We'll Always Have Paris (24 page)

Rita sat beside him and smiled. “Mama said he rose from the dead, which is probably why she always treated him like the Messiah.”

My father put his hand over Rita’s and squeezed it. “I figure I got a pretty good deal for someone who wasn’t supposed to live a single day. I really have nothing to complain about.”

Nothing
to
complain
about?
I thought silently. I realized that my father was trying to keep a positive attitude, but the comment jabbed nonetheless. I had plenty to complain about in losing my father. I smiled tightly, ignoring the mix of emotions linked with knowing my father chose a short life with his addiction over a longer one with me.

“Your father has the most wonderful outlook, doesn’t he, JJ?” Aunt Rita waited for a response then asked again. “Doesn’t he?

“Yeah,” I responded. “It’s really amazing.”

Our lies became my father’s palliative care.

***

Eighteen months, six doctors, and countless tests passed before Katie started predicting her seizures, or
seashores
as she pronounced them.

“Before she has them?” her neurologist yelped. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

“She’s two-and-a-half years old, Doctor. None of this is supposed to happen,” I said.

He suggested one more round of tests in which he would glue electrodes to Katie’s head and attach the wires to a machine that would monitor her brain activity. We had done this test before, but only in three-hour stints. This time, the doctor wanted to keep Katie overnight at the hospital and videotape her for twelve hours.

The nurses at the hospital were surprised when I climbed into the five-foot crib with Katie but didn’t argue. I watched Katie sleep with a turban of gauze bandages wrapped around her head and searched for words as I prayed awkwardly. Being agnostic is the worst. My Grandma Aggie was absolutely positive that when she died, she would be with Jesus. She had no doubt. William is equally sure that once he dies, that’s the end of the road. I yearned for the comfort of certainty.

In the hospital crib, I watched Katie sleeping beside me. Her toddler cheeks were chubby, and her eyes delicate slits. Katie’s little gumdrop mouth moved rhythmically as if she were nursing. Her little toes looked like rows of corn kernels.

“Let Katie be healthy and I will never, ever wish for another thing as long as I live,” I whispered.

The next morning, Katie told me she wanted to watch her
seashore
, so we agreed that the next time she felt one coming, she’d let me know and I’d take her to a mirror. When she sounded the alarm, I raced to get her to a full-length mirror just in the nick of time. She had her usual series of a half-dozen short seizures, all the while standing upright and watching herself in the mirror.

When she finished, she looked at me and said plainly, “I done with
seashores
.” And she was.

Three neurologists agreed that Katie was absolutely experiencing seizures, yet they defied many of the typical characteristics like loss of consciousness. Her primary pediatric neurologist had never seen a patient predict her own seizures, though it was undeniable that her body involuntarily stiffened and shook during these episodes. The doctor’s final diagnosis was that this case was “really weird.”

Days later, I told William I made a deal with God at the hospital. I’d woken up in the middle of the night to the humming of medical equipment. Drunk on grief and sleep-deprived, I begged to exchange fates with my daughter and die in her place. “So I’m definitely going young now,” I told William.

“You’ve been saying that since we met,” he reminded me.

“But now I’ve sealed the deal,” I said. “I want Katie to be okay, but I’m going to miss you guys so much,” I said, tears rolling down my face.

“Don’t you think every parent who’s had a sick child tried to make the exact same deal?” William said softly. “If there was a God, would he really choose
us
for a miracle? No, he’d pick true believers so they could spread the good word.” He placed his arm around me. “There’s no deal. This is very old baggage you’re carrying around.”

I blew my nose. “Promise?”

“Listen, if you ever make another bargain like this, offer up my life, will you?”

“You are such a good person, William.”

“It has nothing to do with being good,” he said. “Offer me up, and I won’t give it a second thought. You can rest easy.”

I smiled.

William said gently, “Be thankful, we got lucky.”

***

After a loud first night in Barcelona—doors slamming, shouting voices—I decided to let Katie sleep in. Thankfully, she was able to snooze through the morning cannon fire.

