We'll Always Have Paris (21 page)

A woman in a flapper dress and her husband stopped to listen as they walked through the lobby of the hotel. I peeked up from my novel and winked at her. The couple sat beside the piano, never glancing at the player to notice her age. They drank brandy and chatted until they stood to leave twenty minutes later. The gentleman dropped a euro coin on the piano and jolted at the sight of my fresh-faced child. He laughed and said something in Spanish to his wife. The two smiled at Katie and gestured applause before they exited.

Katie nodded her head politely, professionally. When the couple was out of sight, Katie looked at me with wide-eyed excitement. She gestured to the coin with a chin-nod to ask if I’d seen her tip. I winked to confirm. My daughter continued playing, now with a straightened back and new air of confidence.

***

Our bus pulled into Cordova in the mid-afternoon—just as every tourist attraction was closing. Katie and I trekked to the Alcázar, creating a brick-colored dust cloud with every step we took, until we made it to the front gate where a woman posted a sign that the last tour had already left. Before I could express my disappointment, Katie sighed with relief. I raised my eyebrows to inquire about her expression. She shrugged. “You’ve seen one Alcázar, you’ve kind of seen them all.”

I smiled. “You do appreciate how lucky you are to be bored with the fortresses of Spain, don’t you?”

“I do,” she assured me. “But we’ve been to three Alcázars in ten days. I get it. War, cannons, glory to Spain.”

The woman at the Alcázar ticket booth told us that all of the historic sites were closing early that day and we would be well-served to return the next. “The only thing to do today is walk around town,” she said.

“That sounds perfect!” Katie said, looking toward the nearly dry river and dirt track surrounding it.

The woman grinned at Katie’s youthful enthusiasm.

After the first lap around the river, our feet were covered in red dirt. I told her about my ten summers at Camp St. Regis.

An hour later, Katie grabbed my hand. “I really do get that it’s a privilege to be burnt out on Alcázars, but I am enjoying this much more. It’s really nice just to have time.”

“I’m so glad you appreciate that, Katie. This really is a luxury.”

“Time? Or the whole Alcázar burnout thing?” Katie asked.

“Both.”

She nodded. “Yeah, you’re right.”

It was bittersweet to see that my daughter had learned the lesson my father shared with me so many years ago.

***

My father lay on my bed, wiping away tears. “I don’t want to die.”

The room was so quiet I could hear my own breath. I could hear the footsteps and the voices of pedestrians walking on the street six stories beneath us and envied the ease of their chatter. I had no idea what to say to my own father.

He continued. “I know that any time we get on earth is a gift, but I’m not ready to go yet. I want to see what happens next. I feel like I’m about to make it big.”

It was the first time I had ever seen him express sadness over his death, and I groped aimlessly for the right words, for any words. I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask about his illness, but what were the rules about responding when he brought it up?

I thought it was probably okay to talk about his death when he broached the subject. Or was switching topics the kinder course of action, the one he specifically requested just weeks earlier?

My heart beat with the cadence of a stopwatch as I struggled for the right words to say. “I know,” I said lamely. But I was painfully aware that I knew nothing. How could I possibly understand what it felt like to know my days were numbered, to feel the life drain from me?

There were so many questions I wanted to ask him. I wanted to hear about his favorite memory of our time together. I wanted to hear about his favorite girlfriend. I wanted him to repeat old stories about how, early in their marriage, my mother accidentally spilled Ajax in their beef stroganoff, then decided to stir it in, hoping he wouldn’t notice. But having him go through such an accounting was selfish and cruel. I wanted to fill my scrapbook of memories, but asking him to relive the memories of his short life would have been torture.

I thought about hugging my father, but I knew it would make him feel weak. He comforted
me
with hugs, not the other way around. As I sat by his side, I was overwhelmed by my inability to make a move, then felt instantly guilty because he was far more overwhelmed by the knowledge that this was his final summer. If I despised my helplessness, I could only imagine how much he loathed his own vulnerability.

It was noon and although he said he had woken up with a burst of energy, my father was now ready for a nap. We had just returned from the post office where we had gone to mail a box of clothes and shoes to my dorm room. My father’s car was in the shop so he had taken the subway into Manhattan, saying he wanted one more visit before I shipped off for my second year of college.

