Speaking in Tongues
Eleanor Swanson
We lie on the bed and you kiss me, the air-conditioner rumbling in the wall. From the window, I can see a palm frond framed in blurry light, dripping with rain. Oh, I say, holding you against me. Don’t stop. I want to build a barricade to pain, to erase the image of the old man spitting and coughing in the stinking house. When we are there, the viney dampness grows over us. We sweat. The air-conditioner in his place is too loud, too cold for him. So we don’t turn it on. My father. I glance at the clock. I have to go.
“I’m going to fix him breakfast,” I say. The good daughter. Gently coax him to eat. Paul rolls over and faces the wall, buries his head in the pillow. “Come back for me later, Christina,” he says, his voice muffled. I don’t bother to shower. I’ll start cleaning as soon as I get there. By afternoon I’ll feel filthy.
I walk down the concrete steps of the Riviera Court Motel, a fifties-style place on the intercoastal waterway. It has a sparkling pool, but we’ve never used it. Sometimes we sit on the dock in the darkness and drink beer, dangling our legs down toward the water, looking for fish. Our talk always focuses on him, my father. How long? We asked each other on our last visit. Now we’re here in Miami again; the time has come. This time, we’re taking him back to Denver with us. We don’t have any other choices.
Even in the pounding rain, cars roar down Dixie Highway, cutting in and out of lanes, tailgating. Driving here is pure-adrenaline-crazy. After awhile, maybe half a day of being here, I start to like it. I feel alive. I step on the gas and pull out into traffic.
I drive fast, remembering him yelling into the phone. “I want you to do something! I want you to come here right away.” We’d been here just a month ago. Now we’re back. I envy Paul’s sleep, the cool motel room. “I can’t take it anymore! Something’s wrong with me!” I hear my father screaming in my head, in my worst nightmares.
I open the door. He isn’t in his recliner, so that means he’s still in bed. I tiptoe to his room and watch him. It’s only nine, and the temperature in the house is already over eighty, but he has mounds of blankets pulled up over him. His back slowly rises and falls, rises and falls. A cat snakes around my leg, meowing. The place reeks of cat food, insecticide, mice, smokeless tobacco—snuff. He saves the cat food cans, without rinsing them. I run the electric can opener and look at gray-looking meat in goopy jelly. I scoop “Shrimp in Aspic” into three bowls and put them outside. I run the hot water till it steams, rinse out the cans, scrub down the counter top and sink with Comet, but the smell doesn’t go away. I take the garbage outside. The stench of rotten meat drifts from the sack and I gag. Someone comes in to clean every two weeks. He says that’s all he needs. I tell him he should have somebody come every day. He makes exaggerated sounds of annoyance and disgust. “You must think I’m a millionaire. Why should I pay somebody to wipe up? I can do that myself.”
I hear him clearing his throat in the bathroom. The sound goes on and on. I remind myself of my mantra for these times. Compassion, patience. He’s old. My mother was his second wife. He used to hate it when people mistook him for my grandfather. I remember the photographs of him as a young man, in Sweden, kneeling in a beet field. After all the years, he still has a heavy Swedish accent—he still says “dat” and “dere,” and mixes w’s and v’s. “Vat’s dat over dere?” I walk out of the kitchen, expecting to see him in his chair, but he’s gone back to bed. “Come here,” he shouts. “I want to talk to you.” Words I’ve come to dread. “Now listen to this,” he says. “Are you listening?”
“I’m listening,” I say loudly. He’s stopped wearing his hearing aids.
“I have an idea. I want you to make me a good breakfast, okay?”
“Okay,” I nod. “That sounds good.”
“What?”
I repeat, more loudly. “That sounds good.”
He rises up on an elbow. “Don’t tell me we haven’t got any food. Don’t start anything.”
I sigh and walk into the tiny kitchen. It’s worse sometimes if you keep trying to make him hear what you’ve said. I fry bacon and make coffee. Cook eggs. I set the table and call him. “Breakfast is ready,” I say.
“I want you to serve it to me in here. I want to be waited on.” His voice is wheedling and coy.
I keep my own voice light, hold my temper. “Come on,” I say. “You should get up now and come to the table.” He takes a long time to get his clothes on. When he finally makes it to the table, I can see he’s in a rage. I sit down across the table from him. He takes a bite of the eggs, then looks at me, shakes his head from side-to-side. “All dried up.” He shoves the plate away, and it slides off the edge of the Formica table and shatters on the floor. I was going to clean it anyway, I think numbly. That’s what I was going to do next, clean the floor. He grabs his cane, totters to his chair and snatches his can of Copenhagen from the table beside him. “You’re no daughter to me,” he says. “I wish I’d never seen you.” He fills his mouth with snuff, pulling his lips out. His gums look dark and hard as the molded surface of his false teeth. “Go away. Leave me alone.”
I stand up. “Don’t talk to me like that,” I say loudly, trying not to sound angry.
He folds his arms and stares out into the room. I’ve seen him sit that way for hours, usually sleeping.
I kneel down and pick up the pieces of the plate.
“Go away,” he shouts and stamps his slippers on the floor, “forget about that. Leave everything alone.”
I go into the kitchen, open a beer, and walk outside. The sun has come out. I sit in the lawn chair near a big hibiscus bush. It’s more like a tree, vibrant green leaves, and fleshy peach-colored flowers. I touch the leaves to remind myself I’m alive. I drink and watch the neighbor’s ragged cocker spaniels, three of them, as they run along the fence, back and forth, barking and barking. I drink, feeling my body go slack and smooth.
I drink a beer before our walk, and put one in my pocket. I like deep pockets so I can bring my beers with me. It’s drink myself numb or go crazy. Earlier, at dinner, we’d tried to get my father to eat with us. “You need to eat something,” Paul said. My father is usually nicer to Paul than to me. But this time he screamed. “Don’t get into it. Don’t get into it or I’ll have an attack!” We had dinner while my father sat in his recliner and peered at us. First he put his hands over his ears, and then he plugged them with pieces of paper towel. “You two are just sitting around waiting for me to drop over,” he called out to us finally, as we were clearing away the dishes.
We walk in the scented darkness. I trip and almost fall. “Be careful,” Paul says. “The sidewalk was uneven,” I say, feeling myself pitching forward into darkness and striking the cement. No, that can’t happen. I have to live. I breathe in and out. I smell the damp grass, the perfume of flowers, the night all around me, shivering through the trees, rustling the bushes. The lights of the grand houses are golden. Paul takes my hand and squeezes it hard, a worried gesture. I’ve been talking and talking. Talking myself sane, talking myself loved, talking my mother and brother back to life, talking myself crazy. My jaws ache. I don’t even know what I’m saying. I cry for my brother, so long dead, electrocuted at twenty. Maybe this time I’m really just crying for myself, because I have to do this alone. Not really. Thank you Paul, I say. My wonderful husband. I look over. Did he hear me? I want to sing, chant my father to some peaceful place. Die in peace, I say inside my head. Or do I say it out loud? I look over, but this time I know Paul didn’t hear me, because now we’re walking over the bridge, right next to the highway. I’m half dizzy with the smell of exhaust fumes, the maddening screech of brakes and scream of accelerating engines. I stand at the edge of the curb and look south at the stream of brilliant lights coming toward me. Headlights. Cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles. The madness of this place. A place where strange things can happen. I look down at the water under us and sure enough, there’s a bird, stick feet skittering atop the water’s surface. It disappears under the bridge, into the darkness. People live under that bridge. Paul says he’s seen them. People who are used to the darkness. I want to see the light again. Headlights streaming toward me.
