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.