Oxygen (26 page)

Joe lifts my hand from his shoulder and brushes it against his lips; he sweeps tears off my cheeks and chin. “Sweet Marie. A death behind you and a death before you.” I close my eyes and try to will the tears to stop. Joe leans back on one arm and braids his fingers through my hair again, softly combing it away from my face. “You and your father don’t know each other very well anymore, do you?”

“I’m not sure we ever knew each other very well. Certainly not past adolescence. It always felt fragile, his loving me. As if it was an obligation instead of an emotion.”

Joe strokes the planes and curves of my face, tracing the lines of my forehead and the folds of my eyes, the arc of my jaw. Now the silence between us feels as patient as time. He starts to tell me something, then stops himself, plainly considering his words, and begins again. “Your dad said something to me about you this afternoon, while you were out. He said—” Joe hesitates and looks away from me, as if that might make it easier for him to keep talking. “He said he never understood why you hadn’t gotten married, that he thought you were too lovely and too smart to have so much trouble with love.” His hands are still now; only his breath brushes against my skin. “He said he blamed himself. It was his own fault.”

I curl away from Joe into a tight knot and he wraps himself around me, laying his head next to mine. “What?” he asks. “What happened?”

His mouth is so close his whispered question fills the room, floods my mind, unravels my life back to a place I’m still learning how to leave, a time I’ve spent twenty-two years apologizing for. He is so close I barely hear my own voice when I tell him, and the raw flesh of that year bleeds out of me again. “I got pregnant when I was fifteen.” Joe doesn’t move, but I feel his arms grow stronger around me. My throat constricts and I have to consciously let go before I can keep talking. “I was a counselor at a summer camp and I met a boy there, another counselor; we both worked in the stables. He was from Arkansas—near your hometown. I didn’t have any experience with boys. I’d never even been asked on a date. I would have been too shy to go. And, I wanted to be
liked
by him. I needed him so much he couldn’t stand me by the end of the summer.” I’m quiet again for a moment, listening to Joe’s even breaths.

“I found out I was pregnant after I got home. There wasn’t any question about keeping it. Not in my mind. I told Mom—she drove me across two counties to a clinic just to be sure nobody would recognize us. There were protestors outside carrying signs with pictures of fetuses. Shouting at us when we went in. Something hit the back of my coat and my mother started crying behind her sunglasses—I’m sure she thought I didn’t see her.

“She wanted me to talk to my father about it—begged me to. She couldn’t stand it, having this ugly, hidden thing unspoken among all of us, but I made her swear not to tell him. And then about a week later I started bleeding. I must have had endometritis—I had a high fever and horrible cramping. They had to take me into the emergency room in the middle of the night. I remember my dad carrying me into the waiting room wrapped in this pink ruffled bedspread, his arms trembling under my weight when he lifted me out of the car. And as sick as I was, I still remember being terrified he’d find out.

“Before the doctor even came in, my dad asked me straight out. He asked me what I’d done. So I told him. I told my Catholic father about the boy from camp, and the clinic. And how sorry I was. I remember that examining room as clearly as if we were in it right now, a small white box of a room with this fluorescent light glaring down over us, and the smell of disinfectant everywhere, and my nightgown sticking to me with blood.” I hold my outstretched hand before my eyes, as if I could blot out that blinding light, then clutch it back across my chest. “My father didn’t speak to me for an entire year. Not one word.”

Joe lies still, curved along the length of my back. He brings his hand up to my face, haltingly at first, brushing his fingers across my brow, light as the shimmer of music down the strings of a violin, even the slight roughness of his skin like the singing of a musician’s calluses along the corded length of the frets. My face tingles where he traces my eyelashes, my eyelids, my temple and cheek, the ridged curve of my ear, the vermilion boundary of my lips.

I turn toward him, and now he traces each again with his mouth, dry and soft and breath warmed, my breath inhaling his, the eddies of our lungs intermingling. His fingers move over the buttons and bands of my clothing and slip them from my body, so I need him against me, crave his heat. His palm presses into the small of my back, lingers along the column of my spine to the nape of my neck, strokes the hollow between the twinned tendons there. The uncertainty of what we are together hums like an electric presence between us; the anticipation of becoming lovers again almost surpasses the act of physical connection.

His body is exactly the same temperature as mine, not varied by a tenth of a degree, blurring the planes of us, now moist and interlocking, rocking together, not penetrating one into the other, not conquering or yielding, but woven so that the coupling itself is complete fulfillment, with no climactic ending to separate the experience of uniting. This must be as close as two lives can come outside the realm of death. And for me it is both passion and forgetting. I am not exposed or vulnerable, but freed. How brilliant that this is the natural act to create a new life.

