Father of the Rain (35 page)

“Where is she now?”

“McLean’s. She always ends up there. They pump her back up with lithium and give her a good talking to about taking it regularly even when she feels she doesn’t need it,
especially
when she feels she doesn’t need it. And then they send her home.” He doesn’t lift his head from my shoulder. I touch his hair, too gently for him to notice. “My dad couldn’t handle it. He’s never been able to handle it. Her mania ignites some sort of terror in him. Now I just tell him to get out, and I call him when it’s over. I don’t know how she was when you saw her, but she can get viciously angry. It’s crazy. And then she can become a puddle of syrupy sickness, on and on about how you are the most sacred, the most perfect being ever to be put on earth. I remember once when I was little she tried to convince me that I was Jesus Christ. I was so scared. I didn’t want to be Jesus. I didn’t want all those holes in my body.”

I hold him tight.

After his breathing has smoothed out, I ask him if he wants to come in for some tea.

“I’ve been inside for so many days. Do you mind if we stay out here?”

I get a jacket and we go over to the lawn chairs by the pool. The pool is covered now by a taut green sheath, but we haven’t put the chairs in the shed yet.

Neal sits in one of the recliners and pulls me down with him. We lie sideways, his chest against my back, his breath in my hair. It feels so good to be held.

“Is this okay?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“I hate seeing her strapped down. I don’t care what she says. I can tune that out. But the look on her face. And her body all cinched up.”

“How often does it happen?”

“The longest she’s gone between episodes is two and half years. But normally it’s a shorter cycle.”

“I had no idea.”

“People have been discreet. It’s a good town in that way.”

“And this was happening when we were in school together?”

“All my life. They used to pack me off to my aunt’s in Maryland for the summer.”

“Every summer?”

“The bad ones.”

He comes most nights after that, tapping at the windowpane, lying with me on a lawn chair in the dark. When the nights grow colder he brings a blanket. We look up at the autumn stars and can only name a few. We spoon, and sometimes we push against each other slightly, but we never kiss.

His mother comes home from McLean’s and he opens his shop back up. “No one even noticed I was closed,” he says.

We talk, but it’s more like thinking aloud. I’m often not sure what I’ve actually said. On clear nights the stars pierce a million holes in the darkness. Jonathan said once that the stars made him feel powerful.

“That’s weird,” Neal says. “They make me feel minuscule.”

“Me, too. Maybe it’s an Ashing thing.”

“Do they make you think of God?”

“No.”

“You don’t believe in God?”

“If there is a God, we haven’t been introduced yet.” I stare at the dark vault above, the little pinpricks of light that are really balls of fire, many bigger than the earth. All these things we’re meant to believe. “Stars just make me think of death.” I tell him about the
first time I had the dead star feeling. I don’t say I have it now, that it seems to have set up camp in my chest.

He says he likes the theory that the universe expands and then contracts, over and over, that your life comes around again, every sixty billion years or so.

Another night I ask him, “Are you writing a novel that begins freshman year of college and ends at a Pottery Barn?”

He doesn’t answer and I start laughing.

“I hate you.” He squeezes me harder. “I hate being a cliché.”

He has three different jackets, his brother’s old leather one, a brown canvas one, and a red-and-black wool lumberjack one. The lumberjack one is an extra large. He wraps it around me and buttons me in, my back against his chest. Sometimes I see him during the day on the street in that jacket and I smile.

“Is she like your mom?”

“Who?”

“The Dead Girl.”

“No. Yes. I mean she’s not cuckoo crazy, but she has a lot of energy.”

“My mother always thought it was important to be bubbly.”

“I like bubbly. But it has to come with some gravitas.”

“And the Dead Girl has gravitas?”

“Being dead helps.”

“Tell me her name.”

“No.”

I make guesses: Megan, Susan, Leslie. He says no to all of them. “Good. I hate the name Leslie. No, that’s not true. I hate the name Le
ss
lie. Le
z
lie’s fine. But if you ever call a Le
ss
lie Le
z
lie look out. It’s spelled the same so how are you going to know?”

He takes his hand off my stomach and puts it over my mouth. “Her name’s not Leslie.”

“Molly?” I say, through his hands.