I went downstairs to the breakfast buffet and smuggled a few pastries for Katie. I left them on her night table with a note letting her know I’d return in an hour, certain she wouldn’t be disappointed about missing my trip to the Laundromat.

With my map in hand, I walked through the Cathedral Plaza on my way to the Laundromat near the waterfront. A four-man band played “Maple Leaf Rag” near the church steps. I stopped, breathing in the freedom of having no pressing plans for the morning. On a whim, I could decide to sit on my laundry sack, grab a waffle, and listen to piano music that made me feel as if I were in a silent movie.

I sat across from the cathedral and watched people pass through the plaza. College students with heavy backpacks trekked by. Couples ambled hand-in-hand past the church, gazing at its perfectly symmetrical spires and arches pointing toward the heavens. A woman holding a small Union Jack flag overhead herded a tour group of a dozen middle-aged women.

Soon, street vendors began setting up tents and displaying their treasures. As the ragtime band continued playing, I fingered through faded Spanish comic books, loose chandelier pieces, and vinyl records. An older woman sold dishes and teacups; a man with a barber handle mustache displayed a glass case filled with vintage jewelry. A father and son stood behind a table offering sports memorabilia from European teams who played in the sixties and seventies.

When I arrived at the Laundromat, the attendant asked if she should separate my whites from colors or just toss everything in together. I smiled, remembering William and my early days together. “
Solo
uno
,” I said. “Let’s see what happens.”

***

William and I started playing house very quickly in our relationship. I was twenty-four and he was thirty. I was done with the club scene and William had never started it. Spending a Saturday night doing laundry and watching a video sounded positively romantic. He cooked dinner and I washed the dishes. All the while, we never ran out of things to talk about.

On that first night of domesticity, William took note of the fact that I was tossing all of my laundry into one machine. “Don’t you separate your whites?”

“Meh,” I said. “Seems like a hassle.”

“A hassle?” he said, looking at me as though I told him I never bothered brushing my teeth. “How do you keep the colors from running?”

“I don’t care, they can run,” I replied. “Life is short; let the colors run if they want.”

He tilted his head. “But your underwear…” he said, drifting off. “And your socks. They’re going to turn blue if you toss in that Michigan sweatshirt.”

“William, I think you should know right now, I have many neuroses, but this is not one of them. I don’t care if my panties turn blue, and if you do, maybe you’ll have to be that amazing husband who’s in charge of laundry.”

Oh
my
God, did I just say that aloud?
I thought.
Who
talks
about
marriage
four
weeks
into
a
relationship?

But he was the one and I knew it almost immediately. My father once advised me to marry a man like his sister Rita’s husband, Arnold. He said, “I’m a good father, but a shitty husband.” I laughed silently because this was exactly the same advice my mother gave me, almost word for word.

William was a modern version of Uncle Arnold. He possessed a nice blend of integrity and acceptance. I needed both empathy and understanding and he had it in spades.

I poured a bit too much Tide into the washing machine to avoid looking up at William.

“Looks like I’ll have to be,” he said. “You’re using a gallon of detergent there.” He paused for a moment.
Here
it
comes: the part where he tells me that it’s been really fun doing our laundry, but he’s really not looking for a commitment.

“I hate to ask you this, Jen,” he began tentatively.

Here
we
go.

He scrunched his face. “Have you ever done laundry before?”

In the weeks that followed, I discovered that William was unusually insightful. He came from a family of anthropologists and was a source of boundless information about other cultures. Nothing struck him as weird; it was simply the custom of a people he had not yet studied. This would come in handy when I introduced him to my family.

We started house-hunting one week after our first batch of laundry and closed escrow on our tiny cottage on our eight-week anniversary. We moved in to our new home on Thanksgiving Day and, after a full day of hauling furniture from truck to house, shared the turkey special at a diner. William wiped a bit of gravy from his mouth. “I know I’ll meet your mother when she comes to San Diego for Christmas, but when do I meet your father?”

