Chapter Two

 

Baltimore, Maryland

Monday, September 25, 1995

 

“I’m looking for my father.” Lillianna addressed the white-haired volunteer in the pink smock behind the information desk. When the woman raised her tired, gray eyes, Lillianna continued, “Calvin Lee Miller. He’s a patient here.”

As the woman’s index finger traced a straight line down the computer printout, Lillianna thought about the irony of what she’d just said. According to her psychiatrist, she’d spent the better part of her life looking for her father. She’d even married a man twenty-three years older than her. But she’d never before searched in a place where he might actually be found. She stifled a laugh.

“Nelson Building. Room 809. Take those elevators over to your right.” She nodded toward a busy, brightly-lit lobby and four steel-doored elevators. “But visiting hours don’t start until eleven a.m.”

Lillianna ignored her warning, crossed the lobby, and jabbed the button for the eighth floor. Once off the elevator, she lost her nerve and ducked into the nearest restroom. She was about to see her father and that frightened her more than anything. Even the thought caused her hands to tremble.

Standing in front of the mirror, she fluffed her hair with her fingertips and tucked it behind her ears. The gray strands reminded her she was a full grown, middle-aged woman. She stared at her polished thumbnail where a tiny, bright dot of blood pooled on the cuticle she’d bitten into the quick.

She lifted her gaze back to the mirror. Lillianna had dressed carefully for their meeting—a denim skirt with leather knee-high boots, a new, long-sleeved yellow T-shirt, and a matching denim blazer draped casually over her thin shoulders.

Still not ready to face him, she dabbed on lipstick, then opened a stall and stepped inside. In a private place where she could pull herself together, she crouched on the edge of the stool and stared at the graffiti etched through the layers of yellow paint. Life is a shit sandwich. Lillianna chuckled. How much time passed, she didn’t know. The cubicle had its own dream-like, slow and sticky quality, like the closet where she’d hidden as a child. Time piled up all around her, filling in the corners.

A part of her wanted to run and catch the first flight back to her life in Oregon. Another part wanted to see him again—wanted to confront him with the damage he’d done. So much of her early life had been spent that way, torn between loving and hating him, between guilt and fear—pulled first in one direction and then another like strands of taffy.

It was odd how the details of her early life with him still existed inside her, independent of her adult self. Those days had their own breath, and Lillianna was sometimes obsessed by them. They tormented and tortured her, even now, when she’d gone so far beyond the sum of all their particulars. They were the memories by which she gauged her life and, once again, they thrust her backwards into the deep pockets of anxiety that had filled her childhood.

 

New Castle, Delaware

Winter 1963

 

Sixteen-year-old Emma lay on the living room sofa, numb and confused.

“Just say you ran into a door.” Her mother lifted Emma’s head and held an ice pack on her daughter’s blackened eye. “Tell them you got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and smacked into your closet door. It happens, honey. Everyone will believe you.”

Emma shuddered in her mother’s arms like a small, wet animal. Only two days remained before her winter dance. She had a date with the high school quarterback, David Baker and a beautiful new dress her mother had made.

“The ice will take the swelling down. It’ll look better by Friday night. We can cover it with makeup. No one will notice.” Her mother spoke calmly, but a nerve twitched on her right cheek just beneath her eye, warning Emma to keep the secret. Above all else, she must be quiet and protect the family secret.

It was early December, and scattered beams of winter light pierced the living room blinds and sliced across her mother’s face like razor blades.

“I hate him,” Emma said. “I wish he died in that war. Why wasn’t he shot by some Nazi? If only that grenade had killed him instead of all those other innocent soldiers.”

Her mother met her gaze. “You don’t know it yet, but there are things worse than dying.” She wiped Emma’s hair away from her face. “If he’d died, you wouldn’t be here. And what would I do without my girl?”

Her mother had learned how to accommodate him and to fit into the fractured spaces left by his anger. Somehow, she could accept the shouting and the blows—too afraid or embarrassed to speak out. So the three of them lived in constant fear inside a silent house where no one knew what went on behind its stucco walls.

It was something Emma vowed she’d never do for any man. “Why does he get like that?”

