and elbows pressed against our ribs to give the comfort of being held. Drifting into sleep that night and waking suddenly to see the ghost-lights and later to hear a car turning into the driveway and there was the sound of a door at the rear of the house being opened and then shut and if our mother had been waiting up for him there may have been an exchange of voices, muffled words we could not hear. And so When had we heard Daddy come home that night was not a question that could be answered even if it had been asked.

Has he ever talked about it with you my sister has asked. As if she has the right.

Back in December I had to take him for more urinary-tract and prostate tests, that had frightened him. By this time he had his way of turning his head to the side, the way you’d imagine a sharp-beaked predator bird turning its head, to fix prey in its sight. He sighted me in what remained of his peripheral vision so that I began to feel panicky, my breath began to quicken as if I were standing at the edge of a steep cliff. It was a dark time of year, winters are long and depressing in this part of the country and I’d taken six months off from work at the local community college where now I had to worry they’d give my job to someone else and wouldn’t hire me back, and suddenly our father was asking if I remembered something that had happened when I was a little girl, a car found wrecked out in the country, a man and a woman were found dead in the car, and his voice was hoarse and faltering and I stood very still thinking Maybe he can’t see me, he won’t know that I am here.

I went away. I left him there. He was groping to find the edge of his bed. I was very upset, I had work to do. Vacuuming, housework. I hadn’t time for this.

Next day he asked if I would take him to church. To church!

Long ago our parents had been married in St. John’s Roman Catholic Church in Sparta. So we’d been told. From time to time our mother had gone to mass there but our father, never. Neither Abigail nor I was baptized in any church. Our mother had never taken us with her to mass. She’d wanted to be alone, maybe. She’d become a nervous woman who wanted to be alone much of the time. Or maybe she hadn’t believed that our souls were very important because we were children and we didn’t require the solace of religion as we didn’t, like our mother, require the solace of solitary drinking and painkiller pills. But Mommy is there God? once I asked my mother and she turned away as if she hadn’t heard.

Now this elderly blind broke-back man who’d been Daddy long ago and was not recognizable as Lyle Sebera was saying, “I want— I want to go to confession.”

I was stunned by this. Couldn’t believe I’d heard right.

Fumbling I said I didn’t think the Church had confession any longer.

“No confession? Eh? Since when?”

He couldn’t see me — could he? Not when I stood right in front of him. He was quivering with strain, half-standing, the tendons in his elderly neck were taut as ropes. I feared those eyes that were glassy-hard and discolored like stained piano keys and the pupils the size of caraway seeds.

I tried to smile. I tried to speak reasonably. Observing this scene from the doorway you’d think What a good heart, that woman! “There have been ‘reforms’ in the Church. You know, there’s a new Church now. The Latin mass has been gone for, what? — forty years. If you want to confess sins you say them to yourself, you don’t involve others in your messes.”

Was this so? I had no idea. Maybe it was so. Maybe I’d read it somewhere. I’d never been religious, it was like being color blind. Messes was to suggest childish behavior, not serious transgressions. Messes was to keep distance between him and me.

He was whining, “You can take me to church can’t you? That church where your mother used to go? I want to talk to a priest. There must be a priest.” He was breathing audibly, sweating. His face was drawn and anxious yet I knew that he was capable of suddenly slapping at me, clawing and kicking at me, even spitting at me if I dared to defy him. “I can’t — can’t — you know I can’t — die without talking to a — priest.”

“ ‘Die.’ You aren’t going to die.”

“I am! I’m going to — die! I want to die! God damn I want to talk to a — priest — a priest — I want to talk to a — and then I want to die.”

I began to tremble. I was frightened but I was angry, too. How like Lyle Sebera to imagine that somewhere close by there was “a priest” to serve him. As, always close by, there was a daughter to serve him. And somewhere at hand there was God to forgive him.

“There aren’t many priests today, either. Didn’t I just read you that article in the paper, there’s a shortage of priests. Remember you laughed, you said, ‘Serves them right, assholes think they have all the answers.’ ”

My father seemed not to hear this mimicry of his voice. I’d thought it was damned funny, myself.

