And so she would walk past her father’s bowed head, go up to her room, and close the door against the horror. Afterwards, she would watch for a moment when she could climb up into his lap and lay her head on the soft cotton of his shirt and feel the warmth of his body. And as long as Adele wasn’t around, he would let her stay there as long as she liked. But then, one day, he had suddenly said, “No,” and pushed her away. She looked up in time to see his eyes flash up to the doorway. Her mother was just stepping into the room.
“Get outside and ride your bike,” she hollered. “You’re too big to be sitting in your father’s lap. That’s for babies. Get going. And you! What are you trying to encourage, huh? Keeping that child a baby until she’s thirty years old, sitting around on your lap like a pet, for God’s sake. If you want something to moon over get yourself a dog.”
From that day forward, her father either shooed her away or made himself inaccessible behind his newspaper. She had become just one more danger to him, like mud tracked in on the carpets.
Cathy never stopped trying to win him back, though. On nights when she could hear her mother snoring loudly from behind a closed door, she often tiptoed through the house to meet her father at the back door. It pained her greatly to see how tentatively he stepped through the laundry room door at nine-thirty in the evening, shoulders drooping, a pitiful uncertainty about him as he tried to gauge whether or not he was welcome in his own home that night. In silence, she helped with his coat, took his damp gloves and set them on the hot water tank, held his grey fedora while he bent over to take off his rubbers. Too often, after removing his shoes, loosening his tie, and finding the bedroom door resolutely closed against him, she would see him return quietly to the kitchen to stand alone in the wedge of yellow light that sliced into the dark room from the open fridge and eat a piece of cheddar cheese and drink a glass of milk. And it was there, as she asked in a whisper if there was anything else that she could get for him, that his beseeching blue eyes found her.
“I can’t take too much more of this,” he’d say, in a low, unhappy voice. And when he’d stop chewing and turn and look directly at her a knife would slice through her heart. Every time he came home late to find the house shrouded in a dark silence, without any supper set aside for him, she felt as if she’d let him down. No matter what the catalyst had been, she felt as if she should have somehow been able to prevent her mother’s rage.
“I can make you a tuna sandwich, Dad, instead of just that piece of cheese? And a nice cup of tea?”
“I can feel tachycardia starting up again,” he’d say, turning back to stare into the open fridge.
The first time he had used the word “tachycardia” she’d been eleven years old and hadn’t known what it meant. But she had looked it up, painstakingly substituting each vowel with another until she hit upon the correct spelling, and now she knew that it meant an irregular heartbeat. She also knew by the lifelong absence of a paternal grandfather and several uncles that the men in her father’s family did not live into old age.
“Your grandfather was dead and buried of a heart attack long before you were even thought about, missy,” her mother had told her. “Nobody in that family has ever made it past sixty-five. So get used to it.”
She knew the story about her grandfather calling the house the night he died. It was before Richard was born. Her father said he could only hear gasping on the other end of the line. But he recognized the sound from having heard it before. That’s how he knew to call the ambulance. When her parents got to her grandfather’s house, the ambulance was just pulling out of the driveway, so they followed it to the hospital. Her grandfather died four hours later, at the age of sixty-four.
For years, Cathy had been counting and recounting the number of years that remained between the present day and her father’s sixty-fifth birthday. At night, before falling asleep, she added sixty-five to her father’s birthdate over and over again, never able to be confident that she had added the numbers correctly. According to her calculations, he would turn sixty-five in 1985. She would be thirty-seven by then. Richard would be forty. But her father could die anytime between now and then. If he lived to his maximum age, he had twenty-two years left. That was a little over two decades, but it was spread across three decades: the rest of the sixties, all of the seventies, and half of the eighties. Medical science might have time to make a breakthrough and be able to save him. Or she might.
For most of her life, Cathy had been preparing herself to outwit death and save her father from his inherited fate. For years she had been watching him, secretly staring intently at the side of his face in church on Sundays, or when she found him asleep in a chair at home, studying him for any slight change.
“Your grandfather’s blood was so thick the night he died they could hardly get it up the needle,” her mother had said. “Saw it with my own two eyes. Black as tar.”
Cathy was convinced that thick dark blood would be visible in the skin, and that she had come to know her father’s skin so intimately she would notice it darkening even before he did. But her hope of saving her father faded on the evenings when he stood drinking milk by the light of the fridge and she saw how he had aged. Lately she had noticed that, although he was only forty-three, the flesh at the base of his throat was beginning to collapse. The sight frightened her. In bed at night she closed her eyes and tried to feel her own heart beating, but felt nothing. Hearts were just like all the other organs of the body, working away silently, for years, except that they suddenly rose up at the last minute, demanding to be noticed for all their hard work before stopping for good. She imagined her father’s heart, pumping erratically, racing, slowing, racing again, all this destructive activity taking place out of sight, without any way to know about it, and, even if she could know, without any way to get in there and calm his heart down in time to save him. She thought about the thick black blood just sitting in his veins, congealing like chocolate pudding, not moving. In her dreams she saw images of white-haired men toppling over, dead, one after another, receding back into her father’s history: grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather. Each one of them suddenly clapping a hand to his chest and slumping forward, blue at the lips and dead before he hit the ground. She worried that she would find her father cold beneath a blanket one morning, his heart having sped up so fast it finally stood dead still.
But how could she help him? What could she do? She had asked the question her whole life. She asked it now as she roamed through an uneasy sleep. What could she do to stop her mother’s terrible anger? To end the horrible silences? Sometimes it seemed to help if she kept her room immaculate, if she was quick at a chore that her mother had given her, if she bent with visible effort over some small spot somewhere and scrubbed with determination. Other times, nothing she did seemed to help. If she could just figure it out, she would do what was required, and then the rages would stop and her father wouldn’t come home to this withering silence. What hadn’t she thought of? She should try harder at school. She should stand up straighter, shoulders back. Her mother hated slouchers; she hated disorder; she could hate something brand new in the morning, something that Cathy had overlooked. Cathy should be ready. For anything.
CHAPTER 3
The next morning, Cathy got up early and tiptoed cautiously past her parents’ bedroom to the bathroom. The door to the den was closed, so she knew her father was in there, trying to sleep on the small red loveseat that was too short for anyone but a child. She’d seen how he did it, lying on his back with his legs hanging off one end of the couch, or lying on one side, facing the room with his legs folded up accordion-style. Neither position could be comfortable enough to accommodate a full night’s sleep. If this was going to be a long silence, he’d have to move somewhere else.
Cathy pressed the bathroom door quietly into place behind her, passing her fingers over the useless lock that her mother had destroyed a year ago. After listening at the door for
