The Adults (30 page)

“Now it is my turn,” he said. “How did you meet Jonathan?”

I stirred the ice in my glass with a knife.

“He was my teacher,” I finally said. “So, go ahead. Put him in jail. He was my goddamn English teacher and he touched me. So
what
?”

My father sat there motionless. He did not look sad or upset or surprised or pleased; he looked out the window. When he faced me again, he had tears in his eyes. “We had no idea,” he said. He picked up his napkin and put it over his face. I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his shoulders shake.

“I mean, it’s not your fault, Dad,” I said. “It’s nobody’s fault.”

He wouldn’t remove the napkin from his face.

“I mean, there is no fault to be had. It’s a good thing.”

He put the napkin down and wiped his eyes.

“Right,” he said. “It’s a
good
thing.”

Neither of us knew what to say. Talking about it felt wrong. Talking about it made me splice my words, stutter nervously, made me not want to talk about it. That had always been the problem and nothing was going to change that. Talking about it made us feel like people different from who we were, the kind of people who had failed, the kind of people whom other people rolled their eyes at, when we just wanted to be people who loved each other and sat around the fireplace and laughed about the way the shadow of the flames made the figures in the da Vinci painting look like cartoons. So we were silent until the waitress came back with my father’s card, so silent I thought the people eating next to us were going to ask us to quit sitting there so damn quietly. We were quiet this way until the cab, when I looked over at my father and he was scratching the bottom of his throat, where his skin was loose and sagging, and he looked so foreign to me, an old man I might pass on the street and feel bad for. I felt panic rise from my stomach to my chest, the acute anxiety of not knowing my father anymore, of being coffined, in this black cab, this hearse, taking us past all the street signs: food store, bank, leftover generic storefronts from Communism, through the hilly dark in a country where nobody spoke our language. Talking was too hard—I of all people should have understood that. So I tried to. I tried to understand that my father had his reasons. Whatever they were, they were sure to be reasons. I made a peace offering. “What can you do with a dinner?” I asked quietly out the window.

“Make it unpleasant,” he said back. He wouldn’t look at me, and I worried that I disgusted him. That I wasn’t who he thought I was, this whole time.

“Ruin it,” I said.

We laughed so softly the cab driver probably couldn’t even tell we had been speaking, and I wasn’t even aware we were laughing until we were stopped at a light and it was silent again. The cane of a pedestrian hit methodically against the cobblestone, and walking sounded like a chore.

When we got back to the apartment, Ester was on the couch, painting her toenails. “
Dobrý den!
” she said, and laughed happily, as she leaned over to give my father a welcome-back kiss. “Honey, our new towel heater has arrived.”

Then she turned to me.

“Who in the world needs a freaking towel heater? Your father does, of course. But we love him anyway I guess. Even if he is supremely flawed.”

When my father did not laugh from the kitchen, I knew what he was thinking: I did not order that towel heater. If there was one thing my father
did
need to prove it was how much he didn’t need a towel heater. He was looking at Ester from the kitchen holding up the towel heater, and I could see him thinking: How can I marry a woman who says “freaking”? That’s teenage talk. That’s little-girl talk.

My father only liked words that had been recognized by the
Oxford English Dictionary
for at least ten years, like “Internet,” and “website,” and he didn’t believe in the immediate acceptance of slang. “It’s irresponsible,” he said once.

“How can you not be for progress?” I had asked him.

“It’s a filtering process,” he had said. “May the best functional slang win.”

I sat down next to Ester and sank into the same spot on the couch. Our hips were touching. “Hey, scoot, Toot,” I said, and she laughed like a little girl discovering rhyme for the first time, even though there were dark circles under her eyes that she didn’t try to hide with makeup. Ester let me get close to her on the couch and share things with her like a sister, but there was still something that she kept shut down, moments when she would avoid eye contact or remind me which countries different perfumes came from even when I had never asked, as if to remind me,
I am older than you I am your father’s lover and before you got here we used to drink wine on the balcony and analyze weather patterns.
It was a different kind of happiness, I could see her thinking, and so is sitting on the couch with you talking. But my father didn’t notice any of that. What my father saw from the kitchen was his daughter and her red-haired friend on a couch, discussing episode 34 of
Merchant Love
, and his daughter asking her friend if she thought that the woman at the creperie was sleeping with the man who sold roses, because she saw them licking ice cream together in an alleyway all by themselves. They looked happy, the daughter said. “Anything is possible on
Merchant Love
,” the redheaded friend said, and then leaned back in the couch as though she were at home.

