I Was There the Night He Died Read online

  “I didn’t think it was any of my business. And I didn’t think it was the kind of thing you’d want to talk about.”

  “You’re right. It isn’t. And I wouldn’t want to. But you should have asked me anyway. It would have shown you cared. About me. Or were at least interested in me. Interested in who I was.”

  “By asking you about something you wouldn’t have wanted to talk about.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I think I just figured out why things didn’t work out between us,” I say.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Not because I’m selfish. Because I’m stupid.”

  Rachel laughs. Stands up and pulls on her coat. “Sam, I really am glad we got to hook up like we did. It’s been an education.”

  I follow her lead and put on my jacket too. “Coming from a teacher, that can’t be a bad thing.”

  Rachel is going to drive home, I’m going to walk—it really is a beautiful day—and we’ve hugged and promised to not let twenty-five years go by before the next time we talk. She gets into her car.

  “And good luck with keeping CCI open,” I say through the open window. “For what that’s worth.”

  Rachel turns her key and the BMW roars to life. “Didn’t I tell you?” she says. “We found out yesterday we lost. For good. It’s closing for sure after this school year is done.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I know how much work you put into it.”

  Rachel shrugs, slips on her black Ray-Bans. “To tell you the truth, I’m actually sort of relieved. All the time I spent at meetings and getting petitions signed and all the rest of it, I’m excited to move on to what’s next.”

  “And what’s that?” I say. “What’s next for Rachel Turnbal?”

  “I don’t know. I guess that’s why it’s exciting.”

  * * *

  When I’m not at Thames View or writing, I sit in the park, I stand on the porch, I look out my front window. The nurses work to get Dad’s fever and blood pressure down, only to watch them rise right back up, and Samantha has become invisible, no coincidence there, I’m sure. It’s almost April—how the hell did that happen?—and some days I can get away with going outside in just a sweater. Today is one of them. I’m taking a break from working on the last chapter of my book; take my Mountain Dew to the window and look for someone who I know isn’t there.

  Who is here is the fat man on his mini-bike celebrating the increasingly fine weather by puttering around in grey track pants and a flowing white T-shirt, the slabs of his seat-bisecting ass slopping over each side. Thank you, spring.

  And of course his fat wife is filming every momentous instant of his motorized exploits with her camera. Except that now, even though she’s got her back to me, I can tell she’s not fat anymore. And when the bike putt-putts past her and she turns around in the street to admire her darling’s daring departure, the ten pounds she’d shed over the winter are hanging in a sling around her neck, the kid fat-cheeked just like his or her dad, but in a good way, a healthy baby way.

  I step out onto the porch. It’s almost warm. I’ve been inside all day, otherwise I might have known.

  Chapter Thirteen

  This time the voice on the phone doesn’t reassure me that there’s nothing to be unduly concerned about, just says I should come to Thames View as soon as possible, that my father’s condition had worsened during the night. The time display on my cell phone says 1:12 am. No one ever heard their phone ring at 1:12 am and wondered if it was good news.

  I call Uncle Donny for a ride while I pull on my pants, but there’s no answer, he and my parents the last people on planet earth not to have an answering machine or voicemail. Thames View would have notified him as well, so he’s probably slept through the phone call. Typical Uncle Donny. I call a cab and stand on the porch in the dark and wait.

  The ride over gives me plenty of time to imagine what to expect, but an empty bed and a dim, nightlight-lit silent ward wasn’t one of them. I jog to reception where a skinny kid with faux-nerdy black framed-glasses and an alabaster complexion and a patchy red beard is holding a Japanese comic book six inches from his face.

  “My father’s not there,” I say even before I stop running. “He’s not in his bed.”

  The boy places his book face down on the counter top. “You must be Mr. Samson,” he says.

  I always think of that same stupid joke: Mr. Samson’s my father, you can call me Sam. “Yeah,” I say.

  “No worries,” he says. “Just take the elevator to the fifth floor and follow the sign to the intensive care unit. Mr. Samson—your father Mr. Samson—was moved there about an hour ago.”

  The miniature simulated waterfall near the elevator reuses its own dirty water to glug away serenely while I wait. No worries. Get back to me in another twenty years, Poindexter, then tell me No worries.

  Thames View has its own topside state-of-the-art care facilities as well as private and semi-private rooms, but I don’t need to ask the nurse at reception which room Dad is in, simply follow the sound of Frank Sinatra’s voice. Uncle Donny must have had his ringer off when I called; he must have been here with Dad all along.

  I don’t say anything upon entering, just nod at the doctor and the nurse on either side of Dad’s bed. The nurse is adjusting the line running from his left arm to the drip stand. The doctor is looking down at him like a parent watching a sick child sleep. Uncle Donny gets up from the chair by the window. The blinds are drawn and his boom box is perched on the window sill. When he doesn’t speak, just comes and stands beside me, I know what I need to know.

  The doctor fills in the details: probably a stroke in his sleep (without an MRI, Dad’s essentially comatose condition makes an exact diagnosis difficult), likely sometime around midnight, system rapidly shutting down, heavily medicated and not in any pain; probably today or tomorrow at the latest.

