I pull the rental car down the driveway and find a spot in the far corner of the parking lot, away from the building that looks like an enormous ranch-style house with oddly placed windows and sliding glass doors that I’m convinced would be welded shut if it weren’t for some overriding fire code. In front of my windshield is an ugly, shrinking mountain of slush and grime—a winter’s worth of plowed snowfall. The trees are bare, rigid skeletons in formation in front of a soft blue sky. It doesn’t look a damn thing like the brochure my siblings and I were shown, which offered lusher, greener photos taken at the height of summer. I don’t remember how we found this place. I say “we,” but this was, of course, Naomi’s work—the only one of us able to function while the rest of us were in denial (or feigning indifference). The cars around me are as nondescript and unremarkable as the building, cars they give away on syndicated game shows, Buick Skylarks and Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais.
Sadly, no one here is winning, on a game show or otherwise.
I always felt it was sexist that it fell on Naomi’s shoulders to handle all of this at the time, but, truthfully, Kenny was ill equipped and, on top of everything, had two young kids. Me, I lived in the city. There’s no place like this where I lived, at least not one we could afford. And my father would have been unhappy and confused with the noise of New York, plucked from the quiet of upstate only to be confronted with screaming sirens and the endless mental jackhammering; it’s enough to drive even those of us in our right minds insane. Besides, I was persona non grata to him. Had been for many years.
I sit in the car, stretching and contorting my legs until I hear a few unsettling pops. It would be more productive to stand and stretch, but I like the sanctuary, the security, that the car’s interior provides. I feel invisible, despite being surrounded by windows, a false confidence that is not uncommon based on the number of nose-pickers I’ve witnessed on this trip. I rotate my feet in circles, and when I get bored of that I flex my calves. I stretch my neck by looking over at the entrance, only to see someone who looks vaguely like Naomi exit the building, and I slouch in my seat to hide. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might run into family while here, and what I would say if I did. Fortunately, it’s not Naomi. She would never wear such a hideous coat.
When I enter the building, I’m confronted with a whiff of depression and sadness, and of the meat of bodies stored in heat instead of refrigeration. The smell is poorly masked with some sort of citrus freshener meant to make it all okay, but somehow makes it worse, slapping a happy face on grimaces of tortured pain. It’s the smell of animal shelters (although not as pronounced), the faces here, too, hoping to be sprung with each arriving visitor but too broken to yelp and bark.
“James Smale,” I say to a woman at the front desk, announcing both my name and the name of my father.
She doesn’t even look up. “Room 124,” she says, with some sort of French Caribbean accent.
His room number is the same as that of my creative writing classroom in high school. The irony. Room 124. The room that set my brain free is now the very one trapping his. “I can go back?” Surely they don’t just let people in off the streets. She finally pays me a glance and holds it a second longer than would be polite before nodding me through. I guess I don’t look dangerous, just neglectful. Which is probably true of all visitors here.
I walk down the hall and smile at everyone I pass. A woman sitting in the hall in a wheelchair. She smiles back, all gums and no teeth. An older gentleman with dark lesions on his bald scalp propping himself up with a walker. A man in nurse’s scrubs carrying a mop; he nods back at me, both of us unsure who has the sadder task.
I find the number 124 on the wall and trace my fingers over the letters of my name on the nameplate underneath as if I’m blind and reading Braille. I can almost feel Annie Sullivan spelling ASL letters into my hand: F-A-T-H-E-R. But I don’t know ASL, so maybe she’s spelling something else.
The door is open. I take a deep breath and step inside.
“Hi, Dad,” I whisper. I fight with the one annoying Demi Moore–style tear that always forms in the corner of my eye when I visit.
There is, of course, no response.
His eyes are open and he stares vacantly at Oprah on the television set on the dresser. I watch him for a while, before turning my attention to the TV. The episode seems to have something to do with a week in the life of a troubled family. I can’t imagine what their troubles are, but I doubt like hell they come close to equaling ours.
Something looks different about my father. Maybe it’s just that he’s older than he was when I saw him last, two Christmases ago. Before I sold my book. Before I met Jackie. Before Frank Latimer. Back when I was somebody else.
His hair is white where it used to be silver, but it’s more than that. Someone’s parting it on the other side. His face is sullen, sunken, vacant; I didn’t know skin could look gray. I turn away, it’s painful to see, and don’t look back until the show goes to commercial, then I pull up a chair beside him and sit down.
“It’s James, Dad.” He doesn’t respond to that, so I say “Jimmy,” the name he often pushed in my mother’s face.
We spoke some on my last visit, but nothing of any consequence; my father seemed to think someone had taken his eyeglasses and replaced them with a pair of identical-looking frames with a slightly different prescription. I told him most likely it was just time for him to see an eye doctor, that perhaps his vision had changed. In fact, I tried to arrange an eye exam with the nurse and Naomi followed up. Several weeks later they found his glasses in a neighboring room—sure enough, another more mischievous resident had switched them.
