Driver's Education (21 page)

As I push through the house's old, crowded back hallways, the passages connecting the kitchen to Finn's old room, I become overconscious of my left hand, which is trembling at twice the speed of my right. I slip it into the pocket of my khakis and grip my left thigh in some attempt
to stop the tremors. I tighten my fingers around the flesh until my nails push through the cotton and leave crescent-shaped incisions in my quads. I say,
Funny, Dad. Really, really funny. Come out now. Come out, we're going to miss it.

When the wind from the bay sends the front door swinging on its hinges, colliding with a cheap ceramic vase, I jump. I lose my footing and knock my forehead against an empty bookshelf. I place a hand on reddening flesh, feeling the early stages of the bruise that will sprout along its surface. At the end of the hallway is the open door, the door he's opened, framing Vallejo Street and a cerulean Pacific sky and the places, the so many fucking places for my father to lose himself.

My palms begin to moisten and I say, “Shit.”

I lost Finn once, too, when he was four years old at a beach in Santa Monica. He was ten yards from me, building sand castles—a speck of white against the blue. I turned away for ten seconds, it couldn't have been any longer, so I could slather sunscreen on the backs of my knees—and I lost him. Too terrified for tears, I leapt and tripped over a hundred angry sunbathers, screaming his name at a volume that never seemed loud enough. Ten minutes later, a lifeguard discovered him—happy, laughing, oblivious—near the snack stand.

Now, standing in the driveway, shielding my eyes from the tempered San Franciscan sun, I realize, too quickly, how similar losing a father and losing a son can feel. There's the same gripping of the stomach, the familiar weakening of the knees. The cramping of the toes into slipknots. That peculiar emotional proportion: four parts panicked dread to one part humiliation. The knowledge that—despite myself—I won't be able to stop shouting his name until I find him, though each time I hear my voice echo off the surrounding homes, I'll wince. I'll be hyperaware of other people spying on me through their half-cracked windows. I'll hear the faint traces of their judgments—the way they scold me, to one another.
What a father,
they'll say.
What a son.

I start walking west down Vallejo, but then, rethinking the decision, I turn east, then west, then east again. How could he have possibly gone so far with his walker? Had he developed some warp-speed option that
he's been hiding from me? Some switch I've yet to find, yet to flip? The times I need him to move quickly—when we're late for one of his countless appointments, when Finn is waiting to be picked up at the airport—he's devastatingly slow. He bungles each step, he stumbles over himself. When I tell him to hurry, he looks at me, raising a single eyebrow as if to say,
Of all the inconceivable options, Colin. Of all of them.

“Colin?”

I jerk my head up to find our next-door neighbor. I know her name. I know I do. For the past fifteen years, we've shared a side yard—a spit of concrete that's vanquished annually by the spring weeds. We've endured the same tedious homeowners association board meetings, often sharing quiet complaints about the weak coffee, the stale cookies. But why, as I count the grey streaks in her blond hair, as I watch her slip her fingers into two leather gardening gloves—why can't I remember her name?

“Oh,” I say. “Oh, hi. Hello.”

“Beautiful, isn't it?”

“Pardon?”

“The sky.”

With a gloved finger, she pushes hair from her cheek. She holds a basket with a trowel and rusted pruning sheers. We both turn our chins upward as a plane soars overhead, slicing a single white cloud.

“Not a lot of days like this one,” she says.

“No. Not a lot of days like this one.”

She smiles weakly and pulls each glove higher up on her wrist; she flexes her fingers.

Before she turns away, I say, “Hey, you didn't happen to see my dad, did you?” And I hope, almost instantly, that she failed to hear me.

“Your father?”

“Yes. Yes, my father.” I lock my knees and ankles, preventing my toes from turning inward, the magnetism of disgrace. “He went for a walk.”

“He's walking on his own now?”

“I—yes. Sometimes.”

Her lips pull together.
You've lost him, haven't you
.

These things happen.

“That's fabulous.”

“If you see him, would you mind telling him—”

“To come home.”