“It’s the alcohol. The best thing to do when he’s drinking is avoid him. If you can’t do that, agree with him, honey.”

“What he said wasn’t true, Mom. If I agreed with him, I’d be a liar. I don’t know how you stand it.”

 

Baltimore, Maryland

Monday, September 25, 1995

 

Unable to remember now if her mother had said anything more, if she told her daughter that day how it was she lived with him, Lillianna thrust open the stall door. Still struggling to find a context for her emotions, she marched out of the bathroom and down the hall toward the nurses’ station. She clenched her hands into fists and shoved them hard against the tops of her legs. When she arrived, she stood, waiting for the nurse to look up from her charting.

She seemed unaware of Lillianna’s presence.

“Good morning,” Lillianna finally said. “I’m here to see Calvin Miller. I know visiting hours haven’t started yet, but I’ve come all the way from Oregon.” For a moment, Lillianna hoped this nurse would be rigid and insist she come back at eleven.

A huge smile lit the woman’s face. “Of course. You must be his daughter, Emma. He hasn’t talked about anything else for days—ever since your brother told him you were coming. You’d think he won the lottery.”

Her cheeks burned. “Actually, I changed my name to Lillianna. I go by that now.”

The nurse looked at her but said nothing.

“Would you mind filling me in a little bit about his condition before I see him?”

“He doesn’t like to talk about himself much, does he?”

Lillianna shook her head, but in truth, she had no idea what her father liked to talk about these days.

The nurse read the notes in his patient chart as she updated Lillianna. It was just as Greg said—without an aortic transplant, her father had weeks, maybe only days to live. And the surgeon refused to operate until either the infection in his leg cleared up, or he agreed to amputation. “The night nurse said he didn’t sleep well last night so you may have to wake him. Fourth door on your left.”

Lillianna smiled like the dutiful daughter she’d ceased to be, but her legs shook, and moisture gathered in her palms. Her empty stomach rebelled as she passed the half-eaten breakfast trays stacked high on their carts. The smells fused on their dome-covered plates—dried egg yolks, bacon, creme of nothing cereal, French toast submerged in maple syrup. She took a deep breath, stood in his doorway and peered inside.

Propped up in the bed with pillows, Calvin Miller stared vacantly at a television set in brackets near the top of the wall in front of him. On the screen, a thick-eyebrowed doctor wearing a lab coat with a stethoscope hung around his neck discussed prostate cancer.

For a few seconds, Lillianna remained riveted inside the doorway. She couldn’t believe the man in the bed, so incredibly changed, was her father. His hair had grown thin and was pure white. He looked exactly like she remembered her grandfather, a man she’d loved without measure. Unable to move closer, Lillianna remained in the doorway watching the individual drops of IV fluid hang suspended for an instant before they slipped down through the tube and into the port stuck in his hand.

“Cal.” It came out in a strangled whisper. Lillianna tried to connect the name with the helpless, broken man in front of her. The choked sound of her voice startled her. She cleared her throat, said it again, louder. “Cal.”

When he turned to look at her, his face lifted in pleasure, while his left hand straightened his hair, then smoothed the front of his blue hospital gown where pieces of toast and scrambled eggs had fallen.

“Emma. Come on in.” He adjusted the volume on his hearing aid, then hit the remote to shut off the television. “I wasn’t expecting you ‘till later.” The skin on the top of his head was pink where the frosty strands of his hair thinned. Short, silver hairs stubbled his jaw and cheeks, running down into the deep folds of his neck.

“My name is Lillianna now. Remember?”

“I’m sorry. Greg told me, but I reckon I can’t get used to it. Emma. It was my mama’s name.”

“I know that. But my legal name is Lillianna. No one calls me Emma.” She thought about kissing him on the cheek or taking his hand—doing what any daughter would do who hadn’t seen her father for so long. But she couldn’t make herself touch him.

After pulling a chair close to his bed, she settled herself.

Her father surveyed her face for a few seconds as if looking for something he couldn’t find. After a few seconds, he lowered his gaze and stared at his damaged right hand—studied the emptiness in front of him, the loss of flesh and symmetry.

