Meet Me in the In-Between Page 22

  “She’s under contract with Warner Brothers. They’re going to make an offer.”

  Warn her brothers. I laid down my fork.

  “And the guy from Paramount I told you about? He’s been talking to Sam and Kate.”

  Salmon Cake. I dimly remembered that, too.

  “You know,” Sylvie said, “as in a directing/starring thing?”

  “Of course,” I whispered. “That’s wonderful.”

  “There are others, too, so we should talk about how you want to play it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you can take the best offer and walk away, or, if you want to stay involved, I can negotiate something else.”

  “Walk away?”

  “Yes,” Sylvie said.

  I tried to hold on to the noise of the restaurant, the burble of deal-making, the clink of cutlery, but my mind kept drifting back to Tijuana, back to the pedestrian bridge. For a moment I couldn’t figure out which was real, Hollywood or the border—until I remembered that in some form, both were fantasies.

  Walk away. Could I? Would I?

  On the bridge I’d asked El Duck whether Alfredo had made it over to the other side. He shrugged. “People give up hope,” he’d said. “They go back to prison. They die.”

  No, I’d thought. No.

  I understood then why I spent so much time lost in imaginary worlds. I wanted things for people that the real world couldn’t give them.

  There was only one way I could walk away from the border, and that was not to be scared for the people I cared about—to make sure they were safe. And for them to be safe, I had to bring them home.

  And so as Sylvie talked, I conjured up the bright coins of light in the basement of the Pink Floyd Fan Club. Vicente and the guys strumming and setting up speakers, when suddenly the door opened and their missing band member finally walked in—Gabriel, with the harpoon scar, his órgano bucal, and the ID papers that a mouse had nibbled. And if Gabriel and his harmonica could be brought home, then so could all the others—the tunnel kids, the splintered families, all the hopeful, the lonely, and the exiled. And what of Alfredo, El Goose, wily old smuggler? Maybe he had failed or ended up back in prison, but I prefer to believe he nailed that one last crossing, that he found a way to the other side. Once again, I pictured a street in the San Diego burbs, an adobe building in a handkerchief-size yard, a raven-haired girl—and Alfredo, waiting in the shadows, smiling his secret smile.

  But to bring everyone home, I knew I had to bring myself home first.

  I thought about Mac and the message of love I needed to embroider on a picture for him. I shut my eyes and heard Mabel clomping up the stairs in her school shoes, and instead of closing my office door, I imagined clearing the space in my head I knew she needed to fill with all the stuff she was learning.

  “You don’t have to decide right now,” Sylvie was saying. “Take as much time as you need.”

  “It’s OK,” I told her. “I’m good.” As we clinked glasses, I noticed the band of pale skin on my wrist where my watch had been. The rest of my arm was sunburnt, covered in the muddy brown spots of freckles. I thought about dabbing the edge of my napkin in my water glass and rubbing them off, but I didn’t want Sylvie to think I was weird, so I decided to wait until I got on the plane.

  HOME

  FUSS FUSS

  Dad coughs a lot on the evening of his birthday. Ask which birthday, and I’d have to say it’s his thirty-seventh, though you should know he’s been thirty-seven for a few years now. Nevertheless, a great deal of effort has gone into making tonight special. Family is here. Friends have made the long journey. On the dining-room table sits a roast lamb with every conceivable trimming, and even if it’s true that Dad would have preferred Frosties and cream, he’s happy, he’s fine. He catches my eye. An hour later, when he collapses, everyone assumes he’s trying to get out of making his thank-you speech. We all know he’s not above that kind of thing.

  Two days later he spikes a temperature of 105 and goes berserk.

  Pneumonia, the hospital says. He’s gone for broke and caught it in both lungs.

  Idiot.

  I blame the tweed coat. It retains water. He really shouldn’t sleep in it so often.

  As soon as my mother gives me the go-ahead, I drive down from London in the gloom of a midweek afternoon. On the motorway, I’m pulled over by a policeman. I’m driving erratically, he tells me. “You’re all over the place.”