•  •  •

On the corner of Broderick and Union I find him curved over his walker, his spine articulated by a series of sharp juts that protrude against the blue fabric of his oxford. When other pedestrians—joggers, mothers with strollers—pass him, they do so in wide curves.

“Dad!” I call out to him, and when he doesn't turn, when he continues shuffling away from me, I break from a jog to a run, a sprint. I yell again, “DAD!”

I take his shoulders as I reach him, leaving wet handprints against the worn fabric. At first I'm too forceful; I take hold of him too suddenly. He releases the walker and takes four small steps backward; I pull him into me and wrap three fingers around the guard belt to prevent him from spilling to the concrete.

“My God, Dad,” I say. I circle my other arm around him to get a better grip on the belt. An approximation of a hug. “What the hell were you thinking? Don't ever do that. Don't ever walk alone.” I repeat, then, “What the hell were you thinking?”

After a brief moment, I feel his hands grip the handles of the walker, which still rests between us. His head, which is bowed into my torso, begins to nudge gently, then with the intimation of aggression, against my shoulder.

“Dad,” I say. “What?”

He says, “I've got to go,” but the words are slurred: they bleed into one another, the spaces between them snipped, colors all running into a shade of black.

I ask him to repeat himself, and when the words blur again, I say, “Dad—please just slow down.”

I can sense him becoming frustrated. He presses his head into me harder, more impatiently. He lifts his arms so they're level with his ribs, and then, exhausted, he drops them to his sides.

“I'm going to be late,” he says, in the same half English.

“You haven't got anywhere to be.”

“Your mother's waiting for me at the train station.”

He wavers on his feet again, this time swinging to the left; I brace him. A car passes, the driver playing its radio much too loudly.

I close my eyes as I feel him breathe against me, as I listen to the incomprehensible sounds of his struggle—the murmurs, the sighs, the tightening of his throat as he winces at the pain.

“Where are you going?”

“We're going to the city if you'll ever let me.”

“But she's gone, Dad.”

He presses against my shoulders again—this time with his hands, and away. He looks at my chin instead of my eyes. He smiles, but only half his mouth lifts. He's glassy, washed out, bare.

“Colin,” he says. “I didn't know you were still around.”

•  •  •

I sit in the office of a man called Dr. Salazar at UCSF's Parnassus Heights Medical Center—a tight cluster of hospitals and research facilities nestled south of Golden Gate Park. At first I brought my father to the emergency center on the Mount Zion campus, where I waited for two hours as countless chirping machines were plugged into his arms, and where I felt more and more guilty for having wished—quietly, and in some back corner of my mind—for this day to come. But then, once he'd been stabilized, they'd transferred him here, to the cardiovascular clinic at Parnassus Heights. They slipped more tubes into the folds of his skin and I was brought to this man to discuss our options.

“He's had a transient ischemic attack,” Dr. Salazar tells me.

“I don't know what that is.”

The office is a cramped, windowless cube. There's one picture on the wall—a black and white photo of a wave crashing over some nameless pier—but aside from that, they're blank. No certificates, plaques, diplomas, nothing. He's taken off his white coat and hung it over the back of his chair. He wears a blue shirt with a wide spread collar and a red tie, the knot loose and askew. He clicks a silver pen impatiently when I ask for an explanation.

“It's a short interruption of blood flow to the brain. Basically a mini stroke.”

“I didn't realize a stroke could be mini.”

“A stroke can be all sizes.”

“Who knew?”

A phone on his desk rings. He leans slightly forward to glance at the number on the caller identification screen; he allows the ringing to continue.

I ask, “Is that what caused the confusion?”

“It could've been,” he says. “The good news is the effects of a TIA are normally temporary. The symptoms usually clear up within twenty-four hours.”

“Normally and usually.”

“Yes.” And then, “We'll want to keep him here for the night, at least.”

“I understand.”

He picks up the silver pen again and resumes clicking it. I watch the ballpoint stab out, in, out. “The concern is this: about one-third of people who have a TIA will have a larger stroke in the near future. And given your father's medical history, that percentage is likely significantly higher.”

