Walking on Water: A Novel (12 page)

Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then I said, “It was only a dream.”

He looked at me sympathetically and said, “You’re right. It was only a dream.” The room fell into silence again. After a moment he said, “Let me look through your notes.”

I handed him the notepad. He looked through it, then gave it back to me. “You got everything.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “I think I’ll take a nap. You can go if you like.”

I sat there fighting my growing emotion. Finally I said, “Okay. Have a good rest.”

“Al.”

“Yes?”

“I love you, Son.”

The words caught me off guard. “I love you too,” I said.

I drove back to the house, my mind reeling from our conversation. I realized that I had preferred living in denial,
something my father, always the pragmatist, did not.
It didn’t mean he was going to die
, I told myself.
He was just being prepared
. My excuse rang hollow.

My cell phone rang a little after ten. It was Nicole.

“Your father told me he’d had an uncomfortable discussion with you, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was about.”

“We went over his funeral plans.”

She hesitated. “You know how he is. Planful.”

My father loved to use that word.
Planful
.

“Is that even a real word?” I asked.

“Your dad might have invented it.”

I breathed out slowly. “He told me that he loves me.”

“He does love you.”

“I know. But it’s not like him to say it.” I hesitated a moment. “He’s planning on dying.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“Yes, I can. It’s like you said. He’s planful.”

There was a long pause, then she said, “What can I do for you?”

“Just being here is enough.”

“Call if you need anything. I mean it. Call anytime.”

My reply caught in my throat. “Thank you. Good night.”

“Good night, Alan,” she said.

I slowly hung up the phone. Part of me wanted to be back out on the road, where I could hide from this. I tried to watch television, but nothing kept my interest. I went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. Finally, at two in the morning, I surrendered to my insomnia. I turned the light on and opened the family history. It was time to finish reading what my father had written.

VII

A New World

Kate’s death was the most difficult thing I have ever experienced. I felt as if I had been ripped in two. As hard as it was for me, I think it was even worse for Alan. His entire world seemed shattered. He was changed. Once I had to get angry with him to get him to eat because he’d lost so much weight. A couple times I found him crying, once in his closet.

Pretending to live as we had before was like living a lie. It wasn’t long before I came to the conclusion that we needed to make a new life or be consumed by the old one.

A few weeks before I had come to this conclusion, a friend of mine from college had contacted me to tell me he was taking over his father’s auto dealership in Pasadena. He needed someone to handle his accounting. He even offered space in his office where I could start my own CPA firm. At the time I told him I would think it over. Now the idea appealed to me.

One of Kate’s neighborhood friends took Alan in while I flew to California. I found us a little home on Altura Street in Arcadia, just east of Pasadena. I met one of the neighbors, a recently divorced man with a girl who was Alan’s age. He told me that the area was a good place to raise a family. I put an offer down on the home, then came back and told Alan that we were going to move. He didn’t seem any more upset than he already was, which I took as a good sign.

We moved just five weeks later. While uprooting our lives was difficult at first, the change turned out to be good for Alan, as it kept him occupied. Not long after our move he became friends with McKale Richardson, the girl next
door, and from then on he spent most of his time with her. I think she filled a hole his mother left.

VIII

And So It Goes

Five years after Kate’s passing I met a woman named Gretchen O’Connor. She was a saleswoman at the car dealership. I suppose she reminded me of Kate in both looks and personality. Like me, she had lost her spouse to cancer. She had four children, the youngest just eighteen months old. I considered marrying her; we even talked about it, but she was so focused on the circumstances of her own children and their pain that I worried about how much attention and love she could provide Alan. As much as I desired companionship, I decided that she wouldn’t be good for him and I told her that it would be best if we didn’t see each other anymore. Saying goodbye wasn’t easy for either of us, but I have never regretted the decision. My son needed me.

As I read this I felt ashamed. More than once I had criticized him for not finding love again. I had never known, never even really considered, just how much my father had sacrificed for me. He had given up his job and home in Denver, then the chance to marry again. How could I have been so unaware? How could I have been so ungrateful?

Life went on. In January 2001 Alan informed me that he was going to ask McKale to marry him. I thought that they were still a little young to get married, but he was smart and I’m not one to intervene in his choices. She
accepted his proposal, and they were married on October 28, 2001.

Alan was accepted to the Art Center College of Design, and he and McKale moved to an apartment in West Pasadena, near the school. The house was quiet without my son. I was grateful to see them most Sundays, when we gathered for dinner.

Just three weeks after Alan graduated he was offered a job with Conan Cross, a prestigious advertising firm in Seattle. I was pleased that he got the position but upset that he would be living so far away. He did well at the agency and won a wall-full of awards.

Three years later Alan struck out on his own, starting a firm called Madgic. Again, it seemed as if my son could do no wrong. The firm grew by leaps and bounds, and Alan continued to win award after award. He and McKale purchased a large, beautiful home in Bridle Trails, an upscale suburb near Bellevue. Then, on September 8, 2011, McKale was thrown by a horse and broke her back, paralyzing her from the waist down. A month later she died of an infection. During this time Alan’s business partner, whose name does not merit mention here, stole all of his clients, leaving my son bankrupt.

Alan had lost everything a man holds dear: his sweetheart, his home, and his business. The loss of any one of those things has brought lesser men to their destruction, but my son has persevered.