“I want to talk to—”

“—to God? You want to talk to God? That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it, you want to talk to God, ask God to ‘forgive’ you. But there isn’t any ‘God,’ either. It’s too late.” I was laughing, a sensation like flames without heat, flames of pure dazzling light passed through me. I was on my way out of the invalid’s room leaving the old man gaping after me.

Invalids say things they don’t mean. Invalids say things to test their caretakers who are likely to be the only individuals who love them and can endure them.

But often then he began to speak of dying. What I needed to do for him was get the right pills the kind that put you to sleep forever: “ ‘Barbitch-ates.’ ” Or his own pills, damn-fucking pills, so many he had to take every day, at mealtimes, it was my task to sort out these pills and make sure that he took them, my task (as I’d promised his doctor) to cut the largest tablets into pieces so he wouldn’t choke swallowing them. So why didn’t I dump all the prescribed damn-fucking pills into a pile and pulverize them and dissolve them in a tall glass of gin, he’d lap down thirsty “like a dog.” I listened to this, the pleading, whining, cajoling, the threat beneath, always the threat beneath, for this scrawny bent-back old man had once stood six feet tall and weighed somewhere beyond two hundred pounds and he’d been a man who had not needed to plead, beg, cajole you can bet your ass, he’d been a man who controlled his family with a frown, a glance, a sudden fist brought down flat on a table. So as I listened to my father’s voice I understood that this was a test being put to me. I was expected to express surprise, alarm. I was expected to plead with him No Daddy! Not when we love you. Instead I mumbled something vague and conciliatory as you do when an elderly invalid is whining in self-pity and self-disgust spilling over you like a sloshing bedpan. But at the same time my heartbeat quickened. He wants to die, I can help him die.

He said, sneering, “You’d like that, eh! Get rid of the old man. You and—” His hoarse voice trailed off in befuddlement, he’d forgotten Abigail’s name.

Not that this was flattering to me, for lately he’d been forgetting my name, too.

But now he’d trapped me: for I couldn’t say “Yes” and I couldn’t say “No.” He laughed cruelly, baring his stained teeth. Stiffly I said, “You’re not very funny.”

“You’re funny. ‘Hel-len’-got-a-poker-up-her-ass.”

Pronouncing my name as if it was a joke. Some TV comic inflection. When I didn’t react, he snorted and threw the TV remote control at me, such a lightweight plastic thing it struck me harmlessly on my right breast and fell to the floor. (We’d been watching Fox TV, his favorite program was The O’Reilly Factor.) I went away, left the remote control on the floor where he’d have to grope for it partway beneath his bed if he wanted it.

He-len. I suppose the name was a joke.

So the subject of dying, wanting to die, how I might help him die began to surface in our life together in that house. It surfaced and sank from view and resurfaced like flotsam in a turbulent river. I thought that yes, my father was probably serious, I believed that he understood that his condition was terminal, he would never even partway recover his health before the stroke, yet of course I didn’t trust him. He was feeling guilt for something he’d done years ago but he’d never once spoken of what he’d done to our mother. How he’d wrung the life from her. How he’d laughed at her, as he laughed at me, speaking her name in mockery. It was the way of the bully daring you to react with anger or indignation and knowing that you could not. Ovarian cancer had swept through my mother like wildfire and when after her first surgery she’d wanted to stay with an older sister to recuperate my father had said yes, that was a good idea, she’d taken his word on faith but after that he refused to see her, even to speak with her, he never allowed her to return to live with him, liked to say he’d washed his hands of her, she’d left him. Now he was elderly and blind and whining about wanting to die and yet he continued to eat most of the meals I prepared for him, except when he was actively sick his appetite was usually good enough, especially for ice cream. Elderly invalids frequently want to die and are aided in their deaths by sympathetic relatives and doctors, I knew this of course yet I would not have dared speak to his doctor about this wish of my father’s, I would not even speak with my father about it thinking I am not a daughter who wishes her father dead. More truthful was the admonition I must not be a daughter legally liable for her father’s death.