“Look out!” Paul calls, grabbing my wrist.
We turn on the television when we get back to the room and I fall asleep in a chair, remembering that my father had wished me out of existence. I am tired, so tired. When I finally wake up and make my way to bed the room is dark and Paul is snoring. I creep into bed and nestle beside him, thinking back to when I had been a little girl—my father’s darling. I see her clearly. He is letting her ride in the wheelbarrow. She is laughing, “Goodbye,” I say.
I wake up near dawn, the way you do sometimes in a strange place, not quite knowing where you are, expecting the layout of your own bedroom. I walk to the window. It’s raining again, a soft drizzle that ripples the surface of the waterway. I stand at the window for what seems like a long time, watching the rain. Cars have begun to thunder down the highway again, the rush hour already started. But the sound is muted by the air-conditioner. I feel my body grow colder and colder, inside and out. There is something delicious about the feeling, as if I am storing up the cold, getting ready for the next day in my father’s sweltering house. Some slight residue of a dream lingers on the fringe of my consciousness, but if I try any longer to recall it, I know I won’t be able to go back to sleep. And I crave more sleep. Maybe we’d walked for hours last night. I don’t know, I don’t remember. The bottoms of my feet are sore. I think I cried. I think I said things about my father that I shouldn’t have said. I don’t remember.
~ ~ ~
I open my eyes. The room is filled with sun, a dazzling warm bath of light. Paul is dressed. He comes over and kisses me. I wrap my arms around his neck. His hair is wet. He smells of soap. “Come on,” I say. “I want you.”
He smiles a little before he gently pulls away. “Can’t.” He looks at his watch. “I’ll spell you,” he says. “I’ll go over, and call you in a while. Hey, something strange happened last night,” he says. “Do you remember?”
I sit on the edge of the bed. “I fell asleep in the chair. I’m sorry.”
“You walked in your sleep. You talked.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Fortunately, I can prove it.” He holds up the tape recorder we bought before we left, a little microcassette. We got it to record my father. It was my idea. A way to prove that he might need guardianship.
“What happened?”
“You got up out of the chair. Your eyes were wide open. You put your hands out and came towards me. You were talking, on and on. It was spooky, believe me. I’d better go. Here, check it out. Maybe you know this language.” He hands me the tape recorder.
“Call me,” I say. “Let me know what to expect.”
“Okay,” he says, opening the door. Warm air drifts in like a ghost.
I put the tape recorder down on the rumpled bed, stand up and stretch. I walked in my sleep, talked? I go to the bathroom and turn on the shower. I take the tiny piece of motel soap, work it into a lather on the thin washcloth, and scrub myself. The water is hot. My skin turns a cheery apple-red. I watch the suds drifting down the drain and try to remember…
The phone rings and I scramble out of the shower, leaving a trail of water.
It’s Paul. “Are you ready?” he asks, without even saying hello first.
“So soon?”
“He was up when I got here. He started yelling at me the second I opened the door. Fuck this. I haven’t even been here for a half hour, and I’m losing it.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, meaning it. I think of smiling old people playing shuffleboard or cards, dandling grandchildren on their knees.
“It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”
“He’s my father. I’m ready. Come and get me,” I say, and hang up. My father has allowed his vitality to dwindle away. He has banished pleasure, health, friendship, and love with his paranoia and anger. Activities still within his grasp don’t capture his interest. All he talks about is himself. Complaints of past and present wrongs and ills. He worked once, provided for a family, had a sense of humor. But age robs certain people of all their good qualities and leaves only the worst of them—the dry, bitter seed. I hurry into my clothes, feeling the familiar dread envelop me like a suffocating blanket. I slip the tape recorder into my purse, lock the door and walk down the stairs to wait in the parking lot.
I’m working inside while Paul is outside packing my father’s tools. My father is in his chair, sleeping soundly. I look through the drawers, my life entwined with my family’s. Dissolving, fading, coming into focus in the mementos, letters, photographs. What will I leave behind? How can I leave my brother’s Key Club Formal Dance glass? How can I take it? Shall I leave the boxes of National Geographic behind? The one and only oil painting my mother and father ever owned? It’s huge and heavy. It has a carved, three-inch wooden frame. I look at the scene—high, snow-covered, gauzily-rendered mountains, an isolated cabin by a glittering stream. Someone’s idea of paradise? I swathe it in bubble wrap and take it outside, just as the phone rings. I step back inside and my father points to the phone and then to me, a command. I pick it up.
“This is Gus Larson. Put your father on. I want to see how he’s doing.”
I hold the phone against my chest. “It’s Gus Larson.”
My father sweeps the air with his big hand, waving away the thought of taking the call. “He talks too much. I can’t understand a word he says. You talk to him.”
Gus begs us to come over. “See my garden,” he says. “Bring your father. It would be good for him to get out.”
I promise him we’ll stop by. “Gus wants us to come over later,” I say after I hang up. “Just for a short visit.”
My father clenches his teeth and looks up at me, both hands flat on the arms of his recliner, as though he’s ready to rise in a burst of savage energy and strike me. “I’m not goin’ nowhere! Can’t you understand anything? You know,” he says, shaking a fist at me. “It’s all your fault. You and your damn work. I wanted you to come here and take care of me. Before I got in such bad shape.” He slams the flat of his hand down hard on his chair. “I’m getting upset. I want a damn beer.”
“Maybe you should try to eat something first,” I say.
“Don’t you tell me nothin’. I want a beer.”
I bring him a beer, open it and hand it to him.
“Thank you,” he says, calmer. “You’re all I got, you know. You and Paul. Sometimes I think he loves me more than you do.”
“I love you,” I say. I love you unconditionally, beyond logic. No matter how much you hurt me. I’m alive because of you.
“Hah,” he says, taking another sip of his beer. “Go away now. Why don’t you leave for a couple of hours so I can rest.”
I walk away, into the kitchen, and open a beer for myself. I’m alive, I tell myself. I think of the tape recorder then, take it from my purse and go outside to the shed where Paul is still packing tools. “He wants me to leave,” I say. “And then he wants to know where I’ve gone.” I rewind the tape and click the tape recorder on. “Yelp! Yelp!” a voice says. My voice. Then a muted sound. “I’m walking around the room now?”
“Right,” Paul says, shaking his head. “It was weird. Your eyes were wide open but you weren’t looking at me. You seemed to be looking right through me.”
My voice starts again. “Etbarnharramlet…etbarnharramletevatnet.” I turn off the tape for a minute. “Does it sound like a real language?”
“Kind of…actually it sounds Scandinavian. Finnish maybe.”
“Finnish is Slavic,” I say. “And I only know about ten words in Swedish. Those don’t sound like any of the ten words. Gus Larson called and I told him we’d come over with my father, but my father had a fit about it. We should go. He’s expecting us. We only need to stay a few minutes.”
