They May Not Mean To, But They Do

57

In the baking, desiccated air of September, Duncan sat up. He demanded to see all his children just once more before he died.

“Die? You just woke up. Slow down, Dad.” Freddie was so happy she felt almost sick. She had not expected to hear her father’s deep, smooth voice ever again.

The doctors were stunned. He’s a tough nut, they kept saying. A tough nut.

“Do this for me so I can die in peace.”

Freddie had already called her sisters, still encamped in Duncan’s room at Green Garden, and they were on their way.

“They’re coming, Dad. Laurel and Pamela are coming from Green Garden.”

“The traffic,” he muttered, looking at the clock on the wall. “I could be gone before they get here.”

As for her brothers, the best Freddie could do was FaceTime them.

Duncan sat up in his hospital bed when they all assembled. He stretched out one pallid skinny arm, tubes dangling from it.

“‘Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones.’”

Someone, one of the brothers on FaceTime, muttered, “This really cannot be happening.”

“‘Had I your tongues and eyes,’” Duncan continued, his voice low now, “‘I’d use them so that heaven’s vaults should crack.’”

“It’s his last performance,” Pamela whispered. Laurel nodded, eyes wide.

“‘A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!’” Duncan roared.

It was a disjointed piece of theater, he spoke only Lear’s lines, but it was moving nonetheless. Freddie was tempted to fill in the missing dialogue, but stopped herself. She saw that this was her father’s show, and a show it was, Duncan’s voice rising and falling with emotion, his arms flung out, then pulled back to his heaving chest.

“‘No, no, no life!’” he cried, turning first to Pamela, then Laurel, to each son’s face, one on Freddie’s phone screen, one on Molly’s. At last he turned to Freddie herself. “‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all?’”

“I’m breathing, Daddy,” she reassured him softly.

But suddenly, it appeared, Daddy was not breathing. He dropped back on his pillows, his mouth agape, his arms hanging from either side of the bed.

There was a hush.

Then Lear opened an eye.

Lauren gasped. “He’s not dead.”

“Rotten trick, Dad,” said Gordon’s FaceTime voice. “You scared the living daylights out of us.”

Duncan, though pale, trembling, and clearly exhausted, smiled through the fatigue, sat up, and bowed from the waist, first to the left side of the room, then the right, then straight ahead.

Freddie began to clap. What else was there to do? It had been a brilliant performance.