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  “You’re very flexible,” Dan said. “I think I saw a few positions in that book you’d be good at.”

  I laughed, though this phone call was making my stomach churn. One call would have been nothing unusual. Four meant my mother. I punched in the buttons to access my voice mail, listened to the message, deleted it. Calmly. Without outward reaction. But when I saw him looking at me quizzically, I knew that I’d merely thought I wasn’t reacting, when in reality, I was.

  “You just went the color of chalk.” Dan rubbed my arms. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s my dad,” I said in a faint voice not very much like my own. “He’s dying.”

  Chapter 17

  If I’d had my choice, I wouldn’t have had Dan come with me. He didn’t ask me, however, what I wanted, and so I found myself bathed, dressed and in the passenger seat of his car before I really had time to think. It was good he drove me. I’m sure I’d have had an accident. I couldn’t even get the seat belt to click, as my fingers fumbled it too much. He had to reach across and buckle it for me.

  We made it to the hospital in time for me to say goodbye, though I didn’t have much to say. My mother had set up a vigil by my father’s bedside, and she wasn’t about to allow her position as the Martyred Widow to be preempted by the Prodigal Daughter.I did what I could. I sat at his other side, holding a hand that felt as dry and brittle as sticks. This was the man who had taught me to read. Who had taken me fishing, taught me how to bait a hook. Taught me how to whistle like the boys did, with two fingers. This was the man who had walked me to the bus on my first day of kindergarten and had been the one to cry when my mother had not.

  This man was my father.

  He died without a few words of pithy wisdom. Without even opening his eyes. I waited, my two hands holding his, for some revelation. Something. Some sign he knew I was there. That he cared. That he was sorry, maybe, or maybe that he wasn’t. I waited for acknowledgment, but in the end he just slipped away without bothering to give me anything, and I was outraged and disappointed and struck sick with grief, but I was not surprised.

  My mother didn’t seem to know he’d passed until I put his hand down and got to my feet. She looked at me with narrowed eyes and a small, hard smirk. “Coward” that look said. “Running away again.”

  “He’s dead, Mother.” I sounded cold and hadn’t meant to.

  She looked at him. Then she began to wail. She keened and howled like the mythical banshee. One that’s come too late to warn the living of death but in time to shriek it’s already happened.

  Nurses streamed into the room. I was pushed aside, backed out, ignored amongst the bustle of their preparations, and I didn’t care. There was nothing for me to do in that room. My heels clattered on the industrial tile in the hall. I heard them telling my mother to calm down. I heard them suggesting she be given “something.” I heard silence a few moments later, but by then I was already at the end of the hall and pushing through the doors into the waiting room where Dan sat on a couch the color of frat boys’ vomit and sipped coffee from a foam cup.

  “Elle.” He got to his feet. “How is he?”

  “Dead,” I said flatly. “And my mother is acting like the holy fucking ghost herself.”

  He grimaced and reached for me, but I stepped back. “I need a drink.”

  He held out the coffee to me, but I shook my head. Our eyes met. I don’t know what he saw in mine, because I have a hard time recalling what, at that moment, I was feeling. If I was feeling at all. It seems likely I was angry, but the memory is cloudy, like viewing something underwater.

  “There’s a bar across the street,” he said.

  “There always is, isn’t there?” came my oh-so-clever reply, and as I had done when we first met, I let him take me there.

  It seemed fitting to toast my father’s passing with a gin and tonic, since that was his drink of choice. I’ve never been so spectacularly drunk. Shit-faced. Pissed. Trashed, wasted, sloshed. Or, as my father had been fond of saying, before the alcohol had robbed him even of his desire for conversation, extremely well lubricated.I remember walking into that bar, a nice enough little pub called The Clover Leaf. I don’t remember walking out. I think I recall a long walk down dark streets, and singing, but that might have been a dream. At any rate, the next thing I do remember with any clarity is the inside of my toilet bowel and the sound of blood rushing in my ears as I heaved.

  It shouldn’t be difficult to imagine how a person such as me, a woman who barely feels comfortable around people when she is well, feels to have an audience when she is ill. That it was self-inflicted was no comfort, and in fact made my shame worse. I squirmed with it like the worms on the hooks my father had shown me how to bait. I cursed with it. I’m sure I frankly wallowed in it.

  Dan, who could have left without a word of judgment from me, stayed the whole time. He brought me ginger ale to sip and saltine crackers, which I promptly vomited again. He held my hair back, then found a ponytail holder in my drawer to do it for me. He rinsed and wrung cool cloth after cool cloth to put on the back of my neck. Most of all, he sat, rubbing my back, while I wept or puked, or sometimes both at the same time.

  There’s a reason why there are clichés. Because much of the time, they’re true. That it’s always darkest before dawn proved itself to me that night as I crouched on my knees and lost my guts over and over. While I lost my self-control.

  He made a pillow for me from a towel and covered me with a sheet. I slept in the clothes I’d worn to the hospital. I woke with muscles aching, head pounding, stomach churning but staying in place. Dan slept next to me, propped between the tub and cabinet under the sink. His head had fallen forward. He snored.

  He opened his eyes when I shifted. “Hey.”

  I said nothing, afraid to open my mouth. Afraid to move too much. It felt as though my head were going to fall off, which might have been a blessing, considering how much it hurt.

  Dan reached forward. “How are you feeling?”

  I swallowed with a grimace at the taste of sickness. “I feel like shit.”

  He looked sympathetic. “You drank a lot.”

  “Yeah.”

  I rubbed my eyes and brought my knees to my chest to rest my forehead on them. The tile floor hurt my butt and made it cold, but I couldn’t rouse myself to move. I was still bone tired.

  And my father was still dead.

  I waited for grief to strike me but I’d numbed myself so sufficiently the night before, I think I was incapable of feeling much of anything. Dan moved closer and rubbed my back.

  “Why don’t you get in the shower? It might make you feel better.”

  I lifted my head to look at him. “You stayed with me all night.”

  He smiled and stroked a piece of hair off my forehead. I cringed to imagine how I must look, hair glued with sweat, rings under my eyes, skin pale. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “Of course I did. I couldn’t leave you alone. I was worried about you.”

  The concern in his eyes made my stomach twist a little more, but I didn’t feel like I had to throw up again. He cupped my cheek, then squeezed my shoulder and got to his feet.

  “C’mon. I’ll run it for you.”

  He made the water just the right temperature, not too hot or too cold. Like an ancient lady, I stood, grabbing the edge of the sink for support. The room spun and I closed my eyes against the sight, gritting my teeth to keep another set of gags from forcing my stomach out through my throat. Shoulders hunched, I shuffled across the tiled inches to the shower. He held my hand and arm to help me in.

  Once in the shower, I got down on my knees again to let the water pound against my back. I put my forehead in my hands on the shower floor. This was a favorite position of mine, almost fetal, which allowed water to surround me as I rested. If I wanted, I could lie flat on my back with my legs slightly bent in this shower, which I’d had built oversize during the renovations. I’d slept this way, with hot water blocking out the world a