The Visibles (12 page)

On that snowy day a few months ago when Dr. Hughes and I first made the connection—“you’re
that
Richard Davis’s daughter?” she’d asked—her face had registered a small, unrehearsed moment of horror. It was
the
look. The look that told me that Leon had told her all he knew and had witnessed—which included a few of my father’s public breakdowns.

I allowed the look to cross her face without challenging it. I pretended not to see it at all, deciding to give her a chance to have a new, more tempered response. “My father’s not doing so well right now,” I’d said, my eyes on the table, giving her space to properly react. “He has clinical depression. He’s been on disability for a while, but I think he’s going to have to resign from the practice altogether.”

And she got to say, “Yes, Leon mentioned it. I’m so sorry. It’s got to be hard.”

Perhaps
that
was why Dr. Hughes didn’t intimidate me: I loved the fearless way she taught, but I know she was just as impressionable and sensitive as anyone. When I left the diner, that first time, I thought about how I let her reaction pass by without commenting. It was the easiest thing to do, of course—if I had called her out on it and asked her to explain, then
I
would have had to explain, which might have meant admitting everything that scared
me.

And then, seconds later, I felt somehow responsible—perhaps there could have been a way for me to have warned Dr. Hughes, told her who my father was in advance so she could have her moment of horror in private. But warned her
how,
exactly? I felt so uncomfortable with myself and the situation, I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, closed my eyes, clenched up my fists, and breathed. When I opened my eyes, I was so amazed that the submarine-round windows of the St. Vincent’s medical facility were still there. And the Two Boots Pizza takeout across the street. The entire city was in its right place. I sort of thought it couldn’t be.

L
ater, when
I unlocked the front door to the apartment, all of the dogs—Fiona, Wesley, Skip, and Gracie, the Smitty dog—greeted me. “Where’s Dad?” I asked them, their eyes wet and bright. They ran excitedly into the living room, comprehending. My father was in his usual spot on the couch, propped up on his knees and looking over the back of it at something out the window. Seven glasses of water, all at varying levels, were on the coffee table, along with a bunch of newspapers and the TV remote.

“Hi,” I announced.

He jumped and turned around. “Summer.”

He was wearing the T-shirt and gym shorts I had given him the Christmas of my freshman year, during one of his active spells when he said he was going to start lifting weights at the Y. And even though I saw him every day, I still wasn’t used to the beard, or that his hair was so much longer, or that he wore oversized square glasses instead of contacts. He had gained thirty pounds from the latest drug he was on. When he took other types of medications, he drooled. Or he twitched, an arm or a thigh, the side of his hip or an eyelid. When he turned his hand a certain way, I saw the mark from the snow globe in the pit of his palm. There were new scars, too, as distinct as tattoos: crosshatchings on his elbow from the time he broke a plate, the half-moon on his wrist from the hunting knife, the puffy, wrinkled crater near his collarbone from the lit cigarette.

“They towed another car,” my father announced, his eyes bright and wide. The dangerous look. “The blue Volvo, the bastards.”

“Ah.” I dropped the apartment keys in the bowl on the credenza.

“It was this morning. Three trucks. And the police came this time. It must have been stolen. They surrounded the car.”

He hefted the window open, hot wind swirling in. He put one hand on his hip. “I’m thinking that white Lincoln might be next. It’s got a sticker on it. See?”

I looked at the white car he was pointing at. “Uh-huh.” I stepped away from the window, leaning against the credenza. I gazed at an old photo of my father and me standing at the top of a snow-covered hill in Prospect Park, wearing snow pants and heavy coats and carrying a single plastic sled between us. We always used to go down the hill using just one sled, my father lying on my stomach, me piled on top of him.

“How do you feel today?” I asked.

“Like shit,” he singsonged, not turning from the window.

“What kind of shit? Cat shit? Dog shit?” I never meant to sound frustrated, but I always came off that way.

In another room, one of the dogs barked.

“Where’s Cora?” I asked, trying to soften my voice.

My father pressed his head against the glass of the window. “I let Cora go. Look! Didn’t I tell you? Here comes the tow truck. I thought they’d give that Lincoln another couple days, but I guess not.”

“You
fired
Cora?” I sank into the couch. “Why?”

“Summer! This is our lucky day.” He pointed at the tow truck. “Watch how they load it up. Have you ever seen this? It’s beautiful.”

“
Dad.
Why did you fire her?”

His shoulders lowered. He turned around and picked up the rain stick that was leaning against the couch. It was supposed to simulate the sounds of the rain forest; he’d bought it a few months ago when we went into the Nature Store. Sometimes, late at night, I heard him turning it over and over, a million tiny downpours. “I didn’t need her,” he said, sulking. “She was always here. She was watching me.”