I felt as though I dropped my fork, but when I looked at my hand, I was still holding it. “What?” I asked.

“When do I get to meet the famous Shelly Coburn?”

It was as though our waitress set down a huge platter of uncomfortable silence. “Why would you say something like that?” I finally asked.

“Because I want to meet him and, you know, talk to him about you and me,” William said.

“My father is dead.”

William looked shocked, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. “When did he die?”

“Five years ago.”

“Five
years
ago? I thought…” he drifted. “You always talk about him in the present tense. I had no idea.”

“No, I don’t. I talk about him in the past tense.”

“You don’t. My sister asked when I was going to meet him,” William said. “She told me I’d better make a good impression because he was obviously very important to you. You talk about Shelly as if he’s alive.”

“Well, he’s not,” I said, looking intently at the sliced carrots on my plate. “You’re never going to meet him.” My eyes welled so I bit my lip, my trigger to stop tears.

I liked that William wasn’t uncomfortable with my pain. He didn’t frantically tell me it was okay because he understood that it was not. He didn’t slather on the platitudes like so many other well-meaning people did. I knew they were trying to be kind when people told me that my father was in a better place or that I was lucky to have him while I did, but it always felt like a conversational pivot, a desperate attempt to change the topic to anything other than death.

I blew my nose in the paper napkin. “I’m not supposed to cry.”

“Why not?”

“I should remember the better days,” I sniffed.

“Can’t you do both?” William asked.

As his words sank in, I shed my first tears over my father’s death. “Why now?” William asked with the curiosity of a therapist.

“I don’t know,” I replied, hearing the clanking of silverware at another table. “I just never could until now.”

***

Returning from the Laundromat in Barcelona, I decided to walk down to the waterfront, which was marked with a large, colorful ceramic sculpture by Roy Lichtenstein. The piece had the same comic book style as his well-known lithographs of kissing couples and tearful women. But the Barcelona Face was abstract, difficult to decipher. With red polka dots covering most of the surface, the sculpture is all primary colors, a splash of blue and a stroke of red that perhaps represent eyes and a mouth. Bright yellow caps the piece; the same sunny shade curves beneath the face.

Heading back to the hotel, I explored the winding stone streets of the Gothic Quarter. Elegantly chiseled historic buildings housed soap shops; chocolate boutiques lined the narrow streets. An itinerant musician played his flute in a small doorway.

In love with Barcelona, I floated through the streets, emerging into the bright plaza, then back to the hotel where Katie was still asleep.

I went downstairs to the lobby to access their Wi-Fi and noticed a man sitting in his chair, his eyes darting from the elevators to the stairs. A teen girl trotted down to him.

“Finally!” he huffed in an American accent.

“Mom said she still needs to dry her hair and Missy hasn’t showered yet,” the girl told him.

“How much longer?”

“About an hour,” she said.

“An hour?” he barked. “We’re in Barcelona. I don’t want to sit in a hotel lobby all day; I want to see the goddamn city.”

His daughter shrugged and told him not to shoot the messenger then disappeared back upstairs.

I wanted to whisper to him the secret that I had just discovered: he can leave. I wanted to tell him that a block away was a place where he could sit at a table on the sidewalk and drink muddy hot chocolate with a sugary churro stick. In my fantasy life, I lean in and share this with the fellow traveler. In reality, though, he was a stern dad, the one who could break up a good time just by entering the room, so I kept my nose down and checked Facebook.

That afternoon, Katie and I stood in line to enter Sagrada Familia, the unfinished sandcastle church designed by Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí. Our necks bent back like Pez dispensers as we looked at the structure, the quirkiest cathedral I had ever seen. It looked as though a child dripped soaking wet sand to create something that was at once elegant and spooky.

The outside of Sagrada Familia was adorned with multiple sides of meticulously sculpted Biblical characters. The inside was a study in mastering the use of natural light. Windows were perfectly placed to create the sense that God himself was reaching down from heaven through the ceiling of this church. Long streaks of light broke through the ceiling windows and spread like spotlights on a stage.