Authors: Katherine Leiner
“I miss Daddy,” she says.
The outline of her small body shows against the night-light in the hall. She is trembling.
“Get in, sweetie.”
She comes into my arms and I pull her close. “I miss my daddy,” she says again. “I’m the only one of my whole class who doesn’t have a daddy.” She moves closer and I rock her. “Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, I see him. He is in the hallway outside my room. He is trying to get up, like he did that day, and I can’t help him.”
I want to tell her that everything is okay. But everything is not. I rock her until she falls back to sleep.
I begin to see a psychiatrist. I do it to get Dafydd off my back. The only other time I’d seen one was at Gram’s insistence.
Dr. Jacobs is tall and thin, all angles. He has dark hair and a huge white toothy smile that spreads ear to ear. His round tortoiseshell glasses make him look even more nerdy than I’ve already decided he is.
“Of course you’re depressed,” he says. “Why should you be anything other than depressed? Your husband just died. He was your best friend, the father of your daughter, the man who helped you raise your first child. You’re all alone in that now. You’re going to have to figure out a new way to live your life. You’re going to have to figure out how to swim. Of course you should be depressed.”
Does Dr. Jacobs think this is making me feel any better? When I ask him, he tells me his job is not to make me feel better. His job is to help me identify the truth and begin to live with it. I wonder if it ever occurs to him that I am not ready just now to live side by side with this hard, cold truth. Perhaps I need a little more time in the denial stage. I get up and walk out, pulling the door behind me shut tight with decision. I am not going back. There are other ways to get through this.
At home I put together a spicy lamb stew with green olives, thinly sliced summer squash, a cucumber and yogurt salad. After pouring my third glass of cold Australian chardonnay, I sit at the dining room table with Hannah and Dafydd. I’ve cut some dahlias for the table and I have ironed the lace and linen serviettes. I’ve showered, washed my hair and put on a clean white blouse, black trousers and red lipstick. Dafydd and Hannah smile at each other and then at me, confident that their plan for getting me help has worked. I smile back at them and chew slowly, fifteen times per bite, still thinking about all the ways I can die.
The minutiae of Marc’s death seem to keep me alive. I become completely pathological about these details. Something, somewhere has gone wrong. If he had the heart of a twenty-five year old, why did it suddenly fail him? It has to be someone’s fault.
I work my way backward, studying all the paperwork from the hospital. I meet the ER doctor who worked on Marc. I meet the nurses. I ask them to tell me point by point, drug by drug, what they did for him, how they worked on him. I want to know how many times they used the “clapper.”
I drive down to the fire station and interview the EMTs who were with Marc in our house and in the ambulance. What condition was Marc in when they found him at home? Was he conscious? Did he speak? Were there any last words? If I had been home, could I have
saved him with CPR? How many minutes did it take them to get to our house? Could he have been saved if they had arrived sooner? Was there pain? Was there fear? Why did he die?
I call the pathologist who did the autopsy. He tells me eighty percent of Marc’s left artery was blocked and thirty percent of the right artery, but the third artery and other vital organs had taken up functioning in their place. The pathologist can’t tell me exactly what killed Marc. Nobody can. Twenty-five-year-old heart, my ass.
I call the cardiologist who gave him the thallium stress test. He reminds me that Marc had failed the first treadmill.
At first I don’t believe him. “Marc said he passed that test with flying colors, that you told him he had the heart of a twenty-five year old.”
“It is quite common to fail the stress test, dozens fail each day. Often it is the machine’s fault, a malfunction of some kind. So we did the test again, and just to be on the extra-safe side, with Marc’s history of dodgy genetics, we did a thallium treadmill.”
I am totally confused. The doctor must be making it up, covering his tracks somehow to prevent a possible lawsuit, because Marc never lied to me. He would have told me about the machine screwing up, having to take a second test.
“But why would Marc tell me he had passed the test with flying colors if he hadn’t?”
“Well, he certainly did fine on the second test, the thallium test,” the doctor says. “Like I said, the first test is not nearly as conclusive.”
I am stunned. “Are you sure? I mean, about the first test?”