I learned in the jungles of Vietnam that when faced with overwhelming loss and stress, a man must choose to live and find his own way through his broken heart. Alan chose to endure. He decided to walk away from Seattle, Washington, to as far as he could go in the continental
United States—Key West, Florida—the very place our family story began.

As of this writing, Alan has nearly completed his journey. I have no doubt that he will. I don’t know if it was a coincidence that led him to Key West or if maybe he was guided by some ethereal force, but either way, Alan has shown himself to be a man of courage and substance. He is a good man with a good heart—his mother’s heart. It is hard for me to fully express my feelings to him, but I love him more than I could ever say. I am honored to be his father.

My father’s writing ended there. I turned the page. There was a note in an unsealed envelope taped to the inside back of the binder. I extracted the paper from the envelope. The note was handwritten in my father’s disciplined script.

My dear son,

This brings our family history to the present. The rest of the story is yours to complete. You are the last leaf on this branch of the Christoffersen family tree. Whether your leaf turns into another branch, or even another tree, is up to you and God. Should you choose to continue our family name, then this book will contain your story and your children’s and grandchildren’s stories as well. Your experiences on your walk will be a great addition to our family history and will inspire all who read it.

I have compiled this history so that someday, after I’m gone, you will know who you are and where you belong. Always remember that you are not alone. I may not have always said it, but I always tried to show you that I love
you. I am proud to be your father. Always remember this, my son, and Godspeed, until you have finished your walk to Key West and your even greater journey after.

I finally understood. My father hadn’t written our family history for himself. He’d written it for me. Only for me. He knew that someday he’d be gone and I would be completely alone. He was giving me a harbor from the squalls of time; he was giving me a place to belong.

I brought the book with me to the hospital the next morning. There was so much I wanted and needed to say to my father. Most of all, I wanted to thank him for all he had done for me. For all the sacrifices he had made for me.

When I arrived he was still asleep. I sat down next to his bed and looked at him, my heart full of emotion. Now I knew the Great and Powerful Oz was not an illusion. The man behind the curtain was far greater than the contrived illusion of my flawed childhood perspective. What would I say to him? I sat there for nearly two hours listening to his heavy breathing, worrying about what to say. I never got the chance.

Suddenly my father’s breathing stopped, then he groaned. His eyes opened wide and he looked over at me. “Al . . .”

“Dad?”

He clutched his chest and grimaced. Perspiration beaded on the side of his face. An alarm went off.

“Dad, what’s wrong?”

“Alan,” he said. Another alarm went off.

I jumped up. “I’ll get help.” I ran out of the room. A nurse was already hurrying toward us. “I think my father’s having another heart attack,” I said.

The nurse ran into the room. She looked at my father, then shouted out the doorway to the woman sitting at
the nurses’ station. “I need some help in here. Get me an EKG and page the doctor.”

I put my hand on my father’s shoulder. He was clutching his chest and breathing heavily. Suddenly he went limp. “Dad, stay with me.”

The nurse tilted my father’s head back, then put two fingers to his wrist. “Mr. Christoffersen? He isn’t breathing. Code blue!” She pushed a button on the wall next to the bed, then turned to me. “Stand back, please.” She lowered the side bar of the hospital bed and began performing chest compressions.

I heard a voice over the intercom. “Code blue, second floor, room B237.”

Two more women ran into the room, one pushing a cart packed with medical equipment. They rolled my father onto his side and placed a board under him. The nurse continued doing chest compressions.

The room exploded with action as more people began rushing in. One nurse put a mask over my father’s nose and mouth while another placed pads on his chest.

I stepped back toward the corner of the room, my eyes riveted on my father. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“He’s gone into cardiac arrest,” the first nurse said.

Just then Dr. Witt hurried in. He looked at the monitor on the cart and began directing the rest of the team. “Give him one milligram of epinephrine,” he said.

A nurse inserted a syringe into my father’s IV. “One milligram of epinephrine in.”

“Pause the compressions,” Dr. Witt said. He studied the screen for a moment. “Start again. We have a shockable rhythm. Let’s prime one more minute and then we’ll start. Two hundred joules.” The defibrillator made a high-pitched noise as it charged up.

“Clear.”

My father’s body heaved.

“Two hundred joules delivered,” said the nurse.

“Continue CPR for two minutes, then check for a pulse,” Dr. Witt said.

“No pulse,” the nurse said.

“Again,” Dr. Witt said.

Again my father’s body jumped.

An alarm went off. They repeated the cycle many more times, but my father showed no response.

After what felt like hours, the doctor turned to me. “I’m sorry.” He said to the nurse, “Stop the compressions. I’m calling it.” He looked at the clock. “Time of death is eight fifty-three.”

One of the nurses walked to the machine and pushed some buttons. The room suddenly became quiet. Dr. Witt turned back to me. “Alan, I’m sorry. We did everything we could, but your father is dead.”

Even though I had witnessed the entire scene, the pronouncement still, somehow, came as a shock. I walked to the side of the bed, and the nurses stepped aside, allowing me to take my father’s hand and feel the last of his warmth. I leaned over him and kissed his forehead. Already the heat was leaving his body. The difference just a few seconds of life make—just a few breaths make. I felt cheated. I still had things I wanted to tell him. There was gratitude left unexpressed. I knelt down next to his bed and wept.