Father of the Rain

23

My daughter is speaking in an English accent, which means she is either a queen or the head of an orphanage.

“You must try to look people in the eye when they speak to you,” she says imperiously to her little brother. “They only mean well.” She has heard that from me, the encouragement to make eye contact. It’s like listening in on their dreams; tiny fragments of their lives are stitched carefully into the story.

“Not witches. Green-faced witches don’t mean well,” Jeremy says. It’s been a few years, but he still hasn’t recovered from seeing The Wizard of Oz at his grandmother’s house.

“Not always. But people do.”

“Yes.”

“M’lady,” she whispers.

“Yes, m’lady.”

They clatter through the kitchen solemnly, Lena wearing my high-heeled sandals and black wool skirt as a cape, Jeremy with an elaborate duct tape belt and a walking stick from the yard. I’m not allowed to acknowledge them.

The phone rings, and a formal voice asks for Daley Amory.

“Speaking.” I wait for the sales pitch. But there is a long pause instead.

“It’s Hatch. Hatch Bridgeton.” He says his name like it is a small joke between us.

“Oh.” My father must be dead.

The children, sensitive to my tones of voice, stop their game.

“Your dad had a stroke. A big one. They can’t stabilize him.”

I got an invitation to Hatch’s wedding and, six years later, a group email about his divorce. I sent my regrets and a ceramic bowl for the wedding, and a short but I hoped sympathetic reply to the email. Other than that, I’ve had no contact with him in all the years that we’ve been stepbrother and sister.

“Are you there now?” I ask.

“I am. But I’m flying home tomorrow. I’ve been here a week and things are falling apart at work.”

“A week?”

I can feel him struggle for a way to explain the seven days between my father’s stroke and this phone call. But I know he’s just been following instructions. “I left a message for Garvey, too. They don’t think he’ll make it through the weekend.”

“I’m not sure,” I say.

“I understand. Scott and Carly are sitting this one out, too.”

In my mind, Carly and Scott are still skipping stones on their beach in Ashing on Thanksgiving Day. But life has lurched on for them, as it has for us all.

In the fifteen years since I last saw my father, I have spoken to him once. It was the night the Red Sox won the Series and broke the curse. I knew he’d be up. I didn’t think about it. I just dialed the number. Barbara answered and I surprised her. She didn’t know what tone to use with me. She told me to hang on and covered the phone. I could hear him refuse, and Barbara insist. I felt her try to seal the holes of the phone’s receiver more securely, heard his voice rising and snapping, and then a sudden, “Hello there,” fake, and drunk as hell.

“I won’t keep you on long, Dad. I’m just calling because of the Red Sox. I couldn’t help thinking of you.”

“What? Oh, yeah. Wasn’t that something?” He kept his voice flat. He wasn’t going to celebrate with me, not even for a second. “Listen, I gotta go.”

“All right.”

“Yup,” he said, and hung up.

Barbara is waiting for me at the hospital in Allencaster, which is fancier now: revolving doors and a glass-domed lobby with an enormous information desk. She is smaller, crumpled. There are black hollows around her eyes, as if the sockets are receding to the back of her head. Her squat forehead is even more foreshortened, the wrinkles thick and deep. I don’t know if this transformation has occurred over the last fifteen years with my father or just in the past sleepless week.

“Oh, Daley, I’m so glad you’ve come.” She is tiny in my arms. She tries to say more but her chest shudders, like my children just before they throw up.

“It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” I stroke the coarse hair at the back of her head.

We don’t always like our children, Daley, but we do always love them, she wrote me after she married my father. She hoped I would come visit them. She’d redone the kitchen. When I didn’t answer that card, or the next, or the next, she wrote a fiercer one. I’d always been a rude and spoiled child, she said. She vividly remembered seeing me at a Christmas pageant when I was five or six and complimenting me on my pretty velvet dress and I turned away with my nose in the air. Julie told me to stop reading the cards. They always had a little tender flower on the front, or a baby animal. She begged me to burn them unopened. I lived with her then, in New Mexico. She saw the pain they brought on, the time it took me to recover from one. It wasn’t Barbara’s attacks on my character that hurt; it was the passing references to my father, the portrait of his life with her that she unwittingly depicted for me. He’d gone back to work for Hugh. He wasn’t coaching the “derelicts” at the youth center anymore. They’d been to a party and he’d had everyone in stitches when he snuck upstairs and came down in a kimono and slashes of eyeliner.

“How is he today?” I ask her, as if we are just picking up from yesterday.

“They’ve stabilized his heart rate. They still can’t get his blood pressure down and he was very agitated last night. But they took off his restraints this morning, so that’s good.”

“Restraints?”

“He wasn’t being cooperative with the nurses.”

“I thought he was unconscious,” I say, trying to hide my uneasy surprise.

“He’s in and out.”

“Is he talking?” Hatch told me he couldn’t speak. I wouldn’t have come if I thought he could say something to me.

“No. Nothing coherent. Just babble.”

