The Visibles (20 page)

I wanted to ask him if he was thinking of leaving soon. What would he do, back in Brooklyn? Would he try to find a job?

He gazed out at the farmland beyond Merewether’s split-rail fence. “You know I’ll always love you.”

I started up. “I love you, too.”

There was a pause, and then he said, “The accident I got in years ago. I told you about the girl that died, right? Kay? We saw her grave in Cobalt?”

I rubbed my eyes. “Yeah. Sure.”

He stared off at the woods. “She was in a coma for weeks after the accident. They kept her alive, but not because they thought she’d live. Because…she was pregnant.”

Far off, a car door slammed. A few birds took off from a nearby tree. “She was pregnant?” I repeated.

“It was unthinkable, really. They knew she was going to die, but they also found out she was pregnant. They wanted to see if they could save the child.”

“Were you there?”

“Well…no.”

“Why not?”

“Her fiancé was there. Her family.”

“But you were her friend. You didn’t see her?”

He took a sip of water and stared at the outdoor thermometer mounted on a post next to the house. “No.”

I tried to process this, to make sense of why he’d chosen this moment to tell me. “So I guess the baby died?” I asked. I tried to remember if I’d seen a smaller headstone beside Kay’s. I couldn’t remember one, but then, I hadn’t been looking.

“What?” my father asked.

“The baby. It died, right?”

He bent down and picked up the sledge, and then leaned it against a tree. “I’m thirsty. Do you want more water? Or another tomato, maybe? It’s good with a just a little salt and basil. I think I’m going to get one for myself.” He started for the door.

I glared at his receding back. He was always like this; he hated discussing things that had died, adults or children, even animals and trees. He couldn’t watch nature programs because they always involved
something strong killing something weak. By the time he came back outside, the other housemates had returned from the movies, bumping around the house noisily, saying
Austin Powers
catchphrases like “Yeah, baby!” and “Danger is my middle name” in swaggering British accents. The conversation quickly veered somewhere else.

On my way home, pressed against the window on the Metro-North train, I felt unsettled, as if I’d left something behind. I started planning the next time my father and I would talk. It would be better. I would be better. I would ask him about gardening and tennis. What was bothering me, anyway? Didn’t I want a father who played tennis and gardened and
interacted
with society? Didn’t I want him to be well?

At work, I watched patients in the waiting room. There were pregnant women with fretful looks on their faces, pale couples trying desperately to conceive, mothers who’d already had a child die from leukemia and were mining their chromosomes to see if something inside of them had caused it.

Was I missing out on something, living this way? Where would I be now if I’d have taken the fellowship in Ireland? What would I be studying, how would I fill my days? There were so many times I wanted to correct the counselors here for mispronouncing easy scientific terms, dumbing down processes until they were basically incorrect, mixing up easy genetic markers for certain ailments. And yet I couldn’t say a word—I was simply an assistant with no rights. A cruel thought occurred to me: Perhaps this was what my mother felt like, before she left us. Stifled like this, compromised, angry that she wasn’t living her life according to exactly what she wanted. But as soon as I thought it, I felt so guilty and small. So I wasn’t doing earth-shattering research. I could be doing a lot worse.

The dogs followed me as I walked through the apartment I grew up in, sifting through my father’s big leather box of receipts and tickets and take-out menus and Post-its and packing slips. I read a few again.
Today, there are only two pigeons sitting on the ledge across the street. Yesterday, there were three. What did they do to the other one?

What had my father alluded to in the hospital, during that bad ECT treatment?
I’ve hidden something from you,
he’d said—or something like that, anyway. Would it unlock why this had happened to him, who he was—or was it ridiculous to think that way? I wandered into his closet and stared at the button-down shirts and blazers he’d left behind. Some of them were moth-eaten or out of style; he’d have to buy new things, if he was considering going back to work. Some of my mother’s clothes were still in there, too, relics of the late eighties and nineties. Three black dresses from Ann Taylor. A suit from Brooks Brothers with shoulder pads. Some pink blouses, a light gray cashmere sweater. I pressed in the rivets of a pair of pale blue jeans. I’d never thought to look through my mother’s pockets before—I hadn’t thought she was the type to leave things in there. But I found a faded receipt stuffed into the fifth pocket, the purple ink still crisp and legible, for a dozen donuts from the bakery down the street. My mother used to have to go to the bakery and buy them for my father because he had an inexplicable fear of standing in the bakery line.

