Monsoon Season (14 page)

And if he could let me go, I’d be free.

I was sitting in the grass, barely feeling the sun for the breeze. It was one of those summer evenings that gives you a glimpse of fall. I would see another fall. It had been a while. It felt like it had been summer every day for the past two years. Autumn was an experience I remembered only vaguely. The way everything smelt like compost, like the entire world was rotting. And I would be here to smell it.

My mother never called back. The next morning I woke to the sound of my father on the answering machine.

‘There’s been an accident. You need to get to the hospital.’

I have never made confession to a priest in my life.

In the third grade, when all the malleable Catholic children were preparing for their Reconciliation, I was being difficult. I told my parents it was none of the priest’s business what sins I had committed. That was between me and God. I think it made them worry that I had done something really shameful. The truth was, I was a good kid. I imagined having to carry out some minor transgression that morning in order to have something to confess. It would probably involve my brother. Otherwise, I’d have to make something up. The way I saw it, the sacrament of Confession actually promoted sin.

For weeks, my father and I discussed this virtually every night when he came home from work. We hadn’t talked so much in my whole life. The downside was that he seemed always to get angry before the conversation was over. I insisted that I didn’t want to be Catholic. He wanted to know why. It was hard to separate what was important to me as a nine-year-old from what would be valid to an adult. It was getting up at seven a.m. every Sunday. It was the camel-coloured coat my mother had purchased second-hand and insisted I wear over dresses in the middle of winter. It was the substitute teacher for CCD class who fumed about the damnation of homosexuals and spent several minutes detailing the hell that awaited them. The incense-induced headaches and daydreams of hostage-takers breaking through the ornate stained-glass windows: it all swam together.

On the way to school one morning, my father turned to me in the passenger seat and asked if I believed in Jesus. It was just another question in his endless attempt to figure out what was wrong with me.

I tilted my head, mulled it over. ‘I guess not,’ I said finally.

My father said nothing for the rest of the drive.

I still went to mass every Sunday. I had to attend CCD one night a week until I was sixteen. But I never participated in another sacrament in the Catholic Church. We didn’t really talk about it any more. Sometimes I’d catch my father’s eye and feel an overwhelming sense of failure. I just never quite figured out whether he thought I had failed him or he had failed me.

My father was sitting hunched over, his hands clasped together. I paused three steps away, not wanting to interrupt if he was praying. I didn’t usually think much of such things but I wasn’t taking any chances.

He looked up and nodded at me, acknowledging that he had seen me standing there. He returned his gaze to the floor.

I sat down next to him. ‘Has the doctor been out?’

He shook his head.

It had taken me twenty minutes to get to the hospital in Springfield. That included time spent getting dressed. I was wearing the T-shirt I had slept in, a pair of jeans and flip-flops. I hadn’t been able to find my shoes. I hadn’t brushed my hair.

She was in surgery. He had said that on the phone. She had internal bleeding, he said. When I asked if he was okay, he seemed annoyed. He was fine.

‘Has anyone called Alex?’ I asked.

He shook his head again. He wasn’t talking. I was quickly realizing that ‘anyone’ had become an extremely select group.

‘Is his number in your cell phone?’ I asked.

He answered by reaching for it, unclipping it from his waist, handing it to me.

‘I’m going to go outside ’cause I don’t think you’re supposed to use these in here, okay?’ I wanted to pat him on the shoulder but it didn’t feel safe to touch him. ‘I’ll be right back.’

I waited for a sign of approval and got nothing. I stood up and walked to the elevator.

My brother once told me that he wouldn’t cry if my parents and I died. He wasn’t trying to hurt my feelings; he was just making conversation. He was thirteen at the time.

He picked up on the second ring. ‘Dad?’

‘No, it’s me. I borrowed Dad’s phone.’

‘Hey, kid.’

‘Hey.’ I was sitting on a wooden bench, tapping my foot on the sidewalk.

‘What’s up?’

‘Um, well, Mom’s in the hospital,’ I said.

‘What? What happened?’

‘She and Dad were in an accident. A car accident.’

‘What about Dad?’ he asked.

‘Dad’s okay. I mean, he’s got a few scrapes, but he seems okay.’