“I can’t, look at me.”
Paul’s T-shirt is drenched.
“Gus won’t know the difference. We’ll take the tape. He can tell us if he recognizes any Swedish words. He can still hear pretty good.”
Leaf lettuce and ferny carrot tops. Bean vines twining up strings. Spinach and beets. Gus gestures. “Look at them radishes,” he says. “White radishes like them Oriental people eat. “I give ‘em away.” He stoops down and pulls up a tiny weed, then three radishes. He shakes them free of moist, black earth. The dirt looks rich, good enough to eat. I imagine spooning it into my mouth, lying down, curving into its darkness and putting forth roots, changing into something else, the way the dead do. But I remind myself that I’m alive. I look up into the sky and close my eyes against the ash-white light of the sun, the fire that burns without consuming. When I open them again, Gus is gesturing with a bunch of radishes. “Here,” he says. “Put these in your salad. Make your father a big salad tonight. Steam him up some of this Swiss chard.” He’s moving to another row, breaking big green leaves of chard, subtlety threaded with red.
Paul has walked to the far end of the garden. He bends down, and then falls to his knees, as if he’s discovered a mystery. I imagine kneeling beside him, as he explains what the earth has told him. Gus comes towards me with his colorful bouquet of vegetables. I think of telling him that my father’s never eaten a salad in his life. Not once. Now he’s barely eating at all. Beer and those canned vitamin drinks. The single hot dog he managed to eat the other night. Eggs, sometimes, if they’re cooked right. But I say nothing. I just watch as Gus finds more food to send with us. He’s dropping things in a white plastic grocery bag. I think of the waste. I think of my father’s life. What if part of me turns out to be like him? Which part will it be? I’m good with my hands. I like to fix things. I love animals and children. I once had a terrible temper, but I’ve controlled it, for the most part. “Now then,” Gus is saying. “Let’s go inside and cool off. I want to show you some pictures.” His accent isn’t as pronounced as my father’s, but still he says “tings” for “things” and has the rising and falling pitch that people mimic in Swedish speech. Ho dee ho dee hoo. I think of the tape. Paul trails behind us and we go inside and sit on a couch, covered with protective plastic. Gus comes out of the kitchen with three cans of Heineken. “Would you rather have a coke?” he asks me.
“No,” I say. “This is fine.”
Next, he brings us an album. It’s full of photographs of wooden toys, simple, three-piece toys like wagons and boats, painted in bright colors. At the end of the album is a photograph of Gus standing with four other elderly men in front of a work bench. “There’s the boys,” he says proudly. “We’re over at that Senior Center. Van comes by and gets me. We make the toys for the Christmas baskets they put together for the poor folks here in town. Couple years ago, I tried to get your father to come with me, but he didn’t take to the idea.” Gus nudged my elbow and winked. “Now if we’d been a group of pretty girls…Your father always took to the ladies. Back in the old days, he was the best dancer at Vasa Hall. You remember dat, doncha?” I nod, seeing my father’s dark, slicked-back hair, the lightness of his step through the turns of a schottische, my mother, brother, and I watching from the sidelines. A handsome man, he wore the costume of the south of Sweden.
Here’s a picture,” he says suddenly.
He thrusts it into my hands. Gus and a woman are standing on either side of a large, chest-high stone, covered with runic characters.
“That’s my wife. She was a pretty gal before she got sick. She passed away last year.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He rubs his nose with the back of his hand. “She went nice and peaceful.” He points to the stone. “That there’s a Viking burial stone. See all that writing? It’s Viking words. It’s telling the warrior buried there how to find his way to the spirit world.”
Gus takes the photograph from me, and when his back is to me, Paul points to his watch.
“I sure wanted to see your father,” Gus says, turning toward us. Not too many of us old-timers left anymore.”
I stand. “Thanks for everything,” I say, holding up the bag of vegetables. “You’ve got a wonderful garden. Keep up the good work.”
Paul puts out his hand. “Thanks, Gus,” he says.
We’re walking down the sidewalk back to the car when I remember. “The tape,” I say to Paul. “I forgot about it.”
“It’s too late now. We’ve got to get back over there and see what’s going on. We’ve got to keep packing. If you think it’s Swedish, let your father listen to it.”
When we get back to his house, my father is sitting in his chair, reading the newspaper. He’s wearing his hearing aids. He puts the newspaper down on the table when we walk in.
“I don’t know why I bother,” he says. “I can’t see.” He looks at both of us. “So did old man Larson tell you all his troubles? You were gone a long time. I thought you were here to see me. I had a Nutrament. Maybe it’s time for a beer. Why don’t we all sit outside in the sun and talk over some things.” He gets up and totters toward the kitchen. We follow him to the refrigerator, and out the back door. We sit side-by-side in the sun, in three rickety lawn chairs.
“Well,” he says when we’re all sitting down. “Sköl. Here’s to better days.” He raises his can of beer.
Paul clicks his beer against my father’s. “Min sköl, din sköl, alla vacka flickas sköl,” he says. My father’s favorite toast. I toast, you toast, all the pretty girls toast. My father smiles a little, closes his eyes and tilts his face towards the sun.
Paul and I look at each other and sip our beers. We’re sitting on either side of my father. Within a minute or two it seems, he’s fallen asleep. His mouth goes slack and a bit of spittle trickles from the corner of his lips. His face is peaceful. I ease myself from my aluminum chair, but it squeaks anyway and my father’s eyes pop open.
“Where’re goin’?” he asks drowsily. “I thought we had some talkin’ to do.”
I go into the house and take the tape recorder from my purse. I rewind it and listen to my voice without understanding a word I’ve said. “Detar ot het hollet. Folgdenna vagen. Detar intay longt.” I rewind it again and walk outside.
My father is talking to Paul. He looks up at me. “I was just telling Paul here…remember that remodeling job I did at Gables-by-the-Sea? That guy was a big shot.”
“He was a pilot for Eastern Airlines.”
“That’s the one. Nothing but the best for him.”
I sit down and hold out the tape recorder.
“You recording me? Don’t record me.”
“No,” I say, “Paul made this. I want you to listen to it.” I play the first part of the tape. My father cups his hand over his ear. When I turn it off, he looks at me curiously. “That sounds like your voice,” he says. “I thought you forgot your Swedish.”
I look at Paul and he smiles. “Can you understand me?” I ask.
He makes a face. “You think I’m a dumb old man? I understand you fine. ‘Hjälp,’ ‘Help,’ you said. Ett barn har ramlet i vattnet.’ ‘A child has fallen in the water.’
That’s me you’re talking about, I guess. I told you that story.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “What story?”
My father looks at Paul. “You remember, don’t you?”
Paul shakes his head.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you people,” my father says. “I told you…when I was a boy, I fell through the ice. I was by myself. ‘Hjälp! Hjälp!’ I was yelling out, over and over. I went under water. I was sure I was going to drown. A boy from the next village, an older boy, was taking a short cut on a path near the pond. He heard me and starting screaming himself. ‘A child has fallen in the water.’ No one came. He had to pull me out by himself, with a tree branch. If I’d died then, you wouldn’t have been born,” he says matter-of-factly. He’s forgotten that he wished me out of existence just a day ago. Our lives turn upon such fragile coincidences.
