The Bill from My Father (27 page)

That night, she phoned at 11
P.M.
to tell me he'd complained of stomach pains that had worsened in a matter of hours. She'd finally sent him to the Intensive Care Unit, where the staff suspected internal
hemorrhaging. Tests were being run, she said, and an internist would consult me in the morning. “Your father's been unusually agitated, but it's probably the pain.” She told me he'd hurled a pitcher against the wall, swearing a blue streak at Lucinda, who up until then had been able to keep him relatively calm—as long as he understood what she was saying. But whenever fatigue or exasperation thickened her accent, he demanded to speak to Betty, who he'd kicked out of his room just hours earlier for “talking his ears off.”

The following morning in the lobby, the buttons for the elevators wouldn't light up no matter how firmly or often they were pressed. People milled around, holding bouquets and sipping Styrofoam cups of coffee. I checked and rechecked the piece of paper on which I'd jotted my father's room number, unable, in my dread, to commit it to memory, which committed it to forgetfulness. The broken button, I warned myself, was only a hint of malfunctions to come. I took a deep breath and tried to both acknowledge the future and hold it at bay.

When an elevator finally appeared, it opened up to reveal Betty. The only passenger, she stood against the dim rear wall, her metallic blond hair like those gold-leaf halos encircling the heads of saints in Renaissance paintings. With her shoulders thrown back and chin uplifted, she stepped into the morning light, her eyes fixed on mine. She looked every inch a heavenly messenger come to deliver momentous news. Tears slid down her cheeks, skin glistening where a layer of face powder had been washed away. She opened her arms, cinched me inside them. I couldn't, and didn't want to, resist. Her bulky lavender sweater smelled pungently of floral sachet, and remotely of Old Spice, the faint, valedictory trace of my father lost to the antiseptic odor of the hospital as soon as I took my next breath.

“It's a miracle!” she exclaimed, pulling away. She dug into her shoulder bag and handed me Kleenex.

I dabbed at my eyes. “What are you saying? Are you saying he's okay? When I saw you crying, I thought …”

“He's regained consciousness! He's talking!”

“Are you sure? Last night Dr. Montrose told me …”

“Go and see for yourself!”

When she stuffed the package of Kleenex back into her bag, a gilt-edged Bible caught the light. Deathbed conversions couldn't be all that uncommon at Saint Joseph's (Brian, who'd been raised in the pragmatic United Church of Canada, referred to these eleventh-hour transformations as “cramming for the final”), and I hated to think that my father might have accepted Christ's salvation while insensible with pain and fear, like a prisoner who finally relents and signs a false confession. Had Betty come here on a mission? Had my father felt it necessary to change who he was, and worse, to disavow who he'd been, that a higher power might spare him from death, or let him die in peace? Better he should dial the prayer line in Texas just to kill time. Better he should defend a headless chicken, proclaiming it a sign from God for the benefit of all mankind.

And so the sight of Betty's Bible stirred me to a revelation: the father I had was the one I wanted, even if I was destined to spend my life perplexed. Of course, I still had qualms about him and always would, but relatively speaking, and for the time being, I'd come as close to qualmlessness as I ever got.

Betty and I were dry-eyed by the time the next elevator arrived. She wrote down the number of the Oxnard apartment she'd moved into with her cousin. We said our good-byes and I crowded in with people headed toward other sickrooms on other floors. I was eager to reach my father while he was still aware enough to notice I brimmed with appreciation.

I had to wait in the anteroom of the ICU for Lucinda to buzz me in. The door opened on a swarm of sounds. A suction pump wheezed. Beeping heart monitors drifted into and out of synch, strangers' pulses briefly allied, then divided. Lucinda, every bit as diminutive and efficient as I'd imagined, introduced herself and turned to lead the way. I followed her glossy black hair, the heavy length of it swaying with her gait. We had to dodge doctors and nurses who spoke in code and moved from one curtained enclosure to the next, all of them responding to a set of demands I could percieve only as an overall blur of emergency. We were halfway across
the room when Lucinda stopped in her tracks. She explained that my father's kidneys were failing and warned me that I'd find him unconscious. “From sedation,” she said, “and losing the blood.” She clutched the edge of the curtain and waited until she saw some sign that I'd registered the gravity of his condition. Then, despite my look of dire surprise—had I misunderstood what Betty had told me?—Lucinda yanked the curtain aside.

