Mark would throw stuff out, then drive in his father’s eighteen-year-old Toyota station wagon to visit him at the nursing home. He’d be sitting in his wheelchair in his double room, with his tray of half-eaten food, his juice or coffee mixed with a gellifier so that he wouldn’t aspirate it, looking with emptied wonder at the air in front of his frozen face. “Hey,” he’d say to Mark. Was he trying to smile? Mark would sit with him, utter comments on the fleeting images on the TV that was always on, pull the child’s crossword out from under the lunch tray. “How’s this one going, Dad? Let’s see, five across, man’s best friend, three letters, what do you think?”
His lower lip would work, his pale gray eyes hold fast on Mark’s face. “Damned if I know.” He’d try to laugh. “My mind is going; I don’t remember things the way I used to.”
When Mark got up to leave, his father’s face, in spite of the Parkinsonian mask, would somehow express, it would positively radiate, a look of bleak abandonment. The last time Mark saw him conscious, there was something (he would swear in retrospect) especially horrified in that parting look, as though his father were seeing deeper than ever before into the abyss. Not seeming to see Mark, nor anything in the room, he said slowly and distinctly, like a blind oracle, “What a way to go.”
Mark drove back to the house, to clear out more of his crap. In the glove compartment of the old Toyota he found a notebook his father had started when he first bought the car, to check how the mileage claimed by the dealer compared to the actual mileage. Other people might do this, with one column recording odometer readings and another the number of gallons of gasoline consumed, but what made his father unusual was that once he’d started it, he couldn’t stop. The list went on for fifteen years. In the back of the notebook he’d created scatter plots with lines of best fit: fuel consumption by car’s age, mileage by year.
More than the rest of the house, the basement, now empty, looks different. The concrete walls and floor are shoddy and cold. Hard to imagine that a man lived most of his real life down here, perhaps found his only happiness down here. Mark slips through the narrow door into the windowless box where his father listened to his music, paid his bills, thought his thoughts. He was in high school before he finally noticed that it must have been originally designed as a fallout shelter. (His sister’s voice: Dumbass!) There is no ceiling light, so the room is almost pitch dark.
When Mark cleared out the desk in here he found, beneath road maps and instruction manuals going back forty years, every birthday and Father’s Day card his father had ever received from his children and his wife. He also found, folded, a sheet of paper with lines in his father’s handwriting from a poem by Robert Frost called “Revelation.”
We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.
Mark stands motionless for a long minute. The room surrounds him with that uncanny silent hum of small enclosed spaces. The Holy of Holies. Maybe once a year he could ritually purify himself, enter this darkness, and query, “Dad?”
Heading back through the main basement to the stairs, he notices still chalked on the wall:
Susan—4
me—116
He turns out the lights as he ascends, floor to floor. Brushes his teeth in the upstairs bathroom, crawls into his sleeping bag on his old bedroom floor. He’s not bathed in moonlight. The moon is low in the west, hidden by the house next door.
Sleep won’t come.
His memories of this room from his childhood are overlaid with those of the years after his mother took it over. (I lost my sweetheart, his father cried. The same words, every time.) Scores of his mother’s mystery novels filled bookcases along every wall. One entire case was devoted to mysteries involving cats, including ones purporting to have been written by a cat. Mark noted that other than Dick Francis, all the authors were women.
Here he helped his mother dress, while she apologized for subjecting his eyes to her “disgusting body.” Here he sneakily deposited deodorant on the inside armpits of her shirts when she was refusing to bathe. Here she told him that the next-door neighbor, Jim, was coming into the house at night to steal her cigarettes, and to sabotage the coffee machine so that she wouldn’t know how to operate it.
On one visit he discovered a framed photo on her dresser that he’d never seen before, the head and shoulders of an attractive dark-haired woman in a tweed coat from (perhaps) the 1950s. It was the only photo in the room.
“Mom, who’s this?”
“That’s someone I used to be pen pals with, I can’t remember her name. Isn’t she pretty?”
“Yes, where’d you find it?”
“It’s always been there.”
A few months later he asked, “Mom, who’s this woman, again?”
“That’s no one. I just like the picture.”
When he moved her into the hospice, he brought along the photo, and set it up on her bedside table next to photos of Susan, himself, his father. He sat near her and read about the Allied bombing of Germany, watched her drift in and out of sleep with her finger in Ruffian. During the long hours he would often gaze at the woman in the photograph and wonder who she was. His parents had never talked much about their pasts, and now he realized there were many things he would never know.
His mother’s last day was in mid-May. A saucer magnolia was in full spectacular bloom outside her window. He tried to direct her attention to it,