“What happened then?” I ask.
“He wrapped me in his coat and took me home. I never saw him again. After he left, my father beat me for going out on the ice.”
We sit in silence for a few minutes. My father stares out into the yard, where a mockingbird hops on the grass before flying into an avocado tree and singing three, clear, pure notes. I wonder if my father’s thinking about the beating, or about being saved that day. I think of him turning blue in the frigid water. I see myself fading out of the world like a movie ghost. I know this is the first time I’ve heard the story of my father falling through the ice.
“What else you got?” he says suddenly.
I play the rest of the tape.
“‘Den er så pass väg. ta den här väg. Den er icke långt.’” You’re giving directions. ‘It’s that way. Take this road. It isn’t far.’ What are you talking about?” he asks, his bushy gray eyebrows twisted up into angry lines. “What are you talking about?”
The next day, Paul drops me off at the house and goes to the grocery store. I walk down the sidewalk, and open the door. My father’s up already or he’s forgotten to lock it. The house is silent. Before I walk to his room I listen for the sound of breathing. I stand in the doorway of his room, then, and watch him. Something’s wrong. At first, I think he’s died. I walk close to the bed. He’s curled up like a child and his breathing is shallow and rapid. I touch his forehead. The skin is dry and hot. I feel myself beginning to shake, wondering if I should call an ambulance. I call his doctor instead, and talk to a receptionist. Then I repeat my story to a nurse. She tells me the doctor is with a patient. “Give him some aspirin,” she says. “He probably just has a cold. The doctor will call you.” An hour passes. Paul is still at the store, and the doctor hasn’t called me back. I hear my father banging his cane on the floor. He’s propped up on an elbow.
“Who are you?” he says. He can barely talk, but his voice gathers up a feeble rage. “You’re not my daughter!” Spittle flies from his mouth. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
I half carry him to the bathroom, and then get him back in bed. I call the doctor again. The call is picked up by the answering service. “They’re out of the office till tomorrow. Is it an emergency?”
“I don’t know,” I snap. “That’s why I need to talk to the doctor.” I’m angry and scared. She gives me an emergency number. Against my advice, my father has gone off Medicare and into an HMO. His doctor is the gatekeeper. When my father had blood in his urine last year, it took me a half a dozen phone calls to get him to approve an appointment with an urologist. When I hang up, I’m furious. At Paul. Where is he? At my father’s doctor. At my father.
I hear Paul at the door. “Where have you been?”
He looks at me in amazement. “What’s wrong?”
I tell him.
“Screw the doctor. Let’s take him to the emergency room.”
My father doesn’t want to go. He fights us as we try to get him into his clothes. I phone the emergency number and the doctor on call tells me to go ahead and take him to the hospital. My father is yelling at Paul. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone.”
After my father is examined, the doctor comes out to where we’re sitting in the emergency room. “I’m going to admit him. He’s got some kind of infection. Weight loss. It’s the downward spiral,” he says.
I tell him about the bladder cancer, how my father refused treatment, insisting there was nothing wrong with him.
He nods. “He probably has a severe bladder infection. We’ll put him on an antibiotic drip and keep him comfortable. I’ll have the social worker call you about getting him into a hospice.”
The downward spiral. A hospice. Death. I’m numb. The doctor shakes each of our hands and tells us to call in about an hour, when my father will be in a room. My heart is pounding. I can feel my ribs moving with each beat. We go back to the motel and sleep in each other’s arms, waiting for an hour to pass, waiting for the phone to ring.
Later that afternoon we go to the hospital. We bring flowers. My father is propped up in bed. He begins to scream at us as soon as we walk in the room. I close the curtains around his bed. “The guilty ones.” He holds up a trembling hand, and then points to me. “This is all your fault,” he says. “I hate you. Get me out! Get me out of here!”
I stand there. I can’t cry. I can’t do anything, feel anything. “You shouldn’t talk to me that way.”
He’s silent, but he looks at me with rage. We sit by his bed and wait until he falls asleep.
I talk to the social worker the next morning. She calls me back two days later. A bed is available in a nearby hospice. Paul tells me in the morning that I’ve talked in my sleep again. He didn’t record me this time. I said the same things, over and over, opening my eyes and thrashing around. It’s that way. Take this road. It isn’t far. Paul says I’m remembering something my father must have said in Swedish when I was a child. A buried memory.
Paul and I go to the beach and I swim and swim as if I can give my pain away to the ancient ocean. I know my father will never again tell me he loves me. I tell myself I can live with that. I can live. Dementia, the nurse said, who heard him say that he hated me. She hasn’t spent a lifetime being belittled by him. Being told she was wrong. Imperfect. Stupid. When my brother died, my father told everyone he had lost everything. I had married beneath me. I did not make enough money. I could not have children. If I had come back to Florida to take care of her, my mother wouldn’t have had to go to a nursing home.
I go to the hospice alone. I stroke my father’s head and tell him I forgive him. He sleeps. I leave, passing the rooms of the dying. I cry when I pass the gaily decorated children’s rooms. I cry all the way out to the car. I cry until I open the door to our motel room. Paul takes me in his arms. He thinks I’m crying for my father.
The next morning at the hospice, the nurse tells me that my father was speaking another language in the night. “I assume it’s Swedish. He’s Swedish, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” I say. “He is.”
“He says the same words over and over again. I don’t know if I should have…but I wrote them down…the way they sounded. I hope that’s okay.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a pad of paper. “‘Var? Var? Are detta vagan?’ He said them over and over. We started him on morphine this morning. He seems peaceful.”
“Var” means “where.” I know that much Swedish. Where? Where? My father is asking directions I go into his room. He is curled in bed like a fetus, his hands clasped together. He faces the window. His eyes are open, but fixed on eternity, his once-brown eyes, now milky and bluish, fixed on some mysterious distance. “Can I get you anything?” I ask, close to his ear. He shakes his head. “Do you want me to stay?” Yes, he nods. “Den er så pass väg. Ta den här väg. Den er icke långt,” I say gently. I know the words by heart. I have listened to the tape of my voice over and over. It’s that way. Take this road. It isn’t far. I stay until he sleeps. I stand near him the whole time, so he can see he’s not alone.
At the motel the next morning the phone rings. The doctor on call tells me my father isn’t doing well. We drive to the hospice. The chaplain meets us in the hall. He takes my hand. “He died about four minutes ago,” he says. “He wasn’t conscious,” he says. “He wouldn’t have known if you were here or not.” We follow him to my father’s room. I touch his still-warm hand. I watch for the rise and fall of his chest, his shoulders, but he’s still. “We’ll take him to another room,” the chaplain tells us. “You can spend some time with him there.”
In the room, Paul holds my hand. He’s crying. The chaplain is saying to me, we’ll leave you alone here. And I’m saying in my mind, no, no, no. But he and Paul disappear and I am alone with my father. “Goodbye,” I say. “You can’t hurt me anymore.” I stand in the room for several minutes, respectful of the mystery. Maybe I helped him find his way. Maybe he finally trusted me, I think, as I leave the room, closing the door behind me.