I’m not sure he had a firm grasp then on who I was, nor am I all that certain now.
“How are your glasses?” I look at them on his face. They’re so smudged with fingerprints and grease I can hardly see his eyes. “Here. Let me help you.” Carefully I lift them off his face. He flinches, but just a little. I wipe the lenses on the T-shirt under my sweater, but they’re so greasy I can’t tell if I’m making them better or worse. “Hold on. I’m going to wash them in the sink.”
He nods, but I don’t think he understands.
In the bathroom I run the water until it’s warm, and find liquid soap in a wall-mounted dispenser. I run the glasses under water and lather the lenses with my fingers until they’re lost in foam. I look in the mirror and hardly recognize myself—I look older too. When did I become such an adult? When did these lines appear, these dark ones under my eyes? Did I have them a week ago, before I left the city? Is my forehead growing north? Is my face sliding south? When did my pores become so embarrassingly . . . porous? The water runs hot and I can feel my hands burning, but it takes a moment before I register real pain; I rinse the lenses under cooler water.
I wipe the glasses dry and place them back on my father’s face. “Here you go. I think you’ll be able to see a lot better with these.” He flinches again. I sit back down in the chair by his bed. He widens his eyes as if he notices an immediate improvement, and I feel happy that my presence here has accomplished at least one good thing. “So what’s new?”
No reply.
“What’s new with me? Well, let’s see. Still in New York. Daniel’s good. He’s directing a play, but they’re still raising the money. I have a book coming out. In August. A novel about mothers and sons. I guess we haven’t spoken about that. It’s been a while. Maybe Naomi told you. I’m sure she did. She seems proud of me. I would like to think that you are too.”
Silence.
I sound unnatural, like a snare drum, my sentences no more than crisp, staccato notes. I remember being a child, playing with LEGO or some sort of toy. How I would make the people talk, how they would have vivid, colorful conversations on all sorts of topics—movies, car racing, city planning—until a grown-up appeared in the room. And then these toys would revert to the stilted, polite conversation of strangers. It feels like that now. Like I want to have an animated conversation, full of excitement and ideas, except an adult just walked in. But aren’t I the adult now?
My father groans and starts banging his hand on the bed.
“Mom’s not thrilled, of course, but I’m going ahead with it anyway. We can talk about the why. I just—thought you would get a kick.” As much as he hated when I would disobey him, he delighted in the few occasions I would cross my mother. “You’re not going to believe who my editor is.” Nope, nope, wrong, I say silently to myself, as if he had offered actual guesses. “Jackie Kennedy.”
I wait for a reaction that doesn’t come.
“Well, Jacqueline Onassis now. That’s what she prefers to be called. Can you believe it? Not that she prefers to be called that, but that she acquired my book? It took a long time for that to sink in. I’m sure you can imagine.”
I’m sure. You imagine. What are these words? I’m not sure of anything when it comes to him. Does he imagine? Can he conjure or visualize or dream?
It was only a few years after my mother kicked him out that he first exhibited signs of his disease. He was still young, so we were slow to catch on; the progression in retrospect was rapid. It was hard to keep on top of reports of his declining health. And, truthfully, I wasn’t sure how much I was supposed to care. Naomi stayed involved. Kenny too. But my mother and I were the most aggrieved, and it was hard for us to know just how much concern to muster, although we managed plenty of guilt. It occurred to me much later that perhaps he agreed to leave knowing he was sick. That he was going away to die, the way a dog might crawl under the house, or a wild animal might retreat far into the woods. That I was just a convenient excuse. Though I knew that was a bit of a stretch. To me it was a relief, his illness, even though I know how terrible I am for thinking it. He struggled on his own. It was hard to imagine his starting anew; his best days were seemingly behind him. Wasn’t it more merciful this way? To have him succumb to something quickly rather than wither quietly (or loudly) for years?
“I’m still looking for an ending. For my book.” I see if that sinks in. “I’m looking for a number of things. I thought maybe you could help.” He actually turns in my direction, but stops short of looking me in the eyes. “She really pulled a number on us, didn’t she.”
I look up just in time to see two terriers trot past his open door. Am I hallucinating? There’s an air vent close to the ceiling; maybe they pump in mind-altering drugs, perhaps that’s how they keep people here calm.
“Excuse me for a moment.” I get up, cross the room, and poke my head into the hall. The dogs greet a woman with an angular haircut angered by severe highlights. She’s crouched in the hallway two doors down.
When she sees me she waves. “Hi.”
“Are dogs allowed in here?” I say it not as an accusation but as a question of policy. Should I get my father a dog? He’s desperate for the company, I think. And maybe it would teach him a good lesson. A dog wouldn’t go anywhere. Dogs are loyal, more loyal than families. More loyal than many fathers. Let him sit with that every day.
