"Emily?" my father asked.
"Hi, Dad," I said.
"Oh, there you are, Emily."
I took my father"s hand.
"Your hands are so cold," he said. "Put some mittens on, will you?"
"I"ll be okay."
"Put some mittens on. Stronzo, give Emily your mittens."
Everybody looked around.
"Where"s Stronzo?" my father said. "Stronzo, give Emily your mittens."
"Stronzo" was Italian for "t.u.r.d," or "piece of s.h.i.t," or "cheating liar," and was a specific nickname for Uncle Vito after he drove his car into our garage by accident one night. It was a specific secret nickname that only the three of us knew. My mother smiled.
"Shh," my mother whispered to my father.
"Where"s Stronzo? Oh, there he is!" he said, pointing to Uncle Vito in the corner.
Uncle Vito pointed to himself. "Me?" Uncle Vito said. "I"m Stronzo?"
The doctor came in. "Your father should get some sleep for an hour," he said. "You all can come back in soon though."
"I don"t need rest," my father said dreamily. "For G.o.d"s sakes, people, I"ll be dead soon! Let me live."
"Victor," my mother said, looking at me and Laura. "The children."
"Why am I Stronzo?" Uncle Vito asked. "I thought Vince was Stronzo."
My mother ran her fingers over the IV. My uncles stared at the heart monitor. Laura took her fingers through her brown hair. The nurses walked by the room in a rush. I cleared my throat. My father opened and closed and then opened and closed his eyes.
"Property tax has gone up in Monroe and that"s a crying shame," Uncle Vince said.
Silence.
"Emily," my father said, pointing to Laura, "is that your daughter?"
"This is Laura," I said.
"Why didn"t anybody tell me I was a grandfather?" my father asked. The needles in his arm were crowded by blue and red patches of skin.
"No, Dad," I said. "This is your daughter, Laura."
Laura stood still. "Dad," she said. "No. It"s me."
"Victor," my mother said. "This is Laura. You know Laura."
"Is it overwhelming?" my father asked me. His lips were thin and crusty. "She is beautiful. Is it overwhelming?"
"Dad," I said. "This is your daughter. Your daughter."
My uncles shifted uncomfortably. Stronzo thumbed the fan.
"Oh, I know my daughter when I see her," he said. "Emily, honey."
"Dad, this is your daughter," I said calmly. "This is your daughter Laura."
"Dad!" Laura screamed. She was about to cry.
My mother put her arms around Laura. "Let"s go, Laura," she said. "Your father is on a lot of morphine right now. He"s very confused at the moment. Of course he knows that you"re his daughter."
"You look at me, Gloria, and tell me when I had the time to have another daughter!" my father said, pointing at us but not quite looking at us. "I"m a busy working man! I have a life, you know that, Gloria! Remember how busy I was? That was always the problem, wasn"t it?"
I kissed my father"s shaking hand.
"Oh, there was never any problem, Victor," my mother said.
"I was very busy and I"m sorry," my father said.
"We"ll let you sleep now," my mother said.
His lips curled as though he was about to cry. And then he was crying, blubbering, wholly sad. "Oh, G.o.d," he said. "Don"t go. This is it, isn"t it? This is it."
"No, this isn"t it," I said.
"Let me count on my hand how many children I had, Emily Marie," he said. "One. Look. One child. And we felt so bad, you know that, Emily. We wished we could have given you a brother or a sister. You were always so alone. So alone. Out on that driveway. I cried. Forgive us? Can you forgive me? I am so old, Emily, too old to have a child."
Mrs. Resnick arrived. We sat in the chairs outside the hallway in silence, and we continued to sit like this for an hour while my mother tried to make conversation (the chairs did not hug her back well), the doctors were so tall (don"t you just hate that), the coffee so-so (the way Emily likes it). Laura was droopy, slouching, confused in her chair, and Mrs. Resnick asked me questions about my business, if it was what I always dreamed of doing, if I thought it was going to sustain me throughout my thirties-and if not, what would I do instead?
I picked at my nails, pushed back the cuticle until I drew blood.
"Emily, stop that," my mother said. "Oh, I"ll get you a napkin."
My mother left and came back with a napkin, a tray of corn m.u.f.fins, four coffees. She swung her hair over her right shoulder, and I couldn"t figure out where she thought she was. When my mother got close enough, she leaned over and presented the m.u.f.fins to us like a consolation prize.
"I"m sorry your father is dying," she said to both of us. "I"m sorry your father is dying."