“Of course she was always here! That’s her job, to be here!”

“She brought a Neil Diamond CD here. Neil
Diamond,
Summer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Even your mother didn’t listen to Neil Diamond.” He shuddered. “I’m fine. This is so exaggerated.”

“You think so?”

“I feel all right. I’ve
been
feeling all right.”

At least he was talking today. At least he was watching the cars. Some days he couldn’t even do that. I wondered if I should call up the clinic in the hospital and cancel the whole thing. Because you couldn’t do just one treatment and decide,
Nah, I don’t like it.
Once you started, you had to do all six. Or eight. Or however many the doctor deemed appropriate. For my father, the doctor had decided on eight. Words repeated in my head:
He will have eight seizures. His brain will be electrocuted eight times.

“So do you want me to cancel tomorrow?” I asked quietly. “Is that what you want?”

He didn’t answer. Outside, the guy operating the tow truck attached the illegally parked Lincoln to its hitch. My father’s shoulders hunched.

“I’m going to call Cora.” I walked into the hall toward the kitchen, all the dogs following. “She needs to come back. She’ll come back, right? You didn’t say anything really terrible to her?”

“Summer…” My father was behind me fast.

I curled my hand over the receiver. “What?”

He gave me a pleading, desperate look. Then, without answering, he walked into the kitchen, bumping a stack of mail teetering precariously on one of the island barstools. A magazine fell to the floor. On the back was an ad for perfume: a naked woman kissing a naked man. I turned the magazine over.
Vogue.

“I thought I canceled this.” I held it up to show him.

He shrugged. “I renewed it.”

“Dad…” I slammed it down on the island too hard. Some of the subscription renewal forms fell out and slid across the tile.

“What? I might read
Vogue
. Ever think that?”

“You wouldn’t read
Vogue.
” I turned it over and looked at the mailing address.
RICHARD DAVIS.
At least it wasn’t in her name. “I don’t
understand these magazines.” I held up the cover, Cindy Crawford in a bikini. “She looks constipated.”

“I think she looks nice. She looks like a woman.” He glanced at me.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What’s what supposed to mean?”

“That look.”

He flipped through the mail. “I didn’t give you any looks.”

“What, I should go around wearing a bikini like she does?”

“No. Of course not.” He bent back the edge of a flyer. “Although it wouldn’t kill you to wear something other than jeans once in a while.”

“There’s nothing wrong with wearing jeans,” I snapped.

“Except that a dress is more ladylike.”

And a suit is more masculine, instead of pajama pants.
“Got me there. You win. Someday when I go off in the world, I’ll wear lots of dresses. Someday when I leave.”

I should have known better. My button: jeans. His: leaving. But who dared press the buttons of someone who was depressed? Someone who could turn on a dime, and—just like he was doing now—start to cry? My father shut his eyes and tried to hold it in. Who dared do this? What dark, evil person?

I crumpled. “Dad, no…stop. Let’s not do this.”

“I wish I were someone else. I wish I weren’t me.”

“But…come on. You’re wonderful.”

“No.”

“Dad.”

I leaned into the crook of his neck, but he refused to touch me. “I can’t have you mad at me. You’re my good girl.”

“I’m not mad at you.”

“Yes, you are. You want to leave.”

I slumped against the fridge.
It’s a huge opportunity,
Dr. Hughes said about the fellowship.
You’ll be away from home.
I had told my father about the fellowship—that it was a prestigious chance to study in my field. I changed one detail, however: I told him it was in New York, not wherever the interesting fieldwork was happening over-seas—in my case, Dublin. I didn’t know I was going to get this far in
the application process. It just happened. Dr. Hughes had said,
Apply, you’ll certainly get it, we all believe in you,
but I really hadn’t thought she’d meant it.

Later,
I told myself.
Tell him later. Tell him everything later.
I thought of the flyer I found the other day, the one with her name printed in large block letters, a date, a place, a topic. I’d kept that from him, too.

He looked straight at me. “I’m terrified, Summer. Of tomorrow. I don’t know if I want to do it.”

Then don’t,
I wanted to say. “But it might help you feel better.”

“What if it doesn’t?”

“It will.”

I didn’t want to take him to the procedure tomorrow, either. It sounded medieval. When trying to imagine how it might work, I felt like I was wandering into a wilderness where I had no compass or bearings.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

I nodded furiously. “The doctor says eighty percent of patients feel better.” I held on to anything. I held on to percentages, hearsay, catchphrases.

“Eighty percent? But that means there are twenty percent that don’t.”