And there was a business card in the next pocket for Karen Keyes, MSW. I’d never heard my mother mention anyone named Karen Keyes. The items appeared staged, like someone had snuck in and filled my mother’s pockets, planting the seeds, waiting for me to uncurl the mystery.

I didn’t know how much later it was that the phone rang. I let it go to the answering machine, expecting to hear Alex’s voice again—he’d already called several times, but I hadn’t had the energy to talk. Instead, my father’s voice floated out. “Summer? Are you there?”

I leapt up and ran across the bedroom to grab the extension. “Dad?” I gasped it out, like he was a ghost I’d just encountered around a corner. “Why are you calling me?”

“No reason,” he said. “I just wanted to call. To talk.”

I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry about our last visit.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just felt like it was…weird.”

Silence followed. “It was fine,” he said.

I stared out the window blankly, my heart beating so fast it felt it
might rip out of my body. A tugboat skidded down the East River, cars zoomed up the FDR.

“You want me to be happy, right?” my father asked, sounding almost afraid.

I cupped my hand over the head of one of the dogs. “Of course I want you to be happy. That’s a silly question. Why would you ask that?”

“I just wanted to make sure.”

“I want you to come back to Brooklyn,” I said quickly. “I’m excited that you feel better. I hope that you didn’t misunderstand me, when we visited. I was just surprised, is all. We just haven’t talked that much, and—”

“I know, Summer,” he interrupted. “I appreciate what you’ve done for me. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.”

The sun broke through a cloud, sending splendorous light across the faces of the buildings across the water. I felt wonderful. He still cared about me. And he was coming home. He was better. The dogs would be ecstatic. They’d remember him immediately—they’d bowl him over and lick his face. We could go to the park and let them swim in the lake and buy each of them a hot dog from the cart.

I was about to tell him that I thought he’d been acting strangely lately, and how I’d felt a little left out, maybe, a little excluded from his life, but it was okay now because he was coming back, because we would know everything about each other again. But then my father coughed. “Summer, I’ve met someone.”

The air conditioner kicked on, sending a cold blast down my back. “Pardon?”

“I met someone.” His words came out rushed. “Someone I think I’ve fallen in love with.”

There were a lot of people out on the Promenade. Two little girls in frilly dresses ran down the length of the walkway, scuffing up their shoes.

“Her name’s Rosemary,” my father galloped on. “I met her here. She’s an aide.” He swallowed something noisily on the other end of the line. “She’s really helped me. She’s been an amazing friend. I wanted
to tell you when you visited, but there wasn’t time. The movie ended sooner than I thought.”

I looked at my left hand. I had been pressing my nails into my palm so hard, there were four white half-moons in my skin.

“I’m coming back to Brooklyn in two weeks,” my father said. “I—we—decided today. I’ve asked her to come with me.”

I laughed. “What, as your nurse?” It just slipped out.

A stiff silence followed.

“I’m sorry,” I backpedaled. “I just…I don’t quite understand. This is all a little sudden. I mean, what, you couldn’t have met this person—she’s, what, an
aide
?—more than a month ago, right? That’s the last time we really talked. Don’t you think it’s a little soon?”

His voice was low. “Well, I met her almost a year ago.”

I went limp.

“I didn’t want to say anything to you until I was certain. My new therapist, Walter? He thinks it’s wonderful. He really supports us, and thinks what we’re doing is perfectly healthy.”

“Healthy?”

“You’ll really like her. She’s very kind.”

“Did I already meet her?” I demanded. “Was she there at Christmas?”

He was quiet for a moment. “Yes, she was. She helped cook the dinner.”

I had spent so much time passing judgment on the patients—the anorexic girl who wouldn’t stop petting Wesley, the grandmotherly woman who worked a jigsaw puzzle of kittens in a basket. I thought
they
had been the ones to watch.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Okay. Well, wow. Huh. I don’t exactly know what to say.”