  I’m not bothered. I’m excellent with sheriffs. “I’m sorry,” I whisper—then, momentum dramaticus as I raise anguished eyes to his—“but my father is dreadfully ill. I must get to the hospital.” The policeman lets me off with sympathetic words. As he dissolves into the flash of his rotating lights, I cackle with laughter. Sucker. My father can’t be that ill. Nobody’s father is that ill at thirty-seven.

  I find Dad’s ward easily enough. Nurse Jummy is on duty. I count the braids in her hair while she talks on the phone. “Cholecystectomy,” she’s saying. “Conversion to open . . . yes, yes, definitely necrotic.”

  An old man floats by on a gurney, a water-lily of urine flowering on his blanket. “Nurse,” he cries plaintively. “Nurse, nurse . . .”

  Jummy consults her chart. “Your father is in the last cubicle but one.”

  I set off through the muttering, coughing, snoring, and weeping. Fragments of families perch on chairs next to beds, gingerly patting blanketed mounds or spooning goo into mouths that open and shut like hinged trapdoors. I walk, slower and slower, then stop. This is a geriatric ward! How dare they put my father here, in this circus of old, this…this freak show of senectitude! I storm back.

  “I want him moved,” I tell Jummy. I make a real fuss.

  “Come with me.” Jummy pushes back her chair. At the end of the ward, she rakes back the pleated curtain then stands aside. I freeze, speechless. My father is no longer thirty-seven. Not even close. He is the oldest man in the world. He is Father Time, and everything adult about me falls away. I want to scream and shout. I want to throw myself to the floor and drum my fists into the ground. When did this happen? How did I not notice? A small part of me holds out for mistaken identity, a doppelgänger playing a mean trick. “What have you done with him?” I want to rage at this chalk-like stranger in his bed. Where is my real father? The one wearing the smoking jacket, the one with the sardonic look in his eye—the one radiating health and humour.

  His eyelids flutter open. “Pa?” I say, and the years and decades crash down around me like falling buildings. I’m overcome by the sort of helpless feeling you get when a skunk has died under your floorboards. It’s not the lungs I’m worried about. It’s the age thing that is beyond my reach.

  “Hello, Dau,” he manages.

  His voice sounds single strand. Pneumonia, the doctors had explained, equals too little pressure in the lungs, equals too few pulses of air into the vocal tract—equals an ant trying to make himself heard at a heavy-metal rock club.

  He tires easily. I don’t stay long. “Keep the engine running,” he says as I get up to leave, and I think, No, not that. Say anything but that.

  I stumble back through the ward and out into the corridor. At the elevator I can’t make sense of the up and down symbols. The anger building inside me is so strong it bolts me to the floor. I stand, digging my nails into the flesh of my palm, waiting for it to subside.

  “You all right?” an orderly asks. He gives me an Extra Strong Mint out of his pocket. I want to tell him about the anger, that it’s a sickness in its own right—that I need emergency treatment there and then, but he’s already moved off to be kind to someone else.

  In the car park I smoke three cigarettes, one after the other, watching their red tips burn in the dark. Yes, I know. We’re all on the same road. But this is not going to be the last stop on my father’s journey. Not this place of self-defeat and shuffling regret.

  Under the awning of the bus stop opposite, a huddle of disaffected youths are sucking
on roll-your-owns and kicking around a beer can. I stare at the pebble-dash of the hospital wall. An ambulance draws up. I grind out my butt. The whole night smells of my fear.

  Keep the engine running, I tell myself. Keep it fucking running.

  Outside the glass doors of the airport, the world awaits. It’s ten years earlier, another of Dad’s thirty-seventh birthdays. The Venture car-rental lady is initializing our paperwork. I glance out at the fierce western sky, the alloy sun. The arctic whiteness of early morning has burnt off but Dad is never warm. My mother, born in Africa, hates the heat. My father, raised in England, can’t stand the cold. He hunkers deeper into his tweed coat. He slept in it last night. It’s January, and in John’s tower room in the canyon, the heating had been on the blink.

  “Coldest few hours of my life,” Dad said cheerfully. “It’s a miracle I survived.”

  In the car, an “authentic forest” air freshener hangs from the mirror. Rental lady explains the radio, the fog lights, then, uncertain of the power structure between Dad and me, dangles the keys neutrally. Dad takes them. I once drove him the wrong way around a roundabout and he’s never allowed me to forget it. Rental lady shoots me a look of gender empathy, then hands me her business card as a booby prize. “Any problems . . .” she says.

