My father was in the next room, half of him totally lifeless. My dad had been out on a gorgeous day last May washing his newest Mustang addition in the spring sun. When the hospital called and a soft-spoken nurse uttered the word, “stroke,” I fumbled for my large keychain in confusion. My dad was healthy and strong. I had never even seen the man down with a common cold; he couldn’t have had a stroke. Men like my dad don’t have strokes; they’re too stubborn to be anything but fine.
My hands began to make their way around the room, shaking and searching for clean clothes, or any clothes in my mess of a home. I had a studio apartment often filled with Boone’s Farm wine bottles and men whose eyes had met mine as they sang of making love on stage at the downtown pub. I was currently failing miserably as a writer and as a human being. Kate and my father had said once they didn’t understand what path I was trotting down or if I was on any sort of path at all. I wasn’t all that sure either.
Rushing without concern, my elbow bumped the yellow nightstand I had snagged at the old flea market to hold photo frames split between me and my father’s house after the accident. I reached down to shuffle the shards of glass underneath my bed, cutting my index finger on the edge of a gold-rimmed frame. I turned it over and bit my lip at the characters grinning within its borders. It was my father and older sister, Kate. My father was proud. He was proud of Kate.
My father was not a man of many words. The most noise I had ever heard him make was when I lied awake in bed at night when he thought I was asleep. He would slouch back into that tattered green sofa after a long bike ride in the Arkansas sun, pop a can of orange soda and turn on the Bulls.
I knew the tune to which all the basketball players trotted into far too well. The tune would play and then the dramatic, booming voice of the announcer would radiate the stadium with the name, “MMMIICCCHHHAAAEEELLL JJOORRDDAANNN!!!”
I didn’t know the weight of the name or the rules of the game, I just knew it made my father catapult from the cushions, landing on hands and knees, knuckling and fisting our blue carpet.
Hoops were everything. If he wasn’t watching the Bulls play it on the television he was peering at my tomboy sister through the living room blinds as she practiced ball on the driveway.
“Come on kid, get in the car.”
We were in my father’s mustang. Most of what I remember of my father is inside a mustang. I’m sure he often coaxed my mother, trying to tell her “Mustang” would be a fine name for a girl. Something made him a different man when he situated his tall frame behind the leather wheel. Maybe it was the sound the engine made, destroying every other noise but the vibrations of the freeway slipping through his cracked window. Maybe it was getting to sing under his breath as me and my sister Kate belted to the air as the wind slapped our hair all around the backseat.
Kate was older than me. She was built to punch someone’s lights out and her freckles contrasted her pale skin, like a dark spot on a cat scan. You couldn’t stop noticing them. Her bangs were cut straight across her forehead with one huge snip, often sticking to it when she ran to and fro on the court.
We were on our way to Kate’s basketball practice. Kate could somehow manage to do anything athletic. If you gave her a ball, she could kick it, toss it, throw it, whatever else you commanded her to. I wouldn’t know anything about any of it. I was too busy spending my time trying to get my flimsy Barbie kite half a foot off the red southern soil and fishing doll limbs from the toilet. Another one of Kate’s many talents was managing to shove three entire Barbie dolls down one commode.
I would watch my father’s eyes scream with pride as her pre-maturely developed legs jumped into a lay-up. He would clap and chew his gum to tiny, tasteless fragments. He didn’t notice much else when Kate was near him. If you had cut the man open then, I am sure Kate would have been at the center of him. What man needs a son when he’s got Kate? Cut-off jean shorts wearing, careless hair, lay-up Goddess, Kate. He studied her like I studied them as they would piece together some gadget or when they built Lego cities that towered over the linoleum kitchen floor.
I’m unsure which was more disappointing to him, me not being able to do a layup or failing to drive a stick shift. Kate did both with ease. They shared a love of pressing in a clutch too hard and the sound of Billy Joel banging on some piano.
“Hey, Kate?” I had once asked into the dark bedroom we shared and into the shadows of dressers and lamps.
“What?”
“Why does dad like you so much? I mean, is it because you can shoot hoops?”
“Iono Bronwyn, why? He likes you too, you know. You’re just, not like us. Watching you play dress up isn’t as much fun as watching someone play hoops is all. I mean, you get it.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
The disappointment escaped my lungs like a popped balloon. That was the last time I asked why my father didn’t look at me the same as he did Kate. I stopped trying to play hoops. I stopped trying to push my short, stubby leg far enough to reach that piece of shit clutch. I stopped trying to understand the melody of Billy Joel, or why my dad thought his tune was so magical. I moved on to throwing myself onto any man that made me feel seen and Kate moved on too. She gave up hoops when her growth spurt ended in ninth grade and took on book smarts, excelling there just as well.
She became a medical student in Boston, a wife of a doctor and mother of twin boys that liked to throw their cheerios into her hair. Her phone calls were as frequent as a lunar eclipse and the last time Arkansas had seen her face, Clinton was stammering about affairs in a nice black suit.
My lip quivered as my fingers touched my sister’s young, smiling face in the photo, beaming next to my healthy, vibrant, full-bearded father. I shoved it under my mattress, hoping the guilt of seeing Kate’s face would dissipate into the threads of the sheets.
I continued to clean up the brokenness on my apartment floor, droplets of blood getting all over the old photographs. I placed them in a pile on top of my bed and grabbed the last one as I rose to my feet.