“How about that it’s great? How about that you’re happy for me?”

“No, it is great. Really.” I didn’t know how to word this. “You’ve been in the hospital, Dad. For a long time. I think…”

“You think what? That because I’ve been here, I’ve…I’ve turned into a child? That I don’t understand relationships? That I’m not worthy of anyone loving me back?”

“I didn’t mean that at all!” Tears of surprise burned my eyes.

“That’s what it sounds like. You assume these things about me, Summer, and I’ve lived with it long enough that maybe I assume them about myself. But I’m not that way. You don’t even know.”

It hurt, like a pickaxe driving into my side.

“What?”

“This is my chance at being happy. I need a chance to grow, Summer. I had that here, and I don’t want it to end. I need a chance to live my life, and you need a chance to live yours. There’s enough room for all of us in that big apartment, don’t you think?”

The sentiment was so familiar. “I’m keeping
you
from living
your
life?”

He let out a frustrated breath. “I have to go. Someone else needs the phone.”

And then he just hung up. I stared at the receiver, the dial tone like a siren. I tried to call back. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered. Something hit me then: everything he said, especially his retorts, seemed like it’d been rehearsed, like he’d traced it over and over in his brain, committing it to memory, knowing that if he didn’t get it out quickly and word for word, he wouldn’t be able to say anything at all. I had never heard him speak so eloquently or succinctly about his feelings, especially if they might hurt someone else. Usually he stumbled, backtracked, realized what he was trying to get out much, much later.

It made me feel both proud and horrible at the same time. He had, it seemed, truly turned a corner. But at the same time, it also meant my father had possibly sat in this new therapist’s office and discussed how certain people in his life were preventing him from growing as a person. Maybe he’d prepared for when he would break the news, make his feelings known.

An unidentifiable feeling fluttered deep, but I didn’t allow it to surface.
I’ll make dinner,
I thought, standing up. I opened the fridge. Eggs. No cheese or butter. Grapes, a wilted head of lettuce. Some milk and some Diet Coke. When I looked around, the apartment was the same as it was just minutes ago, before I’d answered the phone. The bedspread
still rumpled. The dogs still muddy. I breathed carbon dioxide out, plants sucked it in. Everything I took for granted still acted as it should. Almost everything.

I thought about my father and this new woman coming back to the apartment. Maybe he’d carry her over the threshold, stamping happily down the hallway to his old bedroom. I’d begun sleeping in his giant bed, the twinkling skyline as my night-light. I was glad for my father, that the darkness around him had lightened, but I wasn’t particularly glad for myself. The emotion was sore and embarrassing. I no longer had any idea what my place was. I couldn’t bear to think of climbing into my old bed, pulling up the heavy pink quilt I’d always secretly hated.

And then there was the phone call I received a few days later, when coming home from work. A woman identified herself as a nurse from St. Geraldine’s Hospital in Wrightsville, Pennsylvania. She said that Stella Rogers had been in a car accident. Could I come by the hospital and pick her up? Stella was fine, but she wasn’t in any condition to drive.

I started laughing. I told them I was in Brooklyn, New York—perhaps they could call someone who lived closer? The nurse on the phone said that I was Miss Roger’s in-case-of-emergency contact—the
only
in-case-of-emergency contact. Stella had demanded they call me.

I was looking for an excuse to leave. I packed some things and took a cab to La Guardia. The next flight to Pittsburgh was on American. I walked up to the counter and bought a ticket. The plane was boarding in a half hour.

When I got to the hospital, Stella was sitting on a hospital bed, watching television. I gasped when I saw her. I didn’t even try and mask it. She looked like she’d lost about forty pounds and aged a hundred years since I’d last seen her six years earlier. The first thing she told me was she had just watched the 2000 Summer Olympics Women’s Triathlon. “I think I might do a triathlon,” she said. “I used to be quite a swimmer in my day.” I glanced at the old woman sleeping in the bed next to hers. There was a tube in her nose and a wheelchair next to her bed. Stella rolled her eyes. “That’s Agnes,” she whispered. “She’s pathetic.”