We hailed a taxi. My frail but energetic father helped the driver lift the box into the trunk and hopped into the back seat.

“Where to, mon?” the driver asked.

The driver’s voice excited my father as Caribbean and European accents always did. He asked the same question as always: “Ever heard the song ‘Only a Fool’?”

“Never heard it,” the driver said. “Where to?”

“The post office on Twenty-Third Street,” I said.

“I’m driving you six blocks?” He muttered something more, then adjusted his brightly colored knit cap. I wondered why someone with thick dreadlocks would also wear a hat in the August humidity.

“You never heard it?” my father asked, incredulous. “That song was a huge hit on the islands. Where are you from?”

“Jamaica,” the driver said. “Why you hail a taxi for six blocks? I can’t make a living with no six-block fares.”

“We can’t carry the box,” I explained.

“I’m surprised you’ve never heard my song,” my father said, then began humming the opening notes and sang, “Why do I keep fooling myself, when I know you love someone else, only a fool breaks his own heart.” He looked at the driver expectantly. “Sound familiar?”

The man muttered and turned on his radio. “Six fucking blocks.” He began to speed down First Avenue, turning sharply at the corner.

My father grabbed onto the armrest and inhaled deeply. “Take it easy, brother. My daughter gets car sick,” he said.

“She not gonna get sick driving no six blocks, mon. And I’m not your brother.”

I looked out the window, a trick I always found helpful in battling motion sickness. And partly because I knew my father was mortified at my seeing him steady himself during the rough ride. As I watched the Duane Reade and Dunkin Donuts zip by, I realized that my looking away was not only for his benefit.

“Can you slow down?” my father replied.

The driver ignored the request and stepped on the gas.

Trying to lighten the moment, I whispered to my father that I’d never seen such an uptight Rastafarian. My father smiled, then leaned forward, one hand gripping the armrest, the other pressed against the Lucite partition between driver and passengers. Five minutes later, the taxi screeched to an abrupt halt in front of the post office, slamming my father and I against the back of the seat.

“Better than Coney Island,” I said, turning to my father, whose eyes were closed, his breathing labored.

The driver scurried toward the back of the car. “Let’s go, mon. Help me with this box.”

“I’ll get it,” I told my father.

He shook his head. “Give me a second to get it together.”

“I haven’t got all day,” the driver shouted, now standing at his open car trunk.

My father got out of the taxi and walked to the trunk. The two lifted the box, which my father promptly dropped.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, mon?!”

“What the fuck is wrong with
you
, asshole?”

“Asshole? Asshole? I will kick your fucking asshole, mon.” He lifted his fist.

“Stop it!” I screamed at the driver. “Can’t you see he has…” I drifted off.

“I’ve got a bad back,” my father explained.

“Don’t be hailing no taxi to drive six blocks, mon. I need to make money.”

My father gathered every ounce of energy he had and stood straight. “And I need to get my daughter to the post office.”

The two stood facing each other in silence, fists balled.

“I know your fucking song and I hate it, mon.”

My father’s eyes lit up. “You
have
heard it.”

“That’s what I said. I know the song and it sucks.”

The taxi pulled away, leaving us on the street with my package. “That driver was crazed,” my father said. “But you heard him, he knows the song. I knew he was full of it, everyone knows that song. It’s a standard in the Caribbean.”

He lifted the box effortlessly and carried it into the post office. My father remained high for the next half hour as we sent my package to Michigan and walked back to my mother’s apartment.

Then he crashed. “I need to sit,” he said, walking over to my bed. On second thought, he said, he needed to lie down.

I felt crushing guilt that I was about to leave for Michigan, with its vibrant autumn foliage and football Saturdays. In Ann Arbor, everyone was young and healthy. Campus was a place where we all had fresh slates and a world of possibilities before us. I looked at my father and felt even a heavier guilt that I was looking forward to returning to my uncomplicated life.

“I’m running out of time,” he cried, his tears running onto my pillow. I held his hand, struggling to respond.