“Nope. No more guesses. You’ve used up your weekly ration.”

The next night he says, “I didn’t say you were concave. I said I wouldn’t
care
if you were concave. Which you weren’t. And certainly aren’t now.”

“Now he notices,” I say.

And then there is the night we hear the geese, just a few, not even in a V. They are flying too low and at first they make no sound. And then I hear it, a thin frail cry and then another one, more dire, starving maybe.

“They’re too late,” Neal says. “They’re not going to make it.” And then says, “Hey, hey,” but I can’t stop crying for those geese.

One night when I’m buttoned into his red and black jacket he asks, “What would happen if you rolled over and faced me?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.” The smoke of his breath drifts past my ear up toward the stars.

Then he doesn’t come for three nights in a row. I stop by his shop. It’s only four-thirty but it’s nearly dark. Streetlights and headlights are all on. It’s cold enough to snow. I’m wearing my old Michigan parka. I got it at the secondhand shop for ten dollars. It’s orange and slightly misshapen, and Jonathan called me the UFO when I wore it.

Neal is with a customer when I push open the door, their backs to me, looking up at a shelf near the ceiling. They turn at the same time. Neal grins at me, apologetic, grateful, happy. The woman’s cheeks are flushed. There is a suitcase near Neal’s desk.

“The Dead Girl,” I say, before I can stop myself.

“The Dead Girl,” he says.

“
What
?” she says, wheeling around. She is lovely, of course, with round brown eyes and a wry smile.

“I’m Daley.” I put out my hand.

“You really call me that?” she says to him.

“What’s your real name?”

“Don’t tell her!” Neal says, but too late.

“Anne.”

“Anne?” I look at him. I could have gotten Anne.

He shrugs.

“It’s an awful name,” she says. “I hate it.”

“Not as bad as Lesssslie, though.” He looks straight at me, seeing if I understand how it is. I do. I always have.

“Not half as bad,” I say.

And then it’s Thanksgiving. Cold, overcast, the way I always remember Thanksgiving in New England to be. Despite weekly urgings, I couldn’t get Garvey to come. I did get him to talk to Dad. It was a brief conversation, stiff but benign. Maybe, Garvey told me, he would come for Christmas.

My father has his meeting at one that day, and then we go to the Bridgetons for lunch.

They live north of town, down a long wooded road. All the leaves are gone from the trees. Every one. When we’re almost there, my father says they talked about Grace today.

“Grace?” I don’t know who Grace is.

The car stops. The road has ended at the ocean and the Bridgetons’ house. “Patricia said that grace is accepting love, that we all spend so much more time resisting love than just taking love. It’s funny, isn’t it, to think of rejecting love. What a stupid thing to do. But I guess we do it all the time.”

“I guess we do.” I am very flat. I hate Thanksgiving.

“Yeah. Well.” He opens the car door. “Let’s eat some turkey.”

The Bridgetons have their own rocky beach below the green clapboard house. I might have said I’d never been here before, until I stand on their lawn looking down at the rocks and remember climbing on them with an older blond boy, falling down and scraping my knees. Through a window I see the mudroom with a sink in it where my mother washed my cuts and put on Band-Aids.

My father and I cooked and baked that morning: green beans, garlic mashed potatoes, and an apple pie. He can now make five different main courses, and he does his own laundry. We walk around to the front of the house with our platters of food. My father insisted I dress up a bit, so I’m wearing my interview outfit, a beige suit and boots with heels.

Carly Bridgeton opens the door.

“Uncle Gardiner!” she says, and gives my father a big hug. Carly is his goddaughter. I forgot that. She’s the oldest of the Bridgetons’ children, well in her thirties, but the quilted vest and knee socks she’s wearing take twenty years off her.

“Hey there, little peanut,” he says.

“Look at you,” she says. “You look great, Uncle G.”

And he does. His skin is a tawny pink, and his eyes clear and alert. He’s gained a little weight. He looks fit and strong and a good deal younger than sixty-one.

“You remember Daley.”

“Of course I do.” She hugs me, too. “We made cootie catchers together, remember?” But I don’t. Her narrow nose and big freckles are not familiar to me exactly, but if I saw her on a street in a big city, I would think I knew her. She looks like a lot of people I grew up with.

