Nightwork: Stories

AN UNSEEN HAND PASSED OVER THEIR BODIES

My son is coughing in his sleep next to me in my bed, where he has come to spend what is left of this night. My son’s cough is red, noisy, and loose, a clattering wagon on its jagged way down, with me all ears to the racheting sound of my child-self in the bed next to Dad, who is tossing and threatening. “Stop coughing,” Dad says. “You’ll wake the dead.” Bat flap and smoke in the dark of his voice make me hold back this need, hold back from Dad, whose fleshy skull clenches every raw cough I cough. I want to be still. I fix on the chafed, pitted folds at his neck with a promise to sleep, as if my quiet could ease and uncoil this turned-away man, but I can’t and it’s out, rude air through the pipes, a dry sound full of rust. Dad says, “I’m too old for this.” He says, “Oblige me,” and I watch the words turn in this room he calls his own. Dad’s porch, sleeping headquarters, off-limits. How did I get here, close enough to smell him? That’s what I want to know: How did I?

Rolled, damp toweling — the kind Dad sometimes swipes at me — he smells like that. He smells like shaving water, where he floats his brush and lets me blow apart the suds before he snaps a towel, says, “Out. That’s enough; go get dressed.” I only pretend to leave. He never shuts the door all the way, and I want to see, and I can, if I am careful, if I am clever. From where I am hiding, just outside the bathroom door, I can see him. I can see him oiling his back under the sunlamp. It makes me feel lazy just watching him: the way my father massages himself and rolls his shoulders in this heat. So much heat, so much white in wild refraction off the swivel mirror; I see he has to squint to see the parts of himself in the magnified side, where the black eye, lashless and fast, his eye, finds me.

I am almost sure of this — that my father only pretends I am not there.

Like he pretends in his bed this dopey snooze; says, “I give up”; says, “Let me just shut my eyes.”

Am I not the woman he cannot keep out?

I want to wake him still.

I want to shrill in his ear: “Look, you!”

But the thought of him makes me close my eyes, try to sleep, a girl.

I hold to the edge of my bed and watch him sleep. I don’t move. I let my son take up all the room he wants, knowing he will slip away before I am even awake, and even after I have been so quiet, so good.