I
planned to tell Laura the truth when my father took Ester out to dinner to tell her it was over. It had started to snow. I boiled some tea and practiced telling her slowly, in pieces, but as soon as my father closed the door to leave, Laura was excited about something, running around in circles in the living room and then falling to the ground. She lay down with her arms spread.

“Let’s play Dead,” she said.

“Dead?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You be fifteen years dead. I’ll be recently dead.”

She told me to lie down next to her. I wasn’t sure what to do so I did.

“Okay, so you are wearing your dress with white socks. I’m wearing whatever I had on at the time of death.”

She was breathing heavily.

“Then, when you see me for the first time across the bridge, you are going to say, ‘Patricia, you’re wearing
that
?’”

She put her finger in the air.

“By the way,” she said, “I want my name to be Patricia once I’m dead.”

She stood up.

“And then I say, ‘It’s what I was wearing at the time, Bunny Friend!’”

“I’m dead and I still have to be Bunny Friend?” I asked.

“Okay, you can be whoever you want. But, whoever you are, you have to get excited, jump up and down and stuff, and say, ‘Why have you no underwear on, Patricia?’”

To be dead, according to Laura, you had to be on a bridge, and you had to have no underwear on. She would tell me that she didn’t listen to her mother, that it was her mother’s rule never to get in the car without any underwear on, in case you got in an accident, and then you’d be stuck around on the road all day, without any underwear on, and be really embarrassed.

“I was in a car accident,” Laura said. “That’s why I’m dead. See my scar?”

I told her I didn’t think we should play anymore. I suggested dress-up, reading on the balcony. But Laura was too wrapped up in the imaginary scene.

“Okay, so you see me on the bridge, and I say, ‘Wait! Stop right there! I’m coming to you!’ And as I walk to you we eat leaves that are really made out of sugar, and when you are dead, it’s always a race against time . . .”

“But why? We’re already dead.”

“Oh, you can die a few times. I forgot to mention that. Once you die more than three, no, four times, you are officially dead forever. Anyway, so, the water is rising over the bridge, and it’s getting in my ears, and I hate that, because it could lead to a forever infection, and at the last second, you pull me out of the river!”

I told her I was having difficulty imaging the landscape. She ignored me.

“And then,” she said, “I say, ‘Are you honestly going to tell me that nothing new has happened to you since you’ve been dead?’ And that’s when
you
say, ‘It still feels really new to me, Patricia.’”

And that’s when Laura started to get annoyed because she said I wasn’t playing right. She asked me why I wasn’t speaking, why I wasn’t playing along. I told her I couldn’t. I was dead.

“No, you’re not
really
dead,” she said. “You are only fake dead. Don’t you get it? It’s just a game.”

Laura was getting flustered. Her cheeks were pink, and she looked like she was going to cry the way she cried when she couldn’t sleep at night, a tired, overwhelming cry, exhausted by the length of one night.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, it’s just a game. So what do I say next?”

“Never mind,” she said, and started to walk away to the other room. “I’ll play by myself. You are like the worst fake dead adult ever.”

I tried to apologize for this, but she had already turned the corner.

I followed her.

“Laura,” I said, concerned, thinking of all the ways I could possibly tell her that my father was not her real father. That she was in Europe all alone with a bunch of strangers, that her only family was back in America, part of it buried in the ground. How weird, I thought. I could explain to this girl exactly what it looked like to watch her father die, his head crooked and his hands still. But what I said instead was, “Where did you learn this game?”