I had never seen my father express fear, much less cry before. He was always the one who could calm my anxiety and tell me that everything was going to work out. Now he was doing the exact opposite. It felt as though I were standing at the edge of an endless open field and the person who had always led the way suddenly evaporated. Some people die in phases; this was his first step.

A few nights earlier, although he was flying high on cough syrup, my father had the presence of mind to ask for my forgiveness if he needed to check out early. I was stone cold sober and didn’t think to ask the same of him. I had checked out emotionally, shut down to save myself, and I wondered if he could ever forgive my detachment. It was a question that haunted me still.

Finally, after my inane comment that I knew he didn’t want to die, I mustered a trite platitude. “The time we’ve had has been great. Not everyone gets that.”

His eyelids began to grow heavy. “I’ve always said that the spirit is everlasting and the soul is eternal, but when you’re facing death, you wonder if maybe that’s all bullshit.”

After a long pause, I told him I wasn’t sure either. “Do you…do you want a glass of water?”

He squeezed my hand and nodded. “I’m glad we got this extra day.” He closed his eyes. “Time is a luxury. Some of us just get more of it than others.”

We arrived in Seville on a twenty-first-century Eurostar train and left on something akin to a wagon train. The train to Granada was small and black and looked as though men in striped overalls should be shoveling coal into it. It was all quite charming until an hour into the journey, when we started rounding bends and reaching higher elevations. I tapped Katie, whose nose was buried in a book. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Great, how are—” Katie replied, lifting her head. “Whoa, you look terrible.”

“I never get sick on trains,” I told her.

“Well, this is more of a stagecoach,” she said. “Let me get you a Dramamine. We have two more hours.” Katie rifled through my backpack and handed me a bottle of water and a bitter pill for motion sickness. “Water and sleep, Mommy. That’s the best medicine.” I smiled at her parroting the advice I always gave her. I quickly fell asleep to the image of Katie, my father, and I holding hands walking down a yellow brick road. I saw only our backs, but I was certain it was us: three generations with me in the middle, staggering, struggling to find my footing.

When I opened my eyes, I was struck by the sight of a mother and her twentysomething daughter sitting across the aisle in our compartment. Both of the women wore hiking boots and sported long black hair. The mother looked content; she smiled, weathered lines marking her skin. Her daughter donned a ribbed white tank top with a lacy purple bra peeking through. The mother patted her lap, a signal to her daughter to rest her head there, then began combing through her child’s mess of braids. I don’t know why I found them so compelling, but I was unable to keep my eyes off of them. The daughter sat up for a moment and reached toward her backpack, tossed on the seat across from them. She rummaged around a side compartment and pulled out a single bottle of water and fruit roll-up. The young woman tore off a piece of the flattened apricot sheet and placed it in her mother’s mouth. She then fed herself a slice, rested her head back down, and resumed her appointment at the makeshift railway salon.

Noticing my gaze, the mother looked at me, glanced at Katie, and smiled. She continued combing her daughter’s hair. In that brief moment of connection, I felt I was glimpsing my future with Katie and wondered if the mother, likewise, felt a sense of melancholy for her daughter’s childhood.

Still woozy, I closed my eyes again, but smiled internally at the recognition that this was the first time I’d dared imagine myself with Katie as an adult.

When we arrived in Granada, my motion sickness hadn’t passed. Two American college students at a coffee shop advised me I might be suffering from altitude sickness since we were now in the Sierra Nevadas. They said the elevation was actually quite low, but some newcomers felt queasy on their first day in Granada.

At the start of our downhill walk to town, Katie and I were awestruck by the panoramic view of snowcapped mountains, an odd backdrop considering it was well over a hundred degrees outside. “Talk about things looking one way and feeling another,” a red-faced Katie said, wiping sweat from her brow.

We continued downhill, passing several businesses named for Washington Irving, and I confessed to Katie that I hadn’t really done my homework for this two-day visit to Granada. “We have reservations to see the Alhambra tomorrow, but to be perfectly honest, I have no idea what it is. A church? An Alcázar? I’m really not sure. And I don’t know how Washington Irving fits in.”