So many years had passed since the grenade exploded and Lillianna wondered if he’d ever gotten used to it. Wondered what he thought as he examined the stubs, the crooked thumb it left behind, the dark pieces of shrapnel still embedded in his flesh.

She could tell he felt as awkward as she did and her heart ached in vain for the words to make sense of the life they’d once shared. And she suspected he was filled with anxiety she might find those words and speak them. When the tears welled up, Lillianna held them back. She wouldn’t cry—wouldn’t allow him the satisfaction of knowing how much it still hurt.

Lillianna sat in silence beside his bed. She couldn’t imagine what it was like to be him—the man who’d done such unspeakable things to his children. Did he ever think about those days? Ever wonder about the damage he’d done? Looking at the broken old man in that hospital bed, it was difficult to imagine him filled with rage—thundering down to the basement in a blind fury. Hurling her small body across the concrete floor until she whacked her head against the cinderblock wall so hard she’d seen stars.

Where was the father she’d spent her childhood hating, the black-hearted man she once feared so much? What happened to that man, the enemy she’d been running from for half her life?

He was gone. The man whose eyes she wanted to blacken had disappeared. And Lillianna remained confused and uncertain about how to behave. It was almost like she wanted that father back, that monster man, that cripple who devoured her days and nights and filled all the rooms in their house with the sounds of his fury. At least she knew how she felt about that man.

This one was a stranger.

When she looked at him now, it was easier to see the child he’d once been than the monster he became. And for the first time in her life, she wondered what it would be like to rediscover that child.

Was she willing to reach down deep enough? Would finding that little boy give her insight into the man she’d come to despise? But why should she bother? He hadn’t acknowledged her as a child or even noticed her needs.

Her father was so quiet, she thought he’d fallen asleep. And with the realization he wasn’t watching, Lillianna’s shoulders caved inward as if a hammer had struck the center of her back. Tears came.

She caught her breath, shifted toward the wall for a moment, squeezed the tears from her eyes so they’d be dry the next time she looked at him.

When she turned toward him again, he reached for her hand. She slipped it under her right thigh, trying to hide her revulsion. They held each other’s gaze lightly as if even that touch was something they both feared. The thought of touching him brought with it a pain that knotted like a fist in the center of her chest. Why did she come here? She swallowed and tried to imagine what a daughter who grew up loving her father would do or say under these circumstances.

She slipped her hand from beneath her thigh. “How you feeling?”

“Not so bad. I’m not sick or anything. They’re just giving me medicine to see if my leg will stop draining. It’s no use, though. It’s been like this for fifty years.”

Ever since the grenade blew, her father had suffered from osteomyelitis, a bone-rotting disease in his leg. “These are strong antibiotics. That’s why they have to give them to me in the hospital. Who knows, maybe they’ll work.”

She shifted her gaze from his leg back to his face. “I hope so.”

When he stared at her, she looked away.

“The doctor comes in and examines it every day...but he don’t say much. How’s Steven and the kids? Do you like it out west on that horse ranch?”

“We love it. Cassy and Zack are both in college now. They’re not with us much anymore. But Steve has never been happier. I think he’s a farmer at heart.”

“It’s hard to beat the farming life. It’s how I grew up, you know.”

No. She didn’t know. In truth, she knew almost nothing about her father’s life before he met her mother. He hadn’t been the kind of father who took her on his knee and told her stories about his childhood.

Despite her anxiety, their conversation gradually smoothed out and moved forward on its own, carrying both of them with it.

“I must look a mess,” he said. “I haven’t shaved yet this morning. I can’t get my leg wet, so I take a sponge bath at the sink.”

Should she offer to help him? Of course, she should. But…somehow she couldn’t make herself offer something so intimate. “Do you want me to call a nurse to help you?”

“I can do it myself if you just get me some clean clothes and get things set up in the bathroom.”

She grabbed a clean hospital gown, a pair of boxers and a white T-shirt from the drawer.

“Pam’s not coming today. She wanted to give us time to—” He stopped as if he had no idea what his sister, Aunt Pam, had given them time to do. “I quit smoking. Did Greg tell you?”

