Somebody Else's Daughter (3 page)

The vodka burned her throat. She drank and waited, hearing the rain. It was a quiet old house; it wasn't hers. She was a stranger here.

Sometime later, maybe an hour, she felt someone's hand on her shoulder. She'd fallen asleep at the table. It was early still, the sky white, nude. The rain had stopped.

“You fell asleep,” a woman said in a Jamaican accent. “I've made the assumption you're not a criminal.”

Still, she felt caught. Ashamed, she pulled her sweater around her. “I'm his daughter. I grew up in this house.”

The woman examined her face as though she were looking for proof. “He's very sick,” she said. “I'm his hospice nurse.”

Unwittingly, Claire started to cry. It was the last thing she wanted to do in front of this stranger, but she couldn't seem to help it, and they were old tears, they'd been waiting to come out for a long time. The nurse sat down at the table. The sky suddenly looked bruised and it started to rain again and you could hear it beating on the ground.

“I haven't been home for a long time,” she said. “We weren't close.”

“It doesn't matter,” the nurse said. “It's good that you're here, now.” She stood up and held out her hand. “Come, we'll go up. He's been waiting for you.”

They climbed the stairs, and she entered the cold, blue dream of her father's death. It was very quiet. The air smelled of alcohol and Clorox and burned toast. And when she passed the opened windows she could smell the earth too and she could smell the rain. She sensed that strangers had been here, a parade of friends and caretakers, the kind souls who understood what death was, who nurtured it like a garden of delicate black flowers.

There was a draft in her father's room, the window was cracked. Beyond the dirty glass was the yellow field, the ruined garden. Lilacs trampling the fence.

“Isn't he cold?” she asked the nurse.

“The fresh air is good.”

“Can he hear us?”

“Yes, I think so.” Claire swallowed hard; she would not cry her guilty tears. She sat down on her father's bed and looked at his face. It was an old man's face. His blond hair had gone white. His chin pointy, his broad cheeks hollow, his mouth fixed in a gargoyle's grimace. His eyes dim, colorless. She put her palm to his cheek. His skin was warm, damp.

“Look who's here, Mr. Squire. It's your daughter, Claire. She's come home.”

“It's me, Daddy,” she muttered, taking his hand. It was soft in the way a child's hand is soft, before it has learned to be hard. She heard the door settling into its frame and realized that the nurse had left them alone. The room seemed to close in on her. This was her parents' room. The paint-chipped radiators with clanging pipes. The yellow window shades. The Chinese dish on the bureau where her mother had kept her earrings. The Tibetan rug her mother had dragged back from one of their trips. Claire remembered one of her birthday parties, she was eight or nine, all her friends sitting on the steps in party dresses, the lovely Turkish runner, and her mother in a handmade apron, wearing her trademark red lipstick.
Say cheese!
The big windows full of sunlight, pussy willows pressed up against the panes. Something good in the oven. Pink icing on the cupcakes. And her father, in one of his camel-haired sport coats, getting all the girls to giggle and blush.

Her father's chest expanded then deflated. “I'll just sit here with you, all right, Daddy?”

He closed his eyes then opened them again. She held his hand tighter. She sat with him for a long time, looking at his face. Maybe the nurse had been right, she thought. Maybe the past didn't matter now. What mattered was this moment. This moment right now and the one that came next. His dying was a bridge she could cross, and he was waiting for her there, on the other side.

2

For lunch, the nurse made soup, the chicken bones like babies' fists floating in broth. Claire couldn't bring herself to eat. After lunch, she took Teddy up to see her father. Her son stood in the doorway like an uninvited guest with his long arms and legs, hands shoved in his pockets. She nudged him gently, taking his arm. “It's okay,” she said.

They went to the bed and looked down at the old man. Her father's face hadn't changed. His eyes stuck on the ceiling as if someone had Velcroed his gaze. “He's awake?” Teddy asked.

