The Lost Father (68 page)

Stevie

Mai linn

Timothy

Mom

Emily

Emory

Jordan

I laughed a bubble of a sound. Once, Edison would have been first. Now he wasn’t even on it.

I had so much to do. I stood up to write more, but my wrist was incredibly light and I was already far away, everyone I knew in a pasture with long faces and ruffled edges, receding from me one by one.

That blurry shelling fade was the softness. But just then, in that state, the blanket held up to my neck, I thought of the way back. It was one word, slate blue, the shape of a key.

Food. I had to get out and buy food. Live while you’re young, my grandmother said with her eyes already closed. I was still young, I remembered. Maybe it had something to do with finally believing he was alive. Maybe I thought we couldn’t both be. Staying awake was too hard. I hadn’t eaten but I wasn’t hungry. I knew I should go out and buy some food anyway but I was too tired. I slipped just a little once and then again. I counted my friends to myself. I kept counting them naming their names. But then I dropped
Emory. I let them go one by one, like beads, unknotting, slipping from a string.

T
HE NEXT THING
was sitting hard in a plastic hospital chair, egg bottomed, my hair a curtain over my face, a hand forcing me to drink a cup of something that dribbled down my chin. My lip fell loose and hanging.

The old man, my upstairs neighbor, stood there stomping his cane. He rapped loud on the floor, twice for emphasis.

“Drink it,” he said. A firm nurse in white stockings held the cup to my mouth. “It’s just high protein,” she said. “You’re a little weak. You fainted. You haven’t been eating enough lately.” This is where I was when it all sifted back into me.

“I telephone, but who?” the old man said, thumping my cane again on the linoleum. The linoleum was old and cracked and brown with age. The floor was consoling under these lights.

No one, I said. I didn’t want to explain. He stamped his cane twice on the ground. Hard like he had no patience. Then I told him Timothy’s and Emily’s numbers. I wanted Mai linn but I was afraid to tell him a number that was long distance. It seemed to go on a long time that night, the bright lights like bullets of sun pressing down on my head so my hair felt limp and bad, the protein drink which tasted like chalk. Everyone handled me like a thing they didn’t like. They were only professionally kind. The nurse held my chin and the back of my neck, hard, with rubber-gloved hands. “Come on, you have to finish before you can go home.” I didn’t blame her. I’d made myself this.

Then Emily was there. She clipped into the Emergency Room, wearing an orange skirt. She had a hard purse the shape of something we’d learned in geometry.

She put her hands on her hips, looked around. “So what happened?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just didn’t eat much.”

The old man stamped his cane. “I come in with this for her collection.” He held up a framed huge blue butterfly behind glass. The label read P
APILIO
R
UMANZOVIA
. “I send away in catalog, rare butterfly, from China, and your door you left open. I find her there almost dead. She don’t up.”

“I’m fine,” I said, “I was just tired. Jet lag. I just got back from a long trip. I was in Egypt.”

“Where?” Emily said.

“Oh never mind.”

“Egypt. Pfa,” the old man said. “She look dead.”

“Well let’s get out of here,” Emily said. “We’ll start with breakfast.”

I had to give the hospital my social security number and the name of my insurance, which I still had from school. Emily had her car and we offered the old man a ride home, but he just said “Pfa” again and walked off with his cane. We drove to my apartment for me to shower and change and then we were going to go eat. My apartment was open now, she could just see it. It was hardly my things anymore. I stripped and went into the shower and by the time I came out she’d sorted everything into three piles, the way you would anyone’s, a stranger’s. “Cleaners,” she said. “We can stop on the way.”

We went out and had French toast. And then she started to talk about money. She unclasped the maple-leaf clasp of her purse and started taking out bills. They lay curled on the table like dried leaves, each with a different tilt and crease and twist.

Sometimes I thought about money, how you know the feel of paper, you can separate it from the scraps of tickets and bank receipts in a purse flap or pocket with your hand, without even looking. And each country’s money was different, on different paper. It was one of those deep habitual things we never think of knowing. That’s probably the most patriotic thing about me. Knowing dollars by touch.

I knew I had to take Emily’s money. I had to borrow from someone and start to straighten the piles out. But first I had to ask her about Bud Edison.

I asked the worst. “So are you … in love?”

The money lay there on the table, I was counting, it was over four hundred dollars.

She looked sideways, her profile majestic. Her head slanted down. “He’s in London. Again.” She shrugged. “It’s in three weeks.”

“I meant Edison.”

“What? That was nothing. He just came to the shower. You know he is a jerk. He brought a negligee to the shower. It was embarrassing.” She stopped for a second. “Is that why you didn’t come? Because you didn’t want to see him?”

“No. I was in Egypt.”

“Oh.”

I looked down at my food as if it were a duty. I took the money. I didn’t deserve it. At least I had medical insurance still from school. That seemed as stolen now as the sunglasses from Boss’s and Frank Lloyd Wright’s umbrella. I didn’t deserve anything right then. But I had those three things now and I was glad I had them. Most things in this world were undeserved. You had to believe that.

I
T WAS A GOOD RUNNING DAY
, blowy, melting, a vivid sky. It was spring now and I wanted to see the blossoms. I ran every day. The sky over the river was darkening though and I felt a little scared. But I wanted to see the pink-and-white trees because it was supposed to rain in the night and anyway I knew all things could be different tomorrow, so I ran. I saw the blue-gray clouds and the trees, mat light of the blossoms in the wind and I came home feeling, well at least I had that. I liked the increments of seasons, when I didn’t miss a day. That made me feel I was living my life.

Really the attempt to find God was a selfish thing. Beauty was something you couldn’t pass on or give away.