“Likely.”

“It's higher, Mr. McPhee.”

“Significantly?”

“Significantly.” Then, “You might consider a caretaker.”

“You mean a hospice?”

He says nothing.

I ask, “Can I see him now?”

•  •  •

The woman in the bed next to him may have to have the lower half of her leg amputated. She's elderly—about my father's age—and a week ago she tripped and had a nasty fall while retrieving the newspaper from her driveway. She bandaged the wound as best she could, but her circulation is dismally poor, and in the ensuing days it became infected, festering toward gangrene. A blue curtain has been pulled between the two beds,
but I listen as a doctor—not Salazar, but another one—relays this news to the woman's daughter.

I lean over to him. I whisper in his flaky ear, “See? It could be a hell of a lot worse.”

He's already started emerging from the fog, I tell myself: his eyes are still glassy, but there's a brief clarity to them, like they just need to be wiped down one more time. When he smiles, I can see the left side of his mouth struggling to lift. His hands clench, the fingers press together, and I wonder if this is from frustration or pain.

I flip through a two-month-old
AARP Magazine
while he sleeps. As the nurses arrive to change the wounded woman's bandages, I busy myself with an article about the healthiest berries instead of listening to her whimper. I consider very briefly calling Finn, but I stop myself: I tell myself that there's nothing to tell unless there's something to tell, and I dog-ear articles in the magazine that I've got no intention of reading. There are venetian blinds that have been pulled, and I watch as the light that slits through them changes.

At seven o'clock, my father wakes up. I say, “Welcome back to the world of the living,” and this instantly feels wrong, but he humors me anyway. He licks his lips and creases his cheeks. I pull my chair closer to his bed, and I tell him gracious lies that neither of us believes: It was nothing. His electrolytes were just low. We need to get you drinking more fluids, that's all. No—not scotch. Water. Okay, fine, scotch
with
water.

Three minutes before eight, before visiting hours are over and I'll be asked, then forced to go home, he says, “Colin.”

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Why'd you sneak into that movie theater?”

I tell him, “The same reason you lied about Pittsburgh.”

Finn

We're awakened by Mrs. Dalloway's low baying. She's leapt atop Randal's bed and she kneads his bare chest softly, unevenly, with her lone front foot. It's a clumsy endeavor, though, and each time she lifts her paw she half collapses, her scarred and beat-up face colliding with his chin.

Randal stirs slowly at first. He opens one eye, then the other, wiping crusted bits of sleep from the reddened corners of both. But when he locks gazes with her, he yelps; he pushes himself back so his shoulders are pressed firmly against the bed's cushioned headboard. Dalloway remains calm. She continues kneading, falling, kneading, falling.

He says, panicked, “What is she doing? I mean, what the
fuck
is she doing?”

I watch this all from my bed, where I lay prone. The white synthetic down comforter kicked down just below my ass. “I think that means she likes you.”

“I don't want her to like me.”

“We need to buy her more tuna.”

We'd forgotten to close the blackout curtains the night before, after we'd fumbled back to the hotel room through an extremely treacherous rum fog. Now, sunlight fills the room mercilessly. I close my eyes and the pain is white with streaks of orange and green.

“I shouldn't have had that many mai tais,” I say.

Randal is lifting Mrs. Dalloway gingerly, trying to shift her to a pillow
on the opposite side of the bed. She isn't having any of it, though: she trots back to him each time she's displaced.

“No one should have that many of anything.” Then, maybe not particularly meaning it, “Why won't she just leave me alone?”

We take turns in the bathroom. We brush our teeth and splash frigid water into our bloodshot eyes, washing the dirt from our cheeks with brittle plastic-wrapped bars of hotel soap. As we stuff our few belongings into our packs, we scan the room for evidence that Mrs. Dalloway has relieved herself. A puddle of piss behind a floor lamp. A damp spot under a shallow wooden desk. A midget mountain of shit beneath the bed. But—nothing.