Eleanor Swanson
We lie on the bed and you kiss me, the air-conditioner rumbling in the wall. From the window, I can see a palm frond framed in blurry light, dripping with rain. Oh, I say, holding you against me. Don’t stop. I want to build a barricade to pain, to erase the image of the old man spitting and coughing in the stinking house. When we are there, the viney dampness grows over us. We sweat. The air-conditioner in his place is too loud, too cold for him. So we don’t turn it on. My father. I glance at the clock. I have to go.
“I’m going to fix him breakfast,” I say. The good daughter. Gently coax him to eat. Paul rolls over and faces the wall, buries his head in the pillow. “Come back for me later, Christina,” he says, his voice muffled. I don’t bother to shower. I’ll start cleaning as soon as I get there. By afternoon I’ll feel filthy.
I walk down the concrete steps of the Riviera Court Motel, a fifties-style place on the intercoastal waterway. It has a sparkling pool, but we’ve never used it. Sometimes we sit on the dock in the darkness and drink beer, dangling our legs down toward the water, looking for fish. Our talk always focuses on him, my father. How long? We asked each other on our last visit. Now we’re here in Miami again; the time has come. This time, we’re taking him back to Denver with us. We don’t have any other choices.
Even in the pounding rain, cars roar down Dixie Highway, cutting in and out of lanes, tailgating. Driving here is pure-adrenaline-crazy. After awhile, maybe half a day of being here, I start to like it. I feel alive. I step on the gas and pull out into traffic.
I drive fast, remembering him yelling into the phone. “I want you to do something! I want you to come here right away.” We’d been here just a month ago. Now we’re back. I envy Paul’s sleep, the cool motel room. “I can’t take it anymore! Something’s wrong with me!” I hear my father screaming in my head, in my worst nightmares.
I open the door. He isn’t in his recliner, so that means he’s still in bed. I tiptoe to his room and watch him. It’s only nine, and the temperature in the house is already over eighty, but he has mounds of blankets pulled up over him. His back slowly rises and falls, rises and falls. A cat snakes around my leg, meowing. The place reeks of cat food, insecticide, mice, smokeless tobacco—snuff. He saves the cat food cans, without rinsing them. I run the electric can opener and look at gray-looking meat in goopy jelly. I scoop “Shrimp in Aspic” into three bowls and put them outside. I run the hot water till it steams, rinse out the cans, scrub down the counter top and sink with Comet, but the smell doesn’t go away. I take the garbage outside. The stench of rotten meat drifts from the sack and I gag. Someone comes in to clean every two weeks. He says that’s all he needs. I tell him he should have somebody come every day. He makes exaggerated sounds of annoyance and disgust. “You must think I’m a millionaire. Why should I pay somebody to wipe up? I can do that myself.”
I hear him clearing his throat in the bathroom. The sound goes on and on. I remind myself of my mantra for these times. Compassion, patience. He’s old. My mother was his second wife. He used to hate it when people mistook him for my grandfather. I remember the photographs of him as a young man, in Sweden, kneeling in a beet field. After all the years, he still has a heavy Swedish accent—he still says “dat” and “dere,” and mixes w’s and v’s. “Vat’s dat over dere?” I walk out of the kitchen, expecting to see him in his chair, but he’s gone back to bed. “Come here,” he shouts. “I want to talk to you.” Words I’ve come to dread. “Now listen to this,” he says. “Are you listening?”
“I’m listening,” I say loudly. He’s stopped wearing his hearing aids.
“I have an idea. I want you to make me a good breakfast, okay?”
“Okay,” I nod. “That sounds good.”
“What?”
I repeat, more loudly. “That sounds good.”
He rises up on an elbow. “Don’t tell me we haven’t got any food. Don’t start anything.”
I sigh and walk into the tiny kitchen. It’s worse sometimes if you keep trying to make him hear what you’ve said. I fry bacon and make coffee. Cook eggs. I set the table and call him. “Breakfast is ready,” I say.
“I want you to serve it to me in here. I want to be waited on.” His voice is wheedling and coy.
I keep my own voice light, hold my temper. “Come on,” I say. “You should get up now and come to the table.” He takes a long time to get his clothes on. When he finally makes it to the table, I can see he’s in a rage. I sit down across the table from him. He takes a bite of the eggs, then looks at me, shakes his head from side-to-side. “All dried up.” He shoves the plate away, and it slides off the edge of the Formica table and shatters on the floor. I was going to clean it anyway, I think numbly. That’s what I was going to do next, clean the floor. He grabs his cane, totters to his chair and snatches his can of Copenhagen from the table beside him. “You’re no daughter to me,” he says. “I wish I’d never seen you.” He fills his mouth with snuff, pulling his lips out. His gums look dark and hard as the molded surface of his false teeth. “Go away. Leave me alone.”
I stand up. “Don’t talk to me like that,” I say loudly, trying not to sound angry.
He folds his arms and stares out into the room. I’ve seen him sit that way for hours, usually sleeping.
I kneel down and pick up the pieces of the plate.
“Go away,” he shouts and stamps his slippers on the floor, “forget about that. Leave everything alone.”
I go into the kitchen, open a beer, and walk outside. The sun has come out. I sit in the lawn chair near a big hibiscus bush. It’s more like a tree, vibrant green leaves, and fleshy peach-colored flowers. I touch the leaves to remind myself I’m alive. I drink and watch the neighbor’s ragged cocker spaniels, three of them, as they run along the fence, back and forth, barking and barking. I drink, feeling my body go slack and smooth.
I drink a beer before our walk, and put one in my pocket. I like deep pockets so I can bring my beers with me. It’s drink myself numb or go crazy. Earlier, at dinner, we’d tried to get my father to eat with us. “You need to eat something,” Paul said. My father is usually nicer to Paul than to me. But this time he screamed. “Don’t get into it. Don’t get into it or I’ll have an attack!” We had dinner while my father sat in his recliner and peered at us. First he put his hands over his ears, and then he plugged them with pieces of paper towel. “You two are just sitting around waiting for me to drop over,” he called out to us finally, as we were clearing away the dishes.
We walk in the scented darkness. I trip and almost fall. “Be careful,” Paul says. “The sidewalk was uneven,” I say, feeling myself pitching forward into darkness and striking the cement. No, that can’t happen. I have to live. I breathe in and out. I smell the damp grass, the perfume of flowers, the night all around me, shivering through the trees, rustling the bushes. The lights of the grand houses are golden. Paul takes my hand and squeezes it hard, a worried gesture. I’ve been talking and talking. Talking myself sane, talking myself loved, talking my mother and brother back to life, talking myself crazy. My jaws ache. I don’t even know what I’m saying. I cry for my brother, so long dead, electrocuted at twenty. Maybe this time I’m really just crying for myself, because I have to do this alone. Not really. Thank you Paul, I say. My wonderful husband. I look over. Did he hear me? I want to sing, chant my father to some peaceful place. Die in peace, I say inside my head. Or do I say it out loud? I look over, but this time I know Paul didn’t hear me, because now we’re walking over the bridge, right next to the highway. I’m half dizzy with the smell of exhaust fumes, the maddening screech of brakes and scream of accelerating engines. I stand at the edge of the curb and look south at the stream of brilliant lights coming toward me. Headlights. Cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles. The madness of this place. A place where strange things can happen. I look down at the water under us and sure enough, there’s a bird, stick feet skittering atop the water’s surface. It disappears under the bridge, into the darkness. People live under that bridge. Paul says he’s seen them. People who are used to the darkness. I want to see the light again. Headlights streaming toward me.