‘And Mom?’

‘She’s in surgery,’ I said, biting my lip.

‘Is she going to be all right?’

‘I don’t know. They aren’t sure yet. Can you get here?’

He didn’t answer. I thought the cell phone had cut out. Then I heard him taking a deep breath. ‘I’m on my way,’ he said, and hung up.

When I went back inside, my father was talking with the surgeon. I got there as he was wrapping up. He squeezed my father’s shoulder, like they were old buddies, turned on his heel and disappeared behind a swinging door.

‘What did he say?’ I asked, and my dad turned around, seeming surprised by my return.

‘The surgery went fine,’ he said, sitting down and wiping his palms along the tops of his thighs. ‘They’re moving her to post-op and then we can see her.’

There was more, of course. My father was the king of oversimplification. They had removed her spleen. She had several broken ribs, a collapsed lung and a fractured arm. They couldn’t promise us that she was going to wake up.

But for that brief moment in the waiting room, before I saw her blue and purple face, tubes in her wrist and nose, I let my father’s words put me at ease.

Whenever there was silence, someone offered to get coffee. There was a vending machine in a little room by the elevator. You told it how you liked your coffee and it filled the Styrofoam cup and passed it to you. I didn’t really want coffee, but it gave me something to do. By the end of the day, I felt jittery and I peed half a dozen times before eight o’clock.

They had left Hawaii the previous day, flown all night. With the time spent in airports, it had probably taken about eighteen hours. My father was pale and haggard. When I asked him if he’d got any sleep on the plane, he grunted and shrugged. I wasn’t sure what that meant.

I sat on the bench outside the hospital, calling people, grateful for the excuse to get away from my father’s quiet. I called Laura and Jack, my grandfather, my aunt. They all offered to come; I told them to wait. Alex was on his way, we’d know more tomorrow.

When I had made all the calls I could (I even called Jack twice), I rode the elevator back to the third floor. The hospital air-conditioning was set too high. It was pleasant outside, freezing in. I stood in the doorway, rubbing my arms, watching my father sitting by the hospital bed.

He was murmuring something as he held her hand and bent his head. I didn’t know if he was talking to her or to God, couldn’t hear what he was saying. And it wasn’t until he rubbed his eyes with the back of his free hand, sniffed hard, that I realized he was crying.

He looked up at me suddenly, cleared his throat. There was still some wetness on his cheeks.

I stopped leaning on the doorframe, checked my posture. ‘Would you like some coffee?’ I asked.

When I was in college, my parents developed a clever phone routine. My father would place the call, covering the greeting and the obligatory ‘How are you?’ We’d run out of conversation about three lines in, then my mother would rescue us from the awkward silence. ‘Here, your mom wants to say hello,’ he’d tell me, pass her the phone and she’d take over. That was her job.

At Applebee’s the silence was unavoidable. My father looked past me at a muted basketball game. He had a gash across his right eyebrow; the blood had dried thick and almost black. A bruise disappeared beneath his navy blue crew neck, presumably where the seatbelt had caught him at the shoulder, keeping him in one piece.

He looked at me across the table. It occurred to me it might have been the first time he’d looked right at me the entire day. And then I realized he wasn’t looking at me at all. I’d thought he was making eye contact when really he was peering at a spot somewhere between my eyes. He was squinting, frowning.

‘You’ve got a little something . . .’ he said, his voice trailing off. He touched the bridge of his nose to indicate where.

‘Oh,’ I said, startled, sitting up straighter. I dipped the corner of a paper napkin into my ice water. I dabbed at my nose where he had suggested.

He shook his head. It hadn’t worked. I held up the silver napkin dispenser to look at my reflection. It took me a moment to see what he saw.

It was a freckle. It had been there my whole life.

I looked up at him. He was reading the menu.

I left my father at the hospital. Someone had to go home and feed Gracie. I offered to come back and stay the night, too, but he shook his head and I didn’t offer again, relieved.