She said this as though my father and Laura"s father and her ex-husband were not the same person. She said it like we were losing three completely different people. I didn"t know what she was losing and she didn"t know what I was losing, but the doctors kept making it clear that what we were all losing was an organism. This was what happened after too much time in a hospital. When someone died in a hospital, you just said, okay, well, that"s sort of why we brought the organism here. The organism wasn"t looking so good. But when someone died outside of a hospital, you shouted, you screamed for help, you looked at their face and you wanted to scream, This is a man! This is a man who can no longer breathe! This is a man who goes to Spanish restaurants in Prague and eats Italian! You want to scream, How dare you put that man in a bag! You want to scream, even though n.o.body would hear you, even though screaming is the first clear indication that somebody, somewhere, is drowning.
"Take a m.u.f.fin," my mother said. She was still leaning over my chair. I picked out the largest m.u.f.fin of the group. I was always a child, even in front of a child; I was still the child plucking off the tops of the largest m.u.f.fins and handing the bottoms to my mother.
My mother ate the bottom of the m.u.f.fin, despite her complaints, because at the hospital, she was the one whom people talked to; here, she was the one who kept her hair responsibly out of her face and I was the one who twirled the strands that fell limply across mine and thought, We are running out of time to communicate with each other! She was the one who knew the answers. She was the one who said to me on the bench outside his hospital room, "Emily, if n.o.body ever died what would be the point of living?" and I was the one who said, "The point would be to always be alive." She was the one who stayed at our house and watched our silverware tarnish and I was the one who traveled the world and was constantly surprised that the houses I decorated were not my own, the vases I put inside them were not my own, the arched doorways were not my own, the people I loved were not my own, the feelings I felt were not my own, my feet were not my own, my mouth and hands and eyelashes and teeth and skin were not my own, because one day, it would all be taken from me.
"Laura, honey, take a coffee," my mother said, handing the last one to her. "It"s good for you."
Laura sniffed her coffee suspiciously. "I"ll hold on to it," Mrs. Resnick said, taking the coffee from Laura.
We sat this way for hours, all four of us, shifting our feet to the solemn songs of machines, to nurses and doctors guessing which part of my father was next in line for shutdown. His lung. His leg. His brain. When I began to cry, Laura began to cry, so I stood up straight and regained composure.
"Your father once told me that fencing was a winter sport," I said to Laura about Mr. Resnick. "Your father once told me the only word in the English language with no vowels is "gym,"" I said to Laura about my father.
"That"s not a word," my mother said. "Because the actual word is "gymnasium." And that has more than one vowel. I don"t know why your father never understood that."
"He only understood what he wanted to understand," Mrs. Resnick said.
My mother dropped her mouth to speak and I tensed. "Will you be all right?" my mother asked Laura, and I relaxed. "I worry for you."
"I think so," Laura said, and tucked the hair behind her ears.
"How is Mark doing?" I asked Mrs. Resnick.
"He"s well," she said. "He lives in Norwalk. He"s an engineer now. Very happy."
I wondered what Mrs. Resnick and Mark and Laura talked about when they got together, if they could look each other in the face, if they ever even got together. I wondered if Mark"s empty bedroom was making a good storage room, if nightfall was the most appropriate time to be erased, if the body shut down painlessly in the dark, limb by limb, finger by finger, toe by toe, nail by nail, your life more like a faraway dream with every pa.s.sing moment, the people standing above you merely shadows blocking the light. I wondered at what point during your death you could look down at your own body in the noose and think, What is this thing? I wondered if dying hurt more at dawn, when everything was green and crisp and beginning and you were ending, you were tired, you were unsure of what was worse-the things you understood or the things you didn"t. Would Mr. Resnick have felt worse or better knowing that I was watching him die? Would Mr. Basketball think of me on his deathbed? I wondered and all four of us sat in our blue chairs and wondered. We held hands and ate m.u.f.fins like children who couldn"t feel their stomachs and when my mother dropped her m.u.f.fin, she bent over and sobbed into her lap for the first time in years and I knew she loved my father. I knew she could feel him leaving her, and that it hurt just as much, if not more, than the first time he left, even if this time he was still down the hall in his silk robe.
37.
When Jonathan picked me up later that night he had a hard time looking at me.
"You okay?" he asked, driving the car.
"Yeah," I said. My father was a cold slab. My father was a ghost.
Jonathan told me that it felt like a Kafka short story at the hospital.
"Everybody kept going into the dark room to see the person that I couldn"t see," Jonathan said. "Then everybody came out of the dark room crying."
I wanted to smack him in the face. A large acidic pocket of air rose in my chest, but I kept my mouth shut. "Don"t get on the highway," I said. "Let"s go to your place. It"s so much closer than your father"s."
"We can"t," Jonathan said. "I"m sorry."