“Yes,” the nurse confirmed. “Your grandson is here, Mr. Squire.” The nurse tugged on the old man's blanket as if to straighten it, even though it was already perfectly straight. Her father looked like a Kewpie doll in a giant's pocket.

The wind rushed against the house, the screens. The window shades slapped their frames. You could hear the chimes outside. Everything seemed to be moving, but her father was still, his arms at his sides. Claire sat on the bed and took his hand. His fingers were tapered, his fingernails wide and flat like seashells. She had never looked at his hands so carefully. He had lived a long time with his hands and now they were useless. “Dad,” she said. “Teddy's here.”

Teddy hunched over the bed, his arms crossed over his chest. His face pale with worry, doubt. “He doesn't see me.”

“He hears you. He knows you're here.”

He left her there with her father. She could hear him going outside, the slam of the screen door. A little while later she could smell his cigarette. He was angry at her, she knew, for keeping him away from here, for refusing her father's charity, and he'd had a shitty life because of it.

She sat on the bed, moving with the guarded solicitude of a stranger. “I could tell you how hard it's been for me,” she spoke softly. “I could tell you all that. But I won't.” She squeezed his hand hard. “We've hurt each other enough, haven't we?”

Abruptly, his eyes closed. She watched his face, wanting to believe he understood her. His eyes were half moons, slippery, gray. She waited for him to open them, a confirmation of some kind, an apology, but they stayed like that, shut tight.

Later, they walked in the rain. They took umbrellas and crossed the back field. She showed him the old greenhouse, the windows shattered, the grass inside waist high. It was a fragile place, she thought. “There used to be flowers here,” she said.

They went down the sloping lawn to the pond and you could see the clouds on the black surface and all the upside-down trees. Moss like spilled paint at their feet. They crossed the tennis court with its torn net, cracks sprouting weeds. The empty pool full of leaves. Overturned Adirondack chairs left out in the grass like some breed of extinct animal. She pictured her mother walking beside her in one of her party dresses, her father in a tuxedo, their shoulders sprinkled with confetti. Claire had never even come close to having a relationship like that. There had been Billy, Teddy's father, but that had been a short-lived, drug-induced adventure that had lasted a month. And she'd messed up that relationship too.

The years had piled up like dull books. Pages of anger and resentment. She'd rip those pages out if she could. Maybe she'd gotten lost, she thought. It happened to people, it had happened to her. She'd made mistakes; no one had to tell her. Her lousy judgment when it came to men. She knew. But she wouldn't take all the blame for it.

She took Teddy out to supper at a café in town. She drank vodka, watching him eat. They went to a movie at the tiny theater, a French film with subtitles. Driving back to the house they let the windows down. Horses were running in the darkness. Teddy made her pull over so they could hear them. It was a sound, a kind of fury.

The house was silent. She crept up to her room and got into bed. Listened for a while for Teddy; didn't hear him. At last, she succumbed to sleep, a murky deluge, sewer-tepid. Hours later, the nurse woke her. Birds were screaming at one another across the field. “He's gone,” was all she said.

They buried her father in the town cemetery, next to her mother. It was a small gathering, mostly people she didn't know. People her father had worked with over the years, some of whom had driven up from the city. Skinny, beautiful women in black dresses and high heels. Men poised in their suits, holding flowers. Claire smiled at them, grateful that they'd made the trip, but their eyes came back empty.
We didn't know he had a daughter—he never mentioned you.

Teddy took her hand. At seventeen, he had a man's hand and when she stole a look at him she saw a full-grown adult in his new suit. Even under the circumstances, she couldn't help feeling proud of him, admiring him in the suit, grateful to him for behaving himself. For being kind to her. You couldn't teach kindness, she thought. It was something you were born with. People either had it or they didn't. He took her hand and squeezed it, a ritual of theirs— something that they had not done for a very long time—a signal that meant
I love you.
When he was little, just doing ordinary things like going to the supermarket, she'd take his hand as they crossed the parking lot and squeeze it and he'd squeeze hers back.
I love you too, Mommy.
It came to her that one day she too would die and be buried here in this field. She glanced at Teddy, who had spotted a lone dandelion in the grass. He leaned over and pulled it out and blew the fluffy white spores into the wind.