Would I have helped him to die, if I knew I wouldn’t be caught?

Would I have held a pillow over his face until he stopped breathing, if I knew I wouldn’t be caught?

“ ‘He-len.’ Good daughter.”

I laughed. Living with a blind sick old man who dislikes you, you become accustomed to talking and laughing to yourself.

Between us there was an undeclared war. In a distant part of the house I could hear, or believed that I could hear, the old man muttering to himself, laughing also, but meanly, as one might laugh stubbing his toe, and cursing Damn! God damn! Fuck! loud enough to hear if I wished. For years he had not been able to sleep for more than a few hours at a time, needing to use the toilet frequently, but now his nights were ever more restless, disruptive. I would be wakened in a jolt from my exhausted sleep hearing him prowling and stumbling through the downstairs. I dreaded him falling and injuring himself for already he’d sprained a wrist, sprained ribs, bruised himself badly. After a severe stroke at seventy-eight he’d had smaller strokes, all without warning. Years of heavy smoking, heavy drinking, heavy eating had weakened his heart that had now to be monitored by a “gizmo” in his chest — a pacemaker. And there was the macular degeneration that had begun years ago, to madden and terrify. Old age is one symptom after another, a doctor told me meaning to be sympathetic.

After the initial stroke I’d moved back into the house in which I had spent the first eighteen years of my life for I’d been shaken by my father’s rapid decline and I’d been touched by his obvious need for me. For never had Lyle Sebera expressed any need for anyone, and certainly not for me. We’d relocated his bedroom downstairs and close to the bathroom in the hallway and I’d been cheerful and upbeat and he’d been grateful then, at the start. Before more symptoms emerged, that were not going to go away.

Later I would come to realize that my father’s gratitude had been a trick to ensnare me. He’d been a man to seduce women, then to speak of them in contempt as “easy.”

When Abigail called, I told her none of this. That our father was exactly the man he’d always been except now he was miserable and wished to die and that I wished him to die. That I was furious with her for her shrewdness in leaving Sparta to live hundreds of miles away. Instead I told her coolly, daring her to doubt my words: “Oh, you know Lyle. Hardy as hell, he’ll outlive us all.” Or: “He’s doing as well as we can expect. Good days, not-so-good. Want me to put him on?”

Quickly Abigail would say no! For he seemed always to be agitated or annoyed by her, asking if she was “checking up on him” — “wanting money from him” — and seeming not to remember her name.

“But he asks after you, Abigail. All the time.”

“Oh, Helen. He does?”

Abigail was doubtful yet wanting to believe. I had all I could do to keep from bursting into laughter.

Except one day when Abigail was questioning me too closely about our father’s property investments, and his medical insurance, and his latest physical ailments, I did begin to laugh. I laughed, and I sobbed angrily. For it was the riddle of my life now, how I’d become our father’s caretaker. I’d become the “good” daughter as our mother, before her cancer, had been the “good” wife. I told Abigail that it was some kind of grotesque mistake, these past several years. I wasn’t a good person, I hadn’t a good heart. She, Abigail, was so much the better person. Everyone knew that. I was selfish, cruel and indifferent to the pain of others, just like our father. My heart was shriveled and hard as a lump of coal yet somehow I was the sister who’d remained in Sparta, New York, while she, Abigail, had gone away to college and married and had children and never lived closer than three hundred miles away. While I’d never married, never been in love. I’d barely graduated from high school and remained in Sparta taking courses at the community college where now I worked in “food services” and had to be grateful for that. Now I was living in this house we’d both been desperate to escape. I wasn’t a girl of ten, or nineteen, or even a woman of twenty-nine. I was forty-nine years old and how had that happened?

Abigail said, “Oh, Helen. Of course I’m coming there. We’ll make new arrangements. I love you.”

