These Tangled Vines(3)

I didn’t even know who these people were. His other children? My siblings, possibly? A wife? His brothers? Sisters? Cousins? I had no place among them, unless there might be other illegitimate children in attendance, like me. Perhaps then we might have something in common. But I had no idea. I knew nothing.



“You’re up early for a Sunday,” Dottie said when I entered the kitchen.

Dottie was our night shift nurse. She had been with Dad and me for many years, and I adored her because she was always cheerful. She sang show tunes while she worked, dyed her hair pink and purple, and flirted playfully with Dad, which always made him smile, even on the worst days. All our caregivers had been wonderful, but none, other than Dottie, ever lasted more than a year or two at most. They came and they went, which wasn’t entirely surprising. It was a tough gig, looking after a quadriplegic.

“Yes. Did you hear the phone ring?” I asked.

“I did, but you picked it up before I could get to it. Who in the world was calling at seven a.m. on a Sunday?”

Somehow, I managed to think on my feet. “My boss. But before I tell you about that, how’s Dad doing? Did he sleep okay last night?”

The last few nights had been rough, as he had a mild chest infection.

“Like a baby.”

“That’s good,” I replied, “because today’s movie day.”

Dad loved movies and live theater, and it was important for him to get out of the house now and again. Once a week, Jerry, our weekend caregiver, took him to a matinee. That’s when I liked to seize the opportunity to disappear into my makeshift studio in the garage and paint something. It was my only true escape.

At least Dad was lucky in that he had partial use of his wrists and hands. All our nurses over the years had worked with him diligently to maintain the muscle tone. Because of that, Dad was always able to use a computer and voice-recognition software to write. He had been a successful thriller novelist at one time and had three books published, but lately, he wrote articles for the foundation he and Mom had spearheaded in ’96 to raise money for spinal cord research. It had been years since Dad wrote any fiction, other than a few short stories. I think the novels took too much out of him, but honestly, I don’t believe the novels sold very well. The first one did, but the second and third books were a disappointment to his publisher.

I can only assume that must have been difficult for Dad at the time. Writing was the only thing he thought he could do.

Outside of that, he was the bravest person I’d ever known. The accident that injured his spinal cord happened before I was born, so I had no knowledge of him as a man who could walk or get around on his own. All I ever knew growing up was that he loved me and cherished me more than anything in the world. I never considered him to be deficient in any way compared to other children’s fathers. I knew our situation was different, but I never felt deprived, and there were all sorts of reasons for that.

For one, when I was small, he would let me sit on his lap while he sped around the house in his power wheelchair, spinning in circles until I shrieked with laughter. The chair moved at the touch of a button, and he controlled it with a joystick, which he gave me license to use at far too young an age. Together, we caused all sorts of havoc when I drove us into tables and knocked over lamps and teetering piles of books. Oops was his favorite word back then, and we both knew it rankled my mother, who had to clean up the messes we made, and that was before we had full-time caregivers. Mom did everything for him, and her devotion rubbed off on me. Until the age of eighteen, I’d believed we were the closest family on earth because of the challenges we faced every day, especially when Dad was in and out of the hospital for any number of infections that could have killed him. He was very vulnerable then. He still was.

But then Mom died unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm, and I learned about secrets and lies. That’s when I discovered that people weren’t always what they pretended to be. Except for my dad, of course. He was always real with me. All I ever wanted to do, after Mom died, was protect him and keep him happy and healthy. I couldn’t lose him too.

Hence the keeping of my mother’s secret.

“So about that phone call . . . ,” I said to Dottie as she dropped a slice of bread into the toaster for me.

“What in the world did your boss want?” she asked. “I hope it was important.”

“It was,” I replied. “She asked if I could fill in for her at a sales conference in London this week. She was supposed to give a presentation, but she came down with a stomach bug, so she asked if I could go in her place.”

Dottie faced me. “Seriously? To London? England? Where the queen lives?”

I chuckled. “Yes, that’s the place. I’ll have to take a red-eye tonight or tomorrow.”

“And you said yes?”

“Of course. What kind of idiot would I be to turn down a free trip to London?”

I had considered the invention of a fictional conference in Italy, which would have been closer to the truth, but I was afraid to mention Italy to Dad because that was where he had his accident. It was the worst trauma of his life, so it might make him uncomfortable to talk about it or imagine me traveling there. London was a far better fabrication to avoid the subject of Tuscany altogether.

“You guys will be okay while I’m gone?” I asked, facing the toaster, keeping my back to Dottie.