I follow her down hallways. The walls are hung with harbor and beach scenes. She stops at a pair of double doors and puts her palm under a dispenser on the wall. I do the same. Antibacterial lotion squirts out automatically. I rub it over my hands as we go through the doors. The lotion is cold then evaporates. The whole place smells of it. There is a bank of desks and opposite them a row of cubicles. Most of the curtains are open. In the first one is a black man with wires attached all over his bare chest by round adhesives that are not his skin color. In the second a white woman is sitting up, opening her mouth for Jell-O that a nurse feeds her. TVs are blaring: news, sitcoms, the Animal Channel. Two nurses are typing at computers. There is the smell of old cooked eggs. I am aware of everything, as if each pore of my skin is a receptor, waiting for the sign of my father. He is there, in the third cubicle. I feel like I am floating slightly, carrying less than my whole self. I follow Barbara’s coat toward his bed. He is a long log under the covers with arms and a head sticking out. The arms are covered in wide black bruises with green centers. Everywhere else his skin is gray and loose. It hangs off his neck like fabric, and the features of his face, always pronounced and angular, are exaggerated now like a bad caricature. His straight bony nose has a bend in it, and his big ears now have enormous earlobes to match, with a crease in the middle, as if they have just been unfolded. His hair has gone past white to yellow, though his eyebrows are a bright silver, as wiry and abundant as they have always been. A tube is attached to the cartilage between his nostrils but he is breathing through his mouth loudly. At the opening of his hospital gown I can see wires attached to his chest too, the healthy peach of the adhesives no more able to match his gray skin than his neighbor’s. His hands at the ends of the bruised arms lie on either side of him, healthier looking than the rest of him, both curled slightly but not closed, as if holding things: a tennis racquet, a drink.

There is nothing more familiar to me than those brown veined hands.

There are two chairs, one beside his head and the other beside his feet. Barbara points me to the one at his head. I sit without taking off my coat or scarf. Barbara removes hers and lays them on the other chair, straightens her blouse, and faces my father from the foot of the bed.

“It’s Daley, Gardiner.” She speaks loudly, almost angrily if you cannot see how hard she’s trying not to cry. “Your daughter’s come to see you.”

His eyes flash open. I don’t expect them. I feel my body flinch backwards. He scans the room with his yellow eyes, their color and shape and wariness unchanged by time or sickness, before settling on me. I smile as if for a camera. Friend or foe, those eyes seem to be asking.

“Hey there,” I say, my throat dry.

Friend, he decides. The wariness recedes slightly. And fear floods his face as he sees the machines behind me and realizes he is not in his bed at home.

“You’re going to be okay,” I say quietly.

His head moves back and forth slowly.

I touch the metal bar at the side of his bed. “Yes, you are.”

His head moves in quicker jerks. He lifts his arm with the tubes coming out. His first finger tries to separate from the others and touch the mattress.

“No, Dad, you’re not going down.”

His eyes widen, as if he’s surprised to be understood, and he nods.

“You’re going up. You’re going to pull out of this.”

He shuts his eyes. His hand twitches. And then he moans. “Ay ay ow.” Way way down. To hell, he means.

“No, Dad, you’re not going to hell.”

“Daley!” Barbara says.

My father grunts. His eyes stay shut. His mouth opens and he begins to snore.

“What on earth was that about?” She is not pleased.

“He can talk.”

“It’s just babble. He’s certainly not talking about hell, for God’s sake.” She is irritated, questioning already her decision to have had Hatch call me.

My head is pulled back to my father. I need to keep watching him. It feels unnatural to look at or listen to Barbara when he is in the room. I put my hands back on the metal railing and lean in. At the clink of my ring against the bar, his eyes open again right on me. My pulse quickens. I am scared, too.

“Hi, Dad.” It feels strange to say the word Dad again.

“Leh ma tehsumm.” Let me tell you something.

I bend down. “Tell me.”

I feel Barbara watching.

His face is a maze of thin lines in every direction. Drool spills down one side of his chin. His mouth closes then opens slowly. “Espays. Airna seva dray hee.” This place. They’re not serving drinks here. “Godagedashekango.” We gotta get the check and go.

“What’s he saying?”

“Gogehalmury.” Go get Hal Murry.

“Hal Murry?” I ask Barbara.

“What?”

“He wants me to go get Hal Murry. Is that his doctor?”

“God, no. Hal Murry. He wouldn’t have mentioned him.”

I wait for her to realize the improbability of me coming up with the name Hal Murry on my own.

“He’s the new manager at the Mainsail. Your father can’t stand him.”

“Is paysino goo.”

“Dad, this place is good for you right now. While you get better.”

He jerks his head. “Inahn goo shay.”

“You’re not in good shape now, but you will be. You’re on the upswing.” I’m not sure this is true. I have come, after all, to say goodbye. But he was supposed to be unconscious and dying. He doesn’t seem to be dying now.

“Na. Na. Dow.” He tries to point his finger again and winces.

“Gardiner, don’t try to move. Stay still.” Barbara turns toward the nurses’ station. “I’m going to go find somebody. He’s agitated again.”

He watches Barbara speaking and then, when she leaves, bunches his eyebrow hairs together. Who the hell is that? he is asking.

“Barbara,” I say quietly

“Wha she doo hee?”

“She’s your wife, Dad.”

“Ma wife? Ahm mar to Barba Bidgeta?”

“Shhh, Dad, she’ll hear you,” I say playfully, and his mouth curls up on one side.

“Is na posseb.”

Barbara comes back with a nurse who checks all his tubes and the machines they are attached to. There seem to be many liquids going in to him. One bag is sucked nearly empty. She produces a full one from her pocket and replaces it.

“You want to sit up a bit more, Mr. Amory?” she asks. She is a large woman, my age, with deep brown skin and a southwestern accent. Texas, maybe. How has she ended up here in this strange corner of the country?

“Uh-huh.”

She pushes a button on the side of the bed for a few seconds, and the bed goes up but my father sinks down. So she hoists him up easily and he hollers out, right in her ear.

“No screaming, you big baby,” she says. “You’re going to damage my eardrum and I’m going to have to sue your you-know-what.”