I love you would burn in my shriveled heart. Though I had not been able to mumble I love you, too.

“Helen, you must let me.”

Yes I would let her. I smiled to think Yes! Try.

Through this second day of her visit my sister Abigail was suffused with energy, determination, good intentions. Reminded me of when she’d been, for a few ecstatic months in high school, a born-again Christian. She “aired out” rooms long pervaded with the stink of rancid food, soiled clothing and bedding, dried urine. With paper towels and Windex she washed window panes long layered in grime. She drove our father, sulky and anxious, to his morning medical appointment. In a voice pitched as if for a deaf or retarded child she spoke to the old man earnestly and cheerfully and tried not to be discouraged when he acknowledged her efforts only in grunts. I thought He doesn’t want your good cheer, he wants anger and hurt. He wants to be punished.

Never would the old blind man speak intimately to Abigail as he spoke to me. I knew this.

“Why is he angry with me? Is he angry with me? Does he hate me, Helen?”

My sister’s voice began to sound wistful, even resentful. She’d sent me away to take the afternoon off — “Spend some time on yourself for a change, Helen” — and when I returned in the early evening she was looking tired, baffled. The old blind man hadn’t been grateful for her company but preferred to sulk in his room with the TV turned up loud. He hadn’t even seemed to know, or care, who she was! The damned vacuum cleaner had gotten clotted with something gluey and smelly sucked up into the hose. The damned washing machine in the basement had broken down in mid-cycle. The first several “assisted-living facilities” she’d called had no openings, only waiting lists. Cleaning the kitchen cupboards that hadn’t been cleaned for years she’d discovered roaches. Nests of spiders in all the corners of the house. I wanted to ask if she’d noticed how the rear of the old house had begun to sink into muck, to disappear. How the lead backing in the mirrors had begun to eat its way through the glass like cancer.

“How can you live in this house, Helen! How can you bear it!”

Because I am stronger than you. Like a roach.

The rest of the day went badly. I’d warned Abigail that the old man had sharp ears and so he’d overheard her on the phone calling “nursing homes” and he was furious saying he would never leave this house, he would die in this house, nobody could force him to leave this house which was his property, he knew his rights as a United States citizen and he’d go on TV to expose us, if we tried to cheat him. Abigail tried to explain which was a mistake, tried to apologize which was a worse mistake. He shouted, he spat, he threatened, he pummelled the air with his fists, there was nothing to do but assure him Yes we promise no we will not ever, you have our word. Abigail’s next blunder was to try to feed the old man a “special supper” she’d prepared in place of the sugar-laced frozen Birds Eye suppers the old man was accustomed to eating and I was accustomed to preparing, the first mouthful of poached salmon he spat out onto the table: “Trying to choke me with fish bones, eh? That’s why you’re here, eh?”

Abigail protested, “Daddy, no. How can you think—”

Daddy caused the old man to snort in derision. He hadn’t been Daddy in thirty years.

My afternoon away from the elderly blind man’s house had been strange as a dream dreamt by someone not myself whom in some way I seemed to know, even to be bound with intimately, like a cousin not glimpsed in many years. Mostly I drove around Sparta. I drove out along the Chautauqua River. I stopped at a liquor store to bring back a bottle of scotch whiskey and this bottle like a shining talisman I brought upstairs with two freshly rinsed water glasses to share with my exhausted sister Abigail after — finally! — the house was darkened downstairs and the old man sunk into his comatose sleep in the hospital bed installed in his room. As we’d huddled together in our bedroom down the hall as girls so now we huddled together as adults in my bedroom which was our parents’ former bedroom that still felt unnatural to me, that I’d dared even to enter this room let alone appropriate it. Sprawled on my back on the rumpled double bed whose sheets hadn’t been changed in weeks, a soiled foam-rubber pillow scrunched beneath my head, I balanced my whiskey glass between my flat-sloping breasts and listened to Abigail speak in wayward feverish lunges like a marathon runner who has overexerted herself yet can’t stop running, must continue panting and gasping for air until the collapse is complete. We had not undressed for bed. Our clothes were rumpled and smelled of a sickroom. This day that was meant to be my sister’s triumph we’d been defeated by the old blind man yet — so stubbornly! — Abigail reverted to her subject of the assisted care facility we must find for him, as if finding the place was the task, the challenge, and not persuading our father to move into it. Abigail said adamantly that it wasn’t possible for me to continue to care for him in this hopeless pigsty, he had to be moved immediately, for his own well-being as for mine, by which she meant, Abigail said pointedly, my physical and mental health. We would have to get power of attorney over his assets, there was no turning back. I told her yes but we’d just promised him, hadn’t we: No we will not ever, you have our word. But Abigail seemed not to hear.