“Look out!” Paul calls, grabbing my wrist.
We turn on the television when we get back to the room and I fall asleep in a chair, remembering that my father had wished me out of existence. I am tired, so tired. When I finally wake up and make my way to bed the room is dark and Paul is snoring. I creep into bed and nestle beside him, thinking back to when I had been a little girl—my father’s darling. I see her clearly. He is letting her ride in the wheelbarrow. She is laughing, “Goodbye,” I say.
I wake up near dawn, the way you do sometimes in a strange place, not quite knowing where you are, expecting the layout of your own bedroom. I walk to the window. It’s raining again, a soft drizzle that ripples the surface of the waterway. I stand at the window for what seems like a long time, watching the rain. Cars have begun to thunder down the highway again, the rush hour already started. But the sound is muted by the air-conditioner. I feel my body grow colder and colder, inside and out. There is something delicious about the feeling, as if I am storing up the cold, getting ready for the next day in my father’s sweltering house. Some slight residue of a dream lingers on the fringe of my consciousness, but if I try any longer to recall it, I know I won’t be able to go back to sleep. And I crave more sleep. Maybe we’d walked for hours last night. I don’t know, I don’t remember. The bottoms of my feet are sore. I think I cried. I think I said things about my father that I shouldn’t have said. I don’t remember.
~ ~ ~
I open my eyes. The room is filled with sun, a dazzling warm bath of light. Paul is dressed. He comes over and kisses me. I wrap my arms around his neck. His hair is wet. He smells of soap. “Come on,” I say. “I want you.”
He smiles a little before he gently pulls away. “Can’t.” He looks at his watch. “I’ll spell you,” he says. “I’ll go over, and call you in a while. Hey, something strange happened last night,” he says. “Do you remember?”
I sit on the edge of the bed. “I fell asleep in the chair. I’m sorry.”
“You walked in your sleep. You talked.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Fortunately, I can prove it.” He holds up the tape recorder we bought before we left, a little microcassette. We got it to record my father. It was my idea. A way to prove that he might need guardianship.
“What happened?”
“You got up out of the chair. Your eyes were wide open. You put your hands out and came towards me. You were talking, on and on. It was spooky, believe me. I’d better go. Here, check it out. Maybe you know this language.” He hands me the tape recorder.
“Call me,” I say. “Let me know what to expect.”
“Okay,” he says, opening the door. Warm air drifts in like a ghost.
I put the tape recorder down on the rumpled bed, stand up and stretch. I walked in my sleep, talked? I go to the bathroom and turn on the shower. I take the tiny piece of motel soap, work it into a lather on the thin washcloth, and scrub myself. The water is hot. My skin turns a cheery apple-red. I watch the suds drifting down the drain and try to remember…
The phone rings and I scramble out of the shower, leaving a trail of water.
It’s Paul. “Are you ready?” he asks, without even saying hello first.
“So soon?”
“He was up when I got here. He started yelling at me the second I opened the door. Fuck this. I haven’t even been here for a half hour, and I’m losing it.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, meaning it. I think of smiling old people playing shuffleboard or cards, dandling grandchildren on their knees.
“It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”
“He’s my father. I’m ready. Come and get me,” I say, and hang up. My father has allowed his vitality to dwindle away. He has banished pleasure, health, friendship, and love with his paranoia and anger. Activities still within his grasp don’t capture his interest. All he talks about is himself. Complaints of past and present wrongs and ills. He worked once, provided for a family, had a sense of humor. But age robs certain people of all their good qualities and leaves only the worst of them—the dry, bitter seed. I hurry into my clothes, feeling the familiar dread envelop me like a suffocating blanket. I slip the tape recorder into my purse, lock the door and walk down the stairs to wait in the parking lot.
I’m working inside while Paul is outside packing my father’s tools. My father is in his chair, sleeping soundly. I look through the drawers, my life entwined with my family’s. Dissolving, fading, coming into focus in the mementos, letters, photographs. What will I leave behind? How can I leave my brother’s Key Club Formal Dance glass? How can I take it? Shall I leave the boxes of National Geographic behind? The one and only oil painting my mother and father ever owned? It’s huge and heavy. It has a carved, three-inch wooden frame. I look at the scene—high, snow-covered, gauzily-rendered mountains, an isolated cabin by a glittering stream. Someone’s idea of paradise? I swathe it in bubble wrap and take it outside, just as the phone rings. I step back inside and my father points to the phone and then to me, a command. I pick it up.
“This is Gus Larson. Put your father on. I want to see how he’s doing.”
I hold the phone against my chest. “It’s Gus Larson.”
My father sweeps the air with his big hand, waving away the thought of taking the call. “He talks too much. I can’t understand a word he says. You talk to him.”
Gus begs us to come over. “See my garden,” he says. “Bring your father. It would be good for him to get out.”
I promise him we’ll stop by. “Gus wants us to come over later,” I say after I hang up. “Just for a short visit.”
My father clenches his teeth and looks up at me, both hands flat on the arms of his recliner, as though he’s ready to rise in a burst of savage energy and strike me. “I’m not goin’ nowhere! Can’t you understand anything? You know,” he says, shaking a fist at me. “It’s all your fault. You and your damn work. I wanted you to come here and take care of me. Before I got in such bad shape.” He slams the flat of his hand down hard on his chair. “I’m getting upset. I want a damn beer.”
“Maybe you should try to eat something first,” I say.
“Don’t you tell me nothin’. I want a beer.”
I bring him a beer, open it and hand it to him.
“Thank you,” he says, calmer. “You’re all I got, you know. You and Paul. Sometimes I think he loves me more than you do.”
“I love you,” I say. I love you unconditionally, beyond logic. No matter how much you hurt me. I’m alive because of you.
“Hah,” he says, taking another sip of his beer. “Go away now. Why don’t you leave for a couple of hours so I can rest.”
I walk away, into the kitchen, and open a beer for myself. I’m alive, I tell myself. I think of the tape recorder then, take it from my purse and go outside to the shed where Paul is still packing tools. “He wants me to leave,” I say. “And then he wants to know where I’ve gone.” I rewind the tape and click the tape recorder on. “Yelp! Yelp!” a voice says. My voice. Then a muted sound. “I’m walking around the room now?”
“Right,” Paul says, shaking his head. “It was weird. Your eyes were wide open but you weren’t looking at me. You seemed to be looking right through me.”
My voice starts again. “Etbarnharramlet…etbarnharramletevatnet.” I turn off the tape for a minute. “Does it sound like a real language?”
“Kind of…actually it sounds Scandinavian. Finnish maybe.”
“Finnish is Slavic,” I say. “And I only know about ten words in Swedish. Those don’t sound like any of the ten words. Gus Larson called and I told him we’d come over with my father, but my father had a fit about it. We should go. He’s expecting us. We only need to stay a few minutes.”
