And then, suddenly, tables turned, she would understand, she would empathize, and they would embrace, talk about how foolish they had been and figure out how to be close again.
It would be an understatement to say that her reaction was not precisely what he had anticipated.
Life Without Father
Life without father began some few weeks before he actually died, at the moment when he started encasing his head in orange plastic mesh held shut with twine. He did this because, so he claimed, it helped him. Helped him what or how, Elise never knew. It was, her father proclaimed that first day from within the mesh, the beginning of the most lucid period of his life. Yet whatever it was helping or helping with, it apparently didn’t help for long, for soon her father had replaced the mesh with a bag made of wire netting cut from a window screen. He threaded it closed around his neck, the screen’s raw stubble leaving a red band along his clavicle. Correction, the father stated. The orange plastic mesh had helped but not helped enough. The wire screen was in fact the real beginning of the only truly lucid period of his thought. He had not felt so good since before the mother had left, he told Elise, and probably not even then.
Elise wondered what, if anything, she should do. Early on, she suggested to her father that he should remove the netting from around his head, a suggestion that made him distraught. No, he said, didn’t she see? It was a great help to him. She tried to see, and though she could not understand why, she began to hope that, yes, it did seem to help him, maybe, somehow. Her father had not been exactly himself since the mother’s disappearance. He had been, at best, approximately himself and, at worst, not himself at all. With the wire encasing his head he was not exactly himself, either, but he was closer, and more stable in whatever he now was. So she decided that, yes, she was willing to go along with it. In any case, she apparently had no choice.
Yet, correction. This period too ground to a stop, the father’s stability wearing away again, to be followed by the last and shortest stage: a long weekend that was for her the worst to remember, involving a plastic shopping bag. He held the bag gathered at his neck, the force of his breathing making it swell and collapse around his features until it was he who collapsed. While he lay there, Elise loosened the bag enough to let a little fresh air in. He was, he told her each time he came conscious, finally truly lucid, this time he was certain. His voice, bag-muffled, buzzed against the plastic. Soon he was staggering about again, holding the bag tight and closed at his throat. When he fell again, Elise was again there to save him.
During the course of the single long weekend, she loosened the bag around his head eighty-four times. She kept track, even after she grew tired. At one point when she thought she might lose count, she opened her fifth-grade math book and kept track inside its back cover with a series of hash marks. She made four straight vertical marks and one diagonal mark through them and then moved slightly down the page. When not making marks, she was waiting patiently for her father to collapse again. When she closed her eyes to rest, all she could see was the bag swelling and deflating, her father’s features coming clear an instant then wavering away. When she opened her eyes, all she could see was her father lying on the floor, motionless save for his hands, which slowly curled or tightened as she loosened the bag. Until finally she closed her eyes and saw the bag swell and deflate in her head, and by the time she opened her eyes again, her father was dead.
It took her some while to realize her father was dead. Indeed, just as before, she loosened the bag until she could see his square chin, the gash of his lips, the blunt tip of his nose. She got up and made another hash mark in her math book, and then she closed her eyes and slept again. When she woke up, he was still lying there where she had left him, bag still loose, so she closed her eyes and slept further. She could not remember there being a moment when she realized he was dead: when she had gone back to sleep, she didn’t know, but when she awoke again, she knew already, there was no shock to it — in her sleep she had figured it out.
She wondered if she should erase the last hash mark in the math book, but in the end let it stand. Then she tallied them up by fives and came up with eighty and then added the last four strokes onto that. She had saved her father eighty-four times; how could she be blamed for failing on the eighty-fifth?
He was still lying there. All she could see of him were his hands, his chin, his lips, his nose, his clothes. She was not sure if clothes should count as part of someone. She wondered if she should take the bag off his head, and then decided no: on TV, they would leave it on until the police arrived. I will go back to sleep, she thought, and then I will call the police.
When she woke up, flies were turning circles on her father’s face. The color of the face had started to turn, the skin lying differently on what she could see of his chin and lower face. The lips seemed stretched, and had drawn back to reveal the tips of his teeth. A fly slid in and out of his mouth.
She went to get the telephone from the kitchen, brought it back with her so she could keep an eye on her father as she dialed 911.
“What’s your emergency?” asked a woman’s voice.
Emergency? she thought. It wasn’t exactly an emergency, since her father was already dead; there was nothing they could do except come get him.
“My father,” she started to say, and then stopped, not knowing what to say next.
The line stayed silent for a moment, then: “What about your father?” the woman asked, her voice slightly queer. “What has he been doing to you?”
Doing to me? No, thought Elise, she doesn’t understand.
“Darling,” said the woman’s voice. “Don’t be afraid to tell me.”
“I’m sorry, I have to go now,” said Elise, and hung up the telephone.
The police came anyway, two officers who rang the doorbell and then stood on the porch, looking bored. She watched them through the peephole. One had a thin mustache and had lost most of his hair. The other was behind him and harder to see. She waited as they rang again and then knocked. It wasn’t until the mustached one started talking into the transmitter affixed to the shoulder of his jacket that she opened the door a little.
The mustached one kept talking and listening to his shoulder, turning away from her slightly to look at the doorframe. Then the one behind came forward and she saw he had a mustache too.
“Hello,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Elise,” she said, watching him from around the edge of the door.
“Are your parents here?”
Elise thought about that a moment. “Sort of,” she finally said.
“Sort of?” said the officer. “What do you mean?”
The problem, Elise realized, staring at him, was knowing what to say. You could say what you thought was right, what would make sense to you, and nobody else really understood it. It was as if they were living in a different world than you, or as if you were speaking under water.
The policeman was still standing, waiting.
“Would you like to come in?” asked Elise.
She pulled the door wide. He took a step forward, smiling, and then through the doorway he caught a glimpse of her father lying on the floor. He stopped smiling and his hand felt back behind him, searching for his partner.
The two officers in uniform made her sit on the couch and stay there. Other people, not wearing uniforms, came and took pictures. She waited patiently, her feet crossed at the ankles. At one point a man wearing a brown jacket approached her, sat in the armchair across from her.