  “What’s with the music, then?” I say.

  The doctor’s eyes meet Uncle Donny’s; the doctor returns his attention to my father, says something to the nurse about the line.

  “I don’t care,” Uncle Donny says. “He always loved these guys and he should be able to listen to them and enjoy them even if he can’t tell us in so many words that that’s what he wants. And I turned it down low like I was asked to—it’s not going to bother anybody.”

  To the doctor, “It can’t hurt, right?” I say.

  The doctor puts his stethoscope to Dad’s chest. “It can’t hurt.”

  The doctor and the nurse come and go, Uncle Donny and I stay where we are. We listen to the Rat Pack live from the Sands in Las Vegas and watch Dad breathe. In a way, he looks better—calmer—than before the stroke. But, then, autumn leaves look most alive just before they fall. This isn’t a metaphor, this is just the way that leaves are.

  John F. Kennedy is in the Sands audience, and Sinatra introduces him from the stage. “What did you say his name was?” Dean Martin says. After Sammy Davis comes out to join them, Dean picks him up and holds him out to Frank. “Here,” he says. “This award just came for you from the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.”

  Dad didn’t like, Dad didn’t dislike the Rat Pack—he listened to them because Uncle Donny liked listening to them. Uncle Donny wouldn’t know what you were talking about if you tried to explain this to him, but I think he knows it. I think he knows it right now.

  Uncle Donny stays with Dad while I go to get coffee from the machine in the lounge. I was never afraid of doctor’s offices or hospitals, just don’t like them because it’s all so boring: the endless waiting, the cranky secretary’s suspicion that you’re wasting everyone’s time, the doctors only guessing, after all, what’s really wrong. Sara was the one who always made me go and see someone when I’d usually be quite content just to complain. She was the one who, if we were walking Barney at night and she thought
she detected blood or worse in his crap, would bag it and carry it to the first streetlight and not care who noticed while she carefully checked.

  When I get back to the room, Uncle Donny is sitting on the side of the bed, both hands holding one of Dad’s. I put the coffee down on the side table.

  “He was just like he was,” Uncle Donny says. “Then he opened his mouth and made this sound like he was choking or something, then he stopped before I could get the nurse.”

  I sit down on the other side of the bed. In the movies, you know it’s over when someone gently closes the patient’s eyes, but Dad’s eyes are already shut. Uncle Donny lets go of Dad’s hand and gets up and turns off the CD, is giving me my moment alone with him, I know.

  For a long time I thought Dad was already gone, thought I was already used to him being gone. I thought wrong. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, to say. “What’s the date?”

  “The date today, you mean?” Uncle Donny says.

  “Yeah. What is it?”

  “The second. No, wait. Today is tomorrow now. It’s the third.”

  “Then my dad died the morning of April third.”

  Uncle Donny unplugs his boom box from the outlet, stands up and pulls the blind to the side. “It’s still dark out,” he says. “It’s not morning yet.”

  “Then he died tonight, I guess.”

  “I guess.”

  * * *

  Uncle Donny wanted to drive me home after we were finished at Thames View, but I insisted on walking.

  “It’ll take you forty-five minutes to get there,” he said.

  “Who said I was going home?”

  “Where the hell else would you go?”

  “I’ll talk to you this afternoon,” I said.

  I want to walk because I don’t want to think, and I don’t—not about Dad lying dead back at the hospital anyway, nor about him lying alive but dead in his bed at Thames View for the last how many months—but along the way to nowhere in particular I pass by an orthopedic footwear store that used to be where Lewis’ Variety was, where my dad bought me a paperback copy of Jim Morrison’s biography after I’d had my wisdom teeth removed because he knew I liked the Doors and in which I discovered that you could still be cool and get girls without being a jock. I walk by the St. Clair Grill where he and Mum and I used to go for Friday night dinner sometimes, the first restaurant where I was allowed to order for myself and the first nice restaurant I ever went to, the kind where you ate your cheeseburger deluxe with real silverware and the waitress kept coming back to make sure your water glass was full. I cross the street and pass the boarded-up building that was once the Aberdeen Tavern, where one Friday night in high school Steady Eddie and a bunch of us were coming out the door just as my dad and some guys from work were going in and all he said to me was to make sure that whoever was driving was sober and then he slipped me ten bucks. I cut down Emma Street, the street that was just a dirt road when Mum lived there as a teenager, and remember Dad saying how when they were first dating and he didn’t have a car he’d walk from his house on Park Street to her house and back and that the round trip would take him two and a half hours, and when I asked him why he did it, he said because he’d wanted to see her. I shouldn’t be, I know, but I’m smiling. Then I’m crying. Then I stop crying and am smiling again, and this time it’s okay.

  I don’t know what time it is, I don’t wear a watch—I’ve never understood why anyone would willingly wear that kind of urgent existential update on their arm—but Clem’s Collectibles opens at 9:30 am and the C’MON IN WE’RE OPEN sign has been flipped over and CFCO is playing today’s contemporary country hits, although mercifully muted. It’s been twenty-five years since I’ve been in here, a high-school wannabe boho looking for the sort of records that didn’t get played on the radio and the kind of books that my teachers either weren’t eager to tell us about or had never even heard of.