“These are therapy dogs. Specially trained. We bring them in once a week.”
“Ah.” One of the dogs sees me and trots languidly in my direction. I reach down and pat the top of her soft head, and then tousle the hair on her skull into some sort of wisp. She’s more agreeable than Domino, who, much like my mother, does not seem to like being touched.
“Would Mr. Smale like to visit with her?” It takes me a moment to realize that I’m not the Mr. Smale she’s referring to.
“I . . . I don’t actually know.”
“He knows Buttons. Just lift her onto the bed. They’ll be fine.”
Buttons raises one eyebrow and looks away, as if she wants it made clear that she didn’t name herself. I don’t really know the best way to pick up this dog, but after a false start trying to lift her like one might a child, I put my hands underneath her and hoist her into a football carry.
“Look who’s here, Dad.” I thrust the dog forward before setting her gently on the bed. She intuitively finds an open space between his arm and his body, circles ceremoniously two times, and lies down.
My father peers down his nose, surprised to find a dog curled up in his armpit, but not unpleasantly so. He moves his hand slowly to pet her. He looks right at me for the first time, as if to make sure we’re seeing the same thing. I start to pet Buttons too, and our hands touch; it’s awkward at first, the accidental grazing of fingers like two teenagers on a first date. How does this escalate? What do we do next? But we find our rhythm and stroke Buttons’s back in unison, two parallel pendulums never connecting.
“Casp . . .” he starts, before slurring the rest.
“Casper?” Casper was a dog we had when I was growing up.
My father nods. It’s strange to think, with the way his disease works, that all the things I no longer think about are the very things that are readily accessible to him. Memories that are gone or only faint recollections—Casper, for instance—are perhaps as vibrant to him as if he had lived them yesterday. And all the things I’m mad at him for, all the things I obsess over when I’m lying awake at night—his rejection of me, the hateful things he said to my mother—are probably to him long gone.
“So did you know about this?”
My father, of course, says nothing. I’m going to have to do the heavy lifting myself. About what?
“About this Frank Latimer character. Name sound familiar?”
Frank What-i-mer?
“Latimer. Frank Latimer. That ring any bells?”
Never heard of him.
“I just don’t know if I believe you.”
Who is he?
“Well, for starters, it sounds like he fucked your wife.”
My father remains focused on the television and I feel immediate disgust with myself for speaking of my mother so crassly. Anger holds a clenched grip.
“Shocking, isn’t it. They seem to have had quite the affair.”
Oprah cuts to another commercial.
“Maybe if you’d just been a little bit nicer. A little more attentive. A little bit more of a man, maybe that would never have happened.” It takes me a full minute to do the math on that. “But then I guess I wouldn’t be here.” Or I would be fifty percent different. Fifty percent someone else. Fifty percent more him.
It’s hard to know what to wish for.
He starts coughing and Buttons and I look at each other, alarmed. I sit him up and administer a few whacks between the shoulder blades in an awkward attempt to get him to stop. A passing orderly sticks his head in the door, but I wave him away. “We’re fine. We’re fine.” I can feel tears forming in my eyes and I don’t want anyone to see me cry.
The orderly gives me the thumbs-up and moves on.
I rest my father back down in the bed.
“You did know, didn’t you? From the beginning? Is that why you insisted I be called James? To claim some ownership over me? Or was it not until much later. When you wanted me out of the house. Maybe you were done altogether with betrayal.”
I’m fully crying now, and it catches me by surprise. I’ve never done this before, never wanted to give him the satisfaction. He continues to focus on the television, so I find the remote twisted in a blanket and turn it off in a huff before tossing it back down on the bed.
“Doesn’t matter. You were a real asshole to me.”
The room suddenly silent, my sniveling is amplified. It sounds ridiculous, even to me, so I decide to catalog the items on his nightstand in the hopes that a task will put me at ease. A clock radio, lotion, a lamp, a box of Kleenex, wool socks that seem to have been laundered and folded in two, a photo of the grandkids in a frame, probably from Naomi.
With the television off, he returns his attention to me.
I was the asshole?
“Yeah, you were. I was a kid.” I reach for a Kleenex and blow my nose, then return to petting the dog. “And then you got sick, so I was the asshole for not loving you. Real nice.”
This is new, this kind of outburst, and to me it’s confusing. I don’t know what to feel. Is it good? Should I consider it progress? Is this the healing Jackie encouraged me to embrace?
“So about the book. Remember me saying that? I wrote a book. A novel. It’s going to be published.”
My father thinks on this for a moment. “Casper?” His voice is thin and raspy.
