After Her, page 25
I think that the moment when my father understood his failure, and acknowledged his terrible mistake in not believing the story Patty and I had told him about our encounter with the killer on the mountain, was the moment he stopped believing in his own magic. Once that happened, his magic was gone.
THE THREE OF US WERE out driving somewhere a few months after the arrest of J. Russell Adler. Our usual dinner spot was Marin Joe’s, but having found ourselves farther north, we had stopped into an IHOP for a meal.
The waitress pouring his coffee had recognized my father from all those press conferences on television the year before, evidently—surprising, considering I sometimes barely recognized him myself anymore.
“You’re the cop that was working on the Sunset Strangler case,” she said.
Yours truly, my father said, but not like his heart was in it. It said something about where he was these days that I (who used to dread these moments) felt only gratitude that he had the chance to haul out the old charmer routine.
“That guy really had you going for a while,” the waitress said. “Thank God for the FBI.”
My sister and I chewed quietly then. At some point when he was finishing his pancakes, and the waitress came back with a refill, my father had made the observation to her that she looked a lot like Jane Fonda in Coming Home.
“I bet you get that all the time,” he said.
I saw the way he looked at her then, almost seductively, eyes peering up from under those lashes.
This was the first time I could remember that a woman had seemed oblivious. She charged him for the pancakes, like a normal person.
HIS COUGH, WHICH OUR MOTHER kept saying he should get checked out, did not improve. Sometimes now I could hear him struggling for breath. One day, when he was dropping us off after dinner, he told our mother he was thinking of quitting the force.
“But you love being a police officer,” she said.
“A cop needs to recognize when he’s past the top of his game,” he told her. “It’s probably time for the younger guys to step in and take the lead.”
“What are you talking about, Anthony?” she said. “You’re not even forty-one yet.”
“Whatever age it happens to a man, he’d better take note when it does,” my father said. “I’m not going to be like one of those old ballplayers who keeps showing up at spring training when his average drops below two hundred.”
He had told us, back when he was working those eighty-hour weeks, that he was taking us to Italy once he had the case wrapped up. Now he came by the house with a guidebook and said it was time to start studying our Italian.
After the trip, he said, there’d be some changes made. Who knew, maybe he’d open a barbershop.
Chapter Thirty-two
It was late October, just after we set the clocks back, so it got dark by five thirty now, and the rain had started early that year. Pumpkins in the windows at the Pollacks’ house (where baby Ashley had put in her appearance some weeks before). A For Sale sign on Helen’s house. At the end of the street, Mr. Armitage had evidently hired a small bulldozer once again, but this time, instead of ripping up the lawn and replacing it with stones, it appeared he was taking out the stones and putting grass back in.
“His fiancée wants to start a vegetable garden,” Patty explained.
Our father pulled up at the house just after dinnertime that night—not his usual hour, but we were always happy to see him. Patty and I were washing the bowls from our dinner of Campbell’s soup and crackers and wrapping up leftover carrot sticks.
“I need to talk with you girls,” he said. “Your mother too.”
We sat down in the living room. He lit a Lucky. “A little late to quit now, it turns out,” he said.
He had cancer. Lungs. The X-rays showed tumors on both of them. It wasn’t looking good.
“My grandpop always called these things coffin nails,” he said, examining the familiar white packet with its red bull’s-eye on the front. “But he lived to eighty smoking like a chimney. I guess I thought I had the same genes.”
Later Patty and I lay in our beds. I didn’t cry, knowing that would scare my sister.
“At least they caught it,” Patty whispered. “It would have been worse if we’d gone to Italy and they didn’t know till we got back.”
“He’s probably had it for a while,” I said. “You know how he coughs.”
I couldn’t even remember when the last time was that he had really sung to us, more than speaking the words along with the voice on the record player or the eight-track player in his car.
“He’s so strong,” Patty offered. “Other people might not be able to handle it but Dad’s different.”
Italy would be good for him, she said. We’d ride in one of those boats, with the men in striped shirts, paddling down the canals and singing. We’d finally have our father back.
THE TRIP NEVER HAPPENED, BUT while he could still drive, our father came over to our house more than he ever had. There were times that fall when I could imagine the four of us were still a family—our mother, Patty, me, and our father, playing cards around the kitchen table, having popcorn together. Our mother came out of her room more during those months.
“You know the problem with your mother, girls?” he said to us once, as she sat there, studying her hand. “She was too smart for me. She’s the only one that never bought any of my lines. Even when I bought them myself.”
Our mother stared at him over her fanned-out cards. It was the first time in my life I’d seen tears in her eyes.
“You’re as good a woman as they come, Lillian,” he told her. “If our girls turned out this great, I know where credit lies.”
Sometimes, those nights, the four of us talked about the old days. He liked to imagine we had all these great traditions—Candlestick Park, North Beach, the Marin Headlands, the cable cars, Shirley Temples at the Top of the Mark, jumping in the waves at Stinson Beach. None of us wanted to say, We went to each of those places exactly once.
“Remember that French song we used to sing?” he asked one time. “Remember the Flamingo Hotel?”
