Walking on Water: A Novel (3 page)

Even though it was October I rolled my window down a little. The night air was sweet and cool. I love California; I always have. But I couldn’t believe I was back so soon.

“How was your flight?” Nicole asked.

“Long.” I adjusted the rearview mirror. “How did you find out about my father?”

“We were supposed to have our weekly phone call to go over my finances. You know your father—he’s never late, and he never misses anything. So when he didn’t call I called his cell phone. A client of his answered. He told me that your father had been rushed to the hospital with a heart attack. He said they’d been at lunch when your father started to complain of chest pains.

“The client had had a heart attack before, so he recognized what was going on. He called 911 and they rushed your father by ambulance to the hospital.”

“How did you get down here so fast?”

“I took the first flight from Spokane to LAX. He had just gotten out of surgery when I arrived.”

“Thank you for coming,” I said.

“I care about him,” she said softly. “He’s been good to me.”

As I listened to her, it occurred to me why Nicole was so close to my father. I had initially assumed it was because of her inherent kindness—which was, no doubt, part of the reason. But her closeness to him transcended mere kindness or friendship. It was something much
deeper. She had been close to her own father before he committed suicide. I believe that she was looking to fill that hole—first with her landlord, Bill, the man who had unexpectedly left her a sizable inheritance, then with my father. It made sense. No wonder she had caught the first flight here, and no wonder my father loved her so deeply. She was the daughter he’d never had, and she gladly played the part.

I reached over and took her hand. She put her other hand on top of mine.

“What else do you know about his condition?” I asked.

“Not much. They won’t give me the full details since I’m not family. I had to tell them I’m his niece just so they’d let me see him. The doctor will talk to you.”

“He’s there this late?”

“No. But he said he’ll be there in the morning.”

“But you’ve seen my father?”

“Yes.”

“How does he look?”

“He looks like he’s had a heart attack,” she said. “When I saw him he was still pretty drugged up. I held his hand for a while.”

“I should have been there,” I said. I looked over. “I shouldn’t have gone back out. He didn’t want me to go. Maybe he knew.”

“Don’t do that. No one knew. He was glad you were going to finish your walk.”

“He said that?”

“Yes. He knew how important it was for you. I know he didn’t see that at first, but he came around.”

I breathed out slowly. “It really is good to see you again. The last time we talked . . .”

She stopped me. “Let’s not go there. I’m here for you. That’s all you need to know.”

I squeezed her hand.

“So how is the walk going?” she asked.

“One step at a time.”

“How far did you get?”

“Almost nine hundred miles. I made it to Folkston, Georgia, just a few miles from the Florida state line.”

“Meet anyone interesting?”

“Very.”

“More interesting than me?”

“I found a woman who had been tied to a tree by a cult leader. I ended up spending part of the night in their compound and helping another woman escape.”

“That’s got me beat,” she said. “You should write a book about your walk. I’d buy it.”

“I’d have to say it’s fiction.”

“Why is that?”

“No one would believe it was true.”

We arrived at the hospital a few minutes past midnight. I had been to Pasadena’s Huntington Hospital before. Actually twice. The first time was when I was nine and I’d had pneumonia. The second time was a year later when I was playing punchball at school and broke my arm.

It had been a long time since either of those events, and the hospital didn’t look the same as I remembered it.

Following Nicole’s directions, I parked near the east tower. We went inside and took the elevator to the second floor.

The corridors in the ICU were wide and lined with glass walls separating patients’ rooms. We approached the nurses’ station. A tired older woman with tousled hair and wearing dark blue scrubs looked up at me with heavy eyes. “May I help you?”

“I’m here to see Robert Christoffersen.”

She pushed a few keys on her computer, then looked back up at me. “Are you family?”

“I’m his son. I just got into town.”

“Just a minute.” The woman looked back at the screen. “He’s in B237.”

“Thank you.”

Nicole and I walked to the room, stopping outside the door. R. CHRISTOFFERSEN was printed on a sheet shielded behind a plastic holder.

“You go in first,” Nicole said. “You should have some time alone with him.”

I nodded, then pushed the door open and slowly stepped inside. The room was dark, lit indirectly by a fluorescent panel behind the bed and the lights of the monitors. It smelled of antiseptic.

The man in the bed didn’t look like my father. His usually perfectly coiffed hair was uncombed and matted to one side, and his chin was covered with stiff gray stubble. He looked old. Too old. It had been only seven weeks since I’d last seen him, but he looked like he’d aged years. He had an IV tube taped to his arm and an oxygen tube running to his nose. His mouth was partially open as he snored.

I just stood there, looking at him. It was hard to believe that this was the same man who had towered over my childhood like a giant—solid and unyielding as a granite fortress. I gently touched his arm, but he didn’t wake. After a few minutes I sat down in one of the padded armchairs near the side of the room.

After a while I glanced down at my watch. It was five minutes past twelve, California time, three in the morning eastern time. Exhausted, I slumped back in the chair. I’d come completely across the country to be with him, but I felt like I was still miles away.

A wave of sadness washed over me, and my eyes welled up. I had been worried about leaving my father, but the truth was, he was leaving
me
. Maybe not tonight, maybe not even this year, but things were changing. Time was gaining on us.