“If not in Sparta then somewhere else. Peekskill! — there are plenty of ‘assisted living facilities’ there.”

Abigail was sitting on the edge of my bed sipping whiskey in small mouthfuls. Her weight felt heavy, leaden. Her hair that had been sleek-cut and glossy was nearly as matted now as mine and her skin exuded a sick clammy odor. I said, “He’s serious, Abigail. He wants to die here. He wants to die.” Abigail laughed angrily, “Well, he just can’t die. Probably not for a long time.”

I gripped the foam-rubber pillow with both hands, behind my head. I said, “We could hold a pillow over his face. He’d struggle like hell and he’s strong but there are two of us and his heart will give out.” I paused. I giggled. Inanely I added, “It’s been done.”

Abigail frowned. “Oh, Helen.”

Abigail giggled. Abigail drained much of her glass and wiped her mouth with the edge of her hand. “Oh Helen. The things you say.”

Maybe in rebuke, or to comfort or console me, Abigail groped for my free hand, and squeezed. Middle-aged sisters gripping hands. That evening after our disastrous supper I’d overheard Abigail on her cell phone in the room she was staying in, our bedroom when we’d been girls, I stood outside the door listening hearing my sister’s lowered voice, she was speaking with her husband back in Peekskill saying things were much worse than she’d expected, so much worse, can’t leave Helen, my poor sister I can’t leave until as quickly I turned away blinded by tears. My sister whose life was so rich and full and superior to my own cared for me! Another person cared enough for me to be anxious on my behalf, my name had been uttered in a tone of dismay. I was very moved though I could feel nothing much, I’d become anesthetized to sensation as a paralyzed limb.

I said, “Where I drove this afternoon? Out along the river? I was looking for where it happened — the wrecked car, the ‘double homicide,’ remember?” Abigail shuddered and seemed to stiffen but made no reply. She’d become drowsy, lying on her side on the bed, clumsily perpendicular to me, her nearly empty glass against her thigh. I said, “I don’t think I found it. The exact site. I’m not sure,” and Abigail said irritably, “Well, you’d never seen it, had you? I never saw it,” and I said, “Supposedly they’d gone off the road, down an embankment. I mean, they were pushed off the road. It’s very steep there, down to the river. There was a bridge there, I’d thought. Eventually I found an old iron-girder bridge so maybe that’s where it happened. Not where I’d thought but farther out. It’s desolate out there, a kind of swampy jungle along the river where the car must have capsized. I remember that word — capsized. Like bludgeoned — a word that, if you hear it, you can guess its meaning. On my odometer I clocked it, where the wrecked car was found is seven point three miles from this house.” Abigail made no reply. I heard her breathing in husky surges. Like depleted swimmers sinking slowly through the water, unresisting we settled in the warm black muck below.