It is not even gray outside when I wake up. Joe lies next to me beneath the sheet, the crest of his shoulder dropping to the deep cleft of his waist, the rising slope of his hip and thigh like a landscape—a continent of a man, solid enough to sow and reap a crop of progeny and personal hope. And isn’t that what it takes to make love last? Taking the risk to say this may be all but this can be enough? Yielding to the finiteness of what is
really
possible? Declaring that
this
will be my allotted plot of earth to till and harvest over the startlingly short course of my life?

He stirs, stumbling toward the surface of sleep, the flickering of his lids and brow warn me he is close to waking. Then, like a sea creature, he sinks again into slow and even breaths, beneath even the level of dreams. And this time, before he can awaken and leave me, I slip out from under the sheet and quietly gather my clothes from the floor, leaving him before the next dream comes.

For one entire year my father and I walked through the same rooms, ate at the same table, drove in the same car and spoke to each other only through my mother or Lori. For one year my mother sat between us at every meal, linking our hands over grace and filling up the silence with monologues about my father’s research articles, and my track meet times or college application essays.

In that year of silence our house trembled with shrieks beyond the range of human hearing. Supersonic shockwaves ricocheted across the breakfast table, screeched through the living room over homework papers and Walter Cronkite’s “way it was,” screamed above the hiss, hiss, hiss at the end of a record album while my father hunched over his manuscripts engrossed in footnotes and bibliographies. The apocalyptic boom of that silence should have shattered the brick walls of our house, leaving us exposed to gawking neighbors as we sat in orderly oblivion around our dining table, replete with pot roast and mashed potatoes and perfect table manners.

It is amazing how something so abnormal can gradually blur into the background of day-to-day life so thoroughly that its cruelty is no longer apparent. The best of us are capable of selecting what we will see and what we will ignore. It would be inexcusable if it had been a conscious choice.

In the fall, quite near my seventeenth birthday, I won a scholarship to college based on SAT scores. My father congratulated me, and we proceeded with our lives as if the previous year had been imagined. In that same year I began making nearly perfect grades, my mother became noticeably weaker, and my father stopped going to mass.

That year has been thoroughly dammed up behind decades of glossed chitchat about college courses and medical school applications, behind score cards filled with scientific trivia I could recite that finally gave me a notch up—a topic I understood and he didn’t. But just before my mother’s heart attack, as I sat diagramming the flow of blood through her heart to persuade her to have her valve replaced, she told me why my father broke that silence. She made it clear to him that, despite her love, she would leave him if he didn’t. I wasn’t yet mature enough to remind her that he was not the only one who had refused to speak.

The sun has edged far
enough above the horizon to spark hot and yellow-orange across the grass, already steaming away morning dew and softening tar on streets and sidewalks. I close my father’s front door behind me and I’m almost blind in the gloomy living room with its perpetually drawn blinds and dark furniture. How can he live here and not become depressed? The smells inside this house hang like limp flags of age and decay—smells of household neglect, and my father’s physical decline, his unlaundered clothing, his unwashed body.

I dance-step down the hall around the creaking floorboards to Dad’s bedroom door. It hangs open, too swollen and warped with coats of paint to close anymore. He is lying on his back under the wheezing air conditioner, snoring away in stuttering gasps. The arch of his rib cage caves into the wide bowl of his pelvis. He can’t be eating enough. I can almost trace his skeleton under the bedsheet, practically see his heart beating through the thin cotton of his undershirt, rocking along in its seventy-ninth year inside a chest grown from the flexible balloon of a baby into broad-shouldered manhood, and now, finally, shriveled back into the spare bones and flesh of his old age.

His snore clogs into silence and I count the seconds, waiting to see if he’ll roll his tongue clear and gasp for air, or if, maybe, I should run to him and press my ear against his mouth, my fingers against his pulse. Then he curls onto his side and the irregular, staccatoed whoosh steadies into an unobstructed, rhythmic flow—fourteen breaths a minute, twenty thousand breaths a day. Could I count the breaths he has left in him? How low has the number dwindled from whatever seemingly infinite quantity he was allotted at birth? And how many breaths would he need to tell me, face-to-face, that he regrets the course of my life? How many breaths to elaborate on the prejudicial word
fault
when I point out that a woman
can
remain lovely and smart without the validating stamp of marriage? Or would any words beyond the secondhand apology he offered to Joe take every last breath he has?

The air conditioner has been off all night in my room; I’m clammy with perspiration even before I crawl across the bed and punch a button under the metal grill. The machine thuds once and shivers to life, and the fan cranks out a tepid stream of air. I open up my shirt and try to trap any coolness.

“Marie?” I hear Dad calling through the walls. “Marie? Is that you?”