She placed his clothes on the bed, grabbed his slippers from beneath it and tugged them onto his veiny feet, careful not to touch the curled, yellow toenails. “You? Was it hard?” After he strapped on the brace he’d worn on his right leg for fifty years, she helped him up.

“Doc Willingham told me to quit before the surgery. It’s all right unless I get to thinking about it. Then I crave one. Pam filled my nightstand with gum.” He shrugged. “But it don’t help all that much.”

“You should be proud of yourself.” She sounded cheerful. “It’s not easy to quit, especially when you’ve been puffing on those things as long as you have.”

He smiled, pleased as a small child by her compliment, and reached for the crutch he kept propped against the wall. When he was ready, Lillianna pushed the IV pole as he shuffled across the linoleum floor to the bathroom. His slippers made a humming sound, low and rhythm-less, between thumps of his crutch.

She dropped the clean clothes on a small stool beside the sink and located his toothbrush, razor and shaving cream. Once everything was set up, she hurried out of the bathroom and sat on the edge of his bed to wait.

It reminded her of the first time her daughter demanded to bathe herself behind the bathroom’s closed door. Lillianna had stood in the hallway, listening to the sounds of the water, needing reassurance Cassy was safe and hadn’t drowned in the tub. However, her father was not a child. Time had tricked him. Made him an old man instead.

“Yell if you need anything else.”

Staring out the window, her gaze followed the slope of the sun into the branches of the maple trees, down from their red canopy of leaves to the trunks narrowly swept with light. Morning light seeped through his hospital room, shy and pure. It lay its bright rectangular patches on the floor in front of her. The very best time of the day, morning, when everything was new and filled with possibility. Lillianna could tell by the thin clouds that later, the sun would break completely out and shine, riding high and exuberant in a dusty blue sky.

Her father peered around the door, his face drained of color. “Can you give me a hand with this T-shirt?”

Greg had mentioned their father dislocated his shoulder a few months before and still had difficulty raising his arm. But she couldn’t help him with this. It would mean touching him, and the very thought was repulsive.

“I’ll go get the nurse,” she said, then returned a few minutes later, one of the nurses behind her.

The nurse gently lifted his arm up and into the sleeve, before she coaxed the shirt over his head. She helped him back into bed, then shot Lillianna a look. “Do you think you can manage to unstrap his brace? Or do you need me to do that, too?” Her voice was edged in sarcasm and disapproval.

Lillianna took a step back. What right did that nurse, who knew nothing about their relationship, have to judge her? “I can handle it.” Lillianna tried to come up with an excuse that wouldn’t make her seem like a cruel and uncaring person. “I was afraid I’d hurt his shoulder.”

After the nurse left the room, Lillianna took a deep breath, then unstrapped the brace, and combed his hair. It was as fine as a baby’s and beautiful in a way she found touching in spite of herself.

“You seem tired. Want to rest for a while? I’ll sit here next to your bed.” He nodded, looked straight into her face without even an edge of distrust. Amazing. Seemingly oblivious to all the bitterness, hatred and rage that simmered inside her, he turned off his hearing aid.

Lillianna pulled the sheet and blanket up over his legs and settled in the chair to write in her journal.

With his hearing aid off, sealed away inside his own silence, he shut his eyes then opened them, looked at his daughter again like he was trying to make sure she was really there. His eyes were milky around the irises, and from where she sat they appeared almost blue—not the hard, solid brown she remembered. He smiled at her, then closed his eyes.

She watched him for a few minutes, knowing there was nothing she could do now but face whatever awaited them. Now, he would have some company. Whether she believed he deserved it or not, she’d promised Greg she’d stay with their father, and it was a promise she intended to keep. But for how long? She’d been here less than twenty-four hours, and it already felt like a week.

Within minutes, his breathing slowed, became obvious and deep. To the long, rhythmic sounds of his breaths, Lillianna tiptoed out into the hallway, hoping to clear some confusion from her head.

Whoever she was when she arrived at the Johns Hopkins hospital, she was not that person now. And she would never be her again. As unfair as she believed it to be, there was no way for him to make amends. No way to balance the books. Not now that something she never once believed could happen, happened.

And her father was helpless and old.