“I’ll sue you first,” my father says, but the nurse can’t understand him.

“That’s his favorite,” Barbara says when she leaves. “He’s very good with her. Gardiner, can you see this necklace I’m wearing?”

“Ya.”

“Do you remember giving it to me?”

“Na.”

“You gave it to me after you got out of the hospital the last time. Do you remember why?”

“Na.”

“Because you said I took such good care of you.”

My father nods, then looks at me hard. I know what he’s saying. I can hear him clear as a bell: Yeah, she took such good care of me, look where I am now, with tubes up my nose and out my ass.

I drove straight from Myrtle Street to Julie’s that night, with a torn rotator cuff and three sprained ribs. I washed down Tylenol with coffee and got there in thirty-six hours. She took me to the hospital and then back to her apartment. We can find some humor in it now — the wounded bird I was, my months on her couch, my tears in public places. And Michael, the unapproachable mountain bike man, tells it from his perspective, how he was just summoning the nerve to ask out the introverted professor (“one of my many, many misperceptions,” he’ll say) when suddenly below him there was talking and crying every night. He assumed her girlfriend had moved in, and it took us a while to correct this impression. I took a job leading tours through Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde and other sites of the Ancestral Puebloans. I walked through those villages built into the cliffs, trying to re-create for my audiences — groups of retirees, schoolchildren, and teachers — a sense of the real lives that were once lived there. I often overheard a pitying remark about how different life was for them, how basic their needs, how narrow their world. But the more I climbed through the carefully laid-out houses and imagined the families who once ate and slept in them, the more I felt how little the difference, how simple our real needs still are: food, water, shelter, kindness. I loved trying to make that world come back alive for people, especially for the kids, whose imaginations were still so open. When it was time for Michael to move in with Julie, I moved a block away. For four years my social life was Julie and Michael, just as Julie’s had once been me and Jonathan. Occasionally they asked someone else over for dinner, a colleague of theirs, but it never took, not for any of us. We had our rhythm. A new person always threw us off. Julie says that when she told me they were getting married, I looked like someone who was trying to be cheerful while my leg was being sawed off. I just couldn’t understand why they wanted to ruin a great relationship with marriage.

I used to sit at my computer and stare at Jonathan’s address online:

1129 Trowbridge Avenue

Philadelphia, PA 19104

There he was. He was there. He’d made it home again. I had his phone number, too, but when I thought of calling, all I could imagine was him straining to get off the phone. Julie wanted to invite him to the wedding but I couldn’t risk having to meet a girlfriend or a wife, see photos of a little baby. But then, without telling her, I put an invitation in the mail. I knew where she kept the RSVP cards people sent back; he never responded.

Julie and her father argued about the ceremony. Alex disapproved of the bridesmaids, the poetry, and homemade vows. He took a sudden interest in Orthodox rituals. He wanted her to circle the chuppah seven times and to enter it alone with her face fully covered. He wanted the rabbi to read the traditional wedding contract in Aramaic. She said it would take forty-five minutes and was nothing but a pre-nup, all about how many cows Michael would have to pay to divorce her. At least, Alex insisted, Michael would smash a glass as a warning against excessive joy. “I want excessive joy!” I heard her scream at him.

She got married in the small garden of the house she and Michael had just bought. The guests filled the seats outside as I helped her dress, slipping the satin buttons through their holes, threading flowers through her hair.

We stood side by side, me in a dark blue silk dress, she in white tulle.

“My dissertation was called ‘Women and Rites: The Misogyny of Custom,’” she said. “How can I explain this white dress to my students?”

“They’ll never have to know.”

Then she looked at me closely. “You look so beautiful, Daley.” She said this as if it were an important day for me, and not her.

I shook my head. “You’re the beautiful one. You are stunning, Jules.” And she was. She was glowing with excessive joy. But I still didn’t understand why she wanted to be married.

And then her father called up to us. It was time.

I didn’t see him right away. He was sitting behind the big hats of Julie’s aunts, and I was under a frilly chuppah. Alex was in front, beaming, teary, all the tension between them already forgotten. And then one aunt leaned over to say something to another, and there he was. My shock broke his nervous face into a wide grin, and that sun hit my face after years in the shade. I couldn’t help the tears. While her cousin read an Emily Dickinson poem, Julie squeezed my hand and whispered, “You see, there were many good reasons for me to get married.”

After the ceremony we met in the middle of the garden and held each other for a long time without a word, our bodies slotted together in the same way. Everything — his smell, his skin, his thudding heart, his breath on my neck — was what I knew, familiar as a season. So this is what happens to me next, I thought, and I finally understood what my mother had meant about falling in love. It was the surprise, the recognition that everything had been moving in this direction without your ever realizing it.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” I said.

He pulled out four invitations from his jacket pocket. “How could I not?”

Despite what I’d said, Julie had sent one anyway. And Michael had sent one before that. And so, it turned out, had Alex. All these people, looking out for me.

“I knew this would happen,” he said in my ear. I wanted his mouth to stay there, right there. There wasn’t anything else left in the world to want but this.

“What?”

He slipped his hand between us to rub his chest. “All these feelings.”

“You don’t sound so pleased.”

“You know I like a little more control over myself than this.”

I did know that. There were so many things I suddenly knew.

We got married in that spot in Julie and Michael’s garden a few years later. Jonathan’s mother and brothers, Garvey and Paul, were our only other guests. I never knew before that moment that you can feel love, like a slight wind, when it’s strong enough. You can do this, they all seemed to be saying. This is where you can put your love safely.

After I hung up with Hatch, I stood in the door of Jonathan’s study.