  Although there are more porcelain cats and framed pictures of forgotten family members and 7UP bottles impersonating as antiques than anything potentially life-changing, there are also several red milk crates of old record albums, albeit now outnumbered two to one by used CDs and even a few battered cassette tapes. I flip, not expecting to find anything, and I don’t, only the usual collection of junk store vinyl casualties: the Herb Alpert album with the woman on the front covered in whipped cream; one-time ubiquitous Leo Sayer in his high-top sneakers and coloured suspenders hurtling through the air to the top of the charts; the Liona Boyd LP with her in a flowing sheer dress and a guitar hanging across her back and sitting atop a white horse in a meadow. All of them with the vinyl scratched, the cardboard covers scuffed, and their owners long ago having forgotten them.

  “Are the books still in the back room?” I say to the woman behind the counter.

  “Sure are.”

  Just for the hell of it, “Is Clem still around?” I say.

  “Clem Sr. you mean?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m Clem’s granddaughter. Grandpa passed away a couple years ago. Can I help you with anything?”

  “No, I’m”—I point to the rear of the store—“just going to take a look at the books.”

  Clem’s granddaughter smiles, nods. “Happy huntin’,” she says.

  Past the cardboard boxes of obsolete printers and three-legged card tables and chipped tea cups and saucers are the books. The books, and Samantha browsing through them. She looks up from the paperback in her hands.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else back here,” she says.

  “I used to think the same thing.”

  “You used to come here too?”

  “You think you’re the only precocious teenager Chatham’s ever had?”

  “I’m not precocious,” she says, sticking the book back on the shelf. “Just bored.”

  I look at the books and Samantha looks at the books, look at an entire wall of what Clem long ago decreed as CLASSICS to help differentiate these from, for instance, NOVELS (both bodice-rippers and the espionage variety), RELIGIOUS BOOKS (Bibles and inspirational how-to-go-to-heaven guides), HEALTH (The Atkins Diet books and The New Atkins Diet books), and CELEBS (Shirley MacLaine spiritual tomes and Elvis Presley tell-alls). A “classic” according to Clem was anything that someone would have to read, like in school, as opposed to actually want to read.

  “Have you ever read this?” I say, holding up a not-too tattered Grove paperback edition of City of Night.

  “Nope.”

  “You should. You should get it. It’s about a male prostitute trying to survive on the streets of L.A. in the ’60s.”

  “This was obviously an influential book for you. Inspirational even?”

  “It’s well-written,” I say. “That’s inspiring enough.”

  I put City of Night back on the shelf and keep looking. It seems very important that I find Samantha a book.

  “Mrs. Dalloway,” I say, pulling it from the shelf. “A day in the life of one human being. Every thought and feeling and sensory impression.”

  “I’ve got enough to handle with every thought and feeling and sensory impression of my own.”

  “That’s one of the reasons you read. To shake off the burden of selfhood, to realize that it’s been the same shit, different century, for as long as we’ve all been here.”

  At least she bothers to take this one from me, even scans the back of the book. Handing it back, “I have a hard time getting into novels,” she says. “I’m always thinking it can’t be too important if it’s just something that somebody made up.”

  I’m not sure if she’s actively attempting to goad me or is just indifferent, but instead of offering further sagacious reflections upon the utility of literary prose, I stick the novel back into place.

  “Looks like somebody else knows what I mean,” she says, pulling a hardcover from one of t
he bottom shelves. She stands up and hands me the book.

  It’s one of my own novels, abandoned and apparently unread, the book mark stuck on page twenty-three. “No accounting for taste, I suppose,” I say. The receipt is still inside. At least whoever got rid of it paid for it first.

  “Or lack thereof.”

  Intentional or not, I take this as a peace offering. Shoehorning my novel back into place, “Why are you here and not in school?” I say.

  “Why are you here and not at home working on your book?”

  “My book’s done,” I say, which has nothing to do with how I came to be at Clem’s Collectibles this morning, but which is also nothing that Samantha needs to know about. If you can’t spread a little happiness, at least try not to increase its opposite.

  “Congratulations,” Samantha says.

  “It’s just a first draft.”

  “But still. It’s sort of a big deal, isn’t it?”

  I liked to surprise Sara when I’d finish the first draft of a new book—tell her, “I’m done,” and have her say, “Okay,” thinking it was just that night’s work that was finished, then I’d say, “No—I’m done.” No matter what else she was doing, she’d drop it and we’d open a bottle of something and sit on the couch and allow me to feel like what I’d just done actually mattered.

  “It’s a good start,” I say.

  “So I guess no one’s going to die tonight then,” she says.

  “No,” I say. “Anyone who was going to die, they’re at peace now.”

  We both scan the shelves again.

  “I’ve actually got some good news too,” Samantha says.

  “Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

  “I got accepted into McGill.”

  “McGill? McGill University?”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s what they call it. Don’t act so surprised.”