The Nix(212)

So he is beginning to see Bethany as she is, for maybe the first time.

His mother, too. He’s trying understand her, to see her clearly and not through the distortion of his own anger. The only lie Samuel ever told Periwinkle was that Faye had stayed in Norway. It seemed like a good lie to tell—if everyone believed she was in the arctic, then nobody would bother her. Because the truth is she returned home, to that little Iowa river town, to care for her father.

Frank Andresen’s dementia was pretty far along by then. When Faye saw him the first time and the nurse said “Your daughter’s here,” he looked at Faye with such wonder and surprise. He was so thin and skeletal. There were red spots on his forehead rubbed raw from scratching and picking. He looked at her like she was a ghost.

“Daughter?” he said. “What daughter?”

Which is the kind of thing Faye would have chalked up to battiness if she hadn’t known better, if she hadn’t known there might be more to that question than simple confusion.

“It’s me, Dad,” she said, and she decided to take a risk. “It’s me, Freya.”

And the name registered somewhere deep down inside him and his face crumpled and he looked at her with anguish and despair. She went to him then and gathered his fragile body in her arms.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t be sad.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking at her with an intensity unusual for a man who had spent his life avoiding the gaze of other people. “I’m so very sorry.”

“Everything turned out well. We all love you.”

“You do?”

“Everyone loves you so much.”

He looked at her very closely and studied her face a long time.

Fifteen minutes later the whole episode was lost. He caught himself in the middle of some story and looked at her pleasantly and said, “Now who are you, dear?”

But the moment seemed to shake something loose in him, seemed to uncork something important, because among the stories he’d tell now were stories of young Marthe, taking midnight strolls under a dimly lit sky, stories Faye had never heard before and stories that embarrassed the nurses because it was clear the walks were postcoital. Something seemed to lift inside him, some burden let go. Even the nurses said so.

So Faye is renting a small apartment close to the nursing home and each morning she walks over and spends the whole day with her father. Sometimes he recognizes her, but most of the time he doesn’t. He tells old ghost stories, or stories about the ChemStar factory, or stories of fishing the Norwegian Sea. And every once in a while he’ll see her and by the look on his face she understands that he’s really seeing Freya. And when this happens she soothes him and hugs him and tells him everything turned out well, and she describes the farm when he asks about it, and when she describes it she does so grandly—not just barley in the front yard but whole fields of wheat and sunflowers. He smiles. He’s picturing it. It makes him happy to hear this. It makes him happy when she says, “I forgive you. We all forgive you.”

“But why?”

“Because you’re a good man. You did the best you could.”

And it’s true. He did. He was a good man. As good a father as he could be. Faye had simply never seen it before. Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.

So this is what she can do for him now, comfort him and keep him company and forgive and forgive and forgive. She cannot save his body or his mind, but she can lighten his soul.

They talk for a while and then he needs to nap, sometimes falling asleep mid-sentence. Faye reads while he sleeps, making her way once again through the collected poetry of Allen Ginsberg. And sometimes Samuel phones her, and when he does she’ll put the book away and answer his questions, all his big terrifying questions: Why did she leave Iowa? And college? And her husband? And her son? She tries to answer honestly and thoroughly, even though it’s frightening for her. It is literally the first time in her life she is not hiding some great piece of herself, and she feels so exposed that it’s close to panic. She has never before given herself over to anyone—she’d always parceled herself out little by little. This bit for Samuel, some small part for her father, barely anything for Henry. She’d never put all of herself in just one place. It felt too risky. Because her great and constant fear all these years was that if anyone ever came to know all of her—the real her, the true deep essential Faye—they would not find enough stuff there to love. Hers was not a soul large enough to nourish another.

But now she’s trusting Samuel with everything. She answers his questions. She holds nothing back. Even when her answers make the panic boil up within her—that Samuel will think she’s a terrible person, that he’ll stop calling—still she tells him the truth. And just when she thinks his interest in her must be exhausted, just when her answers prove that she’s a person unworthy of his love, what actually happens is quite the opposite. He seems more interested, calls more often. And sometimes he calls to talk—not about her ugly past but about how her day went, or about the weather, or the news. It makes her hope that someday soon they’ll be two people encountering each other sincerely, without the disfigurement of their history, minus all her immutable mistakes.

She’ll be patient. She knows she can’t force a thing like that. She’ll wait, and she’ll take care of her father, and she’ll answer her son’s many questions. And when Samuel wants to know her secrets, she’ll tell him her secrets. And when he wants to talk about the weather, she’ll talk about the weather. And when he wants to talk about the news, she’ll talk about the news. She flips on the television to see what’s happening in the world. Today it’s all about unemployment, global deleveraging, recession. People are panicked. Uncertainty is at an all-time high. A crisis is looming.