Gracie had been lonely and she didn’t try to hide it. She followed me around the kitchen even after I’d fed her dinner, even after she’d given up on me playing fetch. I didn’t have the attention for it. She’d brought me the tennis ball, waiting for me to notice her. I’d thrown it once, maybe twice, before forgetting what I was doing, forgetting where I was. I’d come to my senses when she gave up, releasing the ball from her jaws and letting it
bouncebouncebounce
on the floor.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, her disappointment weighing on me. I walked to the refrigerator, with Gracie so close behind I could feel her wet nose at the back of my knees.

On the surface of the freezer door, beneath a thick, heart-shaped magnet, there was a photograph of my parents. I slipped the picture out and held it between my thumb and two fingers. They were both smiling. My father had his arm slung around her shoulders, holding a brown beer bottle in his other hand. He was distracted, looking off to one side. But my mother was gazing right into the camera’s lens, seemingly right at me. She was smiling modestly, politely, as my father beamed with an open mouth, laughing with the crowd at some unknown and long-forgotten joke. She looked into my eyes without making a sound.

He was always so quiet at home, so loud at parties. He was a mystery I knew I might never solve. She was as predictable as my own reflection. Flawed and familiar, simultaneously reversed yet inexplicably, unarguably identical.

I sat on the floor right there in front of the refrigerator, still holding the picture. Gracie got excited, wagging her tail and licking the tears from my face.

I spent nearly twenty minutes in Starbucks, picking out pastries, like it mattered. I’d showered that morning, pulled my hair back with a clip. I was wearing a purse on one shoulder, a sweater for the air-conditioning, and hard-soled shoes that clicked along the hospital corridors.

I saw Alex as soon as the elevator doors opened. He and my dad were sitting across from each other, talking. Well, to be fair, Alex was talking while my father chuckled out loud, slapped his knee, shook his head. I couldn’t help but wonder what could be so funny on this particular morning.

From a distance, they were mirror images: tall and broad-shouldered, heavy brows, strong jaws. When I got closer, I could see the way the light caught the silver hairs of my father, the golden ones of his son. My father turned at my approach, looking up at me with the sagging face of an old man.

Alex stood up when I walked through the door. ‘Hey, kid,’ he said, and I flinched as he reached toward me and tousled my hair.

I tucked the newly loose strands behind my ears. ‘When did you get here?’

‘He was here when I got back from dinner last night,’ my dad said, suddenly talkative. ‘So your mom wasn’t really by herself at all.’

‘How is she?’ I asked, as Alex took the pastry bag from me and sat down again. I passed the coffee to my father and he took it without answering.

‘She hasn’t woken up yet,’ Alex said. ‘But it’s just a matter of time.’

He’d once told me that any time you bumped your head you lost a hundred brain cells. He proceeded to smack me on the head repeatedly. I must have been pretty young at the time because I thought I’d be a moron by the time the hitting stopped.

I didn’t want Alex to tell me my mother was going to wake up. I had learned a long time ago that Alex wasn’t trustworthy.

‘I’ll let you two catch up,’ my father said, getting to his feet. ‘I need to call the office.’

I sat down as my father walked to the elevator.

‘So, how’s Ben?’ Alex asked, first thing.

I was surprised he’d remembered Ben’s name. ‘We broke up,’ I answered, as if that was really all there was to it. ‘How’s Emily?’

He looked off into a distance at something I couldn’t see. ‘She’s awesome,’ he said, grinning. ‘She’s the only reason I’m still in Florida.’

‘Have you seen Mom?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. Last night. It’s kind of hard to look at her like that.’

‘Did you talk to her?’

‘A little,’ he said.

‘I think that’s good for her. That’s what they say.’

‘Yeah.’ He ran a hand through his hair.

‘What did you and Dad do all night?’

‘We talked. Flipped through some magazines. Played cards a bit.’

‘Did he sleep at all?’ I asked.

‘I think so. I caught him nodding off in the chair a few times. Nothing substantial.’

‘He hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since they left Hawaii.’

‘I guess Mom’s getting enough sleep for both of them,’ he said.

I rolled my eyes. ‘Real funny.’

‘Riley, come on. Lighten up.’ He rubbed his forehead.

‘Lighten up?’

‘Forget what I said. I don’t even know what I’m saying. I’m freaking out.’

I sighed. ‘Okay. It’s going to be okay. She’s going to wake up any minute.’