“You’ll feel better,” I assured him. “Don’t worry about it. So what are you going to do today?”

He shrugged.

“Do you want to do something? Go out to lunch?”

“I don’t think so.” He glanced at me. “You know what you should do today? You should give that coat back.”

I half smiled. I had taken a poncho from someone at a party; I’d told him it was an accident, but he wouldn’t let it drop. “The coat’s owner lives in the Bronx,” I said. “That’s an hour away by train.”

He opened
Vogue
to the middle. “You really shouldn’t go around stealing coats that aren’t yours. At least you could have taken one with money in the pockets, you know?”

“True.” I laughed.

He leaned in for a hug. He smelled as he always had, like cinna
mon gum and soap. It was comforting to think that his smell hadn’t changed, even though everything else about him had. If I closed my eyes and breathed in, I could almost imagine him as the man he was when I was eight, the father in the leather-framed picture on the credenza. It had just snowed, and he was standing on a hill in Prospect Park, a plastic sled in hand, a red, pilly hat coming to a point on the top of his head. I was running toward him, burying myself in the soft folds of his coat, and in seconds we would pile onto the sled and go down the hill together.

There were certain things I wished I wouldn’t have turned my head to see. Once, I saw a car hit a bicyclist head-on, his spandexed body flying into the air and landing jaggedly on the pavement. He did a whole flip in the air. He may have broken his back, maybe his neck. I didn’t stand around to watch; enough people already were. Another time, I saw a Chinese man slap his kid, a six-year-old girl, across the face, as she was coming down the slide at a park. All she was doing was sliding.

My father used to make me look at skin cancer photos, to deter me against smoking or drinking or going into the sun without sun-screen or putting anything carcinogenic into my body. A woman had an enormous melanoma on her leg; it had gotten so bad that the black, puckered welt had eaten straight to her bone.

I could have walked right past the flyer last week without seeing it. There weren’t any others of its kind on other phone poles or parking signs. But my head turned that direction; I walked by it and saw it and there it was.

The Learning Annex Presents Meredith Heller,
it said.
Acting for Beginners.

And then a description:
Pennsylvania native and stage actress Meredith Heller teaches you the basic techniques of acting. Beginners welcome!

It gave a date a few weeks in the future. And a location—the Mayflower Hotel, on Sixty-first Street and Central Park West. And a time.

There was no picture, but her name glowed like an isotope. Of course she had dropped
Davis
and returned to just
Heller.
And yes,
she was from Pennsylvania. But how likely was it that she had become an actress? If a computer randomly came up with a possible fate, it wouldn’t have hit upon this.

After my father wrote my mother back, permitting their divorce, he attempted to hold it together. But eventually, something inside him just gave up. He stopped going to work entirely. He made the couch his permanent residence. And then he couldn’t do much of anything. He wanted to die, he said over and over again. Time felt painful. Every second felt painful. Like needles, like a branding iron singeing his skin. He was sick of things hurting.

I brought him cold washcloths and tried to listen. I filled out the medical disability leave paperwork and submitted it to his office. I knew the people at his NYU lab personally. Leon Kimball. Bethany the lab assistant. They smiled and patted my shoulder and all signed an oversized
Get Well Soon
card, of a cartoon cat with a plaster cast on its leg.

I stared at the Acting for Beginners flyer for a long time. People passed by. Some of them bumped into me. I was standing in the middle of the street in the East Village, near a bus stop. I tried to imagine the people that would go to an Acting for Beginners Learning Annex seminar: gray-haired, jowl-faced East Village types, the kinds who lived in rent-controlled apartments but still solicited for roommates. They would come and take off their shoes at the door and sit in a circle on the linoleum and get into the guttural humming exercises and the role-playing. And where would my father and I sit? In chairs? On the floor? We might stand at the back of the room, in the shadows. We might hide and make small noises and not participate.

I came home and didn’t tell him. We made spaghetti and I was the only one who ate it and I didn’t tell him. We watched television and my father moaned softly and I didn’t tell him. The secret beat in me like a second heart.
Meredith Heller, Meredith Heller.
Perhaps she did climb up on a stage and change completely. That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? To change?

The next day, I met my father at his psychiatrist’s office at New York Presbyterian, the whole way up on Sixty-eighth Street—I was going to
take him out to a quiet dinner afterward. Dr. North popped his head into the waiting room, a weary smile on his face. “You want to come into my office for a sec, Summer?”

My father sat on a leather couch, and Dr. North settled at his desk. When I sank down into a leather chair adjacent to the big picture window that looked out onto York Avenue, Dr. North said, “So. We’re thinking of treating your father with electroconvulsive therapy.”