NOW THAT HE WAS gone, my mother wanted us to dream about our father. She called each one of us and asked if we had seen him in a dream yet, and was deeply disappointed when we admitted we had not. It was as if we were letting her down, failing at some important if obscure group effort to fast-track the mourning process. And yet she hadn’t seen him either, and it had been four months since his death. “I wonder why he hasn’t shown up yet,” she mused. “Is he mad at me? Am I mad at him? We always had such trouble cooperating.” She sounded annoyed, as if he had promised to drive her somewhere and was once again late to pick her up.
“I wouldn’t read too much into it,” I said.
“You know, your father would have been a great husband if only he had been less selfish.”
“Mom, isn’t it time to let go of that kind of thing?”
“Oh, it’s never too late to understand people. That was one of his problems—he lived the unexamined life. So now I’m examining his life for him.”
I don’t know where she got the idea that we were supposed to dream about him. She told me that it was a commonly acknowledged part of what she called the grief work. “Everyone knows this,” she said, sounding impatient. I didn’t argue; it felt as if she’d earned the right to understand her loss any way she chose. After my father’s diagnosis, she had taken early retirement in order care for him at home, giving up a job she loved to spend hours on the phone with the insurance company, to hire and fire home health aides, and to stand over them as they bathed him in the tub. She took him for walks, pushing his wheelchair around the block, and sat with him in the esplanade outside, in the winter sun, and fed him by hand while cooing endearments. “There you go,” she had said, spooning applesauce into his mouth, because solid foods were becoming difficult for him to swallow. “Is that good? Yes, it’s very good. I know it is. Very, very good.” And then he had unexpectedly died within a year, much sooner than any of us had imagined. Now she had neither the job nor him, no distractions at all, nothing to keep herself from thinking about the past. I could feel her loneliness coming through the phone line, like the air that rushes through a subway tunnel before the train appears.
She named an old friend of his, also a lawyer. “You remember him? He called the other day. It turns out your father had dinner with him every Tuesday, for years. He never told me. If I asked where he was, he made something up. Why is that?”
My father had an ingrained and reflexive habit of evasion, an odd tendency to cover his tracks, even when those tracks were completely innocent, but I didn’t want to think about that. Maybe because it made him feel blurry or shapeless when I wanted him to have clear, definite outlines. “Mom, I gotta go.”
“You’ll call me when you finally see him?” she asked.
“I don’t normally remember my dreams,” I said, hedging.
“But this kind of dream is different.”
I hung up and phoned Perrin, not sure what I wanted to find out, feeling restless, vaguely worried. “Why did Dad hide things? You know, about where he was and what he was doing . . .”
“Honestly, I think he just wanted to eat without feeling guilty about it.” Until secrecy became a habit that stretched to include everything.
“Compulsive overeating,” I said.
“Yeah, basically.”
And yet no one theory really covered everything, which is why we always went round and round, adopting one and then discarding it and picking up another. “Mom would tell me this story,” I said. “About when they got married and she started to worry that he was a drug addict.” I was a little boy when she first began repeating that tale. She always laid it out with a bemused air, as if it were a celebration of my father’s childlike eccentricity and their warm, comically hapless union.
“I’ve wondered about that too sometimes.”
“But he always made such a huge point about not using them,” I said.
“It’s hard to say what was really true,” she said, growing quiet. “The one thing I never doubted was that he loved me.”
We sat in silence for a moment. I had a sudden memory of being in the car with my father, parked on a street in Coney Island near the boardwalk, eating hot dogs from Nathan’s. My clothes were damp from the rain. Rain pounded on the roof of the car, and the windshield was a sheet of water, impossible to see through. It felt as if we were under the ocean in a diving bell. What were we doing there? I couldn’t remember, and it didn’t matter. What lingered was the feeling of absolute peace.
I hung up and walked over to my desk, pulled a clean new notebook out of the drawer, and wrote Dream Book on the cover.
Since the funeral, I had been having a lot of trouble sleeping. I would spend nights counting the children’s breaths, and then at dawn I would go to the window and look out at the backyard, where the blue heron had taken to sitting in the pine tree behind our house. The bird had mournful eyes, and it flew with great, slow flaps of its wings, its thin legs stretched out behind itself in a sort of tired Superman posture. It was my dad, just as he had been, slouchy and oddly dignified. I would stand at the window and cry in silence so as not to wake my wife.
But he wasn’t just the heron. He was all over the place. I could feel him in the color of the sky at sunset, turbulent pinks and reds, low-hanging clouds. I had, in fact, seen him on the other side of the street just the day before, walking at a fast clip. I had crossed the street and followed him at a distance, but lost him around the park with its big cypress trees.
WEEKS PASSED AND I did not dream about my father. He was holding back, squirreling himself away for safekeeping as he so often had in real life. I called David to see if he’d seen him, but he sounded leery of our mother’s plan and changed the subject, telling me he’d gotten our father’s suits altered and was now wearing them to work. I knew those suits: browns that were almost plum, grays that were luminous, nearly blue. Pink pinstripes. “Dad always had great taste,” David said. It was true: when he wasn’t depressed and looking homeless, he walked the grungy marble hallways of the criminal court building like the star of a screwball comedy, jaunty and elegant.
“Do you want his shoes too?” I asked, meaning the dress shoes my mother had insisted I take home after the funeral. I’d had them almost six months and hadn’t even tried them on. They were too beautiful to touch.