“My father is in the ICU.”

“What happened?”

“Stroke.”

He came and put his arms around me.

“They think he’s going to die.” I laid my cheek on his collarbone. I didn’t feel sad because my father was in the hospital. I felt sad for his entire life.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, after a while.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t go alone. I’d need you there.” This is what had happened to me in eleven years. I’d learned to need him, to lean on him, which is separate from love.

I could feel him taking that in. “Then I think we should go. All of us,” he said. “We’ll find a hotel with a pool. The kids will love it.”

“Really?” We were saving for a trip to visit his father’s relatives in Trinidad.

“We have to allow for emergencies.”

“I don’t know, Jon. I don’t know if I can do it.”

“He’s unconscious, right? You’ll be able to say whatever you need to say to him without rebuttal.”

“I’m not sure I have anything to say.”

“Then you can say goodbye. You didn’t get that chance with your mom.”

And he didn’t get it with his dad. “But it’s so complicated.”

“Of course it is.”

“I don’t think I’d regret not going.” I’d have to take personal days at work; the kids would miss school.

“But there’s a chance you will be glad you went, an outcome that has a far greater value than nonregret.”

“Said the philosopher.”

“I knew that PhD would come in handy someday.”

Neither of us ever became professors. I teach middle school social studies — ancient civilizations and world history. I like those grades, sixth through ninth, my students still open, willing to reveal their curiosity and imagination and humor to me, willing to allow me mine. Jonathan works part-time for his brother building houses, and writes fiction. He and Dan were nominated for, and lost, the same prize last year, but it’s his first novel that gets the most attention. I see paperback copies of it around school in the fall because a colleague of mine teaches it in the high school. It’s based on the year after he left the terrace on Myrtle Street and roamed the country in his truck, working when he needed cash, moving on when he’d made enough, his careful plans destroyed. He was as itinerant and broke as his father when he first came here from Trinidad, and his life was threatened more than once. It’s a hard book for me to read.

We decided to drive up to Massachusetts the next morning.

Barbara and I eat lunch in the cafeteria. She thanks me for coming. Her crumpled face crumples even more. “I know it means so much to him, Daley.”

“I’m not sure he has any idea who I am, but I’m glad I’m here.”

“He knows. He’s missed you.”

I don’t know that I believe her, but I’ve missed him too. We missed each other. We aimed and we missed.

In the afternoon my father dozes, loud and rattling. They are short naps, sometimes only a few minutes long. And then his eyes open. They move to the TV first, then to me and Barbara, then to the nurses’ station where all the action is, doctors picking up and dropping off paperwork, people tapping things into computers.

“Okay, then, you do that,” his favorite nurse says into the phone. My father imitates her without opening his mouth. He catches her inflection perfectly. He is like a parrot with its beak shut. Barbara takes out her needlepoint and urges me to read my book or get some magazines from the waiting area, but I don’t want distraction.

Visitors pass by on their way to see patients farther in, and again on their way out. They appear briefly, cross our six-foot stage from curtain to curtain, and are gone. A tall young woman in a cape and long black hair passes by. She looks a bit like Catherine did, years ago. My father’s head snaps toward me, eyes wide. I laugh. He tries to speak but it’s just a long croak, a hopeful croak, almost like he wants to say hello to her.

“I don’t think that was her. But it looked like her, didn’t it?”

He nods, still looking at the place she disappeared from.

“Who looked like who?” Barbara asks.

I decide not to answer.

He dozes off. Fifteen minutes later he wakes up and says, very clearly, that Chad Utley came to visit that morning.

“Oh, Gardiner, no, he didn’t,” Barbara says. “Chad Utley is dead.”

My father looks at me. “Deh?”

I shrug. I’m sorry to hear this. Mile High Mr. Utley. He was always kind to me. But I don’t think my father needs to be reminded of his death right now.

“We went to the funeral,” she says.

My father takes the news hard. He stares at his hands. They’re folded on his belly. Barbara and I are at cross-purposes. She needs him to meet her in the present, and I am happy for him to remain deep in the past.

His mouth slackens and he falls asleep again.

“You know, Daley,” Barbara says quietly, “your father lost a lot of friends by marrying me. They all sided with Ben against us. It was very unpleasant. We were alone. Totally alone. Hatch was about the only person who would visit. And Virginia Utley was the worst of them all. But when Chad died, your father was the first one over to her house that afternoon. And she has never stopped thanking him for it. I know you two have had your difficulties, but I don’t think you have any idea what a good man he is.”

I can see her assembling another vignette, so I ask about her needlepoint.

“It’s the ship your father and I took to France when we were first married. It was honestly the most romantic trip. We danced every night. They had a wonderful band.”

“What kind of music did they play?” I have to speak loudly. My father is making a racket in his sleep.

“Oh, all stuff before your time. Our song was ‘It’s Like Reaching for the Moon.’ They played it every night, the last song. Out on the deck. Beneath all the stars.”

“I don’t know it.”

“You don’t? It’s lovely.”

“How does it go?”

You never know, from someone’s speaking voice, if they will be able to sing or not. Barbara has never had a mellifluous way of talking, but she sings beautifully, surprisingly low and rich.

It’s like reaching for the moon,

It’s like reaching for the sun,

It’s like reaching for the stars—

Reaching for you.

At first she sings down to her needlepoint, but soon she lifts her face to me. I do not hide my pleasure from her. Then she looks at my father and she stops short. “Oh, sweetie, oh, sweetie, don’t do that.” She leaps up and goes to the other side of the bed to wipe the tears from my father’s face with her hand, but her own fall on them both. She holds my father’s hands. “That was our song, wasn’t it?”

