The Music of What Happens(65)

I flash back to when I was the big one-three. First wet dream, first boy crush, last of my guy friends before they all decided I was too weird. Dad’s been in the hospital for a month and I’m not allowed to see him too often because he’s in rough shape, I guess. She’s not her chatterbox self either. It’s always been normal for her to flop down on the couch next to me and tell me about her ingrown toenail, or how Dr. Mohler, her dentist-boss, farted while giving some lady an exam and they all just pretended it didn’t happen. This is the first time in my life that she’s not saying stuff, and I know whatever’s going on with Dad is bad. Real bad.

I’m sitting in the blue-walled kitchen on a stool, my feet up on the Formica countertop.

“Off,” my mom says, headed for the refrigerator. “You’re coming with me today.” She grabs a jar of pickles. Half sours. Our favorites.

“Where?”

“To see Daddy. He has some things —” she stops speaking, puts an entire pickle into her mouth, and walks down the hall to their bedroom. That’s the extent of our conversation.

It’s been just a couple weeks since I saw Dad, but when I walk into his room at the hospital he looks like he’s been photoshopped. Like someone came and added deep, puffy bags under his eyes, and erased about 40 percent of his chest bulk, and wrinkled his arms, which are now painted grayish white. I can’t stop staring at him.

I sit down next to his bed and he reaches a freakishly frail hand out and touches my leg.

“Hey J-Bird,” he says, his voice encrusted with slurry, it seems like.

“Hey Daddy.”

“You keepin’ everyone in line while I’m down for the count?”

“Yes,” I say, ashamed that, no, I’m totally not. If that’s my job, I’m really failing.

“Remember. You get extra points if you take care of your mom and keep her happy.”

“And the points have no monetary value,” I say, stealing his punch line, and he smiles, and he puts his head back and stares straight ahead. We sit like this for quite a while, and suddenly he’s sleeping, which, oddly enough, makes me feel relieved. Because as much as I want to hear my dad’s voice — gravelly as it is right now — for eternity, this way I don’t have to think about what I should say. I’m so selfish.

His hand remains on my leg, and I allow myself to close my eyes too, and imagine my dad throwing me a Frisbee when I was eight, and his utter bemusement when I totally whiffed trying to catch it, like missed it 100 percent.

“So you’re not an Ultimate Frisbee guy,” he said, and I shook my head and stared at my feet, and he came and put his arm around me. “Everyone needs to find their own game,” he said. “And sometimes … sometimes the game isn’t even a game.”

I don’t know how my eight-year-old mind got this from those words, but in that moment what I heard was that my dad knew I was different, and as much as he was a cowboy sort of guy, with a fuzzy walrus mustache and a cowboy hat and Wrangler jeans, I’d never be any of those things, and it was okay with him.

After about an hour of him napping, he awakens with a start and says, “What time is it?”

I look at my phone. “Four thirty,” I say.

He looks confused. “Morning or night?”

“What?” I say. “Night. Afternoon.”

“What day is it? Tuesday?”

“Um. Saturday,” I say.

He turns his head away and stares straight ahead. “Oh.”

“Just in case there’s a test,” I say. It’s something he says all the time.

My dad takes a deep breath and turns his frail neck to look at me again. “There’s a test?”

I laugh, because this. This is what I miss. Dad joking with me.

But he keeps looking at me, like he’s waiting for an answer.

“Yup,” I say.

He slowly turns his body until his stick legs are over the side. “Well let’s get going,” he says.

I sit straight up and try to push his legs back onto the bed. “No. Dad. No. We’re not going anywhere.”

He looks so confused. His face. Like he has no idea what’s going on. “But there’s a test.”

“I was kidding, Dad,” I say, but now his face is contorted into a mask of pain, and he starts to wail.

I’ve never heard this noise coming from my dad the cowboy. I don’t know what to do.

“Mom! Mom!” I call. She’s been sitting out in the hallway. I hope.

No one comes. “Help!” I scream, above my dad’s wails, and I start to cry too.

A nurse comes in, and then a second, and they help my dad get back into a more comfortable position, lying down with his legs on the bed. And then my mom comes in, and she must have heard, or someone must have told her, because she looks stricken, panicked.

My dad says, “How to give your father a heart attack,” and he won’t look at me. I need him to look at me. He will not. Or cannot. I don’t know.

Mom puts her hand on my back and says, “Let’s get you out of here,” and I stand and she leads me away from the room.

I never see my dad again. “How to give your father a heart attack” are his last words to me.

And I think maybe it’s my fault that he died. That maybe he just needed rest and that his fragile heart and his aching lungs needed stillness, and me riling him up with my stupidity was the last straw, and that’s what did it.