I was skeptical that this trip would be different from the others. Mona had named me Ye of Little Faith a long time ago, and my mother called me that still, to tease me.
I got off at the California Avenue stop. The town had the look of nothing going on, the road straight like a runway to the deep green hills. I took the underpass below Alma Street that emerged in the golden light on the other side, and walked past the park and the pine trees. The houses around here hugged the ground.
For the previous six months, I’d been taking a small dose of clonazepam, an antianxiety drug that allegedly reduces the amygdala’s fight-or-flight response, 0.25 milligram per day. It was despite, or perhaps because of, my father’s insistence I try weed or LSD that drugs had seemed unappealing before—I’d never done any—but flying back and forth to see him every month, finishing graduate school, my mother sick and low on money, I had found myself unable to focus. Instead, I moved and talked faster and faster. I had a frantic quality, hoping to distract others and not expose myself. I was jittery and defensive and self-conscious, terrified my father would say something awful and then he would die and nothing would be resolved.
In movies, there is the scene when the dying person apologizes—but this was life.
I walked through the house and paused at the threshold of my father’s study that had become his bedroom. There was a photograph by Harold Edgerton of an apple being shot through by a bullet, the skin fraying around the edges of the hole.
I rounded the corner to his room. He was propped up on pillows, his legs pale and thin, like knitting needles. There were framed photographs covering the surface of the chest of drawers, each tilted to face his bed. The chest had drawers of equal widths, and later I would see that inside he’d organized the art and photographs in each one. He was alone, awake, and seemed to be waiting for me. He smiled.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” he said. His warmth was disarming. Tears fell down his face. Before he was sick I’d seen him cry only twice, once at his father’s funeral, and once in a movie theater at the end of Cinema Paradiso, when I’d thought he was shivering. “This is the last time you’re going to see me,” he said. “You’re gonna need to let me go.”
“Okay,” I said. But I didn’t quite believe him, and I wouldn’t have believed he’d die about a month later. I had fuzzy, indeterminate thoughts about how long he’d live. I sat on the bed beside him.
“I didn’t spend enough time with you when you were little,” he said. “I wish we’d had more time.”
“It’s fine,” I said. He was so weak and fragile. I lay down on my side in his bed, facing him.
“No, it’s not okay. I didn’t spend enough time with you,” he said. “I should have spent the time. Now it’s too late.”
“I guess our timing was off,” I said, not convinced of it even as I said it. In fact, I had recently realized my luck: I got to know him before he became hugely famous, when he was healthy enough to skate. I’d imagined he’d spent a lot more time with everyone else than he had with me, but I wasn’t so sure about that anymore. He looked into my eyes and teared up. “I owe you one.” I was not sure what to make of this phrase. During that weekend, he repeated it over and over: “I owe you one, I owe you one,” he said, crying, when I went to visit him in between his naps. What I wanted, what I felt owed, was some clear place in the hierarchy of those he loved.
He and I were alone in the house, except for the nurses who rotated every six hours. A few other people came to visit—people he’d worked with. A few people he didn’t know came to the doors wanting to see him too, wandering into the garden with packages, or empty-handed. A stranger in a sari begged to talk with him. A man came in through the gate and said he had flown in from Bulgaria just to see my father. A cluster of people gathered at the side door, talked among themselves, and then dispersed.
“Do you remember your dreams?”
I was lying on my side in his bed. He was drifting in and out of sleep.
“Yup.”
“Have you always remembered them?”
“Most of the time.”
“What do you dream about?”
“Work, mostly,” he said. “Trying to convince people of things.”
“What things?”
“Ideas.”
“Ideas you thought of while you were dreaming?”
“Sometimes. But usually in my dreams I can’t convince them. Usually, they’re too much of a bozo to get it.”
“Did you come up with a lot of ideas that way? In your dreams?”
“Yes,” he said, then fell asleep again.
The next day I went to the hospital with him for a blood transfusion. This took up most of the day because he was too weak to walk and had to be transported from chair, to car, to chair, to hospital, to chair, to car, to chair, and back into his bed again. The blood was thick and dark in the bag. It looked like fake syrup Dracula blood. The hospital brought him heated blankets that came out of a machine that looked like a refrigerator. He was cold and then hot and then cold.
I sat on a chair in the room with him, hearing the mechanical whoosh of the machine. I wondered whose blood he was getting. I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to call attention to the bag. He had a transfusion every ten days or so. It took several hours. Afterward, he had more color.
“He’s cold, I think,” I told one of the nurses toward the end of the transfusion.
“I’m fine,” he said. I sat on the chair in the corner to wait for him.
“I think he might be cold,” I said again, a few minutes later. I could feel gusts of cold air blowing through the vents.
“I’m fine,” he said, and I had to leave the room for some reason, and when I was called back in, to sit on the chair in the corner, the nurse brought me a blanket.
“He said you were cold,” she said. I hadn’t noticed I was.
“I’m sorry I didn’t spend more time with you. I’m so sorry,” he said from the bed.
“I guess you were working really hard, and that’s why you didn’t email me or call me back?” He’d rarely returned my emails and calls, did not mark my birthdays.
“No,” he paused. “It wasn’t because I was busy. It was because I was mad you didn’t invite me to the Harvard weekend.”
“What weekend?”
“The introductory weekend. All I got was the bill,” he said, with a catch in his voice.
Matriculation. I remembered later how when I was eighteen I’d been carefully juggling my parents, who didn’t want to come at the same time, and we’d decided, with the help of my therapist, and the agreement of both parents, that she would come that weekend, and he’d come a few weekends later. At the time he’d agreed this was best.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m not too good at communication.”
“I wish I could take it back, or change it,” I said. It seemed unlikely, and possibly insane, that our relationship was pinned on one weekend. I didn’t believe it. I’d ascribed some sort of overarching wisdom to him, but people who are dying and trying to set things right aren’t necessarily reflective and profound. I didn’t buy the idea that one invitation, one weekend, could have justified his ten years of almost silence, and the withholding of money for college tuition in my final year.