I scramble back across the bed and up the hallway to his room, re-buttoning my shirt. “Yes, Dad. It’s me. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“What time is it?”

“Early. It’s not even six thirty yet—go back to sleep.”

“You didn’t come home last night.”

“Joe and I had a lot to talk about. I thought it was too late to drive back, so I stayed there.”

He brings his hand up over his face and rubs his palm, dry and rough against the stubble on his cheeks. He exhales in a deep sigh and lies still, as if he is orienting himself to the task of living through another day. “Well, long as you’re all right.”

“I didn’t mean to worry you.” I shift in the doorway and twist my hair up off the back of my neck. “I guess I should have phoned. I’m not used to somebody waiting up for me.” I try to remember if he ever waited up for me in my early years of dating, listening and awake in his bed when my mother called out to be sure I locked the front door, to be sure I was safe.

He grasps the bedpost and pulls himself up to sit on the edge of the mattress, pauses to catch his breath. “Come sit with me a minute. Would you?”

I walk over and sit beside him on the sagging bed, self-conscious to be this close. The details of his room are lost in morning twilight. A fly is trapped behind the closed window blind, battering its wings against the glass pane in a desperate hum.

I’m on the verge of offering to make his breakfast or run a bath for him when he clears his throat and says, “I’m not going to drive anymore. If you or your sister could put the Buick up for sale, I would appreciate it. Lori can have it if she wants to drive it up to Fort Worth.” He is staring into the dark hallway beyond his bedroom door, not even trying to make out my features in the unforgiving shadows.

“Dad…”

He cuts me off with a wave of his hand. “I don’t want the liability anymore.”

“OK. All right. I’ll call Lori later this morning. How will you get your groceries?”

“There’s a bus at the corner. I can get that far.”

“Have you thought about a housekeeper? I could take care of that.”

He shakes his head and seems to sink heavier into the mattress. “Damn. I can hardly believe it”—this said to himself more than to me, and I can’t tell if he is surprised about succumbing to his infirmity, or the fact that the vast majority of his life is concluded, like the last toast at an elaborately planned party when it becomes clear that the anticipation has surpassed the event but sped by unappreciated. “Well. I suppose that would be best.”

He leans over to his bedside table and pulls out the drawer, groping through pill bottles and dried-up ballpoint pens and broken bits of cigar. I am about to get up to turn on the lamp when I remember that it would make little difference.

“You should have this,” he says, holding a silk embroidered lipstick case in his outstretched palm. In an Instamatic flash I see my mother snapping it open to angle the doll-sized mirror at her mouth and slip the gold cap off a tube of Passion Flower, sculpted into a creamy red Eiffel tower by her lips. Something smaller than a lipstick rattles in the box. Inside I find the diamond engagement ring my father gave to her on their tenth wedding anniversary, an apology for the academic poverty of their early years together. “Your mother would have liked you to have it.”

“Dad, are you sure? What about Lori?”

“I’ll give her your grandmother’s earrings. Besides, she’s got a ring.”

“Thank you. It’s beautiful. It reminds me of Mom.” I try to twist it onto my right ring finger. “I’ll have to have it sized.” I smile at him. “Are you just afraid I’ll never get my own?”

“I don’t know what your young man, Joe, is planning. I’d be giving this regardless.”

I shrug my shoulders and slip the ring onto my little finger. Even there it is tight. “Joe and I aren’t planning. We’re friends. Good friends.”

“Your mother was my friend.”

“Yes. You were the best of friends, weren’t you?” It’s true. And being able to share such an honest fact relaxes some of the strain between us. My mother’s love for both of us still has power. “It was a good thing to watch, growing up. A good model.”

He shifts his weight on the bed, bracing his hands on either side of him for support. Then he surprises me by saying what I couldn’t. “A good thing to watch, maybe. But better to have been included. I spent so much time deciphering the minds of dead men I wasn’t much good at listening to young girls. Left that to your mother.” He grips the cording on the mattress. I reach over and close my hand around his. The cool metal of his wedding ring is loose around his flesh, locked forever behind his burled knuckle.

“So. Here we are,” he says, a stutter of cracks running through his voice. He clears his throat. “I taught my students that there was usually a hell of a lot more to be discovered in what was omitted from a textual translation than in what was inscribed—typical of human nature, I’ve come to believe. Now I have to content myself with what I can hear, what people say or don’t say in the few conversations I have these days.” He pauses, and grips my hand, the hard knots of his joints pressing my fingers together. “Why did you come?” he asks me, not sounding angry or taunting, but genuinely interested, willing to admit that we are awkward together.

I stumble for a minute. “It’s been a long time since I’ve visited.”

“Yes. It has been a long time,” he affirms.