We turned onto Seeley Road, the street of my old high school. Webb High. A taupe and asymmetrical castle built in the seventies.
"Jonathan! Stop," I said. "Let"s stop here."
"For what?"
"I want to see the school. I haven"t been inside since I graduated."
"It"s late," he said. "School is locked."
"Not the theater door," I said. "They keep that side door open all the time. I used it whenever I needed to come back to school and get a book."
We parked on the side of the school and walked through the door to the theater. We walked past the auditorium, where Jonathan had kissed me behind the curtain once. We walked past the music room, and the cafeteria, and ended up in the front hallway of the school where there was a big red sign that said DRESS CODE.
NO muscle shirts, NO wearing of pants below the waistline, NO shirts bearing midriff, shoulders must be covered at all times, NO tube tops, NO see-through shirts, NO bandannas or hoods unless they are worn for religious or medical reasons, NO T-shirts that promote racial slurs or gender slurs, NO student shall intentionally expose undergarments, at risk of suspension and/or restructuring of garment. Shoes must be worn at all times.
"Girls started wearing thongs on the outsides of their jeans after you graduated," Jonathan said.
"I suppose it was inevitable," I said.
The front hallway was still packed with the same old trophies and some new ones: Yale Physics Olympics, First Place; National Financial Literary Conference Leaders 08. In the cafeteria, there were no more vending machines. Only big Gatorade bottles that dispensed water underneath a sign that said HOW ACIDIC IS YOUR BODY?
I walked quickly to find my old locker. On the way, I pa.s.sed a large white sign that said THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF A WARNING SIGN, and underneath there was a picture of a genderless child smoking marijuana, a genderless child with his/her head on his/her book, a genderless child drinking from a beer bottle, a genderless child mouthing "F**K!"
I walked faster down the hallway and I could hear Jonathan losing pace behind me, shouting, slow down, Emily, but I couldn"t; I was feeling like my wild, destructive self. Slow down, Emily, slow down, he kept saying, as the white walls blurred past me, and I wanted his voice to go away. I wanted him smaller and smaller. I wanted to feel what life would have been like without him, if he had never walked the dog and found me on the stoop that day. I pa.s.sed wall graffiti on the right that said JENNY CLIMP CLAMPS HER c.l.i.t underneath a banner that read: HEY, GREAT THINKERS: IS THERE A G.o.d? WHAT IS MOST REAL? THE MOLECULES THAT MAKE UP THE AIR, OR THE FEELINGS YOU HAVE INSIDE YOU?
"Jesus," I said. I stood still at my old locker and caught my breath.
My locker was covered in a giant sticker that said VOLDEMORT IS REPUBLICAN. I leaned against the metal. Jonathan caught up to me. "I"m starving," I suddenly realized. Grief made me feel ten years old, crying and panting and barely thinking, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, my stomach ached.
"Here"s home ec," Jonathan said, pointing to the cla.s.sroom.
We walked inside the cla.s.sroom where I had spent two years sewing an oversized stuffed camel. The home-ec room still had four full kitchens, one in each corner of the room, two refrigerators.
"Aha!" Jonathan said, a little giddy, finding a ready-to-make package of cinnamon rolls in the fridge. "Sit."
He pulled out a tiny yellow plastic chair for me.
"I"ll make you some rolls," he said. "But first, we need some music. What"s your father"s favorite CD?"
"Jimmy Buffett," I said. "His earlier work," my father always added, as if he was talking about Pica.s.so"s Blue Period.
"Shockingly, there"s no Jimmy Buffett," he said at the boom box on the windowsill, picking up CDs. But I couldn"t have had a life without him, I thought; he was so good, standing there in the pretend kitchen, trying to cheer me up. "But there"s Beethoven or Wagner or Spanish II."
He put in Wagner and while he took the dough out of the cardboard he made up words to the music just to watch me laugh. I laughed and I laughed and I laughed. Sometimes it was easier to laugh when you were sad. Everything felt more extreme. More romantic.
"I love you," I said from my chair across the room. And when he didn"t say anything, the room felt as big as the ocean. Like I was drowning, in his car again, when I was eighteen and he accused me of my mother not dying.
The oven buzzer went off, and I flinched. "I know your wife is dead," I said. "You"ve been lying to me."
He had expected this, he said. "Let"s just eat."
We sat on the tiny little yellow chairs and ate at the flat round table. I sat there wondering why I catered to Jonathan"s guilt. Suck it up, I wanted to scream, we"re all s.h.i.theads. But my stomach ached, and the rolls were warm, and the icing was slipping off the sides.
When I was full, I said, "Why couldn"t you just tell me? Why are you lying?"
"Let"s get out of here," he said, dumping the tray in the trash.