Becoming Series: Dad is dead
“Your father died. Can you come help?”
Shaking off sleep, I noticed it was raining. Raining hard.
Her voice was cool and distant. Distant, that's the way we handled things like this, Mom and me.
“Yes, I’ll be right there.” Putting the phone down, I pull my pants on and tell Carolyn, “My dad just died.”
On the way, seeing the lights of an all-night gas station on 23rd reflected in the wet asphalt, I give in to my need for coffee and my need to give myself a moment while feeling the guilt.
Guilt from only seeing him once while he was in the hospital. Guilt for my lack of connection to him. Guilt that I only felt I'd won when unable to speak, he handed me the note, saying everything would be okay between us. While reading it, standing there next to his hospital bed, the room flooded with afternoon light, I knew the note wasn't enough, despite the tears in his eyes and his desperate attempt to change what was between us. Or, perhaps, what wasn't between us.
I pull up close to the brightly lit storefront to avoid getting soaked.
The coffee came in a Styrofoam cup with a pressed plastic lid, with a little section you could lift, fold back, and secure in a little indentation in the top. I took a sip. It was too hot. The taste all plastic and weak. Still.
Exiting the overlit store, noting the pumps, I wondered if I should get gas. I don’t need it, but it would give me another moment. No, I need to go.
I pour some of the coffee out as I get in the car, noting that the lights made my disrespect for the coffee and the station visible, although what was it? two in the morning, nobody cares. Placing the cup in the holder, I start the car, turn the wipers on high, and pull out into 23rd, heading south — no one on the road but me.
Down the hill into Rainier Valley, splashing through the puddles, and up Beacon Hill on the other side, I enjoy the car –– the way the gearbox feels, the engine's surge, the feel of the brakes. No one on the road except me. Across the hilltop and down the other side, past the reservoir and past Serbian Hall, where I learned to dance. Remembering the Swing and that tall, skinny girl who was my eighth-grade dance partner. She was pretty and wore long pleated skirts, so long, long ago.
We dated once, maybe twice. Dates, Mom and Dad drove me to and from. A memory of my shame at not having my own car floated up. Did we kiss? I can't remember. She lived in a lovely sunny house a couple of miles from mine with a wide view of the industrial valley below.
Turning onto South Pearl, my head out of the musings, the rain still strong, I see the emergency truck approaching. There are no lights or sirens — they must know there is no need to hurry. I park in the spot next to the door. The coffee is still too hot to drink, so I leave it in the car.
The EMTs pull up behind me.
"Mom?" I meant to ask if she was alright. Knew better.
She holds the aluminum screen door open and asks me to fix it in the open position, something Dad did that she never learned to do. Leaving it in the locked open position, two EMTs follow me in.
Mom directs us to the hall, saying, " He fell on his way to the bathroom. I heard him fall…"
Turning the corner into the hall. Dad is naked, lying on his back. One EMT passes me and checks Dad’s pules. The other is asking questions and making notes on a clipboard. The sound of radio chatter fills the room.
“Mom, why is Dad naked?”
“Oh, I washed his clothes so they wouldn’t go to waste. I’ll take them down to the thrift shop in the morning.”
The coroner arrives and confers with the EMTs. Mom makes coffee, and we sit in the kitchen listening to the coffee perking in its little aluminum pot with the glass topper on the electric hot plate. The EMTs depart. The coroner declines a cup. His helper rolls in the stretcher.
The coroner asks Mom to sign. Dad is gone. Mom and I sit in the kitchen, and she says, “I’ll have him cremated. There’s a place for him in the churchyard.”
We sit. Mom talks about the last few weeks. I’m lost, my head elsewhere. The sun is coming up. The rain has stopped.
“You’ll have to be going to work, Teddy. I’ll be fine.”
Leaving, I wondered about my naked Dad and Mom’s need to wash his clothes so they could be useful to someone else. Why didn’t she put a blanket over him?
Then it came to me. She’d have to wash the blanket.
A few weeks later, I learned that Dad had given away the river property to a blood relative. That, at least, I’d expected.
Ah Ted, this is great. So lean … and yet there are little details, the coffee cup and the way you fold back the top, the streets you pass. But not all the details: you tell us you like the car, but not what kind of car it is. Yeah, I’m a car nut; I wondered. But I can fill it in myself.
I'm in that car with you in the early morning, with the rain. The bizarre contrast of your naked father and your mother's confession of laundering his clothes compounds its eeriness. The thought that ran through my mind was "people act in strange ways when someone has died." Your thoughts about the note your father wrote, all of which occurred during the car ride over, reminded me that after someone passes, there is no going back to change how we acted in the past.