“I can’t, look at me.”
Paul’s T-shirt is drenched.
“Gus won’t know the difference. We’ll take the tape. He can tell us if he recognizes any Swedish words. He can still hear pretty good.”
Leaf lettuce and ferny carrot tops. Bean vines twining up strings. Spinach and beets. Gus gestures. “Look at them radishes,” he says. “White radishes like them Oriental people eat. “I give ‘em away.” He stoops down and pulls up a tiny weed, then three radishes. He shakes them free of moist, black earth. The dirt looks rich, good enough to eat. I imagine spooning it into my mouth, lying down, curving into its darkness and putting forth roots, changing into something else, the way the dead do. But I remind myself that I’m alive. I look up into the sky and close my eyes against the ash-white light of the sun, the fire that burns without consuming. When I open them again, Gus is gesturing with a bunch of radishes. “Here,” he says. “Put these in your salad. Make your father a big salad tonight. Steam him up some of this Swiss chard.” He’s moving to another row, breaking big green leaves of chard, subtlety threaded with red.
Paul has walked to the far end of the garden. He bends down, and then falls to his knees, as if he’s discovered a mystery. I imagine kneeling beside him, as he explains what the earth has told him. Gus comes towards me with his colorful bouquet of vegetables. I think of telling him that my father’s never eaten a salad in his life. Not once. Now he’s barely eating at all. Beer and those canned vitamin drinks. The single hot dog he managed to eat the other night. Eggs, sometimes, if they’re cooked right. But I say nothing. I just watch as Gus finds more food to send with us. He’s dropping things in a white plastic grocery bag. I think of the waste. I think of my father’s life. What if part of me turns out to be like him? Which part will it be? I’m good with my hands. I like to fix things. I love animals and children. I once had a terrible temper, but I’ve controlled it, for the most part. “Now then,” Gus is saying. “Let’s go inside and cool off. I want to show you some pictures.” His accent isn’t as pronounced as my father’s, but still he says “tings” for “things” and has the rising and falling pitch that people mimic in Swedish speech. Ho dee ho dee hoo. I think of the tape. Paul trails behind us and we go inside and sit on a couch, covered with protective plastic. Gus comes out of the kitchen with three cans of Heineken. “Would you rather have a coke?” he asks me.
“No,” I say. “This is fine.”
Next, he brings us an album. It’s full of photographs of wooden toys, simple, three-piece toys like wagons and boats, painted in bright colors. At the end of the album is a photograph of Gus standing with four other elderly men in front of a work bench. “There’s the boys,” he says proudly. “We’re over at that Senior Center. Van comes by and gets me. We make the toys for the Christmas baskets they put together for the poor folks here in town. Couple years ago, I tried to get your father to come with me, but he didn’t take to the idea.” Gus nudged my elbow and winked. “Now if we’d been a group of pretty girls…Your father always took to the ladies. Back in the old days, he was the best dancer at Vasa Hall. You remember dat, doncha?” I nod, seeing my father’s dark, slicked-back hair, the lightness of his step through the turns of a schottische, my mother, brother, and I watching from the sidelines. A handsome man, he wore the costume of the south of Sweden.
Here’s a picture,” he says suddenly.
He thrusts it into my hands. Gus and a woman are standing on either side of a large, chest-high stone, covered with runic characters.
“That’s my wife. She was a pretty gal before she got sick. She passed away last year.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He rubs his nose with the back of his hand. “She went nice and peaceful.” He points to the stone. “That there’s a Viking burial stone. See all that writing? It’s Viking words. It’s telling the warrior buried there how to find his way to the spirit world.”
Gus takes the photograph from me, and when his back is to me, Paul points to his watch.
“I sure wanted to see your father,” Gus says, turning toward us. Not too many of us old-timers left anymore.”
I stand. “Thanks for everything,” I say, holding up the bag of vegetables. “You’ve got a wonderful garden. Keep up the good work.”
Paul puts out his hand. “Thanks, Gus,” he says.
We’re walking down the sidewalk back to the car when I remember. “The tape,” I say to Paul. “I forgot about it.”
“It’s too late now. We’ve got to get back over there and see what’s going on. We’ve got to keep packing. If you think it’s Swedish, let your father listen to it.”
When we get back to his house, my father is sitting in his chair, reading the newspaper. He’s wearing his hearing aids. He puts the newspaper down on the table when we walk in.
“I don’t know why I bother,” he says. “I can’t see.” He looks at both of us. “So did old man Larson tell you all his troubles? You were gone a long time. I thought you were here to see me. I had a Nutrament. Maybe it’s time for a beer. Why don’t we all sit outside in the sun and talk over some things.” He gets up and totters toward the kitchen. We follow him to the refrigerator, and out the back door. We sit side-by-side in the sun, in three rickety lawn chairs.
“Well,” he says when we’re all sitting down. “Sköl. Here’s to better days.” He raises his can of beer.
Paul clicks his beer against my father’s. “Min sköl, din sköl, alla vacka flickas sköl,” he says. My father’s favorite toast. I toast, you toast, all the pretty girls toast. My father smiles a little, closes his eyes and tilts his face towards the sun.
Paul and I look at each other and sip our beers. We’re sitting on either side of my father. Within a minute or two it seems, he’s fallen asleep. His mouth goes slack and a bit of spittle trickles from the corner of his lips. His face is peaceful. I ease myself from my aluminum chair, but it squeaks anyway and my father’s eyes pop open.
“Where’re goin’?” he asks drowsily. “I thought we had some talkin’ to do.”
I go into the house and take the tape recorder from my purse. I rewind it and listen to my voice without understanding a word I’ve said. “Detar ot het hollet. Folgdenna vagen. Detar intay longt.” I rewind it again and walk outside.
My father is talking to Paul. He looks up at me. “I was just telling Paul here…remember that remodeling job I did at Gables-by-the-Sea? That guy was a big shot.”
“He was a pilot for Eastern Airlines.”
“That’s the one. Nothing but the best for him.”
I sit down and hold out the tape recorder.
“You recording me? Don’t record me.”
“No,” I say, “Paul made this. I want you to listen to it.” I play the first part of the tape. My father cups his hand over his ear. When I turn it off, he looks at me curiously. “That sounds like your voice,” he says. “I thought you forgot your Swedish.”
I look at Paul and he smiles. “Can you understand me?” I ask.
He makes a face. “You think I’m a dumb old man? I understand you fine. ‘Hjälp,’ ‘Help,’ you said. Ett barn har ramlet i vattnet.’ ‘A child has fallen in the water.’
That’s me you’re talking about, I guess. I told you that story.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “What story?”
My father looks at Paul. “You remember, don’t you?”
Paul shakes his head.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you people,” my father says. “I told you…when I was a boy, I fell through the ice. I was by myself. ‘Hjälp! Hjälp!’ I was yelling out, over and over. I went under water. I was sure I was going to drown. A boy from the next village, an older boy, was taking a short cut on a path near the pond. He heard me and starting screaming himself. ‘A child has fallen in the water.’ No one came. He had to pull me out by himself, with a tree branch. If I’d died then, you wouldn’t have been born,” he says matter-of-factly. He’s forgotten that he wished me out of existence just a day ago. Our lives turn upon such fragile coincidences.