Patty and I didn’t say anything.
“That must’ve been with someone else, Anthony,” our mother said.
Patty and I knew who.
HE WANTED TO TEACH ME how to drive. I knew it was against the law for me to be behind the wheel at my age, but I wasn’t about to argue with my father, even if he hadn’t been a police officer.
He set the date for a Saturday morning in November, and for once, that day the sun came out. He wanted to drive with me up Highway 1, through Stinson Beach, past Bolinas, into Point Reyes, he said. We were taking the Alfa.
Most people’s fathers wouldn’t start them off driving a stick shift, much less on a road with so many crazy turns and drop-offs that it had been used in numerous sports car commercials. But nobody had a father like mine.
“Don’t tell your mother,” he said, when he picked me up. His old line. Not that it was necessary.
I sat in the passenger seat until we were safely down the road, where we changed places. When we did, I took in the full effect of how thin he’d become since his diagnosis. His pants fell from his belt like a set of drapes, and his hands, that I’d always loved, looked like bones with a little skin pulled over them. He got up from the bucket seat as slowly as an old man, holding on to the side of the car as he pulled himself to a standing position. I could hear every breath that went in and out of him.
“Never keep your eye on what’s directly ahead of you, Farrah,” he said. “You want to focus on what’s a hundred feet up the road.”
“Don’t brake on a curve. Downshift. That’s how the pros do it.”
“If you want to look cool driving, which you do,” he said, “you don’t grip the wheel that tightly. Me, I imagine I’ve got my hands on the shoulders of a beautiful woman. I leave it to you to come up with your own mental picture for this one.”
He wanted to stop at Stinson Beach to look at the ocean, though I could see when we got there that this visit would be harder for him than he’d anticipated. Still, we got out of the car and made our way up the path and onto the sand. He didn’t ask, but I bent down to untie his shoes for him. I knew he’d want to be barefoot.
We passed Bolinas, the town where the citizens kept taking down the road sign to keep the tourists out.
“Hippie town here,” he said. “The women here don’t believe in shaving their armpits. No argument from me there, you understand. Every woman needs to claim her own style of beauty. It’s my curse to love them all.”
We kept driving north. Olema, Point Reyes Station, Marshall. I knew my father was tired—more than tired—but he wanted to keep going. He’d put Dean Martin in the eight-track, and though we talked sometimes, and now and then he’d offer some pointer on my driving, for long stretches we rode without speaking—my father in the unfamiliar position of passenger, me at the wheel, listening to the music.
In fact, I did grip the wheel tightly for the duration of that drive, I believe, but not simply because I was an inexperienced and underaged driver.
I gripped the wheel because I understood that what was happening at this moment was another one of my father’s onetime deals, and I didn’t want to forget a second of it. I recognized that this would be the only driving lesson my father would ever give me. I also knew the reasons he’d taken me out that day went far beyond the desire to provide me with driving instruction.
“My mother wasn’t around when I was growing up,” he said. “I guess I could have been mad at her about that, but I wasn’t. I figured she had her reasons. I didn’t question what they were.”
My fingers stayed clamped around the wheel. Eyes on the road. Best that he not see my face just then, nor I his.
“I could handle it,” he said. “The hard part was seeing what it did to my old man.”
More silence. Tony Bennett now: “My Foolish Heart.”
“It would be a good thing if your mother could get out a little,” he said. “Meet someone. A normal guy. She deserves that.”
This wasn’t going to happen, but I didn’t say it. The first and last man our mother ever kissed was him.
“I don’t lose sleep about your sister,” he said. “There’s a girl who knows how to tell a guy he’s full of shit. Yours truly included. She’s not going to let anybody mess with her. And she’ll be a beauty too, once she gets those teeth fixed.”
I had never heard either of our parents mention Patty’s teeth, not once. It struck me that even now, as he finally acknowledged the problem, he did so without any sense that he’d be paying for the solution. He just knew Patty was a sufficiently competent person that she’d figure it out. Maybe he actually understood, even then, that his twelve-year-old daughter possessed a kind of self-discipline and strength he himself did not.
“It’s you I worry about, Farrah,” he said. We were all the way to the Russian River now—the town of Jenner, where the river meets the ocean. Though the day had turned cool, we had all the windows open, which made it even harder to hear his words to me—coming as they did now so much more softly than they once did, and between labored breaths. The way he took in air now, it was as if my father were sipping from the smallest cup, with only the smallest quantity of liquid remaining, and no possibility for refilling it once that was gone. One drop at a time. Not that, even.
“You’ll be the real beauty, of course,” he told me. “That’s happening already. Men will come after you your whole life, it won’t matter how old you are. You need to be sure, when they do, that there’s something in it for you. Don’t let it be a one-way street.”
WE WERE ALMOST TO MENDOCINO County when he told me to turn the car around. He had put his seat in the reclining position and closed his eyes, and as I made my way back down along the winding highway, I wasn’t even sure my father was awake. I could have worried what might happen if a cop pulled us over and asked to see my permit, but I wasn’t even thinking about that part.