“That’s not fucking Casper, Dad. Casper is dead. That dog’s name is Buttons.” I pause to ascertain if that is even his question. Maybe he’s asking something else entirely. I take a breath so deep I could bust ribs. “Is Casper in the book? No. It’s a book about Mom. Well, a version of Mom. It’s about mothers. And the mysteries surrounding them. You know Mom.” I cringe at how awkward I sound.
Buttons starts licking my dad’s hand and he looks surprised but not displeased. Did I know Mom? Did any of us?
“Well, that’s a really good fucking question.” I’m surprised by my repeated profanity, my apparent need to appear more masculine.
I watch him spread his fingers so Buttons can lick between them. I’m a little put off by how long this goes on, like maybe I should wash his hands afterward—or should have before, for poor Buttons’s sake.
“You’re in the book. Not too much.” I pause to consider my next words carefully, to evaluate the ability I have (or don’t have) to inflict harm, but then I decide what the hell. “At the very beginning you put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger.”
I wait for a reaction, wondering if it’s as painful to hear as it was to say. The acknowledgment that for a long period of time he was dead to me. Slowly my father tilts his head to look squarely at me and his eyes water and his forehead crinkles, even more than it’s now naturally creased, and he nods.
Wouldn’t that have been nice.
“Yeah. Come to think of it. You’d probably prefer it to this.” We continue stroking the dog, although our pace slows, the metronome clocking our hands losing its charge.
I remember a time I visited his apartment soon after my parents split. There was only a bed and one chair and a lamp on a cardboard box. All the clocks in the house were turned backward; the one on the stove was covered with tape. “Why are all the clocks facing the wall, Dad?” I had asked. He didn’t want to answer me, and so I pressed him on it and he finally said it was because he couldn’t stand to watch the time tick by. Only then did it occur to me he might be living with regret.
“The truth is, I didn’t think you were an important part of the story. But now . . .” The licking sounds become unbearable. “Now I’m not so sure.”
Everything I thought I understood is bathed in new light. Perhaps my father always knew he was raising another man’s son, and he stayed and did the hard work of it anyway in the face of such betrayal. Especially then, when it was men who strayed and women who were faithful, a cheating wife a hit to his already toxic masculinity. A gay son? Especially one who wasn’t his? Well, that was just the final blow.
“I’m not mad at you.” The words feel like a shirt I want to like in the dressing room mirror, even though I know it will be an awkward fit in the light of day. “You know what? That’s not true. I am mad at you. Nobody in this family ever, ever says that. No one in this family ever says anything. I’m angry, and I have been for a really long time.”
Very feebly, as if he’s out of the practice of speaking, my father makes a sound with three syllables. Is it a word? There’s no real way of telling. I run the sound backward and forward through my head as though I were examining frames from the Zapruder film. Perhaps there is still something there.
Something.
Someone. Perhaps there’s still someone there and these syllables are important—his Rosebud—a memory from a long time ago categorized in the one lobe or the one cortex or the bits of basal ganglia that are still functioning, that are still showing signs of life. He’s alive, kicking. Just as my mother was more than a decade ago when she sided with me and threw all of his things out onto the lawn.
Then he slams his fist on the mattress. Once, twice, and a third time for good measure. Then both fists, banging them like a gorilla.
“Good! This is good!” I grab a throw pillow from the chair and start punching that until we are two men expressing primal rage. “You’re angry too! It’s not fair that you’re here! GET IT OUT!”
We punch and we punch and we punch. At another time in my life I wonder if we might have punched each other and my pillow and his mattress are just surrogates absorbing our pain. I can almost feel the sting of a fist connecting with my jaw.
And then, a lightbulb.
“Dad, Dad, Dad . . .” I drop the pillow on the bed and put my hands on his, holding him down until he stops. We sit quietly for a moment as we catch our breath. And then I tell him, “This is what Jackie meant when she told me I was letting my characters off too easily.” My father looks at me confused, so I offer, “Jackie, Mrs. Onassis.”
This is why my ending feels hollow—it doesn’t have the requisite anger! The quarantine lasts only forty days, my characters are not going to solve everything in less than six weeks’ time. But they have to at least address the years of resentment they enter the quarantine with in order to position themselves in the right direction moving forward. They have to get really mad. They have to decide they’re not going to take it anymore and say so before they can make a change.
And in the tail of that blazing realization, my father’s syllables finally connect. At least in my mind they do: For-give-ness. We have to get mad, and we have to forgive. I forgive you, I say in my head, because I’m not certain yet that I do. But surely I can let my characters forgive. Try it on for size through them. And come back here someday—hopefully soon—and say those words out loud.
I forgive you.
I punch the throw pillow once last time, then reach up and muss his hair, brushing it back in the direction I’m used to seeing it parted, and suddenly, in that one little difference, like a ship approaching the lighthouse cake we made all those years ago, my father appears from the fog.