My father sprawled in the bed as if sinking into his own impression. His eye lids flickered with the urge to open. With his dentures removed, his lips caved into a mouthful of darkness. Lucinda announced that he was being hydrated intravenously and fed through a catheter inserted directly into his stomach. She'd planted the catheter herself, and before I could stop her, she tossed the blanket aside to show me her handiwork, a thin plastic umbilicus trailing from a scarlet incision near his navel.

For the next week, every time I entered the room, I found him sprawled in the same position, jaw lax, lungs heaving. According to Lucinda, he often woke late at night after the sedation wore off, certain she'd stolen his money. Or else he feared he'd forgotten where he hid it, or whether he had money hidden at all. Soon he believed she was stealing his clothes. Stealing the water that filled his glass. Stealing dirt from the potted plant. This endless succession of thefts enraged him, though even he, a former lawyer, could never prove she'd taken a thing. An old hand at dealing with dementia, she took his accusations in stride. Fearing he might harm himself or another patient, Lucinda sedated him when he grew unruly. But even after a dose of morphine he'd try to wrench the tubes from his flesh, claiming he was late for work, and she had to strap his arms to the bed.

When my father took the first wet breaths of pneumonia, sedation was no longer necessary—a fevered weakness kept him in check. I'd squeeze his shoulder: nothing. I'd insinuate my face into his but discover I was invisible, no one's son after forty-eight years. Now and then a reflex fired down his spine, legs twitching for half a minute.

My father's hearing aid had been removed, and one afternoon I apologized for my part in the misunderstandings we'd had over the
years. There were plenty to choose from, but I mentioned the car and bill in one breath, as if this, at last, confirmed their connection. I apologized for his part too, since I wanted to believe he would if he were able. I had no illusions that my father heard me or understood a word. There had been so many times, especially later in his life, when he gladly switched off his hearing aid; like a child who closes his eyes and believes the world has disappeared, he moved through a hush that silenced the earth. I wished him that muted refuge now.

A month after my father died, I visited the Oxnard branch of Bank of America to open his safe deposit box. I wasn't expecting to discover much of value; during the last days of his life, he'd been badgered by a small but persistent battalion of bill collectors. “They're the ones who're strapped for cash,” he'd told me. “It's their problem, not mine.” My father had come to believe that paying even the smallest bill might make him appear weak or defeated, whereas debt, rather than humiliating him, proved his triumph over the importunings of authority, and finally over the great green tyranny of money itself. In any case, the contents of the safe deposit box constituted the bulk of my inheritance, and I had no idea what I'd find inside it.

With its decorative borders and official seals, my father's death certificate bore a remarkable resemblance to money, though of course it was signed by the county coroner instead of the secretary of the Treasury, a document nonnegotiable in every sense. The bank manager checked it against an entry in her ledger, then escorted me though a security door and into the windowless vault, whose walls were like those of a mausoleum, hundreds of numbered cubbyholes reaching from floor to ceiling. Since my father's box was on the top row, she had to climb a metal stepladder, teetering on her high heels while she inserted the key Dr. Montrose had given me. She slid the narrow safe deposit box from the wall, and as she handed it down to me, I noticed a piece of adhesive tape stuck to the bottom. “Mine,” it read in my father's crimped, arthritic scrawl, a penmanship that came with old age and bore none of its former flourishes. He must
have thought this label would prevent what little he had from being stolen, or prove it belonged to him alone, a hedge against destitution.

The manager led me to a small private viewing room and closed the door behind me. I set the safe deposit box on the table, lifted the lid.