“Really?” Katie said coyly. “You don’t have a map with color-coded stickers?”

“Nope,” I swatted her playfully.

“I am liking this unprepared Mommy,” Katie said, whipping out her phone. “Let me see here. Alhambra. Granada. Spain.”

She’s never going to get reception up—

“Boom! Okay, it says here that the Alhambra was originally designed as a military area then later became the residence of royalty and of the court of Granada in the middle of the thirteenth century.” She continued reading from the Alhambra website. “Throughout the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, the fortress became a citadel, with high ramparts and defensive towers, that housed two main areas: the military area, or Alcazaba, the barracks of the royal guard, and the funky cold medina.”

“Funky cold medina?”

“Just checking to make sure you’re still paying attention. It just says Medina, which is the court city, the location of the famous Nasrid Palaces and the remains of the houses of noblemen and plebeians who lived there.”

She pushed a few more buttons. “So it was a Moorish fortress, and it says on another site that the Alhambra was the seat of government for the ruling Moors until they were exiled in 1492. Then it was the home to Catholic kings. Blah, blah, blah, oh, this is cool: the architecture is a mixture of the earlier Arabic style and the later Christian modifications, making the Alhambra a microcosm of Spanish history.”

“And how does—”

“Washington Irving wrote the book
Tales
from
the
Alhambra
which was inspired by his stay here,” Katie said.

We continued walking in the unfiltered heat. Despite our sunhats and glasses, we were baking as we made our way down the unshaded sidewalk. Katie pointed out a grove where we could stop and cool off—a good idea, I thought. Until I realized it was a graveyard.

“Why don’t we walk a little further and see if we can find a restaurant where we can sit down and have a drink?” I suggested.

“I’ve got a bottle of water we can share. Let’s just sit for a few minutes,” Katie said, looking exhausted.

“I hate graveyards,” I said. I looked again at Katie. “Okay, we’ll cool off and then hit the road again in a few minutes, no longer.”

“I wasn’t asking to stay forever,” Katie quipped.

Moments later, I found myself passing through the gates of a graveyard for the first time since the unveiling of my father’s tombstone, a year after his death.

***

I have always found the rituals around death awkward, especially when they related to my untraditional father. Ritual was so antithetical to who my father was that it felt forced to observe the Jewish tradition of unveiling a tombstone. Loved ones gather around the cemetery plot on the one-year anniversary of their departed’s death and uncover the stone as if unveiling a masterpiece.

I resented the fanfare. After all, when he was dying, my father told me he wanted to be wrapped in an Oriental rug and dumped in the East River. At the time, I laughed, but his point was taken: he didn’t want to follow any religious traditions in death that he hadn’t subscribed to in life. Of course we weren’t going to dump his body in the river, but having an unveiling at the Jewish cemetery was like having a Latin Mass for Timothy Leary.

At the time, I didn’t appreciate that such traditions were to comfort the survivors, so I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder about having to go back to the cemetery in the dead of winter to see the Dead Shelly Show, a term he had coined for his inevitable funeral and unveiling. He turned up his nose at convention, and I felt that by doing the same, I was keeping his memory alive.

When the veil was lifted from the stone, a cold slap of wind hit me as I read his full name: Sheldon Donald Coburn. I crossed my arms.

Sheldon. No one ever called him Sheldon.

My anger dissolved as I read a line beneath, the date of his death.

Aunt Rita asked if anyone would like to say a few words. With her thick New York accent, she said that I had done such a nice job with the eulogy at the memorial service and urged me to share a few thoughts.

“Okay,” I said. The dozen or so close family members looked at me, expecting a touching story or perhaps a poem by Kahlil Gibran. “He died in February. The stone says January.” A collective gasp was followed by my aunt’s quick assurances that the mistake would be fixed immediately.

I heard my father’s voice as clearly as if he were standing next to me. “They killed me off a month early,” he said with a hearty laugh. “That’s perfect! What a perfect ending—a tombstone with a typo.” I knew with absolute certainty he would love it.

After weeks of negotiation, Aunt Rita agreed to leave the tombstone as is: boldly, unapologetically imperfect. Now I felt as if the true essence of my father’s memory was chiseled in stone.