Carly takes our coats and leads us into the living room. On the pink chintz sofas are the two Bridgeton boys, both in coat and tie, pouring handfuls of Chex mix into their mouths. They stand when they see us, wiping their salty hands on their pants before shaking. I can’t remember which one is the one who is doing “who knows what” in Colorado. They both seem to be what Ashing Academy followed by a New England boarding school and a small liberal arts college conspire to produce: clean-cut, self-deprecating, socially agile men. Together we identify who was just a year older than Garvey (Scott) and who was just a year younger (Hatch), who had been on
Dad’s undefeated Little League team three years in a row (Hatch), and who remembered Garvey winning the declamation contest with Kipling’s “Gunga Din” (all of us).

Mr. Bridgeton comes in the room then, lurching, his right foot in a blue cast, the toe of his white sock poking out. On this little patch of sock, someone has drawn a smiley face. A scotch and soda rattles in his hand.

“Holy Christ!” my father yells. “What happened to you?”

“Oh, just a little run-in with a moose.”

The boys laugh and Hatch fetches a doorstop at the other end of the room. It’s a brick covered in needlepoint, the head of a moose stitched in brown and beige on the top.

“Ouch,” I say.

“Tripped right over the goddamn thing in broad daylight. Never saw it coming.” Mr. Bridgeton is looking above our heads and smiling helplessly. He is clearly enjoying his painkillers.

I hear the pulse of a food processor and excuse myself to help Mrs. Bridgeton.

“Don’t go in there unarmed!” Hatch says.

Scott offers me the cheese knife.

The kitchen is small, the pea green color of so many Ashing kitchens in the fifties. Mrs. Bridgeton is putting pecans on top of mashed sweet potatoes carefully smoothed into a fluted pie dish. She has a cocktail on the table, too, nearly drained.

“It smells good in here,” I say. It does. It smells like our kitchen did when my mother was making the Thanksgiving meal.

“Oh, Daley, I’m glad you’re here.” She kisses me on the cheek. Her own cheek is warm and smells like baby powder. “And look at you!” I can see her struggle for a way to compliment the severe colorless outfit.

“My father made me wear it,” I say, to let her off the hook.

“He did? Well, you look lovely.” Her voice grows quiet. “How is he?”

I reach into the bag of pecans and begin another circle inside the one she is finishing. “He’s doing really well. This week he started coaching basketball with this youth group. He loves it.” Kenny, who I recently discovered is my father’s sponsor, told him about the opening.

“I just wish Hugh would take him back.”

“I don’t think he’d want to go back to an office. He enjoys this much more.” He told me a few nights ago that coaching was what he’d always wanted to do full-time, but it wasn’t considered a respectable choice of profession. “Screw respectable, Dad. Follow your passion,” I said.

“Well, he’s wonderful with children,” Mrs. Bridgeton says. “We all know that.”

“My mother used to make this.”

“I know she did. I gave her the recipe.” She reaches in the bag for more pecans. “She and I were friends, you know, before she got involved with the Democrats and all the rest.” She says the word Democrats the way my father does, as if they are a cult that whisks away decent people.

“And then you slather it with brown sugar and broil it?”

“You bake it and then at the very end you broil it.”

“My mother sometimes burned it.”

“It’s easy to burn. It goes from brown to black very quickly.”

“Thank you for having us here. It’s nice.”

“Holidays are hard alone.”

He’s not alone. I want to say. I’m not alone. I wish she were capable of appreciating his progress.

“Who’s in here?”

My father ducks to come through the low doorway.

Mrs. Bridgeton brushes back her hair and smoothes down her green dress.

“Just us Thanksgiving elves,” she says.

My father is handsome in his charcoal suit, crisp white shirt, and tie with the blue and green fish on it. “Look at this feast.” He eyes the vegetables in bowls, the golden turkey lit up in the oven.

“Same meal I’ve been making for thirty-nine years,” she says, wiping her hands on a dishcloth.

“If it ain’t broke,” my father says absently, looking out the window at the gray water. I know he wants to drink with the rest of them in the living room. I can feel it as if the craving were in my own body. I want to hold his hand and tell him it will pass. Be strong, I’d tell him. The holidays are the hardest.