The possibility—the eventual inevitability—of his death would mean more than just losing my father. It would be the end of the world I had known, a world once inhabited by my mother and my wife. My father was the
last, fraying line to my past, the sole witness of who I was and where I had come from. It may have been only the emotion of the moment, but somehow I could already feel the growing vacuum.

I had sat there for maybe twenty minutes before Nicole quietly opened the door and slipped into the room. She walked over to the side of my father’s bed and gently touched his arm, then came and crouched down next to me. She pulled my head into her neck, gently running her fingers along the nape of my neck the way McKale used to do. She felt good. Comforting.

“Has he woken?” she asked.

“No.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was soft and caring. “Are you okay?”

I didn’t answer, which I suppose was an answer. After a few minutes she whispered, “You need to get some sleep. It’s late. Especially for you.”

“I’ll just sleep here,” I said.

“Why don’t you go home and get a good night’s rest? He’s not going anywhere.”

“Home?” I asked.

“Your father’s home.”

I looked back at my father’s sleeping form. Nicole was right. I was so tired that I could have easily fallen asleep in the chair, but it would have been a miserable night and I was exhausted enough already. “All right,” I said. “Where are you staying?”

“At the Marriott,” she said. “It’s close.”

“Why don’t you just stay at the house?”

“Maybe later,” she said ambiguously. She took my hand. “Come on, let’s get you home.”

I stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at my father, then touched his leg. “I’ll see you in the morning, Dad,” I said softly.

He groaned lightly, but never opened his eyes.

On the way to the parking lot I handed the keys back to Nicole and asked her to drive. Neither of us said much on the way to my father’s house. I was just too tired, emotionally and physically.

With the exception of the front porch light, which came on automatically, the house was dark. The first thing I noticed was that there were leaves on the lawn. Of course there were leaves on every lawn on the street, but on my father’s lawn they were as out of place as penguins. My father didn’t abide unraked leaves. After I turned ten, it was my job to see that our lawn was free of them, a responsibility he taught me to take seriously.

Nicole said, “I forgot his house key.”

“No worries,” I said. “My father always keeps one outside for emergencies.”

“Are you sure?”

“If the key isn’t there, it would be the only thing he’s changed in the last seventeen years.”

“Wave if it’s there,” she said, reaching over to unlatch the trunk. “Then call me in the morning when you want to go to the hospital.”

“If my dad’s car’s here, I’ll just drive myself.”

“Let me know,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said. “Good night.”

“Night,” she replied.

I retrieved my pack from the trunk, then crunched through the leaves to the house. At the front porch I laid down my pack, then squatted down and reached behind the potted kumquat tree next to the door, my hands groping around its flaking plaster circumference. As I expected, the house key was there—just as it had been when I was sixteen. My father had placed it there when I started dating so I wouldn’t have to wake him if I forgot my keys.

I waved to Nicole, and she backed out of the driveway. The car’s headlights flashed across the front of the house as she pulled into the street. I unlocked the door and stepped inside.

The house was as dark as a cave, which wasn’t surprising. If my father had a religion, it was thrift, and to leave a light on was a cardinal sin. But at that moment the dark seemed greater than the lack of light. There seemed to be a lack of
life
, a vacuum of energy. Even after I had turned on the foyer light, standing in the silent and cold entryway filled me with a sense of foreboding. The house felt different than it had just a couple of months earlier when I’d stayed there. Now it felt less like a home and more like a museum. Or a mausoleum.

I laid my pack against the wall, then adjusted the thermostat, which, in spite of the month, was turned all the way down. I waited until I heard the furnace kick in; then I walked to the end of the hallway to my father’s bedroom and turned on the light.

Not surprisingly, his room was immaculate. The bed was made with tight military corners, covered in a bedspread that I recognized from my youth. My mother had purchased the spread in the eighties—several years before she died and my father and I moved to California. My father just didn’t buy things like bedspreads or linens. He was pragmatic that way. If an object still fulfilled its purpose, there was no reason to replace it. A few years back, when I had suggested that he get a new couch to replace the ancient one he’d had for as long as I could
remember, he replied, “What’s wrong with this one? It still keeps my butt off the floor.”

The austerity of his room highlighted what few pieces of art he possessed. On top of his bed stand was a statue I’d never forget—a twelve-inch resin replica of Rodin’s
The Kiss
. The lovers are, of course, nude, and, when I was a boy, the figurine embarrassed me more than I could bear. I remember once sneaking into my father’s room with McKale. I had told her about the statue and, to my dismay (actually, horror), she said she wanted to see it. We stood there, next to each other, just staring. Finally McKale said, “It’s beautiful.”

I was dumbstruck. In the sexual naïveté of youth I had just figured that my dad was a pervert. Now McKale was too? Or maybe something was wrong with me. It was all so confusing. “Really?” I finally said.

“Someday I want to kiss someone like that.”

Hearing her say that made me feel funny inside—something I wouldn’t understand for a few more years.

On the wall closest to the foot of the bed was a homemade decoupage plaque, an uncharacteristically crafty piece my father had made for my mother when they were poor and first married.

Kate,

Wherever you are, wherever you go, I love you and I always will.