My father nods. His face is red and wet.

“It’s strange,” I say to Jonathan that night in the hotel room. “They’ve had a life together. I always thought it was such a desperate act, but I think he grew to really love her. And she has many stories in which he’s the hero.”

“How was she to you?”

“Very kind, appreciative that I came.”

“I’m glad.”

We’re on the big bed in our hotel room. Lena and Jeremy are on the floor in front of the TV, hair wet from swimming, surfing the two hundred and eighty channels. I’ve got an eye on the screen, unsure what might flash on next.

Jonathan tips my face toward him with a finger, away from the TV. “It’s okay,” he says. My overprotectiveness is something we struggle with.

“My father is so entirely himself, that’s the weird thing. You can strip someone of so much, but he’s still there. Just the way his hands rest on the mattress.”

“It must be hard to see him like that.”

“I know it should be. But it feels so much safer with him in that bed. I never thought he could be felled.”

“I didn’t really either,” Jonathan says.

“Thank you,” I whisper, and kiss the hollow below his ear. “Thank you for being here with me.” I feel the defenselessness of my love for him, an utter vulnerability, all my guards down and gone.

It took me several years to agree to marriage. Julie listened to all my fears and said, “You seem to think that once you get married your love for each other is going to start draining out like it’s in a bucket with a leak, like you get this one tank of gas and can’t stop for more. You aren’t allowing for the possibility that love doesn’t always start dying, that it can actually grow.” I thought she was delusionally optimistic.

“You’re gooey,” Jonathan says. It’s Lena’s word for when she feels all floppy with affection.

“I am.”

“Stop hugging!” Jeremy says, his head popping up at the foot of the bed. And when we don’t move away from each other, he climbs up and tries to pry us apart. But he can’t budge us.

I have no memory of ever seeing my parents touch. I suppose it is a luxury, his aversion to our affection with each other. I hope someday he will see it differently.

Lena clicks on CNN. The primaries don’t start for four more months, but they’re playing clips of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigning in different parts of Iowa, as if the caucuses were next week. Jonathan and I look on, but we don’t have our usual argument about them.

“Is your father going to die?” Lena asks after we shut out the light and lie, all four of us, in the king-sized bed. They have no name for him. He is my father, but not their anything.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“Are we going to come with you to the hospital tomorrow?” Lena asks.

“Briefly. Daddy will bring you over mid-morning, and if your grandfather is stable you can say hello.”

“Hello and goodbye,” Jeremy says. Death hangs lightly on a six-year-old. Then he thinks more about this. “Do you like your dad?” It’s new to them, me having a dad. They’ve always known that my father lives in Massachusetts and that I haven’t seen him since long before they were born. But he was never real to them until now.

I don’t know how to explain it all to them. “Yes, I like my dad.” I try to think of why, because that’s what they’ll ask next. “He is so familiar to me.”

“Yeah, because he’s your dad,” Jeremy says.

“That’s right.”

But he wants more. “Why is Granny the only grandparent we see?”

“Because Daddy’s dad is dead,” Lena says. “Mom’s mom is dead, and Mom’s dad is dying. That’s why.”

“But he wasn’t always dying.”

I assumed that once I had children I would get in touch with my father. I thought it would feel important to me for them to know their grandfather. But in fact it was just the opposite. “Here come the little pickaninnies,” I could hear him say under his breath as we approached the house. It wasn’t just the possibility that they would overhear a racial slur, or see him drunk and raging. When I became a parent, even moments I had once thought of as tender went rancid: ridiculing Mr. Rogers, pummeling my stuffed animals at night. Once, when the kids were younger, our neighbor, Maya, who was eleven, came over to bake cookies with us. She had a rope bracelet around her wrist, the first hint of breasts beneath her T-shirt. I realized that she was the age I’d been when my parents divorced, and Lena was Elyse’s age. They were both just little girls. My throat squeezed shut and I had to rasp out my instructions. “Why are you talking so funny, Mommy?” Lena asked. Once the cookies were in the oven I went into the bathroom and pressed a washcloth to my face. I had been a little girl, too, with a rope bracelet and breast buds and a father who was reading us Penthouse at night.

The next morning my father is back in restraints. He has had a rough night, hollering and thrashing. A nurse is walking around in a neck brace, and I fear he’s responsible.

Barbara is nearly done with the sea in her square of needle-point. All she has left is the red hull of the ship. My father is sleeping. He has worn himself out.

A new nurse fiddles with a machine. She changes his IV, then pokes his finger for a drop of blood. He wakes up screaming.

“All right, drama king, settle down,” she says. “You want those restraints off?”

My father nods with pleading eyes.

“You gonna behave yourself?”

He nods again.

With routine dexterity she unfastens and removes the stiff bands of cloth. “You’re sort of smooshed down at the bottom.” She turns to us. “Wanna help me get him up?”

She and Barbara each take an armpit and I am told to push his feet. My father is alarmed.

“Na,” he says. “Na!”

“You have to help us now, Mr. Gardiner,” the nurse says. She pulls up the bottom of the covers to his knees. “Now, your daughter is going to have her hands right here on your feet and you are going to push with your legs.”

It is strange to be called a daughter. I put my hands on his bare feet. They are all bone, every toenail long and gray and bumpy. His calves are nearly as thin as Lena’s and the same shape, doubly familiar to me.

“Push. Push,” Barbara and the nurse say to him. “Push!”

As soon as his torso is lifted from the bed, he starts to wail. “Bacafumee,” he says. I don’t know what he means. “Bacafumee.” It’s the first time I can’t understand him.