I was in the driver’s seat, my sister in the front and her cheerio-throwing twins in the back. It was taken the last time we were all in the presence of my father, smiling. I was taking her to the airport to return to her new life in Boston. The picture didn’t do the day’s weather justice. You couldn’t’ see the ice that was an inch thick or the limited driving vision. You couldn’t see the swerving semi-truck or the look on my sister’s pale face as the twins screamed for their mother. You couldn’t see the cracks in the windshield or the ambulances. All the picture showed was the last time my father saw Kate she was in the passenger seat and I was in the driver’s seat. That had been all that mattered. No explanation or amount of accident scene statistics made any difference to my father when Kate was laying still in her favorite black dress.
I threw the photograph in the trash and continued to pace around the cement apartment floor, packing. The last time I had seen my father he was in his only black suit. They had to remove him from the side of the casket. He was weeping bitterly and had pushed my hand away as I tried to comfort him. We were estranged, but he was my father. I was his daughter. I was going to get him. It’s what you do.
I rode the hospital elevator, being directed by a cold looking nurse and found him in a white-washed room with bad television and his far off stare met my form as it leaned on the doorway. Tubes hung as lifelessly from his nose as the starved plants in my cracked windowsill. I called his name as I crossed the tile floor, but no notice was given, no turn of the head or flutter of the lashes. That was my father now; a far off stare, a drip of drool on the chin. There was nothing to do but to bring him to my childhood home, a place of emptiness and pain; a place my father refused to leave despite it’s caved in ceiling and deteriorating stature. That’s the house Kate had last slept in. He wouldn’t leave it.
“Dad, you have to eat. Look, it’s your favorite. Come on, I know you’re hungry. Just eat for me, okay?”
My sorry attempts of pushing the plate of food far enough to convince him to even look in my direction sat stale and useless. I thought of bringing up the old photo frames I had went through a couple weeks back before bringing him back home. I re-coiled the idea as quickly as it had sprung from my mind. Bringing up Kate would be pointless and painful. She wasn’t there. Nobody was. It was just me and my father, left to unsaid conversations. He wouldn’t look my way as I tucked him in at night or when I struggled to lift his weak body into the porcelain tub.
I tried my best to keep him in his normal daily routine, as normal as possible now that he was unable to even walk himself to the mailbox to get the afternoon junk mail. My hundred pound stature pushed his wheelchair to the barn-shaped mailbox Kate and me had painted the summer of 97’.
I fumbled through the mail as dad stared off somewhere at the onion grass growing up to our ankles.
“Junk mail, junk mail, junk mail. Yeah, I know. I really need to get the mower out here. I’ll call him, okay?”
Nothing.
Not even his brow moved in recognition of someone conversing near him. I was angry at him. I was angry that he didn’t acknowledge me when I made him lunch, that he didn’t look at me when I tried to talk to him about Gunsmoke, that he didn’t bat an eyelid in my general direction when I strained to push his wheelchair up and down the driveway every afternoon at three.
“What, dad? What? What do you want? What can I possibly do to make you see me; that I’m trying to help you? Do you even want help? Or is it that you’re not getting help from the person you want? You want Kate-is that what all this is? Well I’m sorry dad but Kate isn’t here and she’s not going to be here. She’s dead. And you act like we died with her! But I’m still here! I’m it! I’m all you’ve got! Say something. Do something. Just look at me for once!”
Nothing.
I walked into the grass off the driveway and kicked the tattered basketball still lying there, left by Kate I’m sure before she left for college. It was worn by the elements from being exposed and handling by her hands for hours of practice in that driveway.
I kicked the ball into the wire fence and let it roll violently back to me and I kicked it again. And again, while my father stared at the onion grass. I bent over, letting my small hands grab the old ball and walked back over to the driveway where the rusted hoop stood, disappointed by lack of use. I fumbled out a dribble and threw the ball shabbily at the threadbare net.
I missed. I shot and I missed. I shot and I missed.
I looked over during my frenzied hysterics and saw my father looking at me. Right at me. I couldn’t tell at the moment what emotion was written all over his face, but it looked like merriment. Trying not to draw much attention to the fact that I had noticed him looking at me for the first time since I was a curly-haired kid, I picked up the ball and kept shooting.
The sun was hot and beads of sweat were causing my forehead curls to form a crown around my ears, but I couldn’t stop shooting. His gaze hadn’t left my torso since the first time the ball had grazed the net. I had my father’s attention. My arms were growing distressed, but I thought it worth it to shoot a few more until my body toppled over.
I let out one last endeavor, knowing the ball would fall miserably back onto the grass I turned back towards my father to wheel him back indoors for his afternoon westerns. I looked at him one last time before making my way towards the back of the chair. I caught his gaze and my jaded body stilled in front of him. The half of his face that could still take any sort of shape looked contrastive to before. His mouth was arched towards the Arkansan sun and a tear bead made its way down the crevices of his cockled cheek.
I picked up the torn ball and went to lay it onto his lap. As my hands began to leave the ball, setting his hand on top so that it might not roll off of him, his fingers made their way on top of mine and the ball. The tear beads fell onto the orange leather and discolored the surface as it rolled down to the edge and eventually fell somewhere I could no longer follow. His eyes looked at the ball and then to me.
I picked it back up and began to shoot again despite my Ramones shirt stubbornly sticking to my backside. With each swoosh I pumped my fist into the air and dad’s crooked smile cracked open. I don’t know how long our shadows idled together under the net or if I made one shot. I do know he didn’t notice much else as I played hoops in the driveway that summer afternoon. I’ll never be sure, but I think if you would have cut him open that day, there I’d be.