  “Let’s make rules,” I say to my father, as he tosses our cases into the trunk.

  “Goody.” He produces a fluff-covered lemon sherbet from his pocket and pops it into his mouth. “I love rules.”

  “No advance bookings, no chains. Seedy motels only.”

  “Agreed. If the decor’s in any way tasteful, we’ll leave instantly.”

  “Any room rate we pay over forty-nine dollars will be considered a failure.”

  “You’re so damned classy, Dau, I can’t stand it.”

  “No fixed route.”

  “Goes without saying. Itineraries are dreadfully bourgeois.”

  “And last but not least, we’re not allowed to fill up the car unless the warning light is flashing.”

  “I’m surprised you felt that was even worth mentioning.”

  I look at the backdrop of mountains, the ridge of mesa, the road stretching ahead into the high desert. “You know, Dad, two people who like to flirt with disaster, no idea where they’re going or why? This might not end well.”

  “Perhaps it’s not supposed to,” he says.

  Monitors beep, medical charts flutter, pens click, machines pump, Dad sleeps.

  The walls of his cubicle are shiny cream. Dozens of coats of paint, each overlaying the one before and preserving between them last century’s germs of this century’s eradicated diseases. This hospital should be a museum. The Varnished History of Medicine.

  The patients on exhibit scare me. I think they scare everyone. It’s not that they’re old; it’s that they’ve moved into a realm of age where it’s no longer possible to tell if they’re male or female.

  “Amiable-looking bunch,” Dad says. “Don’t you think?”

  I crack out a laugh, but all I want is to get up from my chair, run at the wall, and do a backflip—just to prove I still can.

  “So what happened, Dad? You know, on your birthday?” I ask this to make him feel bad. I know exactly what happened. The three of us—Marcus, Susie, and me—have gone over it ad nauseam with Mum. He’d felt ill for days, had a cough for weeks. Instead of taking himself to the doctor, he’d gone for a walk in the rain, shot pigeons, chopped down trees, driven the tractor, built a twenty-foot bonfire.

  “You don’t exactly sound in the peak of condition either,” we tell Mum, when she herself breaks off to cough.

  “It’s nothing,” she says. “Don’t fuss.”

  In the Zuni reservation, the desert is as dry as a sore throat. The dogs are thin, the horses thinner. I am allowed the wheel only when Dad naps. For twenty miles there’s nothing and then, boom—Dad’s eyes snap open just as we’re driving by a sign: WELCOME TO THE TOWN OF GALLUP.

  “Wouldn’t it be ironic if we met a cowboy here?” he says.

  Dad’s good at this, the art of waking up and making a lame quip that I will find very funny.

  In the hospital, Dad’s hearing aid sits on the side table next to his heavy black-rimmed glasses. He’s worn these glasses all his life, and his face has formed around them.

  I watch for the accordion rise and fall of his breathing. He’s always slept like the dead. On his back, hands crossed benediction-style over his chest. I study the pores of his skin, the creases in his ear lobe, the pale veins threaded through his eyelids. Human markings that belong to time, like the rings within trees or the alternating colours of seashells.

  How do you quantify the impact of the people you love on your life? Toss a pebble into the water and watch the ripples radiating outwards, each circle growing wider and wider. Toss in another pebble, then another, until the circles begin to overlap, the cause and effect of each action continuing on, seemingly forever, yet all connecting back to that one first throw. That’s how the relationships of our lives are formed. Layer after layer of paint, hundreds of overlapping rings, infinite circles of love.

  Boom! His eyes open. “Didn’t anyone teach you it was rude to stare?”

  “You look different without your glasses.”

  “Less Clark Kent, more Superman?” He drifts back to sleep.

  I plug in my earphones. A slower clock ticks here on the ward of last rites. I read the newspaper, edit work, concentrate on nothing.

  Boom! Dad wakes. “What’s that you’re listening to?”

  “Music,” I tell him. “I’m listening to music.”

  “Ah, so that’s what it’s known as. Do tell, is it a new thing?”