I had to keep my eyes on the road, but sometimes, for a second, I would look over at my father, asleep beside me, and tell myself to freeze this moment. Never forget. I pretended I was a grown-up woman—thirty years old, or maybe thirty-five, out promoting my bestselling novel, and my father was retired from the police force, and (because my sister would have children, I knew) a grandfather now. Maybe we were driving to some important dinner for authors. Maybe my sister had become a professional basketball coach for some undefeated Division I school and we were heading to one of their games.
Maybe I was even older than that—the age that I have now reached, in fact: halfway through my forties—and my father was an old man. If this was so, it wouldn’t seem so bad that he looked the way he did, or that he seemed to be having so much trouble breathing. He would just be old, that was all.
When we got back to Marin County—the turnoff on the freeway that would take us back to Morning Glory Court—my father opened his eyes in a way that made me realize he’d never actually been asleep, just resting.
“I need to ask you to do something for me, Farrah,” he said. “I want you to drive me to Margaret Ann’s.”
THE PLACE WAS CALLED VALLEY View, though in fact the only view revealed from that location featured the highway.
As my sister and I had guessed back on that day we saw his car parked outside this place—a hundred years ago, it felt, but really just a few months—the person who lived there was Margaret Ann.
The last time we’d visited Margaret Ann—the last time Patty and I had accompanied our father on a visit—I was nine years old, Patty seven. I remember how proud we were of him when—wanting to surprise her one time—he’d done a pull-up on her balcony. The place she lived then was so pretty, we imagined he had brought us to Disneyland, and she was Cinderella. I remember wishing, for a moment, that we could live in this place ourselves, partly because it was so nice, but also because our father seemed so happy there. I remember the feeling I had, after: the awful guilt at liking her and betraying my mother by feeling that way.
Never forgive you.
Pulling into the parking lot of Valley View that day, with my father in the seat beside me, I felt myself hoping Margaret Ann lived in a ground-floor apartment, so he wouldn’t have to deal with stairs.
The old place had window boxes and a clubhouse, a turquoise pool and a hot tub where Patty and I had sat one time while our father and Margaret Ann stretched out on lounge chairs nearby, sipping a drink she’d made them that was pale green, with little paper parasols that we got to take home after.
The pool at Valley View had been drained, and there was a scummy layer of some kind of mold along the bottom. Only a few cars sat in the parking lot—most of them pretty beat-up looking, and a chicken-wire fence enclosed one whole section of the building that did not appear to be inhabited.
One car he recognized, evidently: a very old Volkswagen with a bumper sticker that said “Nobody’s Perfect Until You Fall in Love with Them” and another that said “There Is No Shortcut to Anyplace Worth Going.”
“Looks like she’s home,” he said quietly. Evidently he hadn’t called ahead. He’d been taking his chances.
He made no attempt at explaining to me what we were doing here, and none was required. “I should have picked up a snack for you,” he said, though I wasn’t hungry. “You don’t even have one of those notebooks in the car, for your writing.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I can listen to the radio.”
It turned out she lived in a second-floor apartment, accessed by an outdoor staircase leading from the parking lot to a long, narrow balcony where some of the remaining tenants had set out plants or beer bottles to turn in for the deposit money. There was a stationary bicycle set on this balcony, positioned in such a way as to give the person sitting on it a good view of the highway, and a kitty litter box, a broken stroller, and somebody’s Christmas tree, ornaments and all.
I knew my father would not want assistance on the stairs. But I had to watch as he climbed them, in case it looked like he’d need help. Twice he stopped to catch his breath. Then he started in again. When he got to her door, I saw him pull his shoulders back and run a hand through his hair. He stood there for a moment before ringing the bell.
From where I sat in the parking lot, I could not see her standing in the doorway—only the look of him when he caught sight of her. She must have put her arms around him then, because he stood there a little longer, and I could make out one pale arm wrapped around his neck, mussing up his hair. Then he was stepping into the apartment. The door closed after him.
I sat in the car almost an hour, waiting. Under other circumstances, this would have felt like a long time to be sitting in a parking lot waiting for your father as he paid a visit to a woman who was not your mother—a woman about whom I had once issued the warning that if he ever had kids with her, I’d never speak to him again. If he ever made any life that wasn’t with us. But as it was, I felt only happiness that he was gone that long. Whatever number of minutes he spent in that apartment, I figured, those would be the best minutes he could have right about now. I would have sat there all day if he needed that.
It was starting to get dark when he emerged from her apartment. Once again, he stood there in the doorway for a moment before leaving, and I could tell from the glow of light behind him that she must be standing there again, saying something to him, or maybe they were kissing. Hard to know. I begrudged him none of this now.
He made his way very slowly down the stairs, looking up one more time when he was partway down, but the door must have been closed by then. The glow of light was no longer visible.
When he got to the car, I reached across to the passenger side to open the door for him—as much help as he’d want from me. He lowered himself into the seat with a sigh that went on so long it could have contained every molecule of air in an inflatable mattress.