The doctor says he is positive. He has Marc’s file right in front of him, and he goes on to explain that often even a thallium stress test doesn’t pick up the blockage, as this one hadn’t. “Medicine’s not perfect,” he says. “That’s why we call it ‘practicing.’ ” I feel like smacking him upside his head. It’s grace that I’ve got him on the telephone and not in person. Why couldn’t he “practice” on someone else’s husband?
“So why didn’t he tell me about failing the first test?”
The doctor actually laughs. “I can’t help you on that one.”
“So if he failed one and passed one, if you wanted to be so bloody
extra safe,
why the hell didn’t you do a third test?” I yell into the phone before slamming it down.
I call Dan Wolfe again and again. Each time he tells me something different: his genetics. His diet. The fact that he smoked. Possible arrhythmia. He isn’t sure.
I pace. I sit by Marc’s side of the bed on the floor and read through all the books on his bedside table looking for clues. He was reading Simon Winchester’s
The Professor and the Madman
and highlighted lines all the way through it. Ian McEwan’s
Atonement, A Multitude of Sins
by Richard Ford and Bob Smith’s
Hamlet’s Dresser.
There is a stack of film scripts. I read every single one of the pages he marked. I throw the one book Joe lent him about health and aging through the window.
Searching through his calendar, I find he has appointments and meetings scheduled through January. On January 28, he has marked:
I’s bill due?
Who is I? I don’t know. My birthday is circled. He’s got two trips to Brazil scheduled with Joe. I call Joe, who says he’ll get his secretary to cancel Marc’s flights and Brazilian appointments. I take our walks on the beach and in the hills. I weep.
Finally, after the morgue calls several times, I pick up Marc’s ashes. Dan Wolfe arranged for the morgue and the crematorium. The ashes are in a small copper box. This has me confused. Marc was not a big man, but he was certainly too big to fit in this small space. I stare at the box. What am I to do with it? The man who has handed it to me puts it in a blue velvet bag with a pull string and asks me if he can walk me to my car. He smiles and I notice he has crooked teeth. He puts his hand on my shoulder and I curl down to avoid his touch.
“This is not my husband,” I tell the man. “It can’t be my husband. You have given me the wrong box. This is a mistake.” I suck in a deep breath and stagger in the reception area of the funeral home, the bagged box between my legs. I am doubled over, and the pain everywhere is excruciating. The man puts his arm around my shoulders. The next thing I know I am in the car, the box on the seat next to me. Driving home, I wonder where Marc will live now. Where will we put him?
I awaken in the middle of the night, holding my heart. Working by ear in the darkness, I can still hear Marc’s voice. It comes to me when I least expect it, like now, in the deepest, darkest part of night,
wrapping me wild as he always did, his thick lips around my own, the sound of us knuckling me under, the pure outrageous sex of him. The base of my spine stretches up to him as if he is tunneled deep down inside of me. I move my foot to touch him and all there is is air. Where is he? Perhaps he is in the bathroom or downstairs banging out a tune? The possibility reassures me, like a soft, warm breeze of comfort. I struggle up then, the black waters colder as I come awake to the surface. I stretch my arm long across the bed, still digging out. Where has he gone?
As if it is the blare of the phone at some ungodly hour, I am shocked wide-awake. My heart sinks. All hope dies, and I am left bare in this moment of loss, realizing bare moment is all there is now. I grab hold of my heart again, cradle it gently in my hands.
Although Dafydd has been back in New York for only a week, he returns for Thanksgiving. There’s a brace covering his knee and he is just beginning to move around slowly without his crutches.
“I’d like to walk on the Palisades,” he says. It is a palm tree-lined pathway above the Coast Highway with a view of the ocean.
We drive over and walk for a while in silence, the perfect L.A. fall morning spread out as wide and blue as the Pacific Ocean. We can see twenty-six miles away to Catalina. I admire Dafydd’s profile: his strong, angular jawline, his patrician nose, his high cheekbones. I love looking at him.
And then, as if he has somehow read my thoughts, unconscious even to me, he asks, “Do you ever think about my father?”
I feel caught. I look at him quizzically, pretending not to know he means Evan. As he gazes out to sea I am suddenly struck by just how much Dafydd really does look like Evan, and I realize I have been watching Evan all these years through Dafydd.