  “Yes, and it’s sort of interesting. How can I describe it—like noise, but with more of a tune.”

  “What a tremendous idea,” he says. “I wonder if it will catch on.”

  Pneumonia kills the old, or so the doctor informs us. James Brown died of it, so did Fred Astaire, Gerald Ford, Raymond Chandler, Charles Bronson, and even Tolstoy, collapsing in a tiny Russian railway station, ever the victim of his wanderlust. In the weeks, then months between my father’s drips and pills and different hospital admissions, I scour the Internet, zeroing in on images of lungs, darkly diffracted by disease, as though they’re hiding a cure that only the intensity of my research will uncover.

  “Your father’s hopeless, a nightmare,” Mum says. “He gets furious when I tell him to put on more clothes, furious when I try to get him to eat sensibly.”

  “Hopeless,” we three children agree. Mum’s cross, we’re all cross, but sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea, watching her hide her fear, comforts us. At seventy-eight, my mother is beautiful. I see that she’s getting old, but she’s getting old in a way that makes sense. At fifty she was fifty and at sixty she was ten years further on. My mother has always been grounded in time. All my life I’ve held on to her steadiness like a handrail on a listing ship.

  “You talk to him,” she pleads. “He listens to you lot. He’s stubborn, your father. He’s a stubborn old man.”

  This morning Dad sits still and upright in the armchair next to his bed, staring into the middle distance. His hair, his snowy-white Moses hair, has been neatly brushed in some indefinably wrong way, presumably by a well-meaning nurse. This, too, makes me cross, so I give him a lecture.

  “You can’t sit here all day! If you learned to use a computer, you could watch movies. Listen to music. You could e-mail friends, buy rare trees.” I hear the sharpness in my voice. What I really want to say is: Don’t do less. Don’t diminish. Don’t leave me.

  When I finish, he smiles faintly. “My darling Froggins.” He cups a hand to his ear. “I have no doubt that every word falling from your lips is a wondrous pearl brought up from the bottom of the ocean. It’s just a great pity I can’t hear them.”

  Touché. Dad has always been elegant in his deafness.

  “So, what is it about the road?” I ask him. We’re picnickin
g somewhere in Geronimo country. Giant saguaro cactuses dot the hills, each one a sublime deformity. I’m dining on Cheez Doodles, and my father is halfway through his second pack of Kraft cheese slices. He’s using cheese slices to wean himself off hot dogs. In the last three days he’s consumed twelve, all in a bun and not a mitigating vegetable in between, “but boy, am I beginning to feel the pain,” he says happily. In England he lives on white food. Not the grated bones, raw dough, and fruit mould diet of Erik Satie, but soft smelly cheeses, bread spread thickly with clotted cream and sprinkled with sugar; brandy butter by the serving spoon.

  “What about the road?” he says.

  “Why is it so addictive, do you think?”

  Today the Arizona sky looks freshly painted. A lone rig streaks by, all gleaming hubcaps and lug nuts. Dad watches it go. “The freedom,” he says somewhat distractedly. “What’s round the next corner. Not knowing what you might find there.”

  “I know, I know. But what are we hoping to find?”

  “That’s the point. Could be anything. A sparkling valley of grazing elephants, a nice patch of green grass.”

  “That’s it? That’s what we base our dreams on? A nice patch of green grass?” There are times when I revert to the child with my father. The one who asks the same question a thousand different ways until she gets the answer she wants.

  “If you don’t believe it,” he says, “why do you keep on going?”

  “But what if there’s nothing round the corner?”

  “Just because you don’t know what you’re looking for doesn’t mean to say you won’t find it.”

  I scowl. Don’t be so reasonable, Dad, don’t be so grown-up. Just tell me it’s going to be OK, because that’s all I want to hear.

  “I bet you there’s nothing,” I say, suddenly grumpy.

  “Fine. If you’re going to be difficult.” He crumples the Kraft wrappers into his pocket and lopes off down the narrow track. I watch his sneakers kicking up dust behind him. I don’t follow. I know what’s behind that small hill he’s heading towards. I’ve climbed so many like it—there’s always another hill. But he’s out of sight and the drumming of insects fills the void. From far away, I hear a shout.