“Not my size,” said David.
“Maybe you could get them stretched or something.” The truth was that I wanted to get rid of them. Just having them in the house felt wrong.
He told me it wouldn’t work, and the conversation petered out. Afterward, I went to the closet where the shoes resided like deposed kings and held one in my hand, breathing in the earthy richness of the leather, feeling its surprising softness. I had done this before, had thought of slipping one on for a moment, but could never bring myself to do it. My father’s manic swings had been marvelous to watch, but I had identified with his depressions, and had therefore spent most of my life dressing in cast-offs and hand-me-downs. I put the shoe back with the others and grabbed a pair of old sneakers instead.
It was Sunday and there wouldn’t be any kids in the park. My plan was to walk with Jonah to the coffee shop in the failing strip mall with the megachurch and buy him a piece of cake, just to get him out and expend a little energy—he was three years old, a whirlwind. But halfway there, we got sidetracked by the old military cemetery, which is to say that he suddenly veered off and darted inside the gate. I saw him running down a row of little white headstones, and, in a second, he was gone. I lost sight of him, which caused a moment of panic—that moment of terror when I could glimpse the world without him. And then I found him, and just like that, the fear was a residual tingling in my body.
“What are these?” he asked, pointing to a white stone marker.
“Gravestones,” I said, still panting from the run. “When people die they don’t need their bodies anymore, so we bury them here and mark the place with a stone.”
His look was serious. “When people die, do they stop and get better, or are they dead forever?”
“Forever. They live in our memories. We think about them.”
“Is Grandpa buried here?”
He had been angry when I didn’t take him with me to the funeral in New York, so angry that when I got back he had ripped up the photograph of his grandfather I’d brought in my luggage. “No, Grandpa is buried in New York,” I reminded him.
He nodded. “Do we bury their bones or their skin?”
“The whole body goes in a special box we call a coffin, and we bury it.”
“And what do these say?” he asked, gesturing to the line of headstones.
“They say their names.” I read the inscriptions out loud for him as we walked back toward the gate, the elaborate Southern names sounding exotic to my ears. All people who were once alive, like us.
“So when people die, we turn them into words,” he said.
I THOUGHT ABOUT THAT idea at the mini-mall and the coffee shop and the walk back home and over the next few days of ordinary life, the domestic routine, till the phone rang and it was Perrin on the other end. “Did I tell you that I dreamed about Dad?” she asked.
“Tell me.” I reached for the notebook on my desk and opened it to the first page, ready.
“I looked up and saw him standing in front of me,” she said, “so we hugged. ‘Dad, I love you,’ I said. ‘I love you, too,’ he told me. He was smiling and seemed completely unaware of what had happened.”
“That he was dead?”
“Yeah. We stood there together, feeling very happy, and then a little creature came walking up to us, maybe three feet tall. It was a sloth.”
“A sloth?”
“You know, one of those cute animals with the long hair and the very long arms and the wise, sad smile? He was walking on two legs like a human, which I don’t think they normally do, and he took Dad’s hand and Dad smiled and said to me, ‘Got to go, Sweetie,’ and then they walked off together.”
The sloth—about the size of a child, cute, gentle. I remembered watching my father walk off with my brother Sean when Sean was just a little boy, the two of them holding hands. I was in my mid-twenties back then, but the sight would make me achingly sad because I could never go home with them. I had my own life, such as it was.
I felt a furious need to interpret the dream, perhaps to keep our father from leaving with the sloth forever. “That sloth was you as a little girl,” I told her. “Your unconscious mind was telling you that he’s still alive, but in the past. The you of the past, the little girl, is with him there. The you of the present has to remain in the present, where he can’t go.”
“No,” said Perrin. “It really was a sloth. I woke up crying. I knew that was the last time I’d ever see him.”
MY MOTHER CALLED A few days later. “I finally had a dream about your father,” she said.
“Oh?” I went to my desk and got the notebook, opening to the page after Perrin’s entry.
“He took me dancing. And he was such a fine dancer. We did a fox-trot up and down the length of the room. He looked wonderful, in a beautiful suit with a flower in his lapel.”
“I didn’t know he could dance,” I said.
“He couldn’t. His feet were like two bowling balls. But he can now.”
At dusk, I went to the window and saw the heron there in the pine tree. He looked fierce and thoughtful, and we shared a moment of loneliness together. Later, I fell asleep and had the first dream I could remember in a very long time. It was one of those dreams in which there are no people and nothing happens: just a view of what seemed to be a block in our small city, downtown by the river. I half-recognized the old red brick buildings, the cracked sidewalk, the cobblestone paving. What was odd was the sky, pale and almost lemony, stretching on and on without end.
I don’t always feel that good about the place we live, but in the dream the feeling was deeply good, a form of love. My dream-self instantly understood the significance of what it was seeing: my father was here, and the thing I most feared in life, that something would hurt my children, that I would fail to protect them—that would never happen. Instead, the world would rise beneath me and carry me up, like an ocean swell, and it would give me the strength to be their dad, and we would be happy.
I had slept much later than usual; one glance out the window and I could see that the heron was gone for the day, the pine tree empty. I got up and got dressed, and then went to the closet and pulled out a pair of my father’s shoes: oxblood, cap-toed, with monk straps instead of laces. I put them on and noticed how different it felt to stand in them—firmer, taller. I was going to find that street downtown, the one that almost looked like the dream. Then I opened the door and stepped outside.