“What do you mean?” I ask, like the idiot I sometimes pretend to be since Marc died. So many questions I don’t want to have to answer.
“Do you ever think about my so-called ‘real’ father? You know, what do you call him, my ‘birth father,’ Evan?” He stops walking then and shifts his sweatpants, which have tangled into the brace on his leg. Then he looks at me straight on and says, “I mean, were you ever in love with him?”
I am taken completely by surprise and am unsure how to answer him. On the face of it, it’s a simple question. But based on my avoidance and secrecy about that time in my life, and the fact that in the past I have volunteered almost nothing to Dafydd, it’s probably not such a simple question. His tone is insistent, almost angry. It is clear that Dafydd probably wants to know much more than he is asking.
As I think about it, it’s rather unbelievable that through the years I’ve managed to get away with not having told him much about the disaster, or about Evan directly—and certainly not about my feelings for him. I have never even intimated to Dafydd how hard it was to leave my home: the light, the air, the mountains and, yes, mostly Evan. And I have never admitted I ran from home without: letting Evan know I was pregnant.
I’ve not told Dafydd how hard it was to be pregnant at fifteen. I’ve never told him how Beti and Colin were so wonderful to take me in, and yet I could always feel their embarrassment.
Perhaps I should tell Dafydd that, along with everything else I am facing, I have actually been going over my long-ago past. I might tell him of the dream I had the night Marc died and that his so-called “real father” seems more present in my life at the moment than he has been since I left Wales. The truth is, even hearing Dafydd say his name sends a wave through me.
But instead, I answer Dafydd’s question in the most basic way possible, giving him the simple answer. “Yes, I think of Evan quite often, and yes, I was in love with him for a long time.” Even using the word
love
in relation to Evan sucks all the air out of me. I am close to panic.
“Have you heard from him recently?”
He knows about the checks that appear monthly, even now. Evan’s “contribution,” as he referred to it in one of his early notes to Gram passed on to me so many years ago. Dafydd knows also that Evan backed away because I wanted him to. This I’ve told him so that he would never feel rejected by his father.
“No,” I say. “Why?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about him. I’d like to meet him.”
I remember the conversation I overheard between Dafydd and Hannah. Immediately there is part of me that wants to protect Marc’s position in Dafydd’s life. Ridiculous, but it makes me angry
that Dafydd wants to meet Evan. I wonder if he has decided that his loss of Marc makes him need to place someone else there and Evan fits the bill.
But what is my anger all about? I was the one to sever relations with Evan, the one who left. Maybe the anger is because Evan gave up on me so easily. Still, I tell Dafydd what I know he wants to hear.
“I’m sure Evan would love to see you. He’s always wanted to have the opportunity to know you.” This is far more than I have ever given him of Evan.
“And another thing, Mom. You’ve got to snap out of this. The drinking, I mean. You’ve got to get back to work, your poetry. For your sake of course, but also for Hannah’s. I can’t keep flying back here as often as I have been. What about hiring somebody to help out? A nanny or a housekeeper, just for a while?”
I shake my head no. I start to turn away. “I can handle it.”
“Mom. But you’re not handling it. You’re out of hand.”
How dare he talk to me like this.
“I can’t keep this pace up,” Dafydd says.
I look over my shoulder. His eyes have filled with tears. “Please, Mom.”
I turn around then and take him in my arms. We both cry.
When does this get easier?
This morning, more than two weeks since Dafydd has gone back to New York, our business manager calls to ask if I know a woman named Gabriella Purdue. I tell him she is a Brazilian singer Marc worked with years ago. Ed apologizes when he asks rather straightforwardly if I might have known what kind of relationship Marc had with her.
Confused, I repeat, “Marc worked with her years ago. She sang the title song for
The Yellow Door.
“
Ed pauses and then says, “She called this morning, to inquire if Marc had provided for her in his will.”
At first I don’t say anything, racking my brain. We had recently revised our wills, setting up a family trust for the kids.
“Gabriella Purdue called you? Why would she call you?”
“That I don’t know, Alys. I thought you might be able to give me some answers.”