A MEMORY CAME to me there on the ledge, my back to the cliff, my hands sliding along the damp rock. In the memory, a woman came out of my father’s bedroom.
“You can go in now. He doesn’t have long,” she said. She was a nurse or a caretaker. I nodded, and after she passed by, I took a deep breath and went into the room.
The lights were dim. It was the house I had grown up in, and the walls were the same dark paneling, the ceiling fan still swaying back and forth as it turned. Mom was long gone by then. I knew that as the memory came back to me. My mother had died. Did she pass before or after the airplane crash? I thought it was before, but I couldn’t be sure. I hoped it was before.
My father didn’t move when I entered the room. His eyes didn’t open. His hands were still on top of the beige sheet. The place hadn’t changed much. Mother’s old figurines were still on top of the dressers, the old lamps she had chosen still sitting on small bedside tables on either side of the bed. Neither of them were turned on.
“Dad,” I whispered. It was strange speaking to him like that, calling him “Dad.” We hadn’t spoken in the weeks leading up to that moment—maybe it had been months—and I couldn’t remember the last time I had called him “Dad,” but I didn’t know how else to address him. “Man”? “Mother’s husband”? His name was Virgil, but I never called him that either.
He stirred, and his lips parted, seemed to mumble some words, but no sound escaped. I moved closer, leaned in over him, and for the first time felt genuinely sad at his passing. We had never understood each other. Had we ever loved each other? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think I could remember ever loving him.
“Dad,” I whispered again.
There was a chair positioned beside the bed, and I pulled it over, sat in it, and put my hands on the bed, close to his right arm. He had always been a very hairy person, his arms practically furry in his old age. Hair sprang out of his ears, and his eyebrows were wiry with strands standing up here and there. Tufts of chest hair came up out of his shirt collar. His hands were still the hands of a trucker, cracked and etched with deep lines of dirt, the kinds of stains that would never come out no matter how much soap was applied. His fingers were thick and his hands were powerful. His nails were a mess, chipped and raw around the edges.
Even as he slept, his hand sought mine out, drifting toward my arm. “My son,” he said, and tears rose to my eyes. He had never, ever called me that. He had always spat my name out like profanity: “Dan!”
But there, he called me “son.” I leaned closer. His eyes wouldn’t open, although his forehead seemed to be trying to lift his eyelids by sheer force.
“I’m here, Dad,” I said, and the word “Dad” came easier that time. “Are you okay? Are you in a lot of pain?”
His head shook, lulled around, and it took some effort for him to steady it. When he spoke, his words were slow and slurred. “No, fine. I’m fine, son.”
Again, I melted at the title of “son.”
“Can I get you a drink? Anything?”
He held tight to my arm and didn’t answer. He took in a breath and moaned the exhale, not a painful sound but a tired one. “Just wait,” he said, trying again to open his eyes, to no avail. “Just wait.”
I sat there for quite some time, so long that I thought he might have fallen asleep. Or died. Had he died? I put my ear next to his mouth and nose and thought I sensed some stirring, like the air outside a cave that has another entrance miles away.
“Son,” he said again, the word a balm. “Adam.”
Wait. What? I wasn’t sure. “What did you say, Dad?”
“Adam.” The word escaped from him like a breath.
He thought I was Adam. That’s why he had called me “son.”
“That’s not me,” I whispered. “That’s not who I am. Dad, Adam’s in prison. He killed a lot of people in a plane crash that was his fault.”
“Adam,” he continued, his voice otherworldly, breathless. “You are the one. I have left everything to you.”
I tried to speak, but I could no longer use the word “Dad.” It wouldn’t come out. I couldn’t say it. I hated him. In that moment, when he thought I was my brother, when he called me “son” only because he thought I was Adam, I hated him with everything inside of me.
“You have had a hard time of it,” he mumbled.
“Yes,” I whispered, even though I knew he wasn’t speaking to me.
And then he died. I didn’t have to check his pulse or lean in close to know it. There was an incredible stillness that settled in his flesh, a kind of anti-animation where every one of his cells appeared to harden. Lifeless doesn’t even begin to describe it. He seemed to immediately turn gray, a darkening that blended into the wood paneling and wooden furniture. The room dimmed, perhaps because a cloud passed over the sun, or perhaps because the ghost of him shrouded the window on its way out. I didn’t know. To be honest, I didn’t care. He was dead. I thought that might rid me of the voices, the ones that had told me throughout my entire life that I wasn’t quite enough, that my father didn’t love me, that I had no one.
But the voices never left.