We were wakened suddenly hours later by a noise downstairs of lurching footsteps. Helplessly we lay listening to the blind man make his uncertain way to the bathroom in the hall. I knew to wait for the toilet to be flushed (though sometimes he failed to flush it out of forgetfulness, or spite) and following this it was crucial that he return to his bed for if he did not return to bed, this meant he’d become confused and lost and I would need to go downstairs to guide him back to bed; but more upsetting was the possibility that he’d decided he did not want to sleep but preferred to prowl the house like a trapped animal searching for a way out. I was remembering how a few nights ago I had stopped him at the top of the basement steps, he’d opened the door and was about to pitch forward to break his brittle bones on the concrete floor twelve feet below. And there was the time I’d discovered him in the kitchen where he’d turned on four gas burners emitting a deathly hissing sound for of course (no need to tell me, I knew) the old man’s wish to die might not be a wish to die alone. Abigail said, “How can you live like this, Helen!” but in the next moment she was up, slapping her cheeks to wake herself fully, saying, “We have to help him, he might hurt himself.” Already I was at the door. I was practiced in such nighttime maneuvers and had no doubt that the old man downstairs was waiting for me and would be surprised that tonight there would be two of me, not just one.

We switched on lights. The downstairs was ablaze with light. A festive occasion here! We were not blind and so we required lights to see and in such dazzling light bracketing the vast and terrible night outside we did see: the old man barefoot and cowering in a corner of the living room, turning his head at an angle to sight us in his vision. Abigail spoke to him and he cursed her. I spoke to him and he cursed me. Though Abigail had cajoled him into changing out of his filth-stiffened flannel shirt and pajama bottoms to put on freshly laundered pajamas, yet he seemed to be wearing the same filth-stiffened things. “Oh, Daddy. Oh!” Abigail advanced upon him recklessly not knowing how quick his blows could come, surprisingly hard stinging blows and his nails were broken and sharp as a cat’s, drawing a zigzag of blood in her cheek. We circled him, tried to head him off so he couldn’t stumble into the kitchen. He was glowering, panting. He lunged at Abigail sensing she was the weaker of the two of us, he managed to thrust a floor lamp at her, striking her and hurting her, and he grabbed her, “Damn bitch! Want to suck my blood!” and they struggled together, I tried to pull him off her, loosen his talon-grip on her shoulders. He was fierce and writhing as a wounded snake. He fell and pulled Abigail with him, she straddled his bony thrashing body and grabbed a cushion from the sofa and pressed it against his face. Her eyes were bloodshot and triumphant. Her lips were drawn back from her glistening teeth. “Hate hate hate you why don’t you die!” I grabbed my sister’s wrists and managed to pull her from him. Her thighs were muscular, her bare feet curled with strain. The cushion lay on the old man’s face, his body appeared headless. He was breathing feebly but he was breathing. When I tried to help him up he spat at me, he called me the vilest names. He could not have known who I was, he called me such names. On his belly then crawling, and I tried again to help him and was rebuffed and Abigail crouched above us dazed and affrighted as a sleepwalker wakened too abruptly, she seemed not to know what she’d done, what was happening except that it wasn’t her responsibility but mine, and I would take charge. After some minutes of resistance the old man gave in, surly and still cursing, but I was able to get him back to bed, he was exhausted now and would sink back into his comatose sleep for a few more hours. “None of this has happened, Abigail,” I told my sister, squeezing her icy hands, “he won’t remember anything in the morning.”

We made no effort to sleep that night. Already it was 4:20 A.M. I helped Abigail undress and ran a bath for her and shampooed her hair in the bath and treated the shallow scratch in her cheek and put a flesh-colored Band-Aid over it. By dawn she was prepared to drive back to Peekskill. She’d repacked her small suitcase, her eyes were socketed in fatigue yet she’d put on fresh lipstick and a bright smile flashed in her face. We thought it best for her to leave without saying goodbye to him. For very likely he wouldn’t remember that she had even been here, let alone what had happened in the confusion of the night. Or if he remembered, he would blame

Helen. At the door Abigail hugged me tight and kissed me at the edge of the mouth. I held her for a long moment. “Call me, don’t forget me,” I said, meaning to be playful, and Abigail said, “Oh, Helen. I’m going to help you. I promise.” Abigail could not hear what I was hearing, only just audible at the rear of the house: an elderly voice sounding weaker than usual, fretful and anxious. “Helen? He-len?” I shut the door after my sister and hurried back there.