The rain fell. Edith Piaf on the turntable. She had to order more liquor from Hardy's. People drifted through the rooms, looking at the photographs of her father and his friends. After everyone left it was just her and Teddy. Silently, they ate a meal of spaghetti and she drank from a bottle of Turley, one of her father's favorite wines. She gave him her father's watch, his wallet. He put the watch around his wrist and held it up for her to see and smiled because he was proud to have it. He examined the wallet. It was old, battered. He breathed in the smell of it. They went upstairs to her father's room. There was the empty bed, the sheets stripped. There was the open window.

The following afternoon, her father's old friend and attorney, Irving Lubin, came to see her. They sat in the kitchen. She poured him a drink, vodka. The sun streamed through the old wood blinds, making penitent stripes on the table. Lubin had large, trembling hands. They ate sardines on crackers, doused with lemon. He kept his files in an ancient alligator briefcase that yawned when he opened it like the jaws of an exhausted beast. “Your father was a shrewd businessman,” he told her, thumbing through the papers. “You don't owe a penny on this place.”

“I don't deserve it,” Claire said.

“Oh, I think you do.” Lubin looked at her out of his watery eyes. “It's yours now,” he said. “Make the most of it.” He took out a handkerchief and blotted his tears, then folded the cloth and swept it across his forehead. “I'm an old man now,” he told her. “I knew your father a long time.”

“He trusted you,” she said.

“We understood each other.” He looked at her meaningfully. “He loved you very much.”

“He had a funny way of showing it.”

Lubin nodded. “You've been gone a long time.”

“It was easier than being here.” She swallowed her drink. She wouldn't tell him how inside her heart she was still a thirteen-year-old girl who'd lost her mother. Her father's way of dealing with her mother's death had been to drink too much, staying out to all hours. Claire had lived on Campbell's soup and tuna fish and Kool-Aid. When she graduated from high school, she went out to CalArts and never planned on coming back.

She'd never asked her father for anything. She used to be proud of it; now she wasn't sure.

Lubin lifted his glass and drank from it, then put it back down on the table methodically, like a chess move. “After his second stroke he called me. He wanted me to sell his old truck. I came over to get it; he was in bad shape. He could barely talk. I had to get right down to his ear. He knew he was going to die. He told me he had one request. Just one.” Lubin looked at her. “He wanted you back here, Claire. He wanted you here in this house. He wanted the boy at Pioneer.”

She watched as he fished through the files, licking his big thumb, his tongue quick as a toad's. At last he found what he was searching for and handed her a letter with the private high school's letterhead across the top. Both her father and she had attended the school. “He took the liberty of enrolling Teddy. His tuition's paid.”

She studied the letter. “I don't understand.”

“He wanted to give you something. He wanted to do something important for the boy. He thought if he paid his tuition, you might consider staying.”

“My son isn't the prep school type,” she said wryly.

“Your father built their gymnasium, sweetheart, I don't think they're too concerned about his academic record.”

She shook her head, incredulous. “What did he think? That I'd just drop everything and move back here?”

“Something like that.” The old man studied her carefully.

“It's not that I'm ungrateful,” she wanted to clarify. “I
am
grateful— you have no idea. It's been very hard for me. Raising Teddy. My work, my sculptures, they're expensive to build. It's been difficult.” She finished her drink, trying not to cry. “I just wish he'd tried harder when he was alive, that's all I'm saying. I wish we both had.”

“I can appreciate that.”

“The awful thing is, if he hadn't gotten sick we probably never would have come back here.” She started to cry. “I've been such an idiot, Irving.
Such an idiot!
He missed so much.
Years.
”

“I know he did, honey. You both did.”

Claire nodded; it was the truth.

Lubin closed his briefcase and patted the leather top affirmatively, his business complete. Then he stood up and put on his jacket. “It's a good life here, honey.”