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"Of course." she said, reaching out to touch my arm. "I'll take you to him."
I set my bag down to follow her.
"I'll start seeing to arrangements, dear." Aunt Agnes called after me.
"Oh, Mother," Margaret moaned, "a funeral."
I felt as if I were sleepwalking. Everything around me seemed vague, foggy. I kept swallowing down the urge to
scream. So often people feel that they can scream away their troubles like some giant blowing unpleasant and ugly things out of his way. My heartbeat was so tiny. I imagined my heart itself was withering, closing up like a clam somewhere deep in my chest. In fact. I thought I was shrinking, growing smaller and smaller until I was just a little girl again, a little girl being brought to see her daddy.
I stood in the doorway as if I were waiting for him to sit up on the gurney and beckon to me. The nurse stood at my side, wondering why I was so hesitant. I'm sure.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's never easy losing a parent, no matter how old they are My mother was eighty-six when she died last year, but I still felt as if the world had dropped out from under me."
I looked at her and nodded. "I'd like to be alone with him for a while," I said.
"Of course. Just call for me if you need anything." she said.
If I need anything? I need a second chance. I need to have gotten here before he died. Could you please arrange for that? I thought.
I looked at Daddy lying there so peacefully. His reddish-brown beard was as trim and neat as ever. He hadn't been gone that long, so his skin wasn't the pale of the dead yet. They had closed his eyes. I wished they hadn't. I needed to look into those eyes one more time, even though they would be empty. At least I could remember what had been there.
It took a few more moments for me to draw close enough to take his hand. Funny. I thought as I held his hand in mine, my father had never once raised his hand to me, not even to pat me on the rear end. His anger, his chastising, lived in his voice, in those eyes, in his whole demeanor, and for as long as I could remember, that was sufficient.
My adoptive mother didn't hesitate to take a swipe at me now and again, even if it was always more like waving away a fly. She was very protective of her hands. Too many women her age showed their age in their hands, and she was determined that wouldn't happen to her. With Amou in our home. my A.M. never washed a dish or wiped a piece of furniture. The only thing she cleaned was her own body, and as gently as she would clean a piece of fine china.
"I'm sorry I didn't get here fast enough. Daddy." I began. I took a deep breath. Tears were trapped beneath my lids. I thought I was looking at him through a fishbowl. "But we were never really people who made much of goodbyes, anyway, were we? You accompanied me when I first went off to college, but, unlike the other parents we saw, there were no tears, no desperate hugs, no efforts to cling to the little girl who once was. We were so mature about it, weren't we?" I said, smiling down at him. "We knew how to deal with what for other people were very traumatic experiences.
"Focus, focus. remember?" I laughed. "I don't think you realized how much you lectured me on the trip. I bet you were like that because you were afraid of saying goodbye. I know I was. Daddy. Even though I never shed a tear in front of you or said anything to make you unhappy, I was afraid to say goodbye to you.
"Mother was already gone, but she had missed so many special occasions in my life, anyway. One more didn't seem to matter all that much.
'Well, you kept saying. 'Well, well, well. I suppose I should be going,' you said. 'You'll call me should you need anything, of course.' you told me, assuring yourself more than me. I think.
"Of course. I would call you. So much of our lives was built around of course, Daddy."
I stared at him. He was starting to look more like a statue, a monument of himself, a body already lying in state. It occurred to me that I had rarely seen my father asleep. Neither he nor my adoptive mother welcomed me into their bedroom that often, even if I had a bad dream. He would always come to me and talk the dream out of my head. He reassured me but left me to sleep in my own bed.
"I'm sorry I didn't get here in time. Daddy," I repeated. "There were so many things to say. We had just begun saving them to each other. We had many years of silence to make up for. What do I do now?"
I smiled because, even though his lips were sealed forever and ever. I could hear his response. Naturally, it was in the form of a question.
"What do you do now. Willow? What do you think you should do now?"
"I guess I should finish college and marry Allan or someone like him and eventually have a family of my own. I don't know all the details of our finances, but I will very soon. and I hope I can keep our home. Is that a good answer. Daddy?"
"Is it?"
"I think so."
"Then it is." he would say.
And it occurred to me that I was all right, that it didn't matter that I didn't get back in time to see him take his last breath on this earth, because he was with me forever and ever, his voice always there. I would always hear his questions, be guided by his wisdom. It was not something that died with his body. He had planted them in me like seeds, and they had blossomed and taken root. They would always keep me steady and guide me and help me to see the way.
I leaned over and kissed his cold forehead. Kisses were as rare as birds in winter at our house. My adoptive mother was always afraid of smudging her lipstick. She greeted people with an air kiss, a smack of the lips near their ears, and if she ever kissed me, which was something she was more or less forced to do in front of others, it was still as if she were using her lips to push me away.
Daddy kissed me, but it was always a quick kiss, almost like someone afraid of being caught doing it. which I thought quite funny considering he was a psychiatrist. Do psychiatrists analyze themselves all the time? I wondered, Did Daddy worry about why he was so afraid of being affectionate?