“What happened then?” I ask.
“He wrapped me in his coat and took me home. I never saw him again. After he left, my father beat me for going out on the ice.”
We sit in silence for a few minutes. My father stares out into the yard, where a mockingbird hops on the grass before flying into an avocado tree and singing three, clear, pure notes. I wonder if my father’s thinking about the beating, or about being saved that day. I think of him turning blue in the frigid water. I see myself fading out of the world like a movie ghost. I know this is the first time I’ve heard the story of my father falling through the ice.
“What else you got?” he says suddenly.
I play the rest of the tape.
“‘Den er så pass väg. ta den här väg. Den er icke långt.’” You’re giving directions. ‘It’s that way. Take this road. It isn’t far.’ What are you talking about?” he asks, his bushy gray eyebrows twisted up into angry lines. “What are you talking about?”
The next day, Paul drops me off at the house and goes to the grocery store. I walk down the sidewalk, and open the door. My father’s up already or he’s forgotten to lock it. The house is silent. Before I walk to his room I listen for the sound of breathing. I stand in the doorway of his room, then, and watch him. Something’s wrong. At first, I think he’s died. I walk close to the bed. He’s curled up like a child and his breathing is shallow and rapid. I touch his forehead. The skin is dry and hot. I feel myself beginning to shake, wondering if I should call an ambulance. I call his doctor instead, and talk to a receptionist. Then I repeat my story to a nurse. She tells me the doctor is with a patient. “Give him some aspirin,” she says. “He probably just has a cold. The doctor will call you.” An hour passes. Paul is still at the store, and the doctor hasn’t called me back. I hear my father banging his cane on the floor. He’s propped up on an elbow.
“Who are you?” he says. He can barely talk, but his voice gathers up a feeble rage. “You’re not my daughter!” Spittle flies from his mouth. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
I half carry him to the bathroom, and then get him back in bed. I call the doctor again. The call is picked up by the answering service. “They’re out of the office till tomorrow. Is it an emergency?”
“I don’t know,” I snap. “That’s why I need to talk to the doctor.” I’m angry and scared. She gives me an emergency number. Against my advice, my father has gone off Medicare and into an HMO. His doctor is the gatekeeper. When my father had blood in his urine last year, it took me a half a dozen phone calls to get him to approve an appointment with an urologist. When I hang up, I’m furious. At Paul. Where is he? At my father’s doctor. At my father.
I hear Paul at the door. “Where have you been?”
He looks at me in amazement. “What’s wrong?”
I tell him.
“Screw the doctor. Let’s take him to the emergency room.”
My father doesn’t want to go. He fights us as we try to get him into his clothes. I phone the emergency number and the doctor on call tells me to go ahead and take him to the hospital. My father is yelling at Paul. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone.”
After my father is examined, the doctor comes out to where we’re sitting in the emergency room. “I’m going to admit him. He’s got some kind of infection. Weight loss. It’s the downward spiral,” he says.
I tell him about the bladder cancer, how my father refused treatment, insisting there was nothing wrong with him.
He nods. “He probably has a severe bladder infection. We’ll put him on an antibiotic drip and keep him comfortable. I’ll have the social worker call you about getting him into a hospice.”
The downward spiral. A hospice. Death. I’m numb. The doctor shakes each of our hands and tells us to call in about an hour, when my father will be in a room. My heart is pounding. I can feel my ribs moving with each beat. We go back to the motel and sleep in each other’s arms, waiting for an hour to pass, waiting for the phone to ring.
Later that afternoon we go to the hospital. We bring flowers. My father is propped up in bed. He begins to scream at us as soon as we walk in the room. I close the curtains around his bed. “The guilty ones.” He holds up a trembling hand, and then points to me. “This is all your fault,” he says. “I hate you. Get me out! Get me out of here!”
I stand there. I can’t cry. I can’t do anything, feel anything. “You shouldn’t talk to me that way.”
He’s silent, but he looks at me with rage. We sit by his bed and wait until he falls asleep.
I talk to the social worker the next morning. She calls me back two days later. A bed is available in a nearby hospice. Paul tells me in the morning that I’ve talked in my sleep again. He didn’t record me this time. I said the same things, over and over, opening my eyes and thrashing around. It’s that way. Take this road. It isn’t far. Paul says I’m remembering something my father must have said in Swedish when I was a child. A buried memory.
Paul and I go to the beach and I swim and swim as if I can give my pain away to the ancient ocean. I know my father will never again tell me he loves me. I tell myself I can live with that. I can live. Dementia, the nurse said, who heard him say that he hated me. She hasn’t spent a lifetime being belittled by him. Being told she was wrong. Imperfect. Stupid. When my brother died, my father told everyone he had lost everything. I had married beneath me. I did not make enough money. I could not have children. If I had come back to Florida to take care of her, my mother wouldn’t have had to go to a nursing home.
I go to the hospice alone. I stroke my father’s head and tell him I forgive him. He sleeps. I leave, passing the rooms of the dying. I cry when I pass the gaily decorated children’s rooms. I cry all the way out to the car. I cry until I open the door to our motel room. Paul takes me in his arms. He thinks I’m crying for my father.
The next morning at the hospice, the nurse tells me that my father was speaking another language in the night. “I assume it’s Swedish. He’s Swedish, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” I say. “He is.”
“He says the same words over and over again. I don’t know if I should have…but I wrote them down…the way they sounded. I hope that’s okay.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a pad of paper. “‘Var? Var? Are detta vagan?’ He said them over and over. We started him on morphine this morning. He seems peaceful.”
“Var” means “where.” I know that much Swedish. Where? Where? My father is asking directions I go into his room. He is curled in bed like a fetus, his hands clasped together. He faces the window. His eyes are open, but fixed on eternity, his once-brown eyes, now milky and bluish, fixed on some mysterious distance. “Can I get you anything?” I ask, close to his ear. He shakes his head. “Do you want me to stay?” Yes, he nods. “Den er så pass väg. Ta den här väg. Den er icke långt,” I say gently. I know the words by heart. I have listened to the tape of my voice over and over. It’s that way. Take this road. It isn’t far. I stay until he sleeps. I stand near him the whole time, so he can see he’s not alone.
At the motel the next morning the phone rings. The doctor on call tells me my father isn’t doing well. We drive to the hospice. The chaplain meets us in the hall. He takes my hand. “He died about four minutes ago,” he says. “He wasn’t conscious,” he says. “He wouldn’t have known if you were here or not.” We follow him to my father’s room. I touch his still-warm hand. I watch for the rise and fall of his chest, his shoulders, but he’s still. “We’ll take him to another room,” the chaplain tells us. “You can spend some time with him there.”
In the room, Paul holds my hand. He’s crying. The chaplain is saying to me, we’ll leave you alone here. And I’m saying in my mind, no, no, no. But he and Paul disappear and I am alone with my father. “Goodbye,” I say. “You can’t hurt me anymore.” I stand in the room for several minutes, respectful of the mystery. Maybe I helped him find his way. Maybe he finally trusted me, I think, as I leave the room, closing the door behind me.