I start to offer one of many justifications, but end up letting the sounds of the house fill the space between us. I’m suddenly afraid of what he wants to talk about. Everything I told Joe just a few hours ago rushes back at me. “I came here because I thought you needed help.” Strain makes me sound almost accusatory, as if I blamed him for aging. He doesn’t react, waiting for me to choose whether this will be an argument or a resolution. I say it again, genuinely now. “I want to help you, Dad.”

He turns to look at me. “You’re very like your mother, you know. She was a caretaker. I never fully figured out why she married such a solitary type. You also came here, I believe, to leave something behind. Whatever that is, it’s your own business to tell or not to tell.”

“Did Joe say something to you?”

“Not a word. You left your portable phone here—I found it at the bottom of one of the grocery sacks.” It must have fallen out of my purse when I dropped the bag. I had managed to go half a day without checking messages—a reprieve granted by knowing Marsallis won’t meet with the district attorney for another three days.

“Did it ring?”

He nods his head. “I did not intend to pry into your affairs, but the fourth time it went off I opened it.”

“You answered it?”

“I didn’t know I was answering it. I opened it to try and shut the thing off and someone started talking. A man named Charles Marshalls asked me to have you call him back.”

“Marsallis. Did he say why?” My heart rate has skipped ahead so fast I feel short of breath.

“I told him you were out for the evening and he said you should be at his office as early as possible on Monday morning.”

“And he didn’t say anything else?”

“I got the impression he expected you to know.”

Without even processing the possibility that this might mean good news, tears begin to run down my cheeks. I let them fall onto my neck so my father won’t be aware of me wiping them away. I swallow to steady my voice and ask him, “Is that how you knew something was wrong?”

He shakes his head. “I’ve heard it in everything you haven’t talked about since you got here. Like I said, I’m learning to listen the same way I used to read.” He stretches across to the bedside table and pulls a Kleenex out of a box, steadying himself against the bedpost. He pushes himself upright again and folds the tissue into my hand. “If it helps you at all, I’d like to listen. I am past due on that account.”

I blot my face with the Kleenex and clench my teeth to bite back more tears. My father waits for me; his breath almost imperceptibly rocks the mattress. Minutes of silence pass before I begin to talk. “I’m involved in a malpractice suit. Somebody died in the operating room, a little girl.” He doesn’t say anything until I’ve told him the entire story. For once it’s almost cathartic to dictate the whole thing from start to finish without the constant interruptions and provocative questions of a deposition. Not that there is a finish—I have almost begun to define my life by everything being taken away, like a handprint in the dust. Even when I tell him about the criminal charge that I’m convinced must be waiting for me on Marsallis’s desk right now he only takes in a deeper breath.

At the end we both sit quietly on the edge of the bed. I am wrung out by the retelling of it all, and the crashing of memories through this house, and the lack of sleep.

“Are you all right?” he asks me.

“Oh, I don’t think the whole thing will be settled for months. Regardless of the criminal charge.”

“I meant now. Are you holding up right now?”

I don’t have an answer for him. Daylight slices through the window blinds. The ticks and sighs of the house have submerged beneath street traffic and dogs and neighborhood kids. My father starts to say something else, and stops himself. Then he blurts, “Joe is an interesting character,” as if changing the subject is the only safe reaction.

“He is interesting. And certainly a character.”

“He was there that day. The day the girl died?”

“He was working that morning. He’d already gone home by the time her operation started.”

“He had nothing to do with her care, then?”

“No. I mean, he helped me get ready for her case, but he’ll be fine—the lawyers barely even questioned him. I’m glad you like him.”

“To be specific, I said he was interesting. Don’t know whether I like him.”

I wait for him to go on, but he doesn’t offer any more. “Did he say anything to you about the lawsuit?” I ask.

“No. But I think he could have.” He pauses for a breath and adds, “He strikes me as a man who says a lot less than he says.”

“What do you mean?” I look at him, but he is staring off into the still dark hallway.

He shakes his head and lowers his voice. “Nothing. I don’t know what I mean. At my age that’s often the case.” He sighs and lifts his shoulders, brings a hand up to rub over his face and scratch the back of his neck. The intersecting ellipses of his biceps and deltoid stand out beneath the slack skin of his arm. I have a momentary flash of him as a young father hoisting Lori or me in an arc over his head—the threat of falling had been a game in those strong arms. Did he feel betrayed when we outgrew his ability to heft and carry us, when protecting us became a task of conversation, and we turned to our mother?

I take his hand again. “I’m sorry I’ve got to leave like this. I’ll talk to Lori. We’ll get the housekeeper figured out, and the car. I’ll try and get back as soon as all this gets settled.”

“Well. Some things don’t ever get settled. You just make a place for them. Learn to let them sit there with you, side by side with the good.”