“What’s he saying, Daley?” Barbara asks.

“Bacafumee!” His face is squinched and red.

We get him a few inches higher in the bed. He is covered in sweat. Be careful of me, he was saying. I think of his drunk mother staring at the wall. Isn’t that really all we’ve been saying to each other, generation after generation: Be careful of me? I am trying so hard to be careful with my children. I look at my father. He’s still whimpering a little. I’m sorry, I say silently. I’m sorry we couldn’t be more careful of each other.

Afterwards, he sleeps again. I try to read, pretend to read, but mostly I watch him. I find him as intriguing as a painting. His body tells me a long story that I have, in the past fifteen years, nearly forgotten.

My phone dings.

“They’re here,” I say to Barbara, after I read the text.

We meet them outside the double doors to the ICU. They’re putting on the antibacterial lotion, Jeremy smelling his palms and then his sister’s.

Jonathan puts out his hand to Barbara but she ignores it, steps right past and flings her arms around him, as if she’d never written in her last missive, after a conversation with Neal’s mother who’d seen us at Neal and Anne’s wedding, that I didn’t need to date a black man to get my father’s attention. That time I did write back and never heard from her again.

“Thank you so much,” she whispers. I watch his arms go around her soft pink sweater. Somehow she understands that without Jonathan I would not be here, and she is grateful for his forgiveness. She bends down to greet the kids. They don’t know what to make of this hobbit face and the tears that slip along the wrinkles in her cheeks. “You two have come a long way. They have yummy pies in the cafeteria. Do you have a favorite kind of pie?”

They look up at me to answer.

I put my hand on Lena’s head. “Strawberry rhubarb or pecan,” I say, then move to Jeremy, “and blueberry.”

“Or apple. Or cherry in a pinch,” he adds. He is wearing a baseball cap backwards. In a pinch. My eyes fill.

Barbara smiles for the first time. “I think they have nearly all of those.” She looks at me and Jonathan. “May I take them down there while you two go in first?”

I’m not expecting this. I’m not ready to trust her with my children. My mind spins for an excuse. But before I have one, Jonathan says, “Sure,” and the kids bounce with pleasure. Pie at ten in the morning!

Jonathan and I go through the ICU doors alone. The man in the first cubicle raises his eyes briefly at Jonathan, thinking for a moment he has a visitor. Jonathan catches this and lifts up his hand to the man.

My father’s eyes are open. He looks at my husband for the first time.

“Good morning,” Jonathan says. Like our children, he has no name for my father. There is a guardedness to his face, a thin shield only I can see. He’s had his own tortured relationship with this man. He’s wrestled with him through me, with the wraith of my father that’s still inside me.

My father nods, makes a small sound, does not take his eyes off of Jonathan. He doesn’t appear scared, as he did when he was being lifted earlier, and he doesn’t appear angry or surprised. If anything, it’s a childlike curiosity I see in my father’s eyes. What’s going to happen next? he seems to be saying. And he seems to think Jonathan has the answer.

“Dad, this is my husband, Jonathan.”

Without looking at me my father nods. I know that, is what he means. His right arm twitches. “Ow do?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” Jonathan says. “How are you feeling today?”

“Ahm in pre gu shay.” I’m in pretty good shape. “Pre gu shay.”

“That’s good. You’ll be out of here soon, then.”

My father looks slightly to either side of Jonathan, seeing where he is. “Oh,” he says. “Ya.”

“They treating you well?”

“Oh, sur. Isa gu play.”

Jonathan takes something out of his coat pocket. “I wasn’t sure if I would be able to see you, so I got this just in case.” It is a card, a greeting card. On the front are puppies sleeping in a basket. Jonathan holds it up so my father can see it. I have no idea where this card came from.

My father makes a soft moan of pleasure.

“‘If you get lots of rest,’” Jonathan reads, then opens the card. From a microchip in the paper comes the sound of many puppies yelping. “‘You’ll be howling good in no time!’”

My father loves this. For the first time I see him lift both his bruised arms. He takes the card in his hand and shuts it and opens it for the barking and shuts it and opens it again. He looks up at Jonathan. “Ah lie tha,” he says.

“I’m glad.”

He points to Jonathan. “Av doe?”

“No dogs,” Jonathan says. This is because of me. “Two kids, but no dogs.”

“Ki? Wa they?”

“They’re eating pie with Barbara,” I say.

He looked confused. “Who Barbra?”

“Barbara Bridgeton. Your wife.”

“Ma wie!” He says and he laughs and then winces and grabs his stomach and then laughs again. He points at me. “Daley’s funny,” he says, clear as a bell.

The sound of my name startles me, shatters my illusion that I have been a generic figure, an everydaughter, in the room. And then, before I can respond, he is asleep with his mouth open, making his gagging sound.

Jonathan takes my hand and pulls me closer. We’ve been standing unnecessarily apart from each other. We laugh about it without saying a word.

A cart rattles by outside the cubicle. My father doesn’t wake up. We sit in the chairs.

“Every time he falls asleep,” I say quietly, “I worry that my reprieve is over, that he’ll wake up and remember he hates me.”

Then I hear the kids in the corridor, their small steps, their attempts at whispering.

Barbara pulls back the curtain. “They told me I could sneak them in, just for a few minutes, since he’s been so calm today. I’ve got to go down to the pharmacy in the basement anyway. These children are so polite.” She smiles at them. Would she have said that if they were white? “See you in a little bit.” She closes the curtain, closes us in with my father.

