There were no dirty dishes to speak of, just a mottled layer of crumbs, dust bunnies, and paint-crusted fingerprints that looked like they had been there since before the Internet existed.
He opened a random drawer and found some paintings stuffed inside, small canvases stacked like books, dreary irregularly shaped blobs of black and gray that grimaced up at him, daring him to keep looking.
His father’s work had always been dark—in composition and theme—an early trademark among the proto-flower children of his generation who painted in beautiful colors and optimistic brushstrokes. But these little pictures were lifeless fields of gray and black with a red striation running through them, like veins just under the surface. They weren’t classic. They weren’t modern. When he thought about it, he realized that they probably weren’t even sane. Then again, what else could you expect from a man who kept chunks of lawn in the fridge and torched himself on a Thursday evening?
He looked around and wondered what had happened to the man he had left. The brilliant Jacob Coleridge had been reduced to leaving himself notes and painting mindless blobs of madness. Of all the things he had expected of his father, meaninglessness had never even been considered. Jake dropped the canvas back into the drawer and pushed it shut with his knee.
It was amazing how things could just turn to shit. Thirty-three years of misery had lived here. The house stunk of it. Maybe the best thing he could do would be to light up one of the newspapers, lob it into the living room, and close the door, leaving it to the fire. Let the whole place disappear from memory. Maybe that’s what the old man had been trying to do himself. Maybe he had finally had enough of his own company.
“Stop it,” he said aloud, and with the sound of his own voice came the realization that he was doing exactly what he had promised he wouldn’t—feel sorry for himself. He left the kitchen and crossed a hardwood floor littered with dozens of small Persian area rugs, overlapped at weird transepts like foreign postage stamps on a package.
He went to the big sliding doors that opened up to the ocean, and stood there, his hands in his pockets, his mind trying to be somewhere else. Anywhere else but here, in this home, in this place he swore he would never come back to. He watched the water and took control of his breathing. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of Marlboros, and fired one to life with the sterling Zippo that Kay had given him.
He took in a lungful of smoke and focused on the ocean out beyond the beach. Staring at the water, he remembered the hurricane that was on the way. Another Cape Verde. The town was already preparing for it; he had seen the signs as he drove through on the way to the house—shutters going up, cars being loaded, bottles of water and flashlight batteries being horded by the crate. The grinning orange face of the CNN anchorwoman on the screen of the silent hospital-room television had held a little extra twinkle of malice in it when she had pointed to the massive swirling eye of the beast on the satellite images. It was a big one, bearing down on New England with an ETA of a little over fifty hours. Plenty of time for him to cross the Ts and dot the Is on whatever forms the hospital needed and still get the fuck out of Dodge. He focused on the horizon, trying to see past the clear sunlit day to the approaching storm, but all he saw was the static blue sky of a Winslow Homer watercolor. But bad things were on the way. Something about coming home made it necessary. Good old-fashioned luck, it seemed.
Jake finished his cigarette, dropped it to the floor, crushed it into the carpet with the heel of his boot, and turned away from the photorealistic painting of the Atlantic to the scratched negative of the house. He took his iPhone out of his pocket, dialed without really looking at the screen, and dropped into the thick leather sofa in a cloud of dust.
Three…four…five rings. He checked his watch. Jeremy would be with the sitter and Kay would be at practice, her phone turned off and—
“Kay River,” she answered, the distant caw of the orchestra resonating thinly in the background.
“Hey, baby, it’s me. I just wanted to hear that you and Jeremy were doing all right.”
“We’re good. Don’t worry about us. How’s your dad?”
Jake thought back to the sedated man he had seen at the hospital an hour ago. The white points of mucus in the corners of his eyes. The labored breathing. His hands, melted off and swathed in bandages. “Older would be the appropriate response.” He focused on the waves beyond the pool, hitting the beach, the music accompanying Mother Nature nicely. “Campioni?” he asked, trying to place the arrangement.
Kay laughed. “Good guess. Luchesi.”
“Sorry. I try.”
“I didn’t marry you for your ear.”
“I know.” An image of Kay flowered in his head, her freckles and smile swirling into a mental hologram.
“Are you at the hospital?”
“Finished an hour ago and just got to my dad’s place. It’s a mess. Don’t know if I can stay here.” His eyes crawled over the room, taking in the details. With the garbage and art it looked like a ransacked tomb in the Valley of the Kings, minus a sarcophagus. “Or want to.”
“You can. And should. This is what you need, even if you don’t know it, Mr. Know-it-all.”
Why was it she always knew how to make him feel better about the demons? All he said was, “Okay.”
“Look, I have one more rehearsal tomorrow that wraps up early. Jeremy and I could catch the bus out there. I can spare a few days. I don’t want you going through this by yourself.”
His eyes left the bright moving canvas of the beach beyond the window and found the broad porcelain ashtray with the hastily repaired chunk. That had happened what? Thirty-one years ago now. His hand unconsciously went to the base of his skull and he felt the lump of scar tissue, the one that still lit up if he stared at bright lights too long or got stuck in traffic.
“—ake? Are you there? Jake? Are you—”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I guess I’m more tired than I thought. I’m going to grab a nap, maybe get some food.”
“That sounds like a good idea. Eat some protein. Sardines and cream cheese on multigrain, okay?”
He smiled, and it was a welcome change from the grimace welded to his skull since the hospital had called. “Thanks, babe. I miss you already.”
“I miss you, too. Call if you’re feeling lonely, even if it’s two in the morning. Deal?”
“Deal. Bye, baby.”
He dropped the phone to the littered surface of the coffee table. Motes of dust sprouted, and Jake realized that if Miss Havisham had been a booze hound, she would have hit it off with his old man. As long as she was good at hiding under beds and locking doors when the wolfing hour took hold of her man.
He went up the center-strung staircase and as he climbed higher, he saw garbage strewn over the top of every piece of furniture in the main room, from empty soup cans and unread copies of Awake! magazine to the more esoteric stripped Barbie doll and an old oil filter. At the top of the stairs he paused, surveying a house that had looked so much larger when he was last here.
The light coming in through the big rectangles of glass that opened onto the Atlantic washed away a lot of sins, blanching dust and debris with a broad stroke of blue-white that made him squint. The Persian carpets, overlaid and crosshatched waffles of color, were plastered over with scraps of life like the rest of the house. Jake saw the charred footsteps his father had left in his Alzheimer’s dance, the winning combination in a Twister game for pyromaniacs, over by the sheet of plywood that replaced the one big pane. Jake unconsciously read their pattern, starting just left of the fireplace, sambaing a good four in front of the piano, then turning quickly right for five steps in a foxtrot, finally lurching left again, spinning in place for the finale, and crashing through the glass and out onto the deck where he had run for the pool, flopping in the sludge like a sick fish. With all the booze in his blood, it was a wonder he hadn’t simply detonated, sending the house up in one white-hot mushroom cloud.