This was my inheritance: $5,000 in one-hundred-dollar denominations. Heaped in a blue velvet jewelry box were a few gold rings my father had bought for my mother, rings she'd worn so infrequently they barely held a sentimental charge. Wedged in the very back I found an old sheet of onionskin stationery from my father's law office, the same letterhead on which he'd typed my bill. On it he'd made dozens of computations in pencil, numerals meant to figure out, once and for all, how much money he had. Yet my father trusted none of his solutions; the problems were repeated several times, the numbers smudged.

The modest contents of the safe deposit box came as no surprise. Long ago I'd given up on inheriting my childhood house or any portion of the savings my father had squandered on the business schemes and lawsuits—motivated, I understood now, by burgeoning dementia—that left him bankrupt. I stuffed the jewelry into one of my coat pockets and cash into the other, feeling a weight that the things I carried couldn't quite account for. I left the key inside the empty safe deposit box, the strip of tape still stuck underneath. Soon the manager would slide it back into the wall, my father's claim forever asserting itself in the Oxnard branch of Bank of America.

Once inside my car, I counted out the cash once again. While thumbing through the money, it occurred to me why, just a month ago, my father had tallied these same one-hundred-dollar bills over and over in Dr. Montrose's office, why he kept his calculations locked in a vault. Counting can be a form of consolation, a clarifying prayer; you utter numbers and believe in reason, in the steady progression from one thing to another, in the prospect that things will finally add up. That three follows two is a certainty, as inevitable, my father would have said, as taxes and death.

Soon my father's afterlife began. Which is to say that the repercussions of his death assumed a life of their own.

Late one night, while Brian lay beside me and enjoyed a routinely peaceful sleep, I began to wonder why, according to Betty, my father had regained consciousness in her presence but not in mine. “Dad,” I imagined saying, “maybe there was a reason you didn't regain consciousness when I came to the ICU. Maybe you were still angry I hadn't come to get you out of observation. Or maybe you still thought I'd paid Betty to love you.”

Listen to yourself! A person doesn't
decide
to be unconscious! You don't need a
motive
to go into a coma! Ask your mental-doctor friend!

I'd wrongly supposed that as I went on living and my father didn't, my tendency to invoke his voice, to engage him in the old heave-ho, would simply fade away. But as the weeks turned into months and the months turned into a longer bunch of months, his brusque rejoinders and knotty logic thrived inside me. Picking up the slack in his absence, I played Dad's part with increasing conviction. I still thought of him as irrational, but now that I was better at being him, I thought of myself as irrational, too. Thus formed the bonds of father and son. Too late, perhaps, but unbreakable.

*  *  *

The day Betty had appeared like an apparition in the hospital lobby, tearful over Dad's sudden recovery, I'd stumbled upon indisputable evidence that she
had
tried to proselytize him, whether he'd been conscious or not. After Lucinda rushed me through the ICU and pulled back the curtain, I stood immobilized at the foot of his bed, unable to bridge the abyss between the groggy but talkative man Betty had led me to expect and the thin, intubated figure lying before me, gasping for air. Shunts needled their way into his veins. Glucose dripped through his IV tube like sugar water through an eyedropper. Beneath the scent of rubbing alcohol, he exuded a sourness that some animal part of me recognized as the scent of fear. I moved closer, as if he'd called out to me, though he hadn't made a sound. That's when I noticed a videotape lying on his nightstand. Addressed to
Resident
, it had been sent to the trailer park from the Trinity Broadcasting Network, home to Betty's favorite show,
This Is Your Day
. How attentively she'd watch the afflicted limp toward the spotlit Reverend Hinn, his hands a conduit for the Lord's glory. The video, still encased in its cellophane wrapper, hadn't been opened. The address label obscured its title, though a photograph of orange-and-yellow flames flickered across the box in an ominous conflagration.

Only once, as a young boy, had I stolen something that belonged to my father; I snatched a handful of change from his dresser. He didn't miss it, though for days the fear of getting caught hovered above me like a thunderhead. Years later, when he billed me for my life, I expected to see that petty theft added to my tab. And yet I stole the video without a moment's hesitation. Intuition told me not to let him see it, whatever it was, and so, when my visit came to an end, I scooped the box off his nightstand, parted the curtain, and walked away.