That evening I went up to the old man’s apartment with a box of chocolates. He took it, looked down at the offering in his hands and did not invite me for tea.

“Thank you.” I said.

“You a foolish girl.” He shook his head as if to shoo me away. He started closing the door.

We stood there, the door open three inches.

“How did I look?” I asked. I’d wanted to know that. I still didn’t think he had needed to take me to the hospital.

“You look ugly,” he said, then shut the door.

So it was true.

S
OME DAYS
E
MILY
ran with me. She ran in all white like a tennis player. I sighed at the end of running, my body used for the day, spent but nothing else. In the pawing of our running shoes on the sidewalk, stretching, the question was there, neither of us saying it: so what are you going to do now?

W
ITH PERSIMMONS
and cream from the farmer’s market, I went to see Timothy. He still lived in the garage, but he’d moved his couch and his books to an empty storefront around the corner, a place with a sign on top that still showed the faded traces of lettering, spelling Cora’s Cash Shop. I waited in a chair when I got there. His inner door was closed. A few minutes later, a woman with a baby sidled out, saying, “Thank you.” Timothy saw other people now. On his desk were the standard forms from Welfare and Aid to Women with Dependent Children. He held office hours Wednesdays, when he wasn’t at the Pleiades Palace.

“I’m damaged,” I said, walking into the new room.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“In elementary school even, you don’t know how much it meant to me, every A. I remember specific ones and then how it looked, the whole row. Getting into medical school was the happiest day of my life. You know who’s running the world? In your field and in science and in every other field? People from good families. Not people like me. I was just barely keeping up and now I’ve thrown it all away.”

“You took a risk.”

“I thought I was doing it for love. I wanted love to work. More than anything, I wanted that to work. I had school but it wasn’t enough. But now I’ve gone and ruined what I had. My mistake was trying to be cool and pretend I didn’t care. I tried to be like other people. I didn’t know my limits. Nobody gets everything.”

“You did a brave thing. You wanted more than just school. People with lives like yours do succeed sometimes but they can’t always connect with other people. But some people who had rough starts manage to do both. You’re trying to do both.”

“I could’ve made things different. I could have. I could have left California and gone home to live with my grandmother. I could’ve just gotten on a train home. My mother would’ve sent me. I was afraid my grandmother was too old. That she’d die. But if she’d died—she wouldn’t have, she didn’t die until later—but if she had the Briggses would’ve taken me.”

I noticed his collection of prayer beads on the windowsill to the left of the aquarium. They were hanging over the window, all six of them, the nuns’ beads made of waterlily seeds, the Franciscans’ heavy
wooden beads, the Buddhist bone beads on a yellow cord and whatever the other three were.

“Yes, they probably would have.”

“Emily isn’t damaged.”

“You wouldn’t want to marry Tad.”

“I know.”

“You couldn’t have left your mother then, when you were a child.”

My head turned, lolling, looking around the room. I didn’t really know what to say right now.

“What do you think you’ve ruined?”

“Well, medical school, and I have no savings. No job. Now that I’ve cut the string every bead’ll fall on the floor and go in all directions and scatter like marbles all over the place and I’ll never be able to find them again. I don’t know if I even want to go back to medical school.”

Timothy stood up and walked to his jacket, hanging on the doorknob. He took a Swiss army knife from the pocket. He always carried that. He opened it to a small hinged metal scissors. He nodded towards the beads hanging over the window. “Try it.”

“No.”

“Go ahead.”

I took the scissors, felt the knife weigh in my hand. I walked to the beads. “Which one?”

“Take your pick.” I liked the bone beads but I picked the nuns’, a gift from one of Timothy’s teachers. I didn’t want to ruin any of these looped beads. They were a perfect thing to collect; valueless; they had been used so many times, touched, to pray on.

I cut the string and nothing happened. It snapped and became a long line, not a circle, but intact.

“They’re knotted,” Timothy said. “Bring them here. We can tie them again. Sometimes, in some ways, you’re going to be behind other people. You have to consider your start in life and what you’ve done.” I handed him the beads and he showed me the tiny knots. He gave the ends back to me to tie. Our heads near each other, I saw again how thick the lenses of his glasses were.

“Sometimes I think I don’t really want to be a doctor. I picked that because it was safe and I wanted to make money. Be a success. In Montana, you should have heard, all the Ph.D.’s were calling each other doctor. But I think if I were really free, if I’d had a different life, I would’ve been an architect.”

“You’ve never spoken of pursuing the really lucrative fields of medicine.”

I shrugged. “Mmm, I don’t know.” I’d always thought I would be in family practice or maybe a child psychiatrist. “But it feels rich. Even if it isn’t.”

Then a kid with a boom box walked outside and for a long minute, we heard music.

It was organ music and gradual and then it was gone. For some reason, listening, I felt honored, like I was opening a gift. I felt like someone was telling me they loved me, one to one, me privately. And that is what heals. A person loving another person. In the same room or over time.

“Do you believe in God?” I said, suddenly.

I waited for Timothy to answer, thinking that if every person who heard the piece of music got something from it, that was the multiplication of the loaves. Music for everyone who needed it enough. Timothy still hadn’t answered and he never did.

At the end I sat up cross-legged. I was concentrating on the string and the beads. Finally I slipped the tiny knot tight. I stood up and gave them back.

“You can keep them.”

But I hung them back up on the window, with the others. You should never break up a collection. And you shouldn’t give away a gift.

We used to eat whatever I brought together, in the kitchen of his house in the garage. I brought these persimmons for today. They were ripe and soft, translucent at the tips.

I
WAS
idle.