***

Though I have serious doubts about the existence of an afterlife, it gives me comfort to hold out hope there might be a spiritual plane beyond our human existence. Whenever I hear stories of the deceased visiting their friends on Earth, I have three thoughts about my own dad. One: thank God I will see him again. Two: we’ll have a great laugh over the tombstone typo and the painting of the piano. Three: why hasn’t he shown up? If there are visitation privileges, why hasn’t he come to see me?

Sometimes I wonder if he is angry with me for not being a better daughter. I wonder if he wasn’t able to forgive my early emotional checkout. I had left him to die alone in a rocking chair with a benevolent madwoman caring for him.

When I have these thoughts, my more pragmatic side makes a convincing case that if the spirit does evolve, it can fully understand human limitations. My father loved and accepted the shell I had become in our last few months together. Why would he change his position in a state of elevated consciousness?

On a purely emotional level, though, I’d always felt alone and forgotten. Where were my pennies from heaven? Where were my signs that he broke on through to the other side and everything was cool?

Knowing that I yearned for some kind of beyond-the-grave connection with my father, my cousin Kathy referred me to a medium. “Lana is the real deal,” she assured me. Kathy wanted to connect with her sister, Diane, who had been in Miami at the time of their father’s murder. The older of the sisters, Diane was nineteen and had been spending time with Ernie in Florida.

Diane cut short her trip very suddenly and showed up on her mother’s doorstep in New Jersey without explanation. Ten days later, Ernie’s body was discovered in his home, decomposed beyond recognition. When my mother went to Florida, she approached her brother’s house and was struck by the odor that finally alerted the neighbors that there was a body inside. A police officer held out his arm to block my mother from going any further. “There is nothing inside that you should see,” he warned her. Ernie’s remains had been removed, but the house was a crime scene where a man had been fatally beaten and strangled.

After Grandma Aggie died, information started slowly leaking that Ernie’s death was not a heart attack after all. No one thought Diane was involved in the crime, but it was clear that she either discovered the body shortly after the murder or fled the scene as it was happening. Whenever my mother pleaded with Diane to give her information, her niece teared up and said she couldn’t talk about it. She soon began buying wine by the gallon and drowned her memories every day, until she died of cirrhosis of the liver at forty-four, the same age Ernie was when he was killed.

Kathy told me that Lana the medium makes all of her appointments for the upcoming year on one day in December. She begins accepting phone calls at nine in the morning and by noon is booked for the next twelve months.

On the given day, I dialed Lana’s phone number as soon as the clock struck nine on the East Coast. Busy. I hit the redial button another dozen times, all with the same result. I waited a few minutes then hit redial again, then again, then again. Busy, busy, busy.

Later that night, Kathy called to ask if I’d reached Lana.

“No, I called for an hour and couldn’t get through.”

“Well, I did,” Kathy said. “I am going to see her in October and I booked a phone consultation for you the following week.”

“Really?” I said, trying to tame my excitement at the thought of speaking to my father after twenty-five years.

I just had to wait eleven months for my appointment.

***

The day after Kathy’s appointment with Lana, I called to get the details. “She was frighteningly accurate,” Kathy said. There was no doubt in her mind that she had made a connection to the other side. “I didn’t get through to Diane though,” Kathy told me. She explained that her sister was not available, but she spoke with her father-in-law.

My heart sank. As much as I missed other relatives, I had closure with them. I hoped they were doing well but didn’t have any pressing questions to ask. If Grandma Aggie wanted to pop in at the end to share a quick story, that would be fine, but I was dialing in for my father.

Kathy began. “Lana asked if I knew of anyone who was in the military because she saw a man in a uniform.” My cousin informed me her maternal grandfather was in the Army. Lana told Kathy her grandfather wanted her to know that everything was good on the other side and that he was at peace. “Then she saw a little girl twirling like a ballerina,” Kathy said. “Diane and I had a music box in our room with a ballerina that spun on the lid. And then she said she saw lemons and asked if I knew anyone who liked lemons. I told her that Grandma loved lemon meringue pie and she said she saw an old woman giving her a thumbs up.”