My father’s eyes open and my heart races. What if now is the moment he remembers everything? What if now, with my two children right here, is the moment his memory returns and he hollers, What the fuck are you people doing here? I wish the restraints were still on him.

He makes a small noise, not unhappy. Lena waves to him. He makes another sound, more high-pitched and affectionate. Hello there, he’s saying, not fake but real, a sound he might use on the dogs when he came home in the evening and they bounded around him at the door.

I gently urge the kids forward a few feet. I keep close behind them. Jonathan stays at the foot of the bed, equally vigilant. I don’t know if my father remembers meeting him, fifteen minutes ago. “This is Lena, and this is Jeremy, Dad. Our children.”

He stares at Lena hard. She has her hair pulled back in a polka-dot cloth headband. She looks a little like my mother in her kerchief. She has my narrow face but Jonathan’s smile. She is making eye contact. Then his head swivels quick as an owl’s to Jeremy, who leans back heavy against me. He’s wearing a Sixers T-shirt and my father says something about it that I can’t understand, but when I ask him to say it again he shakes his head. He tries to lift his hand but it doesn’t move very far. He looks back up at them apologetically.

Lena reaches down and touches his fingers. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Jeremy repeats.

“Ni to mit too,” my father manages. His eyes move from one to the other.

If my father notices the color of their skin — Lena’s a milky fawn, Jeremy’s a more concentrated brown — he doesn’t let on. He feels around for the card Jonathan has given him. It takes him a little bit but he grasps it and holds up the photo of the puppies in a basket.

“Ooooh,” my children coo at the same time.

My father nods happily. And then he opens the card and Lena and Jeremy burst out laughing at the sound.

One side of my father’s mouth flinches up high. He breathes heavily through his nose.

“Oo itl ragal.” Two little rascals.

He is looking at my children.

“Did he say something about The Little Rascals?” Jonathan whispers as I walk with them to the lobby.

I laugh. I feel light. “Not the show. He just meant they were two little cutie-pies.”

“He isn’t mean, Mom,” Jeremy says. “Why have we never seen him before?”

Both my children watch me carefully. Was I wrong to have withheld him from them? Perhaps my father would have loved them, perhaps he would have been kind and generous with them. I could see him on the court with them, showing them how to hit a backhand. I could see them easily imitating his grace.

I don’t know what to tell them. I want to be fair: to him, to them, to myself.

“Some people you just have to love from afar,” Jonathan says.

I kiss them goodbye in the lobby. They are going to Ashing for lunch. In Lena’s pocket is a map I drew this morning of the town, of Myrtle Street, Water Street, Ruby Beach, the sub shop, and the penny candy store. Lighthouse Books no longer exists. It is a cell phone store now, Neal told me in his last email. Jonathan will show them the front terrace on Myrtle Street, where he stood asking me to come with him to California. They know this story. They love to hear it, love the thrill of thinking about how we almost didn’t become a family. I can listen to Jonathan tell it, the way he exaggerates the size of the house, the barking of the dogs, and the leashes in my hand, and laugh. But when I am alone I can remember the years of pain, the hollowness of my life after that moment, and it aches for a while, as if that time never ended, as if it never turned into a funny story that we tell our children.

I get a sandwich in the cafeteria and go back up to the ICU. The woman next door is wheeled away to a different wing. She is sitting up, holding a jar of flowers. Her two sons, old men themselves, walk on either side of her gurney. My father sleeps, loudly, mouth open, ropes of white spit shaking and breaking and forming again after a swallow. Barbara leaves to run some errands, and I am alone with him for the first time. I watch him as if he were an event of some kind. The lines on his face have dug deep: laugh lines, scowl lines, squinting lines. On his forehead they are perfectly horizontal and vertical, etched in squares, a tennis net across his brow. His hands twitch in his dreams. They are surprisingly smooth, not creased and buckled like his face, the veins raised, more green than purple, the most pronounced where they cross the bone in the middle, the pencil lead still blue beneath the skin of his knuckle.

A beeping comes from one of the machines and his favorite nurse comes in. She lasers his wristband, checks his IV, punches a button to stop the beeping. He looks up at her with devotion.

“Are you thirsty, Mr. Amory?”

He nods and she opens a drawer and peels the plastic wrapper off something that looks like a lollipop, swabs his mouth with it, and tosses it into the trash. It is a small moist sponge. He looks at her gratefully.

“They’re right here.” She pats the drawer. “You can do that anytime for him.”

She flicks a switch on the side of his bed, and his head comes up almost to sitting. She opens another drawer and pulls out two small pillows which she slips under each of his arms. He looks much more comfortable than he’s looked all day. I thank her. I’m not sure she hears me.

“Pretty green eyes,” she says to me on her way out. “Just like your dad’s.”

I wait for him to drift to sleep but he doesn’t. He is more upright now than I’ve seen him, his arms resting on the pillows as if he held a drink in one and a cigarette in the other, as if he were lying on a chaise by the pool thinking about a dip and saying, “I wonder what the poor people are doing today.” He stares straight ahead, puffing up his cheeks, then blowing out the air, watching his nurse through the opening key a report into a computer and laugh at something a doctor behind her is saying. Did my father ever have a conscience? Did he ever wake up in the dark and think: I have treated some people badly; I have been selfish; I have caused pain? Or did he truly never develop to that extent? Was he only ever capable of feeling his own needs, his own pain? Was there any way to have had a good relationship with him?

He turns to me and groans. “Ow,” he says. “Ow ow.” He points to his stomach. “Desomfinfissdowdere.” There’s something fishy down there.