Laura was on the ground, petting Raisinet’s underbelly. “Mark,” she said.

The dog was silent. The snow fell harder outside.

“Raisinet,” Laura said. “Shhh. Raisinet is dead. But he still has two more lives left.”

I put my ear to Raisinet’s stomach and when he didn’t move, I decided I would never, ever tell Laura the truth because the truth was that this dog was dead. The truth was this girl was overwhelmingly alone, more alone than I ever considered myself as a child, and I didn’t want to suddenly become the stranger who made her put her ear to the dead dog and listen to the silence.

“Take him away,” Laura cried. “I don’t want to sleep with that dead thing in the house.”

“Okay,” I said, brushing her bangs. “I’ll take it away.”

“Far far away,” she asked.

“I promise,” I said.

I sent Laura to bed. “Promise far far away?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. Laura closed her door and I looked for something to put Raisinet in. I found one of my father’s small-sized suitcases and placed his body in. “Good-bye, Raisinet,” I said, and when I closed the lid, I started crying. The room was dark, the way it gets dark after no one bothers to turn the lights on while the sun sets. I decided to give it one last try and called Jonathan at the hotel. He actually picked up.

“Hi,” he said.

“Let’s go to the bone church,” I said to him.

I waited for my father to come home and sat on the couch with the dog in the suitcase. I practiced breaking the news to my father: “The dog is dead,” I said aloud, but it didn’t sound right, so I added, “Dad, the dog is dead,” and that didn’t sound right either, so I said it in Czech, “
Pes je mrtvý
,” and that didn’t sound right either, because in Czech, nouns could be masculine or feminine, but they could also be separated into living and nonliving, and so maybe it was not grammatically correct to still call the dog the
pes
because part of being a dog
is being a dog
, and it was now more dead, more
mrtvý
, than it was a dog.

By the time my father arrived, the truth didn’t sound right in any language, so I just said it.

“Dad,” I said. “The dog is dead.”

“Where is it?”

“In the suitcase,” I said.

“Why the hell is it in the suitcase?” he asked.

“I promised Laura I would go bury it.”

“Now?”

“It doesn’t feel right to fall asleep knowing the dog is in the living room, dead.”

“I suppose not,” he said, sitting down. “I suppose not.”

He had questions: did Laura know (she was the one who found him), was she sad (about as sad as she got before she was forced to shower), how did it happen (like everything), well what does that mean (at some point, his heart stopped beating).

A
t the hotel, everything was different. Snow was piled high outside, and Jonathan was awake at the kitchen table. My legs were goose-bumped and cold.

“Heat’s not working,” he said.

The heat had been off since the middle of the day when the pipes froze and the temperature inside the room had dropped to fifty degrees. He called the front desk and they said they were working on it, a repairman was coming. We looked out at the tiny world covered in snow and as far as we could tell, there were no streets or people or things to say. The repairman was surely out there, somewhere else, never coming. Jonathan was across the room. The doornails were dead at the hinges. The dog was heavy in the suitcase.

“Where have you been?” I asked him.

“Here,” he said. “Reading the paper.”

Something about him was off. He looked broken. Like a wire in his brain had snapped. Like he had been staring at a plant for too long.

“A whale randomly exploded in Australia,” Jonathan finally said, picking up the American newspaper on the table. “Scientists are still speculating.”

I opened the window.

I put the suitcase on the table. “What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s the dog,” I said. “The dog is dead.”

“
Emily Marie
,” he said.

When he was sorry about me, sorry for coming to Prague, sorry for ever sleeping with me in the first place, he liked to use my full name as an imperceptible method of scolding.

“We have to bury it at the bone church,” I said, holding up the suitcase.

“Now?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He looked at me like I was crazy, but we covered ourselves in our winter coats and hats and got on the tram. Jonathan was acting weird, like he thought I was weird, so I tried to lighten the mood. I told Jonathan that at Apropos Restaurant that morning, there was a sign above the vent that would have made him laugh. It said something in Czech, with the English translation underneath,
DO NOT COVER SPIRACLES OF HEATING.