“There is, Dad. It’s a catheter.”

“Ow!” he says, more loudly, and puts his hands down in the covers. He lets out a terrible wail.

“Don’t touch it, Dad. It needs to be there.”

He brings his hands out but he glares at me. He balls his fists together and spits out something. “Sick of it,” I think he says. “Sick of it,” he says again.

“I know it’s uncomfortable, Dad.”

He glares. No, you don’t; you don’t know the half of it, he is saying to me.

There he is. There is the man I know. “Try to relax. Let’s think of pleasant things.” I wonder what would be pleasant to him now, apart from a martini. “Let’s imagine you’re back at home on a summer day.”

He glowers. He starts muttering so fast I can’t understand him. He is pissed. He is yelling at everyone, but he can’t get his voice to go much above a whisper. I can make out a few swears, but not much more. He is looking down at his own fists. I feel how distant I am from all his emotion now, how little any of it is connected to me. I’m glad my kids aren’t here to hear him.

“Go to sleep, Dad,” I say finally. “You need rest.”

He turns and notices me again. There are tears leaking out of his eyes. I get up and wipe them, then open the drawer with the sponge lollipops. I peel off a wrapper and put it on his tongue. He closes his mouth around it and sighs. When he opens again, I pull it out, put it in the trash, and sit down in my chair beside him.

His hand knocks against the metal bar. “Wiya ju ho ma ha?”

I put my hand over the bar and onto his. It is cold. I squeeze and he squeezes back. I keep my hand in his for the rest of the afternoon.

That night, around three in the morning, I wake up crying. I cry on my stomach, the tears spreading on the bottom hotel sheet. I shake the bed, but no one wakes up.

Barbara calls at six. They’ve discovered a large clot in his lungs. They won’t let her in to see him.

“We’re coming over,” I tell her, and we hurry to dress.

We meet in the cafeteria. I let the kids have pie with their breakfast. Barbara insists on paying. Her hands shake as she tries to pick out the change from her wallet.

We take a table in the far corner. And then Lena and Jeremy gasp. I look up to see what gruesome bombing in Iraq or Afghanistan they have seen on one of the screens hanging from the ceiling, but they are not looking at the televisions. They are looking at a man in the middle of the cafeteria smooshing his face with his hands for their benefit. They are looking at their Uncle Garvey.

They run across the room and leap on him, hike up him like a tree, and he pretends to try and swing them off. They are still hanging from his back as he hugs Barbara, who is crying, and then Jonathan, and then me, also crying. He smells like his van: chicken and cigarettes.

“They won’t let me in to see him,” he says.

“They’re intubating him,” I say.

“Jesus. What does that mean?”

“There’s not enough oxygen in his blood because of a clot, and they have to put in a breathing tube and then try to get his blood to thin.”

Garvey nods, breathing in. He is nervous. He thought he’d see Dad this morning. Now he has to wait. Now it might be too late.

“How are you holding up?” he says to Barbara.

“Having all you kids here is the silver lining.” Her voice breaks. I think about that Thanksgiving, about how she’d held a family together for nearly forty years and then broke it for my father. Family is important to her. And we are my father’s family.

“Let’s go get you some pie,” I say, steering him back toward the food.

“Someone’s lost her fiery roar,” he says, once we are out of earshot. He has gotten his fair share of cards, too.

“I know.”

“What’s going on with Dad? Is he going to croak before we can get another good swipe at each other?”

“I don’t know. It seemed like he was doing better. He was alert and talking.”

“How’d that go?”

“Good. He’s sort of circa 1980, so that makes things easier between us.”

“You’re kidding.”

“He thinks I’m joking when I tell him he’s married to Barbara Bridgeton.”

Garvey laughs.

“Hatch told me he was unconscious, and then I get here and he opens his eyes and starts talking to me. Sometimes they have to strap him down because he’s taken out a few nurses. They’re all walking around with neck braces and bandages.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“It’s a little trippy.” It feels so good that Garvey is here and I can exaggerate everything.

“Is he about to die? Is the doctor going to come find us and pat our backs and tell us they did all they could?”

“I don’t know.”

My father dying still doesn’t seem possible to me. It never has. Seeing him in a hospital bed seems like a violation of natural law. And now, with Garvey here, he’s turned back into a caricature, fodder for jokes, not someone who is our father and is about to die. We don’t know how to be serious about that.

Garvey looks toward the parking lot. “I don’t really want to be here for that.”

We pay and head back toward the table. “Kids look good,” he says. “Lena’s shot up three feet. They’re not mad you dragged them up here for the macabre deathbed scene?” He throws his head back, raises and tightens all the tendons in his neck, and rattles quietly, so Barbara can’t hear, “Don’t let them take me! He’s not exactly going to go gently, is he? Jeremy looks darker than he did last Christmas. He got some serious African genes, didn’t he? Very Masai. Lucky bastard. Shit. No sickly pouffy-haired portraits of him by a fucking fountain looking like Lord Fauntleroy.”

“How’s Baby D?” Lena asks when we reach them.

Baby D is my namesake. Garvey pulls out a new photo. She’s a very large two-year-old and Garvey likes to take Paul Bunyan-like photos of her. In this one she is lifting up the back end of one of his moving vans.

“How does she do that?” Jeremy asks.

“She’s a strong little girl,” he says, and winks at Lena.

“We have a giganormous TV in our hotel room!” Jeremy says.

“Cable?”

“Two hundred and eighty-six channels!”

“They don’t get much TV at home,” I explain to Barbara. “So it’s a big deal.